­Christians have been pro-life ever since the beginning of the church. The practice of abortion and infanticide were rampant in the Roman Empire at the advent of Christianity. It was both common and expected practice to either kill or abandon a child who was unwanted, determined to be unfit in some way or seen as an economic burden on the family. Female children were the most vulnerable, often being disposed of simply because they weren’t boys. Both infanticide and child abandonment were promoted by such philosophical and intellectual luminaries as Aristotle who wrote, “As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared.”

Early Christians were unanimous in their condemnation of infanticide and child abandonment. According to historian Larry Hurtado: “So far as we know, the only wide-scale criticism of the practice, and the only collective refusal to engage in infant exposure in the first three centuries AD, was among Jews and then also early Christians.”

Christians in the Roman Empire couldn’t appeal to their legislative leaders to pass anti-abandonment or anti-infanticide laws. But they didn’t sit idly by and just criticize a pagan culture that approved of the death of innocent children. Instead of simply protesting a culture of death, they created a culture of life. Abandoned children were rescued from exposure, they were adopted into Christian homes where they were loved, cared for and nurtured in the faith.

 It wasn’t just abandoned children who were cared for. The unwanted elderly, the sick and the disabled were cared for as well. Famously, Christians, against cultural norms and expectations, ministered to and aided victims of the plagues that swept through the Empire, often at the cost of their own lives.

It was through this kind of activism driven by love for Christ and love of neighbor that would see the ethos of Western culture completely shift from a culture of death to a culture that valued human life above all else.

While vestiges of the Christian morality regarding life still remain, ours is a culture that is ever devolving into the pagan morality the first century church combated. Lest we despair and resign ourselves to defeat, remember how God used the early church to transform their culture. Like them, we must develop a womb to tomb ethic that sees all humans as made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore as worthy of life.

 Like them, we must have the courage of our convictions to serve and protect the most vulnerable among us whether at the beginning of life or at the end. We must be willing to sacrifice to see others live. It’s simply the right thing, the Christlike thing, to do. But who knows, the Lord may also use our actions in protecting and serving the most vulnerable to transform our culture of death into a culture of life.

With this I end my final editorial as editor of the Advent Christian Witness. It has been one of the great privileges of my life to serve in this way. I am humbled and thankful beyond words. And I am also encouraged as I leave the Witness in the hands of those far more capable and gifted than I. I look forward to an even brighter more fruitful future for this magazine. Soli Deo Gloria.