The unborn John the Baptist is also described as a brephos (Luke 1:41, 44), this being a Greek term meaning a babe, an infant, a newborn child. When Mary's greeting reached Elizabeth's ears in Luke's Gospel, the unborn John the Baptist leapt for joy in his mother's womb (1:44) we are also told that he was filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb (1:15). However, from a biblical point of view, it is clear that a child is human before birth. Today the at-birth view is most often found among pro-abortion Christians. Furthermore, modern science reveals that the unborn have been already "breathing" through the placenta (the pre-birth organ equivalent in function to the mouth), which has been taking oxygen and nutrients from the mother's bloodstream. The idea that one inhales a soul at birth would suggest that souls are made out of oxygen molecules and that we inhale them and exhale them all the time, two notions incompatible with biblical anthropology. Breath is a biblical metaphor for one's spirit or life-principle since the only living humans in everyday life are breathing humans but breath and spirit are not the same thing. This fails to appreciate the Bible's use of metaphor. Scarcely less bizarre than the post-birth hypothesis is the assertion made by some, supposedly based on Genesis 2:7, that one receives a soul and becomes a human when one draws one's first breath.
It may become somewhat more common as abortion and euthanasia lead to a greater push for infanticide and thus a greater desire to rationalize away the humanity of a newly born child. Needless to say, this is a bizarre idea and is not likely to have much traction outside New Age circles. The idea in this case would be that there is no magic point where a child has to get a soul it just depends on what soul chooses the body first. This harmonizes with a common New Age idea that souls get to choose the body in which they reincarnate.
Some New Agers state that some children do not get their souls until several days after birth. It is, however, held in a small number of New Age circles. This idea is so far out of Judeo-Christian tradition that it has always been recognized as an impossibility. There are four basic possibilities for the time this can occur: at conception, between conception and birth, at birth, and after birth. To see why, let's begin by looking at when the child gets a soul i.e., at the point of ensoulment.
Some individuals confronted with a loved one who is comatose are counseled that the person's soul is no longer present, that it has "already gone home to God," and so it is okay to kill the body that is left.īoth of these arguments are wrong for a variety of reasons. Prior to this point, the unborn would not be a human being, and so killing it would not be homicide.Ī parallel argument is sometimes made in the case of euthanasia. One of the arguments used by pro-abortion individuals is that it is permissible to kill an unborn child because nobody knows when the child gets a soul.
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