Creation Order, Violence, and the Church’s First Surrender
How the Church’s Abandonment of Order Prepared the Way for Violence
I keep returning to the same difficult conclusion. The church keeps trying to treat the symptoms of cultural collapse while refusing to confront the disorder it normalized long before those symptoms appeared.
Abortion is violence. It is the taking of human life under medical language and legal protection. Scripture gives no room to dispute that. Violence arises within conditions already shaped by denied limits, abandoned authority, and a refusal of creaturehood. Abortion emerged from a moral environment already formed by disorder and disintegration.
The church’s withdrawal from creation order belongs at the front of this account, not at the margins.
Creation Order Is Foundational, Not Optional
Creation order occupies a central place in Scripture’s moral reasoning. It is not a peripheral doctrine assumed in passing, but a governing reality that shapes worship, authority, and obedience.
When Paul addresses head coverings, he grounds his reasoning in creation, the fall, glory, authority, angelic witness, and the nature of worship. That density matters. One may wrestle with the application, but the structure of the argument cannot be dismissed without cost.
This passage stands among the most carefully reasoned treatments of embodied worship in the New Testament. Paul deliberately ties visible practice to pre-fall order and cosmic accountability. The force of that connection exposes how casually the church has learned to downgrade creation-based reasoning.
Head coverings address the public acknowledgment of God’s order within worship.
Signs Shape the Moral Imagination
The church removed a sign without replacing the theology it carried.
When visible markers of order fade, they quietly reform how order itself is imagined. Submission fades from sight, then from thought, and eventually from conscience. Authority is treated as conditional, distinctions are questioned, and autonomy is elevated as a moral good.
Signs do not confer righteousness before God. They form understanding and train conscience. They form instinct and expectation. When the church leaves confusion unaddressed, the surrounding culture amplifies and radicalizes it.
The Ideology Did Not Begin Outside the Church
Abortion emerged from a moral vision centered on self-ownership and autonomy, not from medical neutrality. Choice was elevated over obligation. Autonomy over dependence. Freedom over creaturehood.
That claim developed within a context shaped by the collapse of male responsibility. When men relinquished authority in the home and the church, a vacuum emerged that women occupied, and ideology later consecrated and systematized.
The church had already eroded the ground by treating headship as a matter of choice and redefining submission in abstract terms, signaling that order itself was adjustable rather than rooted in God’s design. When order is treated as optional, power always fills the gap.
Why the First Sign Fell So Easily
Head coverings were among the first practices set aside because they were visible, embodied, and increasingly resisted. Removing them required no confession, no replacement theology, and no confrontation with deeper implications.
The explanation given was cultural distance. The reality was theological retreat.
The removal of the sign was followed by silence, leaving the church without a clear articulation of order. Silence can form understanding as surely as instruction does. Over time it trained the conscience to regard visible order as unnecessary and even suspect.
The Denial of Limits Always Bears Fruit
Abortion represents a revolt against the created order of reality itself. It refuses the given boundaries of creaturehood, relation, and dependence. It claims self-rule in a place where Scripture teaches received life and dependent being.
When creation order is denied, conflict escalates. Resistance moves from authority to truth and finally to the body. The weakest bodies bear the cost first.
This reflects a pattern that can be traced and tested, not a speculative fear.
Responsibility Before Blame
Scripture assigns responsibility in a clear order. Adam is addressed first, and his silence is judged as a failure of stewardship rather than an innocent absence.
The issue is not initiative exercised by women alone, but authority relinquished by men. When men refuse to carry authority, women are left with constrained choices, none of which restore peace. Disorder is the predictable result.
What the Church Refuses to Name, It Cannot Heal
The church repeatedly denounces visible evils while leaving the conditions that produced them intact. It speaks against abortion while affirming autonomy as a moral good. It grieves social disorder while resisting discipline within its own life. It asks for healing while refusing repentance.
Creation order functions as a restraint against harm and stands as a gift embedded in God’s design. When the church no longer lives openly as a creature under divine authority, its moral claims lose coherence. Attention remains fixed on consequences while the underlying structure is ignored.
This argument is oriented toward submission to God rather than reassurance from the past. Faithful obedience addresses the source before it addresses the symptom, because obedience always begins upstream.