Arminian fruit

A favorite tactic of Arminian apologists is to preemptively discredit Calvinism by associating Calvinism with the execution of Servetus. One problem with that tactic is that it cuts both ways. Consider, for instance, the author of the infamous Roe v. Wade. What was his religious affiliation?

Justice Harry Blackmun was active United Methodist

3/4/1999

By United Methodist News Service

One of United Methodism's best-known members, retired Supreme Court Justice Harry Andrew Blackmun, died early March 4 at Arlington (Va.) Hospital at the age of 90.

Blackmun was the first United Methodist to serve on the Supreme Court since the retirement of Charles E. Whittaker in 1962. 

He is best known for his majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, upholding the constitutional right of a woman to decide whether to have an abortion. 

Blackmun joined Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church in Washington soon after going to the capital. He frequently read Scriptures at Sunday morning worship. Senior pastor Bill Lawrence said Blackmun always prepared a contextual statement to precede the reading of the text. "He was active in the fellowship life of the church," Lawrence said. "He would greet people during coffee hour Sunday morning. His life was an expression of his faith."

Praise for Blackmun's serious involvement at Metropolitan was echoed by the Rev. William Holmes, who retired in 1998 after 24 years as senior pastor of the church. "He had a great love for the Scripture and was really a scholar of the biblical literature," Holmes said. "He also had a great love for the United Methodist Church as a denomination."

At the invitation of Bishop James K. Mathews, Blackmun addressed the members of the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference in the late 1970s and taught a Bible story based on a book in the Old Testament.

For 12 years, Blackmun was a member of the governing body of the United Methodist Publishing House in Nashville. During that time, his friend, the late Emory Stevens Bucke, was book editor. It was a custom for Abingdon, the agency's book-publishing arm, to send complimentary copies of the 100-plus books it produced each year to board members. Blackmun would routinely pencil corrections in each book and return them to Bucke.


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