I have been following the commentary on Indiana's U.S. Senate Republican candidate Richard Mourdock's remarks about pregnancies resulting from rape being God's will. His remarks are both shocking and disappointing, not only because they seem to violate a fundamental sense of human dignity but also because they seem to violate the essence of what most Christians believe. A good summary of commentary from mainstream religious outlooks can be found on Think Progress here.
Beyond what spokespeople are saying, though, I have my own views of this as a Christian that definitely do not coincide with Mr. Mourdock's outlook. He says that he comes for a place of deep faith on this matter, and I have to respect that at face value, but that doesn't mean that his beliefs are typical of Christianity. Unfortunately his statement makes it easy for people to attack both him and Christian values, thinking that they are the same, perhaps.
Jesus teaches us all to do better than that. And I think that Jesus would agree that raping women is not God's will. It's the will of selfish and cruel men.
More on this beneath the gentle waves of that orange curve thing.
First off, I do believe as a Christian that life - all life - is a sacred gift from God. That includes the life of an unborn child, but also its mother, its father and every other creature in creation. Life is God's gift, period.
But what does that say about what to do about pregnancies that are forced upon a woman through rape? That is not so clear. However, God's word revealed in the Christian gospels offer us some insights as to what a Christian relationship with God can lead us towards in such circumstances.
A key example of an unexpected pregnancy is found in Mary's "immaculate conception" in the gospel of Luke. Being told by an angel that God intends for her to have a child, Mary responds to the angel in Luke 1:38: "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word."
You might say that this is one of the most important examples of a woman's right to choose. God wasn't simply looking for a free uterus which was available for fertilization by the Holy Spirit (virgin births are rare - about one in a million - but a known natural phenomenon). God was looking for someone who was willing to choose to be a mother to the son of God. Without Mary's consent, then she would not be a willing servant acting out of love, but a slave forced to obey. Mary loved God and wanted to have this child that was foretold by the angel. This foretold fertilization was completely consensual - Mary was wanting to serve God as a mother.
By contrast, mere mortal men who rape women have nothing of the sort in mind. They are not thinking about doing God's will at all. Jesus tells us in John 15:12, "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have already loved you." Note that this is a singular command - there are no others. There is absolutely nothing loving about rape. It is a violation of God's will for us expressed through Jesus Christ. Rape is saying that might makes right, that what a man wants to do selfishly should not be challenged by God or anyone else. It is to say what a man wants to do is by definition God's will. That's not Christianity - it's just pure self-centeredness.
So what happens when a woman becomes pregnant by way of rape? The truth is that a new life has been created. But is that God's will? In the sense that biology works the way that God intended, perhaps so. But that biological act is not the result of an act of love - it's been born of godlessness. God doesn't will rape, and God doesn't will pregnancy by rape. Pregnancy is pregnancy. What a woman does with a pregnancy is that woman's moral choice. The act that caused it was not loving, and therefore not godly.
Some women have the moral, emotional and spiritual outlook to accept a pregnancy from rape as sacred life no matter how unsacred the act was that created it - an act that was the exact opposite of Mary's divine gift of pregnancy offered lovingly from God that she willfully accepted. But understandably many women cannot take that viewpoint. As sacred as that unborn child may be, so is her own life sacred. How she offers to serve God's sacred gifts is her own choice.
And women faced with this type of decision have much to weigh. If a woman gives birth to this child but cannot love the child because of the hateful way in which the child came into being, that hurts the child's sacred life as surely as anything else hurts them. It violates Christ's sacred instruction for us to love one another as God has loved us. Nobody is perfect - we all have our weaknesses in making choices.
God doesn't make us perfect by our choices. A woman isn't necessarily right because she had an abortion after a rape pregnancy or right because they didn't have an abortion. That's a judgment that only God can make, ultimately. None of us has divine wisdom. All we can do is to love the source of all divine wisdom and to try to love one another as that God who gave us that wisdom has loved us. We make our best choice, accept the judgment of the world, which may not be God's judgment, and then we move on, seeking God's loving and right path.
God hates rape. God doesn't hate children born from rape. God loves that child as much as anyone else. But God also loves women, and God especially loves women who have been abused by selfish people. God knows that the choices that they face in such circumstances are hard choices, ones that will stay with them the rest of their lives. And God wants to be with women making those choices, letting them know that they are already loved and not condemned if they accept God's forgiveness for having done the best that they could and seek to follow God's way in making their next choice.
Mary gave us the perfect example. Did she in fact know that she would even be able to carry God's promised child to term? She didn't. Did she know if she would be a good mother or that her promised son would fulfill God's promise? She didn't. But she was ready to try. That was a hard choice. Other choices that she could have made would have been hard also. And God would have loved her even then.
If we doubt this, we need only turn to the gospel's story of an adulterous woman in John 8:1-11. Holy men of the temple came to Jesus and said that the Mosaic law required them to stone to death an adulterous woman. Jesus pondered this for a moment and then suggested to them that the one who was without sin should cast the first stone. They all walked away. Jesus then turned to the adulterous woman and asked her if anyone was left to accuse her. She said no one was left. "Neither do I condemn you," Jesus said. "Go, and sin no more." Jesus hated her sin, but loved her as a person in need of forgiveness and more right living more than he hated her sin or the sin of the temple authorities who would have taken God's sacred gift - her life - because of her sin.
God hates sin. Rape is sin. But God loves us, even though we sin. As Christians we should focus less on throwing stones and more on dropping them and helping one another in the light of God's love for us to sin no more. We can only do that by loving one another as God has loved us. Dealing compassionately with the aftermath of a rape resulting in pregnancy is hard enough. We don't need to heap burning coals, metaphoric or otherwise, on the minds of women struggling with such a decision. If we dealt with people buying handguns to willfully kill people the way that some deal with women considering an abortion as the result of a rape then the world would be a place of far greater peace. Let's look at the bigger picture of compassion and sacredness of life and honor all life as it was meant to be honored. God asks nothing less of us, I think.
Discuss.