When Richard Mourdock, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Indiana, recently claimed that the birth of a human life, even when conceived by rape, was the will of God, he was as pretentiously sincere in his religious conviction as he was care-less, if not thought-less in his theology and ethics. At least from a Christian perspective.
But then Mourdock, publicly supported by Republican presidential challenger, Mitt Romney, was merely echoing this political season’s Republican platform which excludes the justifying of abortion even in cases of rape.
The problem, of course–semantically–was that Mourdock was suggesting that God wills such an act of violent assault for the purpose of procreation. Even if, as he later claimed, what he said was not what he meant. Not that politicians aren’t often heard to make such similar claims when suffering from foot-in-mouth disease. Unless what they said is what they meant, which some would call a “Freudian slip.”
Mourdock was right on at least one thing. From a Christian perspective, there are no ethics apart from theology, any more than there is, for Christians–at least when you read the Bible–theology without ethics.
For example, the familiar Decalogue in Exodus 20: if the first four commandments concern humanity’s relationship to God, the latter six are comparably concerned with interpersonal relations among humankind.
Or again, Jesus’ seminal citing, in each of the first three Gospels (Matthew 22, Mark 12, Luke 10), of the joint admonition in Deuteronomy 6:4 and Leviticus 19:18 that “all the law” consists of a similar loving of God and others as oneself.
Just as St. Paul declares (I Corinthians 13): “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am but a noisy gong or clanging cymbal.”
At least Richard Mourdock got that part right, at least from a Christian perspective. For in Christian believing and behaving, what one believes about God (theology) is always expressed in one’s attitude and behavior (ethics), just as one’s attitude and behavior (ethics) reveals what one believes about God (theology).
Mourdock is also correct, according to Christian theology and ethics, that all of life–and certainly human life–is a gift from God (Genesis 1: 27).
Here, however, is where both Mourdock’s theology and ethics–in this case, related to the scandalous subject of abortion as a result of rape–lacks both insight and discernment.
Granted, there have surely been instances where a fetus conceived under the awful circumstances of rape has, on the part of a victimized woman, been carried to term in the birth of a human life who subsequently flourished and thrived in the most meaningful of ways.
That is not to say, however–as Richard Mourdock, in such a revealing way, put it–that God ever willed anyone to be violently assaulted (raped).
Or as a colleague once reminded me of this important qualifier. “I explain to women I counsel, who have been raped,” she said, “that such an atrocity has nothing to do with their sexuality, which is a gift from God. Rape is not about sex; it’s about violence. It is being assaulted,” which is not something God ever willed, for whatever reason, to happen to anyone.
What Richard Mourdock, among like-minded others, seems not to understand is that what God may “allow”–given the radical freedom in which all of life has been so lovingly and purposefully created–what God may “allow” is often so tragically different from what God necessarily “wills.”
In Christian theology and ethics, evil is always relative to good, which is absolute, such that evil, then, is a perversion of God’s good will. And the freedom of God’s creativity (God’s way of loving) even allows the goodness of creation to be perverted (evil).
As Christians we believe that God can bring good out of even the worst of circumstances. Or as my mentor, the late John Claypool, once put it, in such a graphic, metaphorical way: “We live in a world where roses grow out of manure.”
But to believe that God wills such a tragic dimension to life is to confuse the ends with the means, the difference between God’s ultimate, redemptive purpose which too often finds expression in and out of a broken-ness in this world so far from anything God ever willed as anywhere close to good (Genesis 1: 31).
One hardly has to be a Christian to realize how tragically flawed is the dualistic thinking of the likes of Richard Mourdock. From such a myopic perspective, things are either all-good or all-bad, exclusive of any ambiguity. Which leads to such distorted ethical reasoning as that of Mourdock: that if the conception of human life is a gift from God, then the circumstances of such conception must reveal God’s will as well, however far from the will of God such circumstances may be.
The theology of Christian ethics, however, understands such moral ambiguity in non-dualistic ways. Reflecting, instead, a both/and view of a God who, as merci-fully as grace-fully, embraces all of life, however near to or far from God’s purposeful, redemptive will.
Nowhere is such a perspective more vital than in the tragic circumstances Richard Mourdock so arrogantly reduces to his own limited, distorted ethical reasoning. For if, indeed, rape and abortion are both as far from the will of God as the gift of new life reveals such divine will and purpose, how can rape, rather than abortion, be considered God’s will?
The truth, of course, is that neither reflects the will of God. As is often the case in a fallen, broken world where moral choices too often involve options neither of which qualify as good; where such choices are reduced to somewhere between bad and worse. Or as Martin Luther famously put it, to be a person of Christian faith is to “trust God and sin bravely.”
If the likes of Richard Mourdock seem hardly given to embracing the faithfulness of such radical grace, I also find it disturbing that folk who espouse such similar politics are so notably selective in the particular moral and social issues they so arrogantly promote. Such an approach, of course, is meant, psychologically, to obscure a host of insecurities by hiding behind the “right-ness” of one’s position on whatever her/his pet cause.
The Richard Mourdocks of this world frame the “abortion argument” on either/or terms: one is either “anti or pro-abortion.” Except just because one is “pro-choice” does not necessarily mean that one isn’t also “pro-life.”
Folk such as Mourdock are more concerned with being “right” than with being faithful–in all the ambiguity that faithfulness is so often expressed–at least where Christian theology and ethics are concerned. Nowhere is this glaring irony more tragic than in circumstances where the options are so far from anything good; where they are, rather, only somewhere between bad and worse. `
