MOURDOCK’S DILEMMA

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/mourdocks-dilemma.html


There is no good mother who, having given her daughters permission to go to a dance, would not revoke that permission if she were assured that they would succumb to temptations and lose their virginity there.
—Pierre Bayle, “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” 1697.

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The latest Republican spin seems to be that when Richard Mourdock, the senatorial candidate for Indiana, said that if a child is conceived by an act of rape, “it is something that God intended to happen,” he was bumbling his way toward a less controversial proposition—that “life is precious, regardless of the circumstances,” as Rob Jesmer, the executive director of the Republican National Senatorial Committee, told the New York Times. Jesmer added that Mourdock “didn’t say it in a particularly articulate way.” Mourdock may be both idiotic and vile, but I don’t think he was especially inarticulate, and I don’t think he was merely alleging that life is cherishable, whatever the conditions of its conception. He was more pointed: he said that life is a “gift from God,” and that even “if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” Obviously, it all depends on the meaning of “it.” For an air-brusher like Rob Jesmer, “it” means life, and not rape. But the force of Mourdock’s claim, the shock of its haplessly radical transparency, lies in the fact that by “it” he clearly meant both the rape and the life that might come from it. Since God intends life to happen, God also intends all the various ways, good and horrible, in which life comes about. That is the commonsensical reading of Mourdock’s words.

This may be unpalatable, and for many non-believers it is a profound reason not to believe in the traditional God of monotheism, but there is nothing theologically peculiar about Mourdock’s position. (He is an evangelical Christian.) First of all, he was doing nothing more than offering the familiar weak defense of God in relation to evil and pain, the silver-lining defense: out of the unavoidable abundance of great suffering and hardship that exists in the world, God produces redemptive teaching. New life is born, or we learn something important about ourselves, or we come anew to God or Christ, etc., etc. As Bart Ehrman pointed out in his book “God’s Problem,” the Bible is full of such stories. When Joseph confronts his murderous brothers in Egypt, he lectures them about how (in Ehrman’s words) “even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” The Job story ends in the suffering faithful man restored to happiness and prosperity, as reward for his hardship. And, of course, the story of Jesus’s sacrifice and resurrection is the ultimate version of the redemption idea: God suffers with us on the cross, dies, and is born to new life in heaven, a place where God wipes away all tears from our faces, and where there is no more death or sorrow. In her essay on affliction, the philosopher Simone Weil essentially argued that suffering is good for us; that we are like apprentices who must learn on the job, by making painful mistakes.


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