God and Rape.

More people talk about God than know about God. When it comes to God, we are all, as Marilynne Robinson says, biased toward error.

1. Suffering and the Book of Job.

That’s one of the points of the Book of Job. Job was a righteous man. God loved him. God boasted of him. But God permitted Satan to afflict him. And Satan afflicted him. It was a mauling.

As grief flayed a ruined Job, Job’s friends added to Job’s suffering by pouring the salt of their theology over his raw, wounded spirit. They said that God himself had ruined Job, and that God was in the right. They told Job that it followed that Job was in the wrong. Job defended himself to his friends and to his God.

At the end of the Book of Job, God restores Job. At the end, God addresses Job’s friends. He tells them that they are wrong and Job is right. He commands them to go to Job and offer up a sacrifice of seven bulls and seven rams. God tells them that Job will pray for them, and that God will not deal with them according to their folly, because God will hear the prayers of Job.

2. Richard Mourdock, rape, and the will of God.

Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said, "[E]ven when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen." Based on this belief, he justifies denying a woman the right to end a pregnancy in a case of rape.

Now, that is not quite blaming the victim; that does not go quite as far as Job’s friends. But it’s not only that Job’s friends judged Job. It’s also that they presumed to tell a person who suffered why he was suffering. In saying what he said, Mourdock sits in the seat of Job’s friends.

But suffering-and-God’s-will is a great mystery. Maybe it’s a mystery that cannot be explained, only known, and only known by experience and reflection. 

Everybody should be humble about the suffering of others. That's Job. Certainly, we should be careful about giving to one who suffers the book on suffering.

I’m glad for my suffering. It has made me, by the grace of God, wiser. And it gives me a little knowledge of suffering. But if a friend of mine suffers, I hope that I would have the wisdom and compassion to weep with them, rather then to piously heap on them my pious ideas.

4. Some questions for Mr. Mourdock.

And it’s not the case that Mr. Mourdock’s ideas about God are self-evident. Some questions arise about Mr. Mourdock’s theology. If rape is the will of God, does somebody who talks a would-be rapist out of raping thwart the will of God? Or is the fact that an intention is carried out proof that God willed that act? If that’s true, why would a rapist’s choice be the will of God, but a woman’s choice after rape would not be?

5. Suffering.

I’m going to do the thing I speak against. I’m going to dip into theology of suffering.

The Book of Job notwithstanding, the idea of blame for suffering persists, and it persisted in the time of Jesus. Jesus’s disciples saw a man born blind, and they asked Jesus, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:2 (NIV).)

Jesus replied, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him." Then he spat on the ground, made mud with the spit, and pasted it on the blind man’s eyes. Then he told the man to wash the mud in a particular pool. The man gained sight.

This account says tells me that suffering doesn’t call for empty speculation; it calls for mercy and action.

6. Mercy.

Job’s friends put themselves at the mercy of Job and God. Mourdock puts himself at the mercy of rape victims and God. He needs to make his propitiation to God, and he needs to hope for the prayers of victims of rape all over the world and across time. Their pain is not fuel for him to burn under them for their choices.

If those who have been raped, and especially those who have been raped and who have had to make hard choices after being raped – if those women have the good and strong heart to forgive Richard Mourdock and to pray for him, God bless them.