LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2019, Page 328

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

⤓ Download .txt · copy text

328

IV. THE CHILD AS A GIFT OF GOD

have given themselves in love to each other. Aiming to express
their love for each other as fully and completely as they can, they
sometimes find that, in the providence of God, their love-giving
has also been life-giving. Then they receive the child not simply
as a product of their aims and intentions, but as a gift and a mystery, springing from their embrace—a blessing love gives into their
arms. They might well say what the biblical writer says of Hannah
after the birth of Samuel: “The Lord remembered her.”
Such an understanding of human procreation shaped Christian
thinking about parents and children. Moreover, when taken seriously it can provide young men and women in our society something they are often lacking today and desperately need—namely,
a “cultural script” that helps them understand both their individual
identities and their relation to each other. They can learn to see their
relation not merely as a matter for choice but as entry into a pattern
for life given by God. They can learn that the erotic desire they experience for each other is also a desire to give birth, to turn outward
as a couple. They can learn to think of the body not as an instrument
used by a person to produce desired outcomes, but, rather, as the
very place in which we are personally present to others in friendship and in love. Moreover, the script they enact is not just a natural
fact. It has its basis in the mystery of God’s own creative work.
The opening chapter of the Gospel of John is clear that our world
was created in and through Jesus, the One who is God’s Word of
love to us. So also, our own procreation, growing out of the giving
and receiving of love between a man and a woman, can image the
mystery of God’s creative work.
According to the other, competing story, which is becoming
increasingly influential in our culture, parents are simply people
who undertake what we might call a reproductive project. The purpose of that project is to produce a child of their own—that is, one
who satisfies their desire for a child to rear, a desire that they feel
must be satisfied for life to be fulfilling and complete. If for one
reason or another they are unable or unwilling to produce a child
of their own through sexual intercourse, they can have recourse
to technological means of assisted reproduction to accomplish that
goal, and they can (if needed) hire a woman to serve as a surrogate,
using her body as an instrument to gestate the child.
If we think only in terms of results, we may suppose that they
have simply found another way of doing the same thing others do
through ordinary procreation—namely, have a child. In fact, however, although a child may result from both sexual intercourse and
various forms of assisted reproduction, these are not simply different ways of doing the same thing. In the first, spouses align themselves with God’s act of creation in love. They do not suppose that
the person exists apart from the body. They do not use the body as
an instrument to produce a desired result. Rather, they simply give
themselves to each other in love—not just in spirit but also in body.
And then, sometimes, God blesses such mutual love with the gift
of a child.
Thus we have two stories marked by different ways of thinking about our bodies and our children. Is the body the place of personal presence, in which we give ourselves in love? Or is the body
an instrument we use to accomplish our goals? Is the child a product of our own will and choosing, one whom we have made? Or is
the child one who is begotten, springing from our mutual love and
our equal in dignity?
When we use our bodies as instruments for reproduction, we
learn to think of ourselves less as the embodied creatures God has
made and more as free spirits—detached from the body and free
2019 Convention Workbook

to use it as an object for achieving whatever purposes we desire.
Then it is hard not to think of the desired child as a product we
have made—and, quite possibly, made to meet desired specifications. Moreover, we may then have no reason to refrain from using gametes acquired from third parties or from hiring a surrogate
to gestate the desired child; these may, after all, simply be among
the necessary means of production. Indeed, Christian women have
sometimes been eager to serve as surrogates, thinking of their fertility simply as a capacity they can give to others. Compassion for
those who are infertile becomes then a formless emotion, no longer taking its shape from God’s own creative work. For if we have
come to think of ourselves as free spirits who may choose to use
the body for whatever good purposes we have in mind, it may be
that our churches have failed to teach us how rightly to honor our
creation as embodied persons.
God so structures human life that marital love serves both to
strengthen the bond between spouses and, sometimes, to give rise
to the next generation. We might say that in both the love-giving
and the life-giving dimensions of marriage the most basic gift God
gives a husband and wife is the gift of a shared time. They are given
time to learn what fidelity in love means; time for each to learn to
care for another who is as different as their bodies are different; time
to shape a future together; time for their union to give rise, by God’s
providence, to the next generation; time for their union to turn outward in other shared ways as well. The companionship of marriage
is, therefore, much more than a series of isolated sexual acts; it is
a shared history within the time God gives us. Likewise, when we
think of the gift of children, we should see them within the context
of that gift of time, as the fruit not of isolated sexual acts—as if a
marriage were a series of one-night stands—but of the marriage as
a whole. Hence, although contraception (for which different methods are available) may be misused, it can also be rightly used when
husband and wife seek to shape their time together in response to
God’s calling. The shared history of each married couple, the time
God gives them, will have its own particular shape, with children
differently spaced and in different numbers, in ways appropriate to
their own particular and peculiar life together. Each married couple
will need to attend to the shape of that shared life; there is no one
shape that fits all. We can only say that their shared time should be
marked by companionship that is faithful for the whole of life, a
companionship that turns outward to the world—usually, though
not necessarily, through the gift of a child or children born to them
or adopted by them.

A child of one’s own?
When married couples who hope for children experience infertility, it is natural that they should feel sadness; for erotic love
naturally desires to give birth. It is natural for them to hope that
their mutual embrace will be creative, will give rise to a child who
embodies the oneness they share. It is natural that they (and, no
doubt, their parents who want to be grandparents) should value the
human significance of the lines of kinship and descent that locate us
in the world. And it is not surprising that, driven by desire for what
they think of as a child of their own, they may consider turning to
technologies of assisted reproduction.
To be sure, an infertile couple could turn to IVF, use no thirdparty gametes and no surrogate, implant all the embryos produced,
and refrain from using PGD to screen those embryos. Perhaps in
such a case the deeper significance of procreation will not have
been lost, although even such a limited use of IVF risks beginning
to think of the child not simply as gift but as product. Moreover, we