The Right to Punishment

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.

We’re talking about case laws today, the Book of the Covenant that follows the Ten Commandments in the book of Exodus. We’re going to talk about what it means to take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And in order to get there, we’re going to go into outer space because we have an example or an illustration from the TV show Babylon 5, which I have not seen. We watched the first two episodes and I was like, “Why are we watching this?” so I haven’t seen the rest of it, but I gather that I should.

You have to give it until the second season. “Passing Through Gethsemane” is an episode in the third season of the sci-fi show Babylon 5. It’s been off the air for a number of years now, but was one of the first TV shows to actually have a story arc from beginning to end. The creator, J. Michael Straczynski, was dealing with theological and philosophical concepts throughout, and since he is an atheist but up for anything, we can occasionally see some interesting things.

In this particular episode, a number of presumably Roman Catholic monks have come to the space station Babylon 5 and are trying to find a place there. It turns out that they’re very good at ordering and researching and putting things in place, just like monks have been doing for 2,000 years or so. Their head, Brother Theo, comes to the captain and with decided understatement says, “One of my monks is having bad dreams.”

It turns out that this monk, Brother Edward, is having flashbacks to a previous life. What he does not know, and what nobody knows there, is that he was a convicted murderer, and in that future generation the penalty for murder is the death of personality.

Psycho-technicians perform a mind-wipe, removing the original personality that supposedly committed the crime in the first place, and by implanting new false memories creates a new personality oriented toward community service. All he wants to do is help. “For as long as I can remember, all I’ve wanted to do is serve people.” Then he’s released someplace far away from the victim’s family so that no one will ever run into him.

This solves the problem of prison overcrowding real nicely, but in this case we find that Brother Edward is being reminded little by little of his previous life by friends and relatives of his victim who don’t want it forgotten.

The whole episode calls into question the morality of such a thing. Is it right to re-write a personality in order to get rid of a murderer? Is that actually justice? Should the State have this kind of power? If it were possible, or possible in a different way, say with some kind of psychological treatment to completely re-write the personality of a murderer, would that be better than executing him? If so, why and by what standard?

J. Michael Straczynski says, “I don’t got any answers. I’m an atheist. But I want all the rest of you to think about it.”

As Christians we come to this and say, “That’s not what God said to do.” The history of the penal system in America, England, Europe, and throughout the world has been one of the natural man trying to find a way to be wiser and kinder and more efficient than God, which is a deadly pursuit any way you look at it. That’s sort of where we’re going.

The original article was entitled “The Right to Punishment,” and that perhaps seems like a paradox to the modern world. The right to be punished? We tend to think that the opposite of punishment is to go free, but not necessarily. The opposite of punishment may be rehabilitation by someone else’s standards.

C.S. Lewis had a lot to say about this, and we’ll come back to him in time, but let’s start with the biblical premise for justice – an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, stripe for stripe.

This is a phrase that’s been horribly abused because Jesus references it, and people, often not understanding what it meant originally or what Jesus meant when he said, “Yeah, that’s not what you should be doing,” have sort of thrown it out as Old Testament and therefore outdated, barbaric, uncivilized, cruel, the product of a different God who really isn’t as kind and hip as Jesus is, so this is where we start.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” This is Matthew 5:38-39.

Anabaptists, Quakers, and others have understood Jesus to basically be rejecting the Old Testament ethic in favor of something new, kinder and gentler. Eye for an eye might have been what believers were supposed to do in the old covenant, but now Jesus is introducing a new and better way, and so their commitment to non-violence, passivism, and their rejection in participation in civil government and military.

Also it explains the significant role that Quakers have played in prison reform. They want to do something to the criminal that’s kind and helpful and thus rehabilitating, but there’s some problems with that.

First of all, context. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is discussing a number of things that the humble believer of his day would encounter, like being compelled by the Roman military to carry an object, a kind of burden, a mile. Jesus says, “If they tell you to do it a mile, go two.” You’re being sued in court and someone takes away your inner coat, and Jesus says, “Give him your cloak also,” and so on.

The point here is that Christians are not to be ornery and selfish and always trying to get even. There’s a day of perfect justice when God will sort everything out and all things will be just and right and equal, but in this life we’re not God. We are to act personally with kindness. We’re to refrain from revenge. We’re not to avenge ourselves.

Sometimes the best way to get on is to admit, “I’m dealing with a tyrant. I’m dealing with a bad cop. I’m dealing with a corrupt IRS agent,” and roll with it, rather than standing up and insisting on my rights or the letter of the Constitution. Paul at times asserted his right as a Roman citizen, and at other times he backed off a little, according to the best interest of the gospel and of the fledgling church that he was dealing with at any time.

And side note from the case laws, I think I’ve mentioned this before, there’s punishment for the corrupt judge. There’s not punishment prescribed for the one who offers a bribe, because you might need it, which has a lot of implications for the person who says, “I was in a bind. I had to pay.”

That reminds me of the message in the New Testament where it says the woman kept coming to the judge, and the judge didn’t care about her, but she pestered him so much that he finally said, “Fine, I’ll give you your answer. I’ll give you justice. Stop bothering me!”

And it would be easy for the perfectionist to say, “But wait! That’s not truly justice then. She should have stood on moral principle and argued logically, not gone after nagging.”

“She got what she needed, didn’t she?”

“No, but that’s pragmatic!”

Yeah, it is, and in some cases that is what you’re dealing with. You have a goal that is good and right, but you’re dealing with people who are not good and right, and they’re not going to give you the good and right thing.

And you’re not to blame for them not being good and right.

Right, exactly. Sometimes you go around them or under them or behind their back.

A practical example from my denomination’s history. Many years ago, the Back to God Hour out of South Africa was broadcasting up into the area that was at that time I think called the Congo. It’s undergone a name change a number of times. There were a lot of people who were receiving the gospel and believing it and they wanted to organize these churches, but the national government said, “No, you may not do this, unless of course someone from outside our country would like to fund all of this.” In other words, they flat out were asking for a bribe from outside their country.

So our denomination said, “That’s all you need? You need a couple thousand dollars and you can suddenly start organizing these churches? Okay, we’ll pay the bribe.” They didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. And rather than trying to get the State Department involved and stir up lots of angry publicity, they just paid the money and the churches were able to organize and to go on and function as congregations of Jesus Christ.

We can think of other things, particularly now when, you know, there are government officials who frankly are out to get the church, and others who are just trying to do their jobs, and others who would gladly look the other way if you give them any incentive whatsoever. Sometimes we need to learn to live in terms of this.

There’s a danger of perfectionism that says, “ I must be exactly right and exactly clear and never back down and never compromise and never go behind anybody’s back. Everything has to be out in the open.” That’s not scripture. We’re called to live at peace with all men, and sometimes peace means, “Your honor, I brought you this apple pie. Can we talk about my problem for a minute?” and go with that.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is saying, “You’re looking at a rule that applied to Old Testament court systems, the penal system, and you’re trying to impose it into personal ethics. This is how judges were to act; therefore, this is how I will act.” What you end up with then is a system of personal revenge. “I will not stop until I get even.”

And a personally vengeful spirit.

Yes. Turning away from that is not an exclusively New Testament thing. Yes, Paul says, “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay,’ saith the Lord.” That’s Romans 12.

Then in chapter 13 he goes and talks about the powers that be as avengers set up by God, servants, deacons of God who are there to avenge, to execute the wrath of God upon those who have done wrong, so God has a system within history and on earth to deal with wrongdoers, but we privately aren’t it.

Paul in saying, “Don’t avenge yourselves,” is drawing upon the wisdom of the Old Testament. Here are three verses from Proverbs:

Proverbs 20:22: Say not though, I will recompense evil; but wait on the Lord, and he shall save thee.

Proverbs 24:29: Say not, I will do so to him as he hath done to me. I will render to the man according to his work.

Then this, which Paul actually quotes in Roman 12 –

Proverbs 24:25: If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if be thirsty, give him water to drink, for thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the Lord shall reward thee.

So in personal ethics we are not to seek an equality. We’re not to seek to get even. We’re not to always need to have the last word or the last penalty. We are to be forgiving.

And of course the question comes up – and this has something to do with the recommendation I’m going to make later – but people will say, “In other words, you can just blow it off and forgive it, because that’s how God is?”

No, that’s not exactly how God is. God killed his own son, and in light of what God did for us and the fact that Jesus died for sinners, we can take that and apply that here and say the God who saved me and forgave me enables me here to forgive you at this point in time. Now eternally you’re still going to answer for this if you don’t repent of your sins, so we even have a platform here for the gospel, but we throw it back in God’s lap and let God be the ultimate arbitrator of justice and kindness and all that kind of thing.

Looking back now, away from the Sermon on the Mount and back to the original context – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – first of all, it’s a figure of speech in general. We’ve talked about restitution. Let’s say that a piano player, a guy who makes his living with the piano, ticks off somebody and the guy comes after him with a club and smashes his hands, and the guy is hauled in front of a judge.

Does the judge say, “Well, you broke this piano player’s hands, so we will break your hands”?

That sounds more like the Mafia than a judge.

More than that, is it equal?

No.

No.

Emily, tell us why is that not equal?

Because what’s been taken from the piano player is not just the use of his ten digits. It’s his livelihood. It’s his way of making a living, probably his artistic joy in life as well. That’s simply not summed up in the loss of the use of your hands, as grievous as that is. If the other guy is, I don’t know, a singer…I guess I’m only coming up with musical occupations at the moment…

Can we smash his vocal cords? Does that work?

Maybe, but then that has a lot more implications than just your occupation, where that’s human connection that’s been lost, so that’s not quite equitable either.

Right. There’s a case law that’s not here on the table. It’s a side thing. If a man has an oxen that’s known to be violent, and he kills your son or daughter, the law says he shall be executed unless a sum of money be offered instead, at which point the man can pay. He must pay the sum that’s been charged.

There’s nothing about arbitrating. Nothing about bargaining. Nothing about, “Well, I’ll do this,” and you bring it down. The people who have just lost their son, or maybe it’s the husband, the breadwinner – a lot of possibilities here. Yes, you could get the careless irresponsible man executed, but does that really help you?

If the guy is there laughing at you and making fun of this and not repentant, you might be tempted to go for the death penalty, but in most cases I think people are going to say, “You know what? A large financial settlement is actually better and more equitable, more just, than taking the man’s life.” The threat of the death penalty is there so that the guy can’t just stall and fiddle around and not make any kind of restitution, but the possibility of a monetary settlement is here.

Now, we’re told again and again – and this is also relevant – throughout the law that we’re to take no satisfaction for the life of a murderer, so although satisfaction can be taken where it’s accidental or due to negligence, it can’t be used where the murder is accomplished by guile, premeditation…

Malice aforethought.

Yeah, which seems to say that financial settlements are acceptable under other circumstances. In this extreme – someone died – a financial settlement is acceptable, and it would seem to work backwards that financial settlements in general are acceptable.

So back to the piano player who’s lost his hands. I mean you can probably get the fingers working enough for daily chores, but he’s never going to be a concert pianist or even a lounge lizard pianist to speak of.

Did you just say lounge lizard?

I did. I’m thinking Billy Joel in Piano Man.

A dream job of mine, by the way.

So you’re going to need to pay more than $5. As you said, you’re talking about a man’s livelihood. That’s a lot of money, but if the threat behind it is something violent – actually, it’s always going to be violent because – here appealing to another of the case laws – we’re told that the man who stands before the judge and hears the sentence and refuses to submit to it is to be executed – contempt of court…

So coming from a number of angles, we get at what I think the Bible is telling us with “an eye for an eye.” It’s not so much setting a brutal and intolerable standard. What it’s saying is you can do an eye for an eye, but you can’t do a life for an eye, or take off a head for an eye. The punishment needs to fit the crime.

That not only means that we raise the punishment to fit the more serious crime, but it also means we bring the punishment down to the level of the simpler crime. We don’t take off the hand of the thief. The Bible gives us there a concrete illustration of restitution, and we can begin to look at other possibilities.

Again we’re back to “life for a life” being the one thing that does not seem to be figurative, because we have plenty of evidence throughout the Bible, from the Noahic covenant forward, and in the case laws, that we are not to take satisfaction for the life of a murderer, that the proper punishment for murder is death, is execution. The State is given the sword not to poke people but to kill people.

And it’s not just military dress. The phrasing in Romans 13 is he does not bear it in vain. It’s not a showpiece.

Yeah, and the language that Paul uses there in Romans 13, avenger, he’s referring back again to the case laws. In this case it’s something that is ritual and ceremonial. It’s a figure of Christ.

If a man was killed accidentally – the two examples the Bible keeps giving is you’re out working on the mountainside and you let go a boulder accidentally and it rolls over your friend, yes, you could have been more careful, but you certainly didn’t intend that. Or you’re chopping wood with an axe, and yes, you should have made sure the axe was in good condition before you kept swinging, but oops! The axe head flies off and hits your friend. You didn’t intend anything here, but you were to run like everything for the nearest city of refuge.

There were three on each side of the Jordan, and the horns of the altar in the tabernacle counted, because the next of kin, the kinsman redeemer, at this point becomes the avenger of blood. He is to go after you and he’s to execute you before you reach the city of refuge. If you reach it, then the elders there act as a court and decide whether or not this was indeed accidental.

If it’s murder, you’re turned back to the judges who have the original jurisdiction and you’re executed, after a proper trial and such, but if it’s determined, “No, this was accidental,” then you stay in the city of refuge until the death of the high priest. So the death of the high priest sets you free. Hmm, how many images of Christ can we work into one ritual institution? But what we’re talking about here is most certainly execution, and when Paul makes the State the avenger of the innocent, he’s handing them the role of the avenger of blood.

“We’re not doing this anymore. Now the gospel is going out to the broader world. We’re going to let the State handle this,” but what the State is handling, as you say, is the sword that is not worn in vain, a sword that’s used to kill people under certain circumstances prescribed by law.

Which is another reason – and stop me if I’m getting off into policy tangents – but the reason the more ostensibly kind-hearted policies don’t tend to function as well is because everything the State does is backed up by a threat of violence. That’s the only way it can operate is this compulsion. It operates by force, necessarily.

If you don’t pay your taxes, you will go to jail. If you don’t XYZ, you cannot be allowed to live in society. They can only do negative things. They can’t do positive things.

So we believed, until the late 1800s and early 1900s when the idea of rehabilitation came along as a scientific possibility. Now, we’ve looked before at the American penitentiary system as an attempt to re-create man, but it was drawing on older models and on some elements of the Christian faith.

But with the invention of psychoanalysis and modern psychology, which wrapped itself in scientific language and scientific dress, we get this scientific theme of “We now have the technology to rewrite personality, to change the character, to change the man. The man is sick. The man is broken. Let us fix him, rather than punish. Punishment is brutal. Punishment is barbaric.

“If a man is in the road with broken bones and bleeding all over the place, you don’t go out there with a sledgehammer and pound him and finish the job. You send a paramedic or a doctor out and you minister to him. You take care of the injury and you make him whole again. That’s what the State should do. We should make people whole. We should rescue them from themselves and from their mental illnesses. That’s so much kinder and gentler and nobler than anything in the Bible.”

Because the Bible has a much deeper idea of the corrupting power of sin. This ‘making whole again’ – I don’t think it’s so simple.

But remember, the romantic view of man is that man is fundamentally good, and if he’s not acting that way then something’s wrong, and the something wrong has to be essentially – well, not essentially him. It’s not part of his essence. It’s something external to that essence. It’s environment, it’s education, it’s toilet training, possibly something in his physical body. It’s his economic system.

If we find that thing – maybe it’s just a set of bad habits, maybe it’s alcohol, maybe it’s drugs – if we can just get him out of and away from all that, break the dependencies, break the bad habits, put him someplace where he’s loved, where he’s taught self-affirming things so he has a proper image of himself, then his natural goodness will assert itself and everything will be okay.

Now, it may take a while, at least now because we don’t know everything, but give us enough time to learn more, give us enough government funding to learn more, and give us time with the patient, and we will make him better, because that’s what love does, right?

We’re seeing in this generation love being used as the great trump for everything. “You want to do that? But that’s not loving. You want that government policy? But that’s not loving. Love requires that you do this. Love requires that you submit to that. Love means total acceptance. Love means that you encourage the government to spend money in this particular direction, because if you don’t actively encourage the government to spend the money, you’re not loving. You’re hateful. You’re prejudicial. You’re wicked. You’re…fill in the blank.”

There’s a couple wonderful quotes from C.S. Lewis about this rehabilitation thing. One is from his novel That Hideous Strength. He has one of his villains say this, or this is a sum-up of what the villain says:

For desert was always finite.

That is, what you deserve for your crime, that could be measured out in exact numbers of years or stripes or restitution dollars or whatever.

So desert as in just deserts, not as in pie.

Right. The moment I read that I realized, “Wait a second, it’s going to be awkward,” but what you deserve was always finite.

You could do so much to the criminal and no more.

Because you’re done. It’s an equation. This equals that. Eye for eye.

Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit. It could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was.

And, of course, they’re doctors. They mean well. Who are we, who are not experts, to question either their good intention or their skill or their techniques?

And if cure were humane and desirable, how much more prevention?

So more and more we turn the State into a ministry of public health in order to keep people from going bad in the first place.

A theme picked up in That Hideous Strength, the villain says to the protagonist, who’s a sociologist, “My job working with criminals goes hand-in-hand with yours, sociology,” because this is what it’s all about – not catching the crook afterwards, not punishing him afterwards, but creating a set of circumstances in which he never becomes a criminal, that is he never violates social order as we deem it.

This is something else from Lewis. This is from “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.” It appears as an essay in God in the Dock. Here’s what he says:

To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of "normality" hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I grow wise enough to cheat them with apparent success – who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared – shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust – is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard.

One of the things we have to see here is that Lewis is not saying that these psychotherapists are bad people. They may have very noble goals. They may feel deeply. They may love their patients. But their standard of morality and of what they are allowed to do to another human being is something that is not rooted in the word of God. They have made themselves gods. When you make another human being God, you end up dealing with some problems, implications, and consequences that are inescapable, because no man can bear that burden. No man can be God. No man is wise enough, kind enough.

We weren’t built for that.

And Lewis says this along those lines:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

They mean us well. Why would anyone want to stop them? And this should be horrifying.

So we come back to the title – The Right to Punishment. I have a right to serve my sentence and be done. I have a right to walk out free when I have served whatever service or paid whatever penalty or made whatever restitution the law requires of me. But to be trapped in some huge psychotherapeutic session with no end in sight until, as he says, I am changed into another person or I’m smart enough to figure out how to tell them what they want to hear, this is ungodly and wicked. It’s setting up, as Lewis says, the worst of all tyrannies.

We started out here wanting to be kind and loving, more so than God, and what we end up with is something that is absolutely horrific.

Just as a sort of clarifying discussion when it comes to the death penalty, for which there’s a not-insignificant number of people who are using that very same argument of loving kindness to argue against it, what is your opinion on perhaps recognizing the just quality of such a restitutionary or expiatory act, recognizing that that is a just thing that God commands, and perhaps also recognizing that perhaps it’s not being used properly in the current governmental structure in which you reside.

So to bring it to an extreme for clarity, do we say, “Well, the government has the right to execute murderers,” and therefore it’s okay for someone living in Nazi Germany to say, “This person has killed this person.” Maybe someone has died and they say, “This person killed them,” and it happens to be a Jew who is accused, and all the evidence is falsified, and then they’re put to death.

What’s the argument for saying maybe we shouldn’t be talking about the technical legality of the government to perform this when it’s in such a corrupt state?

Isn’t that kind of a straightforward logical fallacy of how the abuse does not nullify the proper use? Just because people are abusing the death penalty doesn’t mean the death penalty itself is wrong. It means that the use of it has been wrong.

That’s exactly what I’m affirming. I’m not saying that the abuses make the use of it wrong, because obviously it doesn’t. I would affirm that this is a just thing, that the concept of executing murderers is biblically justifiable.

I’m just not tracking where your question is, I guess.

I think he was throwing this out here so that we can look at it, and so that we can acknowledge what you just said, Emily, that the abuse of it does not nullify the thing itself.

I think while we’re here – because I don’t remember that I actually ever put a discussion of the death penalty in this series, shame on me, but this is a good place – what we hear as the other counter-argument is, “But courts can make mistakes.”

Bryan just used the example of in Nazi Germany the accused is a Jew, and the State is predisposed not to want him alive, so trumps up evidence or looks away when the evidence is not to its liking, and this Jew, who is in fact innocent, is now executed. And if that can happen then, doesn’t it continue to happen? And if it can happen there under those circumstances – yes, those are the most obvious – but can it happen even accidentally in our own country?

With the best of intentions, the District Attorney and the police department think they’ve got their guy and they present the evidence, and the defense doesn’t live up to its job and the man is executed, only for us to find out weeks or months or years later that in fact he was innocent. Isn’t that justification for doing away with the death penalty, because we can never bring that man back now.

As human beings, we need to feel the emotional weight of that. We need to be able to say, “Yes, that is terribly sad, and that’s why everyone involved with this process needs to exercise the utmost care and not be full of themselves and not be arrogant and not turn this into some kind of political agenda or ‘I’m going to make a name for myself and run for governor off this case.’” That’s why everyone needs to be under oath and so on, but there’s a couple things we need to say here.

First, justice is always fallible, and although this is an extreme case, courts always make mistakes. They do so very often. That’s the reality. The second thing is that when God gave the law, he knew that. He gave it to fallible sinful human beings and gave them the authority to exercise these penal sanctions, including the death penalty, when he knew that sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally we get the wrong guy.

We can look at God and say, “God, how dare you!” Well, because this earthly life is not all there is, when we execute somebody that’s ultimately not their punishment. What we’re doing is sending them to a higher court. That person does not stop existing. The moment his body stops quivering and the brainwaves fail, he appears before God as a living soul, where God passes final sentence.

And that one is perfect and infallible.

That one is perfect and infallible. It may be that at that point the man enters eternal joy beyond anything we can conceive of, or eternal misery reserved for the devil and his angels. God doesn’t miss on that one. When we see this world as all there is, it’s easy to say, “There’s nothing worse than dying,” to which the Bible responds, “Oh, yes there is, and death is not always loss.”

It is certainly an encouragement to get ready for what comes afterward, but the God who made the world, the God who knows the human heart and the God who from the beginning knew the outcome of every single trial that would ever be carried out on this planet in all of its thousands of years of history still gave us this system, because he deemed it on the whole better for the progress of his kingdom than the alternative.

It's better than anarchy, better than locking people away. “Yeah, let’s lock someone away for life. That’s really kinder and gentler.”

I always wondered too if there’s a certain level of – I don’t want to say this is the case in every single case – but a certain type of carelessness. If we the jury decide that he’s guilty, he’s just in prison but he’s still alive, so it doesn’t matter that much.

I think, at least as it’s dramatized for us in film, for whatever that’s worth, we do see and it seems to be consistent with human nature that when the death penalty is on the table, juries are far more careful about convicting. If they know that they’re going to send a man to lethal injection, the electric chair, the noose, whatever, the decision is more nerve-wracking. It’s more difficult.

A reasonable doubt becomes a lot more reasonable and doubtful because you’re now dealing with this man’s existence on this planet. You’re going to send him to God. He stops in this timeline and resumes in another, and do we really want to do that? Are we that sure?

The American system is good in that you need to get 12 people to agree to that, and a judge to superintend it to make sure that all the legal niceties have been observed, and to remind said jury of its responsibilities and what the law actually requires of them.

This is a good time to recommend a film like 12 Angry Men, where such things are played out. Although the theme of that movie seems to be slightly left-leaning, yet not wholly because yes, we do need to be careful and we do need to think through this and we do need to consider possibilities. Do I know this man is innocent? No, but do I know he’s guilty? No. Well, there’s the reasonable doubt. This should not be, “Well, the guy stinks of evil. Off with his head!” Those people you don’t want on a jury.

American people more and more don’t want to serve on juries. It’s bothersome. It’s time-consuming. There’s not enough parking downtown – which shows how little we care about our fellow man and about the judicial system.

There was a time when juries were chosen more or less from the most educated, the most respectable professions and elements of society. It wasn’t exactly picking a name out of a hat or out of the DMV file, and you can make an argument both ways. It’s good to have those who are used to exercising authority and responsibility to be the kind of people who make this decision, but it’s also good that the man be one of us, someone who can relate to who we are and where we are.

Again, I’d appeal to 12 Angry Men just as an example of this being played out. You’ve got one guy who’s from the slums and understands just some very practical things about the kid on trial and the kind of life he’s lived. It makes a difference, whereas you get somebody else who’s used to authority and used to calling the shots and used to pushing things along, and he plays his role.

There’s a lot to discuss here, and Christians haven’t for a very long time, but the roots of the jury system are the priesthood of the believer. You don’t need a law degree. You need to know Jesus and have the fear of God in your heart and be an honest man who has a concern for both justice and mercy. These are some important things that we need.

So here’s the thing. How do you fix the justice system? Well, a law should be passed. Yeah, that’s kind of the point. We need new people. We need godly judges and lawyers.

We need the preaching of the gospel.

We need the preaching of the gospel. We need to change people’s hearts – not we, God. He needs to write his law on their heart so that there is an echo of response, an innate sense of right and wrong. You don’t have to walk into a jury room and say, “Now, what’s the right thing to do here?” We should know the right thing. The question is what’s the evidence say and then we can debate evidence. We can debate facts and interpretation of facts, but the basic morality…

“Well, you know, we’re in Nazi Germany. This Jew is accused of killing a white woman, a matron of our society who’s brought forth five fine Hitler children.”

None of that is remotely relevant to anything. We need not to come in with our own presuppositions of who’s worthy and who’s good. We’re all sinners. That should be one of our starting points, and we need to consider ourselves as well and put ourselves into this guy’s shows.

And yet, ultimately, if we are serving on a jury we are exercising civil authority. We’re working for God and we need to go into the courtroom with that mentality. “I answer to God for this, and one day I will answer to God. I’ll stand before him just as surely as he will if he’s executed, and I want to hear ‘Well done,’ not ‘What were you thinking?’”

We hope in this podcast we have played some small part in reviving this conversation that needs to happen about these things.

Shall we switch over to recommendations? I think we can all sign on to 12 Angry Men. Any others?

I will recommend American Gospel 2. There’s a second American Gospel film that we watched with friends over the last couple Saturdays. This one is called American Gospel: Christ Crucified. The first one was an attack on the health and wealth gospel. This is an attack on progressive Christianity, the emergent church, and basically a bunch of guys who think they’re wiser than God.

Their argument is that we can’t really be sure of anything, except for the fact that the historic gospel is wrong because the historic gospel says that God sent his son to the cross, and that would be cosmic child abuse. That would be unjust, unfair, illegitimate ethically, and so obviously not what the gospel says, if there even is a gospel. There may be many gospels. There may be some broad category of gospel. Paul had his gospel, John had his gospel, Jesus had his gospel.

This justification by faith thing, this penal substitution, okay, maybe Paul talked about that some and maybe there’s some truth in that somewhere, especially for Paul, but you know, as the church grows in its understanding of who this God person is, we’re going to refine our understanding of the gospel and what it really means.

Anyway, it’s a wonderful assault on all of that, with biblical answers from theologians, pastors, and Christian workers who I suspect everyone will recognize. I recognize some of them from your neck of the woods.

My only quibble is that when they’re trying to explain the Trinity, they use diagrams.

No!

Yeah. And when they try to explain the Trinity and the hypostatic union at the same time in the same diagram, and how God can be angry with his son – the theology is great, but when you try to draw it out in pictures, especially little circles that move around…

There are numerous diagrams.

Yes. And it was sad that all those people on the couch, some of them teenagers, were laughing at the whole thing. But aside from that…

Aside from pictorial representations of the Trinity…

“That’s partialism, Patrick!”

And someone actually called that out in the middle of all of it. Aside from that it is well worth your time if you can stomach some of the brazen arrogance of some of these young guys.

I’m reminded of Lewis who, when he’s describing frivolity or something like that – remember in Screwtape where there’s joy and then there’s joke and then I think the last one is frivolity or something – but he says that the joke is always assumed to have been made, though no one ever makes it. Everyone sees the funny side, although no one’s ever explained what that might be.

I was watching some of these young guys who do the podcasts and the radio programs and such, and you just say something and they begin to smirk and to smile with such arrogance, and you say, “Don’t you understand you’re going to stand before God one day for this? You don’t know the truth, or you do and you’re pretending you don’t.”

I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of them. Are they that foolish or that stupid? I think stupid is better. Maybe they just really are incapable of understanding simple theology and should go become trash collectors someplace.

What’s the saying? Never assign to malice what can be assigned to stupidity? It’s the more gracious thing.

It’s the more gracious thing. And by the way, that wasn’t a slam on trash collectors, because I’m sure there are many godly fine ones.

And that’s my thing. Without the support of my family and friends I could not have made it through. I would have just turned the thing off, yelled and screamed and walked off. But if you want to understand the currents in today’s theological setting, I think it’s an excellent thing to watch.

All right, Bryan?

This past week I listened to the audiobook for Laura Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken, which is a phenomenal story of a World War II bombardier pilot who is stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean after their B-24 experiences mechanical failure.

He’s adrift with two of his co-pilots, who survived for 47 days and were eventually picked up by the Japanese Imperial Navy, at which point he spends a couple years in mainland Japan at a couple different POW camps undergoing the absolute most inhumane treatment you can possibly imagine, having communicable diseases tested upon him and being forced to stand in a shack in winter in nothing but a traditional undergarment, and all sorts of horrible things.

So this is a real cheery read, is what I’m hearing.

Very cheery. But what’s wonderful is towards the end, after the surrender of Japan to the Allies and his return home, and after a fairly rough bout of alcoholism and tobacco addiction and night terrors, wherein he was remembering the horrible things that one of these camp wardens did to him, he is dragged along unwillingly to a Billy Graham crusade by his wife.

He makes a beeline for the door the minute Billy says, “All right everyone, bow your head and close your eyes,” and Billy apparently sees the movement and goes, “You don’t leave. You can leave when we’re done praying, but you don’t leave right now,” and he kind of stopped in the middle of the aisle.

He went on and said something about, “You think that God doesn’t care about you, or you think he doesn’t exist, but let me tell you, when the chips are down and everything’s going wrong and he’s after you, he’s going to give you strength and you don’t know where it comes from.”

At that moment – the guy’s name is Louis Zamperini – Louis goes, “You know, come to think of it, we had three strafing runs from a Japanese bomber before we got picked up by one of their ships, and none of us got hit by bullets. I somehow survived all that time in a POW camp – multiple POW camps – and all of us somehow were not enacted under the ‘kill all’ order that all of the Japanese camps were going to do in case of surrender or defeat or retreat. Oh.” Then he also remembered, “Oh yeah, I kind of promised you if you got me out of that I’d live my life for you. Oops.”

God’s cashing in on that.

All at once, apparently. It’s a fantastic story because of all the eyewitness stuff and his descriptions, but that part towards the end – you get teary-eyed. I highly recommend it. It’s fantastic. The movie, I am told – I’ve not seen it, but they made a movie off the book – but the movie ends with him walking out of the POW camp. We get none of the other stuff because, can you imagine? I can’t imagine why they would do that. But it’s called Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.

Cool. My recommendation is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne was writing in the context of the early-ish 19th century America. There were a lot of reform societies including prison reforms that we’ve been talking about, teetotaling temperance crusades, things like that – huge movements in the time.

The short story is called Earth’s Holocaust. He starts to question this idea of, “Okay, we’ve gotten rid of alcohol. We’ve gotten rid of the prison system. We’ve gotten rid of this, we’ve gotten rid of that, and yet the world’s not perfect. We’ve thrown it all on the flames and what’s left?” It’s a very thoughtful, very well-written little short story, so I recommend that heartily.

I’ve never heard of that one. I’ll have to read that.

What is the title again?

Earth’s Holocaust.

So that concludes our episode for this evening. Thank you guys so much for being here. Thanks also to our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.

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