God in Captivity by Tanya Erzen

Author:Tanya Erzen [Erzen, Tanya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807089996
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

The art of punishing is the art of awakening in a criminal, by pain or even death, the desire for pure good. Those who are so estranged from the good must be reintegrated with it by having harm inflicted upon them. This must be done until the completely innocent part of the criminal’s soul awakens with the surprised cry, “Why am I being hurt?” This innocent part of the soul must then be nurtured until it becomes able to judge and condemn past crimes and attain forgiveness.6

Today, many nondenominational and evangelical Christians seem wedded to the idea that punishment awakens good and the biblical idea of God’s law as retribution, whether it is imprisonment or the death penalty. The chaplain at Lawtey Correctional Institution in Florida, a Southern Baptist who believes wholeheartedly in heart change and transformation, still insists on the necessity of the death penalty. When I asked the chaplain about Karla Faye Tucker, who was executed by the state of Texas in 1998 after becoming a devoted Christian, he responded, “You pay the Old Testament price even if transformed. There is still a penalty to pay.” The chaplain recalled how he broke down crying when he had to minister to Ricky Sanchez, a Cuban who came to the United States on the Mariel boatlift in the 1980s and was going to be put to death. “God’s Law,” he explained to me. “It’s not about getting even; it’s about fulfilling the law.”

Both Gorringe and Mark Taylor, a professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and critic of mass incarceration, argue that remembering the executed Jesus is crucial for mobilizing resistance to mass incarceration.7 Instead of focusing on the crucifixion and the violence of atonement, Christians could highlight Jesus’s teachings and words. Jesus was a criminal who resisted the Roman authorities and preached a practice of forgiveness and fellowship that is absent from the theological underpinnings of punishment today.8 Gorringe, however, argues that, to a human being who has wronged his fellow man, forgiveness is an infinitely more convincing proof of love than punishment can ever be and may, therefore, touch the heart as punishment cannot.9

The faith-based ministries reinforce some of the retributive and vengeance-centered ideas about punishment. In their view, a person like Shawn must suffer and find forgiveness solely through God, rather than in relationship with other people, including those he has harmed. However, the origins of the Darrington seminary, where Shawn lives, grew out of an unlikely story of vengeance and forgiveness between two Christians, the father of a murdered daughter and the man who killed her. Grove Norwood funded and conceived of the seminary in Texas after his personal history of tragedy led him to believe faith-based programs in prison were the solution to changing the hearts of prisoners. Norwood is a rangy former fighter pilot and Vietnam vet in his seventies with a lined, weathered face and a shock of stark white hair. He’s a self-described country boy from the small Texas town of Simonton,

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