I was raised in a particular theological framework, which
taught that all people above the “age of accountability” (not a specific age
per se, but rather the age at which a child is aware of right and wrong and can
be held responsible for sin – those who never develop the mental capacity for
this being considered infants for theological purposes) have sinned and fallen
short of the glory of God, as it states in Romans 3:23, and have therefore
merited eternal damnation in the literal fires of hell – or, more precisely,
the lake of fire, which is worse than hell, hell being the jail before the
white throne judgement at which the sentence to the eternal prison of the lake
of fire is given. It was often taught and preached that all sins are equally
bad, because every sin is an affront to God, and none is worse or less
offensive than another. The only way to escape hell/the lake of fire is to be
saved, to be born again, to ask and trust Jesus to forgive one’s sins,
believing in his resurrection and publicly confessing him as lord and savior.
My father, having narcissistic personality disorder and
getting into arguments with the board of deacons of his church when I was
between the ages of 10 and 12, subconsciously got back at them by preaching
publicly that many people – including some deacons and Sunday school teachers –
thought they were saved/born again but really weren’t and, when they died,
would “split hell wide open” – a favorite frequent phrase of my father’s. And
he preached this on Sunday and Wednesday nights, the services that the devout
attended. Those who only came on Sunday morning could easily be seen as lost
(the term for the unsaved) – but that those who came on Sunday and Wednesday
nights as well might go to hell was a testament to the seriousness of the sins
churchgoers committed.
Of course, there was only one person who was “convicted” by
such preaching and worried about his own salvation and who therefore came down the
aisle during the invitation during one of the 57 verses of Just As I Am – and
that was me. My father was clearly surprised, and you could tell I wasn’t the
one he was trying to get down the aisle – my mother tried to convince me there
was nothing to worry about, while my father encouraged my doubts and tearful
prayers, but also said those who worried about their salvation were the ones
who really were saved – it was the complacent who didn’t worry about it who
were actually damned.
Sometime after that I came down the aisle again, at age 10
(we were in that particular congregation when I was between ages 10 and 12) –
this time not in tears doubting my salvation, but “surrendering to the call to
preach”, ready to dedicate myself to be a preacher and maybe a foreign
missionary. An elderly deacon died not long after that, and as we were on the
church steps waiting for the coffin to be taken out of the church, I remember
telling my mother and another woman in the church that I knew how I wanted to
die – my mother nervously said “you want to be raptured, right?” – but no, I
wanted to martyred in a foreign land, killed for the faith of Christ as had
been the Southern Baptist missionary Bill Wallace whose biography I had read
from the church library for a foreign missions book challenge the church held.
I have no idea what the other woman thought of this exchange.
Around this time, I got a Gideon New Testament with the plan
of salvation – and I marked it up with the scriptures that one could use to
lead someone to Christ – and began haranguing my classmates, er I mean
witnessing to them about the necessity of salvation. (I was 11 by this point,
as I remember being in sixth grade with a teacher who had been a football coach
who dipped snuff in front of the class, spitting the tobacco juice into a
coffee cup.) I think I convinced one classmate to go through the process – I
doubt that it had any lasting effect, but some of the older boys in my Royal
Ambassadors group (the youth group for boys in Southern Baptist churches)
commended me for this “soulwinning” success.
So it is against this theological backdrop that I started
thinking about the death penalty and how it was a horrifying injustice, because
there might always be some hope, however slim, that a convicted murderer or the
like might nonetheless find his way to repentance and be saved. Given that our
whole life was devoted to the task of saving as many people as possible from
the horrors of eternal conscious torment in hell/lake of fire, it made sense to
me that the death penalty was completely at odds with the gospel (as I
understood it from my parents) and that therefore Christians should want to
abolish it. If God had mercy on us enough to send his Son Jesus Christ to die a
horrible death on the cross as an atonement for our sins, then surely the least
we could do is do everything in our power to bring everyone, including prisoners,
to salvation.
I vividly remember being in the back seat of the car with my
parents when we went shopping, and I told them this – and was shocked at the
reaction. My father started railing about how horrible murderers and child
molesters were and that if someone were to attack me he would absolutely kill
them (oblivious to the difference between acting in self-defense and someone in
prison for life). My mother agreed with my father. And they saw my views as an
attack on the “biblical” mandate of capital punishment. I could not understand
the absolute thwarting of any possibility of salvation that the death penalty would
impose – and the cognitive dissonance between my parents’ teaching of the utter
gratitude we, as miserable sinners, ought to feel at the salvation we received
although utterly unworthy – and the rejection of giving that mercy to others. I
also did not understand how, in one context, all sins were the same, yet in another
context they were not. I don’t know that I made the connection at the time, but
Jesus told the parable about a servant who was forgiven a large debt by his
master who then refused to show mercy and forgive a much smaller debt owed the
servant by another servant – when the master learned of this, he turned the
servant over to the tormentors – we studied this parable in “Training Union”,
a Baptist Sunday evening version of
Sunday school – we even acted it out, and a girl in the class wanted to be a “tormentor”,
which made the teacher laugh because it was obvious she didn’t know what the
word meant.
They did not convince me – and this was the beginning of my
move away from their theology. That someone could be sent to hell, God’s hands
completely tied because of the sinful behavior of his Christian followers,
seemed to me to be utterly unjust – and ultimately this began my road to a
universalist theology.
