Life and Death Locked Up in a Cell

For Whoever Observes the Whole Law, But . . . 

We have never met Brenton Tarrant, nor are we likely to do so.  He is the first to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in New Zealand--that is, Tarrant must literally spend the rest of his natural life in this world locked up in a cell.  His egregious acts of mass murder necessarily have attracted the most severe penalty "on offer" in the present judicial system of New Zealand, as it were. 

Christians will be thinking long and hard about all of this.  But Christians will be thinking differently from atheists, agnostics, and Unbelievers of all sorts and stripes.  They will also have a distinct view from Islamic folk. 

Christians will be conscious of the fact that Brenton Tarrant has been spared the most extreme form of judicial punishment available in this life: that is, the death penalty.  Secondly, Mr Tarrant may well live another sixty or seventy years in his cell.  That existence might lead to his atonement and forgiveness--but only if Tarrant repents of his horrendous sins and turns to Christ, believing in His mercy and cleansing. 

Thirdly, Christians will be acutely aware that Tarrant's evil is replicated to some degree or other in the lives and attitudes of every Christian that has ever lived, or ever will live.  We look at him and see ourselves.  There have been times when we have lost control of our tempers and sentiments to the extent of wishing evil upon others.  The wishing of evil upon others makes us guilty of that every act itself.  So, as we consider Mr Tarrant, we end up being condemned with him because to some extent we share his evil. 

Doubtless there are many who would find such thoughts to be offensive.  "How dare you say that I am like that evil man" would be the natural response.  Well, Christians are commanded to measure themselves by standing alongside Christ Himself, not alongside Mr Tarrant.  Unless we are like Christ in all regards, we are as doomed as Tarrant is.  "For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it" [James 2:10].

May God have mercy upon us all.

Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Apocryphal Death Bed Conversions

Jake Meador
The Federalist

In a recent essay for the New Yorker, Lawrence Krauss bemoaned the common habit among some conservative Christians of conjuring up fanciful deathbed conversion narratives about prominent non-Christians. He specifically mentions the well-known tale of evangelist Elizabeth Cotton, who made up such a story about Charles Darwin. She claimed that he told her from his deathbed that he wished to “recant the doctrine of evolution in exchange for Christian salvation.”

Krauss’s odd phrasing aside, he points to a problem that really does exist in pockets of conservative Christianity. In addition to the stories of Darwin, other conservative Christians have made up similar tales about other prominent enemies of the faith—Voltaire and Thomas Paine, most notably. Making up a conversion story about a famous person is obviously a horrible thing to do. At its root it is lying about a person’s views of God, which is horrifying enough, but it also implies a certain distressing insecurity in the believer. Krauss is right to condemn this sort of thing.