Jailhouse Conversions

Should you ever become a convicted felon, you will find out quickly that a visit from God in prison will benefit you not only in your next life, but also while doing your time in this one. You might lose more friends from getting religion than you had without it, but on balance, you will still be better off. Your new friends will be a considerable improvement on your old ones, particularly if you have to make peace with your surroundings for a long time. And if you ever do get out, telling people about your cell-block conversion can give you a huge leg up on re-entering the society of the law-abiding.

Does this opening paragraph seem a little cynical to you? If you think so, you are not alone, especially now that Terry Nichol's second jury failed to sentence him to death for his participation in the Oklahoma City bombing. One thing that seems to have carried weight in the assessment of Mr. Nichols was the belief of some of his peers that he had become "religious" since the bombing, and that as a result, he could make a positive contribution to others in prison were his life spared.

In other cases, other juries have seemed ill-disposed to such religious sentiments. And the outrage over the Nichols jury's ambivalence suggests that a very large number of people in our society have great difficulty seeing how a violator's claim to conversion after his or her heinous act can ever mitigate against punishing the act itself according to the full measure of the law. Apparently, one or more on the second Nichols jury took the accused's profession of new-found religion at face value; others did not. Would it make any difference to our own reactions if we could know for sure whether the profession was genuine?

I think it just might. For along with the suspiciousness that most people have --- the most conscientiously religious included --- of the genuineness of jailhouse conversions, the possibility of sudden and wholly transforming experiences of God's presence and power in another person's life is a possibility that has always been close to the vital center of American thought and life, whether that possibility is framed in religious terminology or not. "In the criminal justice system," as Law and Order buffs refer to it, merely bringing offenders to justice is never enough; rehabilitating them is even more important. (Although in the passion of the moment, it is easy to forget this.)

Our revivalist traditions put the point a little differently, e.g.: "There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins; And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains…(William Cowper) But the point is still the same, as Cowper went on to say: even those who are as "vile" as the thief on the cross can become as clean as that thief became that day, washed in the blood flowing from Jesus' own. Even Timothy McVeigh? Apparently not; Tim seems to have cast his lot early on with that other thief on Golgotha, who remained content only to mock his Redeemer. But Terry Nichols? Well, most of us simply do not know whether the reports we have heard of his new-found faith are reliable or not. However, if they are reliable…

Therein lies the problem: only God knows the truth that is in each human heart, no matter how true or how false anyone's most heart-felt professions may seem to anyone else. Professing faith falsely mitigates nothing. Professing faith truly might mitigate even the most horrendous acts --- all sins are forgivable, if the Apostles' Creed is any guide --- if we could only know that the professing is genuine. But we cannot, at least not as God knows. However, God has not left us utterly in the dark about the things of the heart. We are richly blessed by our Creator with the capacity to discern the spirit within each of us by looking at what we do. It is by our fruits that we are to be known.

By this measure, Terry Nichols still has a lot of proving up to do, and most people have seen no good reason to give him any more time in which to do it. They may be right. Certainly, we can understand why the families of the Oklahoma City bombing victims would want to run out the clock on Mr. Nichols, if in fact all of them do. But I cannot help wondering if the blood that is still on his hands may have come from two fountains, and not just one.

A Methodist Theologian Not To Forget

This summer, a number of Annual Conferences of the United Methodist Church are including in their meetings a celebration of the life and work of Albert C. Outler, one of the most influential Methodist theologians in the history of the denomination, on the fifteenth year of his death. They are bringing back fond memories.

When I joined the faculty of Perkins School of Theology in 1969, I brought with me an intimidating homework assignment. The previous Spring, my first letter of welcome to the faculty was from Dr. Outler, and it included both an invitation and a recommendation.
His invitation was to teach the course in Methodist Constitutional History which had been a favorite of his at Perkins for many years. His recommendation was to start boning up seriously on Methodist history --- right then. To get me started, he sent under separate cover his own copy of William Warren Sweet's Methodism in American History.

My second day at Perkins, I was unpacking books when Albert dropped by and asked me to lunch. Alas, I had to face this great man across fish and chips with a still too general knowledge of Methodist history and with the confession that though I was gaining on it, it was going to take a while. "I can help," he said. And help, he did. He encouraged me to work up a briefer overview of American Methodist history than he was himself accustomed to offering in the Methodist Constitutional History course. Then, he suggested that my students and I might spend the second half of the semester working with him directly on an interim report to General Conference about doctrinal standards for the new United Methodist Church. What a deal!

Albert Outler was at that time chair of the Theological Study Commission formed by the just merged Methodist and Evangelical and United Brethren churches, whose mandate was to work out a statement on basic doctrine that would represent both traditions faithfully. Few people knew how difficult his task was. His committee members were constantly firing off notes, recommendations, and position papers that they not so subtly suggested would provide just the perspective on United Methodist theology to last us until the second coming.

Albert's problem, as I came to see as a result of reading all this material, was that members of the Study Commission neither saw the history of the merged denominations the same way nor shared anything close to a common theological methodology. In spite of these obstacles, however, the "theological pluralism" that the Commission's final report celebrated was anything but "theological indifferentism," contrary to the viewpoint of many of the report's critics right down to the present.

More often than not, I was simply awestruck watching Albert steer this very diverse group of committed Christians toward a working agreement on difficult matters of normative doctrine. But I should not have been surprised. Albert was already working with the greatest and most ecumenically-minded theologians of our time on the most vexing issues threatening Christian unity, and his particular contributions to Protestant-Roman Catholic dialogue on the meaning of tradition were well known and appreciated. Further, he had spent three years as the Methodist Church's official observer at the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church. The book he wrote about Vatican II's new vision of the church remains one of the finest produced by any of the theologians who attended, Protestant and Catholic alike.

While in Rome, Albert quickly won the trust of the movers and shakers at the Council, and in so doing, got us a hearing for our own doctrine and doctrinal standards statement. What he wanted the Vatican to know especially was that at least the United Methodist branch of Protestantism had moved beyond the era of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, attack and counter-attack, into an era of honest acknowledgement of mutual sin, by hearts warmed by grace, set ablaze by the one Spirit with a love to share with all humankind.

With the approval of the 1972 General Conference, Albert delivered what became Part Two of our Book of Discipline in person to the Roman curia. And Rome's response was historic. In it, for the first time since the Reformation, the Roman Church officially recognized a Protestant body --- ours --- as a church instead of as merely a group of "separated believers." I was in Albert's office when he opened the official communication from Rome, and shared with him a moment of pure, unbounded joy, a kind of joy that our current encirclement by the wagons of unthinking and unloving traditionalists and liberals alike threatens to snuff out altogether.