Justice, Part II

UPDATE: An acquaintance from high school died in the shooting. Her name was Grace Kim. My condolences to her family. 

REVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out."  

-Francis Bacon, Of Revenge, 1561-1626

          For context, please read these articles first:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-rt-usa-shootingoakland-update-8-pix-tvl2e8f2ggy-20120402,0,3142133.story 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/02/BABJ1NTM3Q.DTL&tsp=1 

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2012/04/02/dead-hurt-california-christian-university-shooting/w3dLfKMJM20xZvqj3Z5UbP/story.html

          If you haven't the news already, a gunman has been captured in connection with the shooting of 7 dead and 3 wounded individuals at a small Christian college in Oakland, California yesterday.

          That is Oakland for you. As in, the city my dad worked for a few years fixing up and building a new elementary school. My parents go into the city every Sunday for Catholic Mass (20 min. away from my house). So immediately I was alarmed by my sister to call my parents. Thankfully, they were safe. They did not know anyone who was hurt, either. So thank God.

          Let's have a mourning period for the families of these victims. Perhaps it is too early to bring up enacting tougher gun-control laws. We need to understand what happened. We need to understand what motivated the killer. We need to find out who it was—suspects are entitled to innocence and a fair trial until proven guilty. The legal system must weed out revenge's "wild" corruption of justice (Bacon). Finally, we need to examine ourselves—what is it about us that we see in the killer himself? Because as long as we are convinced that such acts of violence are the product of "crazy" individuals, then we refuse to understand the ways in which violence is always part of a larger cause. What led to this? If we can or once we have pinned the answer to that question down, then what are we to do?

          Quote from SF Chronicle article:

Kaine Ping, 21, of Oakland, said authorities informed him that his sister Katleen Ping, 24, was among the dead at Oikos.

He said his sister, a devout Christian who studied nursing and was an administrative assistant at the school, was survived by her 4-year-old son.

“I believed she's a saved person," Ping said. "And that means she's in heaven.”

          Quote from Boston Globe article:

Deborah Lee, who was in an English language class, said she heard five to six gunshots at first. “The teacher said, ‘Run,’ and we run,” she said. “I was OK, because I know God protects me. I’m not afraid of him.’’

          How are we supposed to react to this tragedy, as human beings? By this question, I mean, disregarding what faith we adhere to or don't adhere to?

          To me, a lot of these first-person quotes seem a little iffy. You've heard it all before: we should be happy for the departed if they believed in God and/or accepted Jesus Christ. I mean, I agree to an extent: Jesus Christ provides a world-template for me that appears to be the best one to adhere to. Yet, as human beings, we are naturally sad when someone close leaves us. Whether or not an afterlife exists, death is always going to sadden us to some extent.

          Also, does God protect us? Does he care? Because if we saw the totality of the instances of individual suffering happening in the world at this moment, we are tempted (with good reason) to say no. I would have to disagree with the woman who believes God protected her from the shootings. It's not impossible, but it's fairly implausible. If God could protect her, why didn't he protect the others? Another response to this question is that God has a specific plan in mind for all of us, whether or not death comes to us sooner than to other people.

          To the atheist who uses suffering to disbelieve in the goodness and omnipotence of God: I understand your position. I wouldn't even disagree with you. That said, how can we find ways to create dialogue between believers and secularists on the issue of school violence?

          My position, while somewhat untenable, is that God is just and that God does care. This is difficult to understand, partly because any attempt to explain it will reek of bias. There will be a day in which God will be held accountable for the suffering that has occurred on Earth. He will have to answer as to why He let those people die. And on that day, God will also hold Satan accountable for the suffering that he has incited. But that day has not come.

          Another way of thinking about it is that God is intimately aware of our suffering. He understands what it feels like to die what seems like a meaningless death. In fact, Peter wants to save Jesus from dying what seems to be an unworthy death for the king of kings:

²¹From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

²² Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”

²³ Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

(Matthew 16:21-23, New International Version)

          Peter is being glib here, but he is also being human. As human beings, we aren't able to see the future. We don't understand what death means in the long scheme of things. We know that death makes us sad, but of its deeper significance we are unable to grasp. For Christians, Jesus' death and resurrection is the central point of history and therefore anything that denies that premise is not part of truth.

          I don't mean to suggest non-Christians are not moral or that they do not have a firm grasp on reality. I'm saying that God/Jesus himself was familiar with suffering. He understood it from the perspective of a human being. Jesus suffered. Finally, he died; it is through his blood and body that believers are ultimately saved.

          To the atheists that have tuned out by this point:

I have saved the best of the faithful until the last. Dr. Francis Collins is one of the greatest living Americans. He is the man who brought the Human Genome Project to completion, ahead of time and under budget, and who now directs the National Institutes of Health. In his work on the genetic origins of disorder, he helped decode the “misprints” that cause such calamities as cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease. He is working now on the amazing healing properties that are latent in stem cells and in “targeted” gene-based treatments. This great humanitarian is also a devotee of the work of C. S. Lewis and in his book The Language of God has set out the case for making science compatible with faith. (This small volume contains an admirably terse chapter informing fundamentalists that the argument about evolution is over, mainly because there is no argument.) I know Francis, too, from various public and private debates over religion. He has been kind enough to visit me in his own time and to discuss all sorts of novel treatments, only recently even imaginable, that might apply to my case. And let me put it this way: he hasn’t suggested prayer, and I in turn haven’t teased him about The Screwtape Letters. So those who want me to die in agony are really praying that the efforts of our most selfless Christian physician be thwarted. Who is Dr. Collins to interfere with the divine design? By a similar twist, those who want me to burn in hell are also mocking those kind religious folk who do not find me unsalvageably evil. I leave these paradoxes to those, friends and enemies, who still venerate the supernatural. 

-Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011 

          The paradox that Hitchens mentions here is the tenuous relationship that Christians have with the dying. We are supposed to be joyous when a Christian dies, for God has called him to Heaven. Yet even our own salvation is not something we can be certain of, ultimately. So how can we be joyous?

          Hitchens raises another point: how should Christians pray for the salvation of non-believers? Most of us would say yes: it is one of our duties to do so. Yet, salvation takes place on an individual level, and it is not even up to us; Christ saves us—we cannot attain salvation ourselves.

          My opinion? Prayer is important, but not for the reasons we commonly believe it is. It was Kierkegaard who wrote, "The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays." We cannot influence God to do a single thing in this world. God's plan is supreme. God has predestined the elect and the depraved. We cannot know whether Hitchens has gone to Heaven or Hell, so it is time for us to stop making misguided predictions. We should pray for the dying and for the dead, but it is ultimately God's decision—we cannot "interfere with the divine design." 

          My prayer: 

God, bring justice. Teach us what justice is. Change our hearts. Open our eyes to the injustices of this fallen world, and allow us to understand that it is us who are in need of salvation. We mourn the dead, the dying, and the suffering. Not my will, but thy will be done.