Consequences | “Hope on Death Row” with Jenny McBride

Show Notes:

The death penalty is a controversial topic, especially for Christians--people who see the reign of God as one of forgiveness, restorative justice, and mercy. How do we reconcile ending someone’s life with the all-encompassing grace and love of Jesus Christ? Today’s guest, Dr. Jenny McBride, talks us through those conflicting concepts.

Jenny is Associate Dean and Associate Professor at McCormick Theological Seminary. She was the Board of Regents Endowed Chair in Ethics at Wartburg College in Iowa and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Initiative in Religious Practices and Practical Theology at Emory University, where she served as program director for the Atlanta Theological Association’s Certificate in Theological Studies at Metro State Prison for Women. 

Jenny’s deep friendship with Kelly Gissendaner, Georgia’s only female death-row inmate who was executed in September 2015, grew out of her experience as a professor in the certificate program. Jenny got to experience Kelly’s deep and growing faith and walked with Kelly through the final moments of her life, reminding her that “Jesus is going to be with you.” Jenny’s latest book, You Shall Not Condemn, tells Kelly’s story through her own friendship with Jenny and other religious leaders and advocates.

You Shall Not Condemn doesn’t have a release date yet, but as soon as it does, we’ll let you know on The Weight’s social media.

Transcription:

Eddie Rester 00:00 I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:01
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.

Eddie Rester 00:03

Today our our guest is Dr. Jenny McBride, who has been a friend of Chris's through the years, through his theological education, and comes to speak to us today about a friendship that she made.

Chris McAlilly 00:15

Jenny has written a book called "You Shall Not Condemn." It will come out this year, in 2022. And it centers on a story with a woman she met named Kelly Gissendanner, who was a woman who was on death row in the state of Georgia.

Eddie Rester 00:30

Kelly was eventually executed in 2015. But in 2010, Kelly began a theological certificate program that some of the theological schools in Atlanta were doing in the prison where Kelly was and Jenny and others went to teach. Jenny went to teach theology. But more than teach theology, she met someone who she saw the redemptive work of Christ moving in her, and she and others became an advocate for her for clemency as her date of execution approached.

Chris McAlilly 01:07

The conversation about the death penalty in America is a very big topic. And it's complex. And, you know, there's crimes and consequences and whatnot. I think one of the things that Jenny points to in the conversation that I'll take away is that a person is basically more than the worst thing that they've ever done. And so part of what you get a glimpse of is the humanity of Kelly through a friendship that she has with Jenny, and then also in the book, there's a friendship that Kelly developed with a an internationally known theologian from Germany named Juergen Moltmann, who is known as a theologian of hope. And that factors in the conversation as well.

Eddie Rester 01:50

I think for me, one of the things that struck me is that often our theological understandings have places where they stop and one of the places that often as Christians, or at least my theological understanding stop is at the jailhouse door. And what does it mean for us to believe in hope and redemption and reconciliation, in the midst of a place where people are broken and have done broken things?

Chris McAlilly 02:14
Yeah. I'm gonna have to listen, go back and listen to episode again, to really, I mean, there's a lot going on.

Eddie Rester 02:22 There's a lot. It's good.

Chris McAlilly 02:23

And it's, you know, I think it's not... You know, because I just find myself, oftentimes, most days, I'm dealing with my kids, I'm dealing with the things that are right in front of me. And I really don't have a lot of time to think through the implications of our faith, the implications of the gospel and our faith, for certain dimensions of our society I have a lot of contact with, and this is one of those conversations. And I mean, it's challenging, because it's not an easy one. And I hope that you learn some things in here. I certainly did. And, you know, I think it puts us in a position to deepen our understanding and faith.

Eddie Rester 03:11

Hope that you'll like, that you'll share, and that you'll write a review for us, on whatever platform you're on. That helps us get in front of other people, whatever the algorithms are, I don't know what those are. But that helps us. Other people find the podcast as well. So thank you for doing that. And thank you for listening.

Eddie Rester 03:29

[INTRO] Life can be heavy. We carry around with us the weight of our doubt, our pain, our suffering, our mental health, our family system, our politics. This is a podcast that creates space for all of that.

Chris McAlilly 03:41

We want to talk about these things with humility, charity, and intellectual honesty. But more than that, we want to listen. It's time to open up our echo chamber. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]

Chris McAlilly 03:57
We're here today with Jenny McBride. Jenny, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Jenny McBride 04:03 Thank you for having me.

Chris McAlilly 04:04
Jenny and I knew one another. Eddie, you don't know this.

Eddie Rester 04:06
I don't know this. You hadn't really talked about it.

Chris McAlilly 04:08
Yeah, we knew one another in Atlanta. She was a postdoc at Emory University at Candler

School of Theology, and that was when we got to know one another.

Eddie Rester 04:18
That other School of Theology.

Chris McAlilly 04:21

Jeez, man. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. We have Ginni on today to talk about a book that is coming out in 2022 that she's written called, "You Shall Not Condemn." When is that coming out, Jenny? When will that be released?

Jenny McBride 04:40

That is a very good question. I've been trying to get an answer to that question. It should be very soon. I have the page proofs, but no cover yet. I had hoped and thought it might come out in March and it still might but I just haven't heard back. But I will let you all know as soon as it's out, so you can let your listeners know.

Eddie Rester 05:02 Absolutely.

Chris McAlilly 05:02
Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that project. It kind of centers on a friendship that you have with a woman named Kelly. Tell folks about that friendship.

Jenny McBride 05:12

Sure. Well, Chris as you know, part of my time when I was a postdoc at Emory at Candler School of Theology, I'd gotten my PhD just a couple months before in 2008. And I stumbled into this amazing opportunity, which was to teach first just a class session in a brand new theology certificate program that was hosted by Candler School of Theology and the Christian ethicist there Liz Bounds and in partnership with the chaplain at a woman's prison in Georgia, Susan Bishop. And I got in on teaching a class period in the pilot program, then was able to teach a theology foundations course and then serve as a program director on site inside the prison on Fridays.

Jenny McBride 06:06

And the second cohort of students that we had go through the program in that cohort was Kelly Gissendaner. She was the only woman on Georgia's death row at the time. So it was a really big deal that the warden at the time really broke prison protocol and allowed her to be a part of this program. People who are on death row are supposed to be locked down 23 hours a day, and often, it's 24 hours. So the fact that she was able to come and spend Fridays in a classroom with her peers and, you know, dive into the same kind of academic theological work, Chris, that you did through your seminary program and other people in seminary programs are doing all across the country. So really, our friendship began in the classroom as a professor- student relationship.

Chris McAlilly 07:03

Why was Kelly on death row? I think it's helpful to understand the full scope of kind of the circumstances and then kind of the journey, for folks to kind of have a sense of the background there.

Jenny McBride 07:18

Yeah, so that's a really important question. And I will answer that question. I will say that one of the things that we learn, those of us who have had the opportunity to go in and teach in these higher ed in prison programs and other people who ministered to people who are incarcerated, is that in some way, starting with that question, in terms of trying to get to know the person, it's kind of the wrong place to start. Because so much of what we're trying to fight against as we're growing in a society of understanding the real injustice and really even evil of the prison system is that one of the things that does is that it essentializes people into their worst moment.

Jenny McBride 08:11

So in that regard, if anyone is out there who has done prison ministry, or is wanting to do prison ministry, I would say that the first thing you want to learn about someone is not their crime. You want to to kind of encounter them in the whole of their humanity. But it is true that I do begin the book, "You Shall Not Condemn," which is a story--it's Kelly's story. It's the story of her faith and of our advocacy movement on her behalf that all really rose, the advocacy movement, rose out of the theology certificate program, and that's kind of the focus of my book is telling her story through the lens of theology, but especially her own theological studies.

Jenny McBride 09:02

So I do begin the book in kind of a risky way, I think, with talking about her crime, but I do it through the story of Cain and Abel to instantly make some really foundational theological points. So Kelly's crime... I think that a lot of times when we're talking about women, and talking about someone who's a sympathetic character, which Kelly very much came to be a sympathetic character, is that we want to kind of have the story be a little softer, like say, "Well, I guess she was abused by her husband. Is that why the crime was committed?" And that's not the case with Kelly. So she was convicted of planning the murder of her husband, Douglas Gissendaner, who was the father and stepfather of her three children, with her lover at the time, Greg Owen, and he was, Greg Owen, was convicted of the actual murder. Kelly got the death penalty for the planning, or the the partial planning. And Greg Owen got life in prison with parole for the actual murder itself. So that's kind of one point right there where we see the inconsistencies with the death penalty. But certainly the crime itself was was horrific, and one that she came to very much regret.

Eddie Rester 10:41
I was reading, I think her graduation speech, her theology graduation speech, and one of the things that's very apparent in it is, one, her deep love of faith in this conversation around theology. And one of the things that really spoke to me, she says that "Theology is about growing in truth, rather than being a finished thing. Even prison cannot erase my hope or conviction that the future is not settled for me or anyone. History is still in the making." And when you talked a minute ago about you don't start with why they're in prison, you start with their humanity--it feels like if you start with why they're in prison, then it begins to take away some of that sense of the future. In your friendship with Kelly, how did you see her growth towards that? What opened her eyes to that?

Jenny McBride 11:39

Yeah, well, part of Kelly's story that's so important for me as someone who's telling it in the form of this book is that there were many, many people--she ended up having a deep and wide community of people. And there were a handful of people that did the really hard work, right when she was first incarcerated. And as her children who were advocating for her said, you know, and as Kelly herself has said, she was a very bitter person, and was, yeah, just a very bitter, and in her own words, selfish person.

Jenny McBride 12:27

And there was a pastor in Atlanta, who I don't know all the details around the story, but she was a pastor who just decided to visit Kelly and to reach out to her and they formed a pastoral relationship. And that pastor had the really difficult conversations with Kelly that helped her sort of face what she had done and face who she was. And it was really that pastor and some other chaplains in the prison, that really, I think, sparked was a very complete transformation, a kind of conversion experience. And that happened many years before the theology program started.

Jenny McBride 13:19

And so by the time that I got to know Kelly, she had--I'd have to go back and remember how many years--but she had had years and years of living out her Christian faith. And she had tried to do this in whatever way was possible. So she had done a kind of distance Bible program and kind of gotten more acquainted with the Bible. But really for her, she would say that the theology certificate program, being the sort of academic rigorous, you know, a place in which we encourage faith-seeking, understanding, so the questioning of Scripture, the wrestling with God, the asking honest questions, that whole experience really deepened her faith in a way that she very much appreciated.

Chris McAlilly 14:17

Talk a little bit more specifically about what that certificate program entailed. For folks who maybe don't have any connection with theology school, or maybe don't even know what that course of study might look like, just kind of go through the mechanics of it, and kind of how do you do that in a prison setting? What are the some of the constraints, and then what are the opportunities of doing theology in that kind of environment?

Jenny McBride 14:46

Yeah, so it was a certificate, not a degree program, but a certificate that was sponsored by Candler and then the three other Protestant seminaries in Atlanta. And it was a year-long program, by the calendar year. So we start off with a Bible foundations course, the same kind of thing that you would get at any sort of progressive seminary, of thinking about historical, and Bible as literature, the social context, all those pieces to understand the world of the Bible. And then that was followed by a theology foundations course, which I taught for the first few years. And that would be sort of a systematic theology class, including some church history. And those were taught by either seminary faculty or PhD students.

Jenny McBride 15:46

And then the second half of the year, the students in the program could choose from a variety of electives. And actually, the way we set up the program, we had seminarians apply to teach a class. So the foundations courses were like four hour courses once a week, and then the electives were two hour courses, so students were taking two at a time. And those were a wide variety of classes. And as the program kept going, that variety of offerings got even larger. So we had graduates go through the program, and then alums could keep taking electives. So you know, it wasn't a degree program, although there are both undergraduate degree programs in prisons across the country, and there are also some theological schools that are doing degree programs as well. But it was, you know, it was reading and writing papers, and getting grades and feedback, and the kinds of really exciting, challenging conversations that you have in any kind of academic environment.

Chris McAlilly 16:59

One of the things that strikes me about that--I want to get to the theological dimension of the course of study in a moment--but just coming back to this base question of, you know, how do you encounter? Especially for folks who don't have a lot of contact with the prison system, kind of, how do you even approach the conversation with folks who are in that environment? And it seems like, you know, you do education with folks who have a future, you know, I mean, we do it with children, we do it with folks who are on lifelong learning projects, and it seems like to do education in a prison system is a way of, in some ways, is almost like preserving the image of God in a person and I guess, resisting kind of totalizing that person as evil or without a future or, you know, stripping their humanity in other kinds of ways? Does that resonate with you?

Jenny McBride 18:01

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that, so, one of the first thoughts is that the higher ed in prison programs, and now it's a whole movement, you know, there's a national coalition of higher ed in prison, there's sometimes regional and state coalitions of different higher ed institutions that are providing a wide range of degree programs or certificate programs. And one of the things that does often happen that you're very much right about with program offerings in prisons is that they're focused on people who are about to get out.

Eddie Rester 18:36 Right.

Jenny McBride 18:36

And that means exactly what you said: that the people who have life in prison without parole-- or sometimes even life in prison with parole, which we know is still decades, you know, sometimes 30 years or more of people being in prison--and the higher ed in prison programs, in terms of their sort of best practices, are like no. Part of what it means for us to come in and do this work is that we partner with a prison system, and part of what we say is a non-negotiable is that this has to be open to anybody.

Jenny McBride 19:08

So in the case of a theology certificate program, there were many people who had some kind of life sentence, whether it's with or without parole, and of course, in Kelly's case, being being on death row. So yeah, you're absolutely right, that it is very important for that case. And then the other thing is that in Kelly's case, her story that is so powerful, is that she is a minister to other people in the prison. And so part of the work of the theology certificate was it was equipping her. I mean, she was already doing it before the theology certificate came around, but it's equipping her with biblical, theological, pastoral care skills, all these sorts of things for her to even be a better minister.

Jenny McBride 19:54

And so yeah, absolutely this idea that we have, those of us who are not connected to prisons, that we just throw people away, you know, we throw away, lock them up, throw away the key. Well, no, these are human beings who are going to form community, you know, it's often a, you know, unhealthy community because of the forces of the prison. But of course, they still go on living life. And so it's very important to be able to have these kinds of resources to make their life more manageable inside the prison.

Chris McAlilly 20:33

And it seems like one of the things that you really highlight in the book, and as you think about Kelly's story as a theological drama, is that what she's up against is that death is the end. And it's a complete end, that there is nothing beyond it. And I think that's where I want to bring in Juergen Moltmann. So one of the theologians that you guys read, preeminent German theologian of the last generation, for folks who don't know, Juergen Moltmann, maybe you could kind of give the sketch of who Professor Moltmann has been and kind of what his work has been and then how he got connected with Kelly.

Jenny McBride 21:22

Yeah, yeah. So this is the central piece of really why I wrote the book. So in my theology foundations course, we read some writings from Juergen Moltmann, and I'll say a few more words about who he is in a moment, and he's known internationally as the theologian of hope. And Kelly read him, and as many people respond to his work this way, just really loved it and felt a sense of hope, of course, this sense of liberation. He also writes about the Holy Spirit. We read some of his work on the Spirit, who he calls the Spirit of Life. It's a very life-giving theology. And Kelly knew that I had a collegial relationship with Professor Moltmann. I had met him, actually, at that time, just about five years before during my doctoral work at the University of Virginia, and had written him--and he was known all across the world for being a good letter writer. And Kelly said to me, "I'd like to write him. Do you think that's okay"? And I was like, "Absolutely, you should write him," because I knew that he would write her back.

Jenny McBride 22:26

And it ended up being this beautiful friendship that grew through letters for a few years, and then he actually was invited to Emory to give a talk. And we ended up scrambling and combining that event with the graduation of Kelly's cohort. So Professor Moltmann came into the prison, met Kelly and the other graduates, and was our keynote speaker. And then they continue their letter writing, all the way up until really the day of her execution.

Jenny McBride 23:02

But who Juergen Moltmann is... He was in his 80s, I believe, at the time that they started writing. He's now in his 90s. He is one of the most-read theologians of the 20th and 21st century. He's written just a number of really groundbreaking books on kind of a wide range of topics. But one of those is about hope. And we can talk a little bit more about his understanding of hope, perhaps later, but he's, yeah, he's someone who most people who go to a seminary of like a mainline church will certainly read him in a theology class.

Jenny McBride 23:48

And so it was just a really important relationship for Kelly. And then it actually ended up being really important for our advocacy movement as well. Because when Kelly went out for clemency, and she was denied it, then I reached out to just a colleague through religious studies circles who had a religion column at the New York Times, and said, "Do you think writing about their friendship would be of interest to you?" And he said absolutely. And because it was in the New York Times it got picked up by other places. And so really, her friendship with Professor Moltmann was really kind of the heart of our advocacy movement.

Eddie Rester 24:26

I remember her story, at least pieces of it, and then going back and reading about it. You know, I was a from afar watching all this unfold in 2014 and 2015. As you think about your four to five, I guess, five years of walking alongside Kelly and knowing her and watching her learn and grow and watching her ministry. I know that there are women who form groups outside of prison because of her work. What did it teach you? What did it begin to shape in you because of your relationship with her?

Jenny McBride 25:06

Yeah, I mean, you know, in some ways I had to write the book to grapple with that. And the book, I should say, really central to the book, is the publication of the letters between Kelly and Reverend Moltmann, and so then it tells the story before the letters and then does some theological reflection about her execution and about Professor Moltmann's of theology of hope, as a way of making sense of what we need to do to fight the death penalty.

Jenny McBride 25:37

But yeah, I think that it took writing the book for me to start to be able to articulate a lot of this, and in a lot of ways, yeah, it's hard to summarize, because I think that in some ways, the beauty and the strangeness of having first a professor-student and then a friendship with Kelly, it's so surreal. And I think it's just there's so much about... There's so much that is surreal about the death penalty, that we as a society kill people, that we execute people, that we murder people and that we all know we do this, but most people aren't really close to it or connected to it. So I think for me, for the writing of the book, a lot of it was me, sort of... and I apologize, I just I, I can't talk about this without getting emotional.

Jenny McBride 26:56

The surprise is that it's taken this long before I started to in this conversation with you all. But a lot of it was sort of giving myself permission for not knowing how to take in everything that was happening. So on one level, the friendship is a friendship like any other and has laughter and inside jokes and then this intimacy of talking about theology, but in this way that very much connects to our own faith life and our own existential questions. But on the other level, as I say in the introduction, that I kind of rediscovered who Kelly was, and I actually learned stuff about her from going back and writing and having kind of the space to do that.

Jenny McBride 26:56
And so I, you know, I don't... Maybe one takeaway is not to romanticize the story, that it's, it's, it's cut through...

Eddie Rester 26:56 No, it's okay.

Chris McAlilly 28:07

Yeah.

Jenny McBride 28:10

With the horror of what we're doing, and what we're doing, not just with the death penalty, but with the prison system as a whole. And so I think that there is, you know, there's a lot of, I think, important conversation now around the word "trauma," and realizing all the ways that so many people in our society are experiencing so many different kinds of trauma, and certainly being incarcerated and then even that extra layer of being on death row is a trauma. And so then for those of us who kind of go inside this space and have so much privilege to leave, you know, and just to kind of pop in and pop out, there's still an indirect trauma there, too. So it's difficult work, you know. It's the belly of the beast.

Eddie Rester 28:59 Yeah.

Jenny McBride 28:59 In a lot of ways.

Chris McAlilly 29:01

Thank you for sharing. I mean, I can hear in kind of what you're sharing just how impacted you were, by the whole experience. I think, you know, in reading the book, I mean, I do think that it's interesting to think about friendship as a central, it's just a central dimension to what, the way, I don't know, the angle of vision that you have. I think a lot of times, just thinking about the way in which most people including myself encounter stories about the death penalty, or particular people, typically on Twitter, there'll be an advocacy movement about a particular individual, or there'll be something in the broader news, kind of the news media cycle environment. And both of those are super impersonal and hard to connect with, you know. And I think what you've done both by kind of entering into the space but then the way in which you move closer to it through friendship, and then also kind of giving us a window through letters into the friendship between Kelly and Juergen Moltmann. I think, I don't know, there's a way in which friendship allows us to see something in a situation that I mean, frankly, I've just never... I've never had that angle of vision. So thank you for that.

Jenny McBride 30:26

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's hard. It's hard to capture any friendship, you know, any really close friendship. How do you summarize? Or, you know, the speeches that are said at weddings, those sorts of things, it's really, often it's like one moment you're capturing or, because words sort of fail to capture the depth of these kinds of relationships that are so mutually transformative.

Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 30:52

Right. One of the things that you say is that it's an important theological category for Juergen Moltmann. "In friendship," he says, "we experienced a broad space in which we can expand." And I just, I mean, I hear that that happened for Kelly, it happened for you, it happened for multiple people within kind of the context of the situation.

Jenny McBride 31:12

Yes, definitely. Yeah. And the other thing about Moltmann's understanding of friendship, he has this phrase called "open friendship." And part of what he means by that is friendship with a public quality to it, you know, so this open affection and public respect for people who are negatively labeled, you know, so, so open. So you're right, that the open friendship of publicly witnessing and saying "this person is my friend that this society wants to put to death," that is, you know, it's a mode of resistance. It's a form of advocacy.

Chris McAlilly 31:52
I've never thought about friendship in that way. I mean, that's really interesting. I mean, I have to ponder that. I think Eddie's gonna jump in here.

Eddie Rester 31:59

Yeah, one of the things, you know, so many folks don't think much, and they definitely don't think theologically about the death penalty. They think maybe emotionally. They see what has been done and what they expect to be done on the other side. We don't talk about it much, except in those rare moments when there may be an execution date set for someone. I remember, for me when I was in seminary, years ago, you know, raised in the South, the death penalty is the death penalty. And I read something by Greg Jones in his book "Embodying Forgiveness," and he said, and I can't quote it exactly, but basically, as I remember, it is that for us to put someone to death is to claim that we can end the story of redemption. And for me, that shifted my thinking, at least. If there's someone who's listening today, and they're like, I'm not exactly sure what I think, or maybe, I don't know how to think about it, what would you say? What's the core of your advocacy from a Christian perspective for ending the death penalty?

Jenny McBride 33:09

Yeah. I think that part of what draws me into the work of teaching in prisons, I stumbled into it, but then what kept me there is that I think the way that we as Christians think about prisons and punishment basically makes us take our basic Christian claims all the way to their logical end. And we can't just spiritualize them and be like, "oh, of course, God loves everyone," when we think that it's okay to cage people. Or, you know, "God is the God of forgiveness," and then, as you said, and then we think that we can end their growth.

Jenny McBride 33:59

I mean, Kelly, clearly was, quote, redeemed. She was a restored person. And then we cut her off from her own experience of living out that restoration and of all the people that she was impacting. So yes, so this is the question. And I would say that there are, because it draws on the most basic foundational claims we have as Christians, there is so much to say. It's not just one thing. I'll try to sketch out some of those. And that's really part of why I'm writing the book is that I try not only through her story that I call a theological narrative, but also to have sort of explicit theological reflection from a number of different angles.

Jenny McBride 34:16

So I think part of it has to do with like a basic question of what actually is the good news? What's the Gospel? And I would define it as that the Gospel is the good news of God's reign, of the coming Kingdom of God, of the New Earth, and that that reign, that kingdom, has particular content, and it's the content of love and justice and peace. It's the content of all the things that Jesus directly commands. It's the content of do not condemn, do not judge. So through Jesus making visible the reign of God on earth, through the incarnation, and by doing that, God through Christ is showing us how to live now in this world. So that's a key piece.

Jenny McBride 35:46

The other piece is that if the Gospel is the reign of God, which is a reign of life, and it's the triumph of life over the powers and principalities of death, the resurrection is the triumph of life over the crucifixion. And that's another key piece is how do we understand this Pauline category that I think is so central to Paul's thought, which is that sin is a force. It's a power. It's what Paul calls powers and principalities. And there's a lot of theologians and biblical scholars that have done good work about. These are not just, you know, abstract demons flying in the air. These are our institutions, our policies, our economic systems, and political structures. It's all these things. It's any institution or system, or structure that is death dealing.

Jenny McBride 36:41

And when we're talking about the death penalty, it is quite literally, that's exactly what it is. It's an institution that creates death. So it is a power and principality of death. And it is therefore against the reign of God. And that reign, in addition to the other things I said, is a reign about forgiveness. It's about a restorative justice, which has mercy at its heart. It's about the new creation. It's about all these things. So I think those pieces... I mean for me, what I just sketched, just sort of the basic sketch of what Christian faith is about. It's what we see in the personal work of Jesus. I talk about it in part three as kind of the yes, no, yes, of the Christ event. So in the Incarnation, God says yes to the reign of God that Jesus makes visible. And in the crucifixion, God says no to retribution and violence and death. And then in the resurrection, God says yes to the triumph of life over those death-dealing powers. So that's one way. There's other things I could say. But that's kind of one overarching sketch of a framework that we can start thinking about the death penalty and about prisons as well.

Chris McAlilly 38:02

Come back for folks who perhaps are still trying to kind of grapple with there's this theological dimension, this biblical understanding of the reign of God that has certain content not only in the life to come or in a in an eternal round, but also here and now. You mentioned kind of Christ and the life and death and resurrection of Christ, but talks specifically about the cross. You make this a point of emphasis as well. So how do you do theological reflection about the crucifixion of Christ in light of this larger conversation about the death penalty?

Jenny McBride 38:43

Yeah, so. So I say in the book that, you know, being up close, I didn't literally watch Kelly's execution, but I was on the phone with her moments before it, and then accompanying her throughout the whole process. Being that close can't help but make you rethink Jesus's crucifixion and what God's role is in it. Now, I had actually already started doing a lot of theological rethinking and had come to different conclusions than what is often sort of formulaically talked about in churches, which basically it comes down to kind of a popularized version of what theologians called the substitutionary atonement theory, which is that God punishes sin, and that human beings are sinful, and we deserve punishment, the punishment of hell, and that Jesus takes our place and takes that punishment on the cross. And so many different kinds of theologians and especially the late 20th century and now 21st century have many, many, many critiques of that atonement theory.

Jenny McBride 40:06

It starts out with Anselm, called the satisfaction theory in the 11th, 12th century, and then the Reformers take it on and kind of make some tweaks to it. And it's often called the satisfaction theory. But what it what it does--now there's some some truths, some things I would affirm built in to it, God's love for us, the sacrifice of Jesus, these sorts of things. But what ultimately, it's a model based on retributive justice, in the sense that retributive justice is that we get what we deserve. But instead of us getting it, Jesus gets it on our behalf. But it's not a model of rest of restorative justice. And part of that is that it's also a model that says that God needs to use violence to forgive us. And that's, hopefully, people can see that that's problematic on a lot of levels.

Jenny McBride 41:11

So that's why... So basically, that experiential answer to your question is that watching an execution up close by accompanying Kelly, you see the horror of it. And we don't often, Christians in our churches, we don't often even think about the crucifixion as the death penalty. You know, sometimes even saying, "Jesus was a victim of the death penalty." And we're like, wait, what? This was the crucifixion. It has this theological meaning. And that's why reading the Gospels is really important. No, this was clearly an execution by the Roman state.

Eddie Rester 41:54
By the act of the government.

Jenny McBride 41:54

The religious leaders, yes. So that's one piece. But the other part is kind of within that sketch I just made of the yes, no, yes, that Jesus was living out the making visible the reign of God till the end, and that reign is also non-violent. And so when the political and religious powers were putting him to death, he sacrificially went to the cross. And yet the resurrection is God's answer to that, that the violence and the power plays of our political and religious realms are not the final word. And that the resurrection is really the triumph or the evidence that the way Jesus lived his life of embodying the kingdom of God is actually the way we're supposed to live it on Earth.

Jenny McBride 43:07

I mean, another just one other real quick thing, because I know that for listeners that can all maybe get a little heady, especially if it's unfamiliar ways of thinking. But the other piece that's really important about the cross is that Jesus is in solidarity with victims of state execution. He's in solidarity with victims oppressed by death-dealing powers. So there's a really important piece. And of course, James Cone, the father of Black liberation theology, is someone who said this very clearly. And Professor Moltmann's written about this, as well, that, you know, it's what I said to Kelly, when I didn't know what else to say in our last phone conversation, was, "All I know is that Jesus is going to be with you."

Jenny McBride 43:56

And so, yeah, so there's a real sense of the suffering God who is with others in their oppression. And that is important. But it's also important because we don't just stay there. We look to the resurrection, but at the resurrection is also the judgment on those political and religious powers and principalities that put people to death.

Chris McAlilly 44:26

Well, Jenny, there's so much more that we could explore and say, but I just really appreciate you taking the time to be with us today to kind of unpack a bit of what's behind and what's ahead in the book that you've written. We'll link in the show notes to where folks can find that. We're so thankful for your time today.

Eddie Rester 44:48 Thank you, Jenny.

Jenny McBride 44:49 Thank you for having me.

Eddie Rester 44:50
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Chris McAlilly 44:58

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