Instead of Atonement: The Bible’s Salvation Story and Our Hope for Wholeness

By Ted Grimsrud

Do atonement theologies that focus on Jesus' death underwrite human violence? If so, we do well to rethink beliefs that this death is necessary to bring salvation. Focusing on the Bible's salvation story, Instead of Atonement argues for a logic of mercy to replace Christianity's traditional logic of retribution.

The book traces the Bible's main salvation story through God's liberating acts, the testimony of the prophets, and Jesus's life and teaching. It then takes a closer look at Jesus's death and argues that his death gains its meaning when it exposes violence in the cultural, religious, and political Powers. God's raising of Jesus completes the story and vindicates Jesus's life and teaching.

The book also examines the understandings of salvation in Romans and Revelation that reinforce the message that salvation is a gift of God and that Jesus's "work" has to do with his faithful life, his resistance to the Powers, and God's vindication of him through resurrection.

The book concludes that the "Bible's salvation story" provides a different way, instead of atonement, to understand salvation. In turn, this biblical understanding gives us today theological resources for a mercy-oriented approach to responding to wrongdoing, one that follows God's own model.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Mar 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781621895794

Ted Grimsrud

Ted Grimsrud is the Professor of Theology and Peace Studies at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Among his books are Instead of Atonement: The Bible's Salvation Story and Our Hope for Wholeness (2013), Compassionate Eschatology: The Future as Friend (2011), A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder's Pacifist Epistemology (2010), and Theology as if Jesus Matters (2009).

Book preview

Preface

There is a saying, perhaps going back to Leonardo da Vinci, that there are no finished projects, only abandoned ones. I feel the truth of this statement strongly with this book. Partly because I have lived with it so long, I have found it difficult to let it loose.

My first step was taken over thirty years ago when, as a student at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, I wrote a paper, Discipleship and Atonement in the Synoptic Gospels, for Professor Willard Swartley’s New Testament Theology and Ethics course. Willard gave me much appreciated encouragement to keep working on this theme and even to consider working on a doctorate.

About ten years later I read something by Paul Ramsey, the influential advocate for the just war tradition, where he agreed that the core difference between his thought and that of my pacifist Mennonite mentor John Howard Yoder had to do with their respective christologies. At that point I decided to focus on that issue. It has taken awhile (and many changes in focus along the way), but here is fruit of that decision.

It is also the case, as it usually is when I complete a writing project, that I keep learning of more materials I should take into account. It is hard to resist the lure to keep attending to important newly discovered resources—until I remember that the new resources enter the scene faster than I can read them all anyway. So, it is time to move on with what I’ve got.

My need to abandon this project serves as a good reminder, though, of the limited and focused agenda I have had with it. I have not actually intended to do everything. I simply want to tell a story about what the Bible seems to me to teach. And I want to link this story with our problem with violence, partly as a challenge to traditional Christian theologies that have not addressed that problem (and may, actually, have exacerbated it). I tell this story as a thought experiment more than as a comprehensive and definitive analysis.

I have approached this material as a theological ethicist, a preacher, a teacher of undergraduate college students, and a concerned world citizen. I have, as a non-specialist, mined biblical scholarship as a resource to help in what ultimately is advocacy work—an effort to contribute to peace on earth.

I have debts beyond recalling to teachers, friends, writers, and students. I do want explicitly to mention several crucial ones, though. I appreciate Eastern Mennonite University’s willingness to grant me a sabbatical for the school year 2003–2004 that allowed me to write the first draft of this book. During the spring semester of that school year, I met regularly with Dan Umbel, then a precocious college senior, to share and discuss drafts of my chapters. Dan’s many insights strengthened the book. Several years later, when the project was trending toward moribund, Vic Thiessen, at that time director of the London Mennonite Centre, invited me to present a day-long seminar at the Centre on this material. That most helpful experience helped rekindle my motivation.

Most of all, going back to when I first began to think about salvation and peace in the early 1980s, my life partner Kathleen Temple has listened, talked, challenged, and affirmed through all the stages of reading, writing, preaching, lecturing, and rewriting. She shares the hopes I express as I dedicate this book to Eli and LouLou.

one

Introduction: Gospel as Bad News?

Violence as a Theological Problem

We generally associate the term gospel or good news with the message of Jesus and the Christian faith. We have strong biblical grounds for doing so. The early Christian document we know as the Gospel of Mark gets right to the point in its very first verse—announcing the agenda for what follows: "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."

The Greek word here that is translated gospel (or Good News in the NRSV’s preferred rendering) is evangel, the root for evangelism and evangelical. Mark makes the basic claim, along with the rest of the New Testament, that the story he tells of the ministry of Jesus contains the good news of God’s healing work for humanity. This work provides our hope for healing and reconciliation.

Mark’s good news may be closely linked with the central motif in the Old Testament related to salvation: shalom, or peace. Mark explicitly connects the good news of Jesus with the story that began with the children of Israel. Mark’s second verse contains a quote from one of Israel’s greatest prophets, Isaiah, presented as a prophecy concerning John the Baptist. Mark thus makes clear that the story that Isaiah was part of (Abraham, Moses, and their descendants) continues with Jesus, in whom the hopes of Israel are fulfilled.

Jesus enters the scene, in Mark’s account (1:15), with a powerful proclamation: The time is fulfilled (i.e., the story is reaching its climax). The kingdom of God (i.e., the promised time of shalom, the purpose of the story) is at hand (i.e., is now present). Repent (i.e., turn from your idols and turn toward God) and believe in (i.e., trust, accept, welcome into your hearts) the good news (i.e., the announcement that the king’s kingdom is victorious).

The present tense of this proclamation is unmistakable. Jesus makes God present in a powerful way and the world will never be the same. However, when we 2,000 years later place the fulfillment of the promises with Jesus, we face many questions. In what sense did this fulfillment actually happen? Are we to understand that Jesus meant what he said in a literal sense? Has the community Jesus established to embody what he announced conveyed truly good news to the world—or has the message been profoundly mixed with bad news?

This is not the place to make the case for a specific conclusion regarding the dynamics of the connection between Christianity and violence.¹ However, we may assume a consensus that the Christian movement has had a problematic relationship with violence throughout its history—think of support for warfare, treatment of alleged heretics and other offenders, and harsh discipline of children as an expression of God’s will, among other examples.

If shalom (peace) stands as a close synonym with salvation in the Old Testament, the relationship has become more complicated in Christian history and theology. In fact, an important body of historical analysis has lately been suggesting that many traditional understandings of salvation may actually underwrite violence.²

Numerous public opinion surveys as well anecdotal evidence support the impression that in our present time in the United States, being a self-identified Christian makes a person more likely to support warfare, harsh criminal justice practices, and corporal punishment of children.³

Is there a direct connection between understanding salvation in terms of God’s retributive justice and support for inter-human violence? British theologian Timothy Gorringe suggests there is. He argues that Christian atonement theology, articulated influentially by Anselm of Canterbury, dovetailed with the emergence of more retributive criminal justice practices in Europe to underwrite state-sponsored violence.⁴ Harry Potter, a British historian, illustrates this dynamic in his history of the move to abolish the death penalty in Great Britain, a process slowed significantly by church leaders who argued theologically in favor of the death penalty long after general public sentiment in Britain supported abolition.⁵

According to American theologian Donald Capps, the history of Christianity has witnessed numerous theological legitimations for the physical and emotional abuse of children under the rubric of punishment, tough love, or teaching the child a lesson.⁶ Capps argues that the abuse that has resulted from such treatment of children has been made even worse by the religious justifications given for it.⁷

These concerns about the possible complicity of Christian salvation theology with violence provide the impetus for the rereading of the biblical materials in what follows in this book. What do we find as the Bible’s core salvation story if we read it front to back without the lenses of post-biblical (possibly pro-violence) theology? Does the Bible indeed contain a salvation story with shalom-oriented emphases instead of the possibly more violence-oriented emphases of traditional atonement theologies based on understanding God in terms of retributive justice? Does the Bible actually present salvation in ways that focus on life in the present instead of on death in the present and life in heaven after death as in traditional atonement theologies?

In calling this book Instead of Atonement: The Bible’s Salvation Story and Our Hope for Wholeness, I have a specific use of the term atonement in mind. I do not mean to suggest that salvation has nothing to do with atonement in any possible meaning that might be given to the term. Rather, I use atonement in the title in the sense of the popular meaning of the term as referring to sacrificial payment that makes salvation possible.

D. Stephen Long’s dictionary definition of atonement is typical: The atonement is how Christ accomplished our justification (i.e., ‘being found just or righteous before God’) through his sacrifice on the cross.⁸ Implied in this understanding of atonement is that God’s ability to provide salvation is constrained pending the offering of an appropriate sacrifice. I will suggest later in this chapter that such an understanding of God being constrained is based upon a notion of God’s justice or holiness or honor carrying tremendous weight in God’s ability to relate to sinful human beings. It seems inevitable that violence play a role in satisfying the demands of God’s character—and that violence is part of God’s response when the satisfaction is not forthcoming.

It is atonement in this sense to which I will counter-pose the salvation story I believe that the Bible tells. With the phrase instead of atonement, I mean to suggest that salvation in the Bible is not dependent upon atonement—that is, dependent upon adequate sacrifices being offered (including the ultimate sacrifice of God’s Son, Jesus) as a condition for salvation. I also mean to suggest that in the overall message of the Bible, God’s response to sin is not violence (see the concise statement in support of this suggestion in Hos 11:1-9).

However, before we turn to this book’s main agenda, the recounting of the merciful, shalom-oriented story of salvation the Bible tells, we need to linger a bit longer with the question of how violence is a theological problem.

The Logic of Retribution

Despite the widespread occurrence of inter-human violence throughout most of recorded history, the case may be made that most human beings tend to want to avoid lethal violence toward other human beings. In human experience we usually need some overriding reason to go against the tendency to avoid lethal violence. To act violently toward, especially to kill, other human beings, is serious business, undertaken because some other value or commitment overrides the tendency not to be violent.

Almost all violence emerges with some kind of rationale that justifies its use. Psychiatrist James Gilligan argues, based on his extensive work with extremely violent offenders, that even the most seemingly pointless acts of violence usually nonetheless have some justification in the mind of the perpetrator.⁹

Most socially accepted uses of violence (e.g., warfare, capital punishment, corporal punishment of children) follow a fairly self-conscious logic. At the core of this logic usually rests a commitment to the necessity of retribution; using violence is justified as the appropriate response to wrongdoing. When the moral order is violated by wrongdoing, justice requires retribution (defined as repayment of wrongdoing with violent punishment, or pain with pain).

We find deeply ingrained in the religious consciousness of the United States the belief that retribution is God’s will. I will argue that roots of that belief owe more to extra-biblical influences and are not based on the best reading of the biblical materials. Yet we cannot deny the close link between Western Christianity as it has come to be and the strong support for retribution (that is, for justifying violence as the appropriate response to wrongdoing).

A theologically grounded logic of retribution underlies rationales for using violence. In the logic of retribution, when all is said and done, people understand God most fundamentally in terms of impersonal, inflexible holiness. They see God’s law as the unchanging standard by which sin is measured, and believe God responds to violations of the law with justifiable violence.

According to the most popular account of this framework, human beings are inherently sinful. Jesus’ death on the cross offers a sacrifice that provides the only basis for sinful humans to escape deserved punishment. Most violence is justified as in some sense being an expression of this deserved punishment (punishment defined as inflicting pain in response to wrongdoing). Violence in response to wrongdoing is required by the logic of retribution.¹⁰

The theological rationale for retributive punishment asserts that appropriate punishment reflects God’s character. The first, most basic, attribute of God is holiness—which means that God simply cannot countenance any kind of sin. If God has direct contact with sin, God must destroy it. A modern evangelical theologian, Millard Erickson, echoes ideas from Augustine, Anselm, Luther, and Calvin: The nature of God is perfect and complete holiness. This is . . . the way God is by nature. He has always been absolutely holy . . . . Being contrary to God’s nature, sin is repulsive to him. He is allergic to sin, so to speak. He cannot look upon it.¹¹

Erickson most directly follows John Calvin in how he articulates this view. Calvin wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, there is a perpetual and irreconcilable disagreement between righteousness and unrighteousness (II.xvi.3). Hence, Christ has to undergo the severity of God’s vengeance, to appease his wrath and satisfy his just judgment (II.xvi.10).¹²

Human beings have been told what we must avoid doing in order to keep from violating God’s holiness. When humans sin, we are diverging from God’s laws. Since the laws come from God, we sin directly against God. Erickson writes, The law is something of a transcript of the nature of God. When we relate to it, whether positively or negatively, . . . it is God himself whom we are obeying or disobeying. Disobeying the law is serious . . . because disobeying it is actually an attack upon the very nature of God himself.¹³

In this view, when human beings violate God’s holiness, God must (due to God’s holiness) punish them. Violated holiness must be satisfied. According to the logic of retribution, then, God (in effect) is governed by inflexible holiness and human beings invariably violate that holiness. Because of the fundamental nature of this holiness, God is not free to act with unconditional mercy and compassion toward rebellious human beings. Simply to forgive would violate God’s holiness. Compassion without satisfaction is not possible for God. To quote Erickson: For God to remove or ignore the guilt of sin without requiring a payment would in effect destroy the very moral fiber of the universe, the distinction between right and wrong.¹⁴

Justice, in this framework, works to sustain the balance of the universe. If the balance is upset, justice requires recompense to restore the balance, payment to satisfy the requirements of the balance. This payment is made through punishment, pain for pain.

In much Christian theology, here is where the doctrine of the atonement enters. Due to the extremity of the offenses by human beings against God’s law, the only way God can relate to human beings is if there is death on the human side to restore the balance. The only way this can happen is through the enormity of the death of God’s own son, Jesus, whose own holiness is so powerful that it can balance out the unholiness of all of humanity.

Jonathan Edwards wrote that the crucifixion of Jesus was willed and ordered by God as the most admirable and glorious of all events because only in this way could human beings be granted salvation.¹⁵ When we confess our helpless sinfulness, we may claim Jesus as savior from God’s righteous anger. Jesus satisfies God’s retributive justice on our behalf.

Within the logic of retribution, salvation (i.e., the restoration of harmony with God) is achieved as the result of violence. Such a means to salvation is consistent with the view of the basic nature of the moral universe as founded on impersonal holiness. Salvation happens only because God’s holiness or honor is satisfied through the ultimate act of violence—the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. In light of this understanding of the nature of God and of the fundamental nature of the universe, the logic of retribution indeed leads to acceptance of justifiable violence. Violence may be the best response to wrongdoing.

Retributive Responses to Crime¹⁶

Let us look more closely at one particular expression of retributive violence, the dynamics of criminal justice in the United States. Criminal justice is only one issue among many where the logic of retribution exerts a major influence—but it may be the most easily perceived.

Punishment involves the intentional infliction of pain and is, thus, a form of violence. Punishment by the state, then, requires some justification as it involves the state acting violently, something normally considered morally and socially unacceptable. Because violence requires a rationale, punishment has given rise to a huge variety of justifications for delivering such pain.

In our criminal justice tradition, the overriding justifications given for harsh punishments, even to the point of death, have and continue to be tied to an understanding of ultimate reality that believes that this reality requires retributive justice when fundamental natural or divine laws are violated. Such retributive justice is seen to restore the moral balance.¹⁷ Most obviously, the death penalty provides a way to balance the scales of justice that demand a life for a life, the ultimate punishment for the ultimate crime.¹⁸

This understanding is to a large extent rooted in a particular understanding of God as ultimate reality: retribution is needed to satisfy the requirement God has that violations be paid for with pain. When someone commits a wrong, it is assumed, the central question of justice is What does she or he deserve? The assumed answer is punishment.

So, in the arena of criminal justice, the issue of authorized human beings inflicting punitive pain (including death) on other human beings has theological as well as philosophical and political significance. In saying that violence is a theological issue, I use theology in a broad sense to refer to beliefs about ultimate reality, foundational beliefs about the nature of the universe. I use God as the common human symbol for ultimate reality.¹⁹ The issue of punishment has to do with how human beings understand the world we live in, the values by which we shape our lives. Beliefs about God and God’s character shape our concept of retribution or punishment as justice.

Part of the theology underlying retributive justice speaks of how God was (and is) understood. There are some key aspects of the view of God generally characteristic of medieval Europe that shaped (and were also shaped by) the emerging punitive practices of criminal justice and that continue to be foundational in present-day practices of retributive justice. God’s will for violent punishment provides a crucial impetus for the overriding of our tendency to need justification for killing or in other ways acting violently toward human beings.

Retributive theology has infused the social, political, and cultural life of the West in very fundamental ways going back not just to the medieval period but into antiquity. Timothy Gorringe makes a strong case for the atonement theology of Anselm of Canterbury (c.1033–1109) providing a crucial link in applying this view of God to the practice of punitive criminal justice.²⁰ However, surely the roots of such an application of these theological themes go much further back, to the infusion of Greek philosophy and Roman political thought into Christian theology, fostered especially by the extraordinarily influential writings of Augustine of Hippo.

The key impact Greek philosophy had on theology may be seen in emerging notions of God’s impassivity, the growing abstraction of concepts of justice, and the objectifying or othering of offenders. The Greek-influenced theology provided a notion of God’s impersonal holiness and retributive response to violations of that holiness. In the early Middle Ages, this theology merged with Roman legal philosophy, which was also centered on impersonal principles. Instead of being based on custom and history, law in this perspective stood alone.²¹

Justice became a matter of applying rules, establishing guilt, and fixing penalties—without reference to finding healing for the victim or the relationship between victim and offender. Canon law and the parallel theology that developed began to identify sin as a collective wrong against a moral or metaphysical order. Crime was a sin, not just against a person but against God, against God’s laws, and it was the church’s business to purge the world of this transgression. From this understanding of sin, it was a short step to assume that since the social order is willed by God, crime is also a sin against this social order. The church (and later the state) must therefore enforce that order. Increasingly, focus centered on punishment by established authorities as a way of doing justice.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the cornerstones of state justice were in place in Europe, and they drew deeply from the underpinnings of retributive theology. New legal codes in France, Germany, and England enlarged the public dimensions of certain offenses and gave to the state a larger role. Criminal codes began to specify wrongs and to emphasize punishment.

The primary instrument for applying pain came to be the prison. Part of the attraction of prison was terms that could be graded according to the offense. Prisons made it possible to calibrate punishments in units of time, providing an appearance of rationality in the application of pain.

Between the mid-1800s and the 1970s, the practice of criminal justice in the United States evolved away from strictly retributive justice. David Garland, in his important book, The Culture of Control,²² argues that the penal-welfare model gained ascendancy among criminal justice professionals, with a concern for rehabilitation of offenders and a diminishment of focus on strict punishment. This model, however, never received widespread support among the general population. Because politicians for a long time found it disadvantageous to try to intervene in criminal justice issues due to conventional wisdom that criminal justice was a no-win issue to be identified with, the prison system was allowed to pursue its own agenda.

However, with a significant increase in the crime rate in the United States after World War II, politicians discovered that law and order rhetoric actually gained them popularity. The criminal justice system tended to be centralized and bureaucratic and not noticeably effective in reducing the incidents of crime. Hence, when strong critiques were raised in the 1960s and 1970s, the somewhat ineffective focus of rehabilitation was soon significantly lessened.

The logic of retribution that became embedded in our criminal justice practices by the nineteenth century, even though it was mitigated against somewhat during the penal-welfare era, has returned with a vengeance in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first. As summarized by legal scholar William Shuntz, No previous generation of Americans embraced the version of retributive justice that has held sway in the United States over the past thirty years. . . . Only in the last decades of the 20th century did most American voters and the law enforcement officials they elect conclude that punishing criminals is an unambiguous moral good. The notion that criminal punishment is a moral or social imperative—the idea that a healthy criminal justice system should punish all the criminals it can—enjoyed little currency before the 1980s.²³ In the retributive model of justice, crime has come to be defined as against the state, justice has become a monopoly of the state, punishment has become normative, and victims have been disregarded.

Going back to the Middle Ages, penal theory helped reinforce the punitive theme in theology—e.g., a satisfaction theory of atonement that emphasized the idea of payment or suffering to make satisfaction for sins. Retributive theology, which emphasized legalism and punishment, deeply influenced Western culture through rituals, hymns, and symbols. An image of judicial murder, the cross, bestrode Western culture from the 11th to the 18th century, with huge impact on the Western psyche. It entered the structures of affect of Western Europe and in doing so, . . . pumped retributivism into the legal bloodstream, reinforcing the retributive tendencies of the law.²⁴ The result was an obsession with retributive themes in the Bible and a neglect of the restorative ones—a theology of a retributive God who wills violence.²⁵

This view is embedded in the Western criminal justice system through our modern paradigm of retributive justice, which might be characterized like this:

Crime is understood primarily as a violation of the (unchanging, impersonal) law, and the state is the victim.

Offenders must get what they deserve. The aim of justice is to establish blame and administer pain in order to satisfy the demands of the moral balance in which the violation is countered by the punishment.

The process of justice finds expression as a conflict between adversaries in which the offender is pitted against state rules, and intentions outweigh outcomes and one side wins while the other side loses.

A Recipe for Alienation

The paradigm of retributive justice that dominates Western criminal justice is a recipe for alienation. By making the satisfaction of impersonal justice (God’s holiness) the focus of society’s response to criminal activity, the personal human beings involved—victims, offenders, community members—rarely find wholeness.

Moreover, the larger community’s suffering often only increases. Instead of healing the brokenness caused by the offense, we usually increase the spiral of brokenness. Many victims of violence speak of being victimized again by the impersonal criminal justice system.²⁶ Offenders, often alienated people already, become more deeply alienated by the punitive practices and person-destroying experiences of prisons.

Garland portrays our culture of control in criminal justice as a new form of segregation. We focus not on rehabilitating and reintegrating offenders, but on identifying and isolating offenders. The prison is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety.²⁷ That this segregation has a decided racial aspect in the United States is confirmed in Michelle Alexander’s powerful book, The New Jim Crow.²⁸

Present dynamics emphasize the difference between offenders and law-abiding citizens. Garland writes, being intrinsically evil or wicked, some offenders are not like us. They are dangerous others who threaten our safety and have no call on our fellow feeling. The appropriate reaction for society is one of social defense: we should defend ourselves against these dangerous enemies rather than concern ourselves with their welfare and prospects for rehabilitation.²⁹

James Gilligan, former director of psychiatry for the Massachusetts prison system, draws on his experience working closely with violent offenders to critique retributive justice in the our criminal justice system. A society’s prisons serve as a key for understanding the larger society as a whole.³⁰ When we look through the magnifying glass of the United States prison system, we see a society focused on trying to control violence through violence, a society that willingly inflicts incredible suffering on an ever-increasing number of desperate people.

Despite our democratic principles and our belief that a person is innocent until proven guilty, our per capita prison rate is one of the highest in the world. And our rate continues rapidly to grow. Between 1924 and 1975, the rate of incarceration remained fairly steady at around 100 prisoners per 100,000 population—a rate at that level higher than most industrialized nations. But between 1975 and 2007, the rate increased by more than seven times, to 700 per 100,000.³¹

This exploding prison population faces increasingly worsening conditions. According to Gilligan, prisons have become cruel, inhumane, and degrading, with severe overcrowding, frequent rapes and beatings, prolonged and arbitrary use of solitary confinement, grossly unsanitary, disease-inducing living conditions, and deprivation of elementary medical care.³²

Underlying our society’s tolerance of these dehumanizing conditions is a rational self-interest theory of violence.³³ According to this theory, people decide to use violence based on a rational calculation of costs and benefits. If the costs of wrongdoing are understood to be high enough, that should deter such wrongdoing. At least implicitly, assumptions follow from this theory that to allow our prisons to be hellholes will serve to prevent violence by deterring would-be wrongdoers (similar logic applies to the rationale for the death penalty).³⁴

The Logic of Retribution in Practice: A Story

Robert Hughes, in his account of the settling of Australia, illustrates this theory.³⁵ Great Britain founded Australia as a penal colony in the late eighteenth century. The British encouraged a terrible reputation for Australia, better to help deter crime. Over time, though, life in Australia proved to have its attractions, so officials decided to establish a prison within the prison that would indeed be worthy of even the most hardened criminal’s terror.

Norfolk Island sits 1,000 miles east of Australia. The British leaders ordered Thomas Brisbane, Australia’s governor, to prepare a place of ultimate terror for the incorrigibles of the System.³⁶ He established on Norfolk Island a prison of last resort from which no escape would be possible. Brisbane intended this island to serve as the nadir of England’s penal system, the lowest level of hell. In Hughes’s words, Although no convict could escape from it, rumor and reputation would. In this way, the ‘Old Hell,’ as convict argot termed it, would reduce mainland crime by sheer terror.³⁷

The settlement of the island began in 1825. The government’s philosophy was concisely expressed: Our object was to hold out that settlement as a place of the extremist Punishment, short of Death.³⁸ This object was achieved; Norfolk Island became the worst place on earth. The hellishness of Norfolk Island may be seen in this example. A group of prisoners would draw lots, one became the murderer, the second the victim, and the rest witnesses. The prison’s chief did not have the authority to try capital crimes; the murderer and the witnesses had to be sent to Sydney for trial. The prisoners yearned for the meager relief of getting away from the ‘ocean hell,’ if only to a gallows on the mainland.³⁹ After several years of such murders, the government began sending judges to the Island to try, convict, and hang the murderers there.

Hughes quotes a leading Scot churchman of the time, Reverend Sydney Smith, who asserted that a prison should be a place of punishment from which men recoil with horror—a place of real suffering painful to the memory, terrible to the imagination, a place of sorrow and wailing, which should be entered with horror.⁴⁰

In 1837, the British government sent Alexander Maconochie, a British naval commander and college professor, to investigate the treatment of prisoners in Australia. He