“Bring back the electric chair.” This was Senator — and gubernatorial candidate — Marsha Blackburn’s response to the Tennessee Department of Correction’s failed attempt to execute convicted murderer Christa Pike by lethal injection earlier this week. The response was quick; it evidenced no thoughtful moral deliberation in real time. Perhaps Senator Blackburn had grappled with the moral implications of the judicial taking of a human life in the past and had reached an accord with capital punishment. Perhaps it was an unreflective reaction. Perhaps the senator is simply more interested in “how” the deed might be done effectively than in whether the deed should be done at all. I make no judgment because I do not know Senator Blackburn’s heart.

But, I do know her public position on a related issue, and that makes her “electric chair solution” all the more confusing. Senator Blackburn is adamantly anti-abortion. In fairness to her, she would — and does — describe her position as pro-life. In fairness to logic and semantics, I cannot describe it that way. A consistent pro-life ethic defends the sanctity to life — all life — from conception to natural death, and that precludes capital punishment.

I wonder if Senator Blackburn has pushed her positions to the limit, which is where all positions are tested and often come undone. Toward this end, I propose a thought experiment. Suppose it had been humanly possible to know — from the moment of Christa Pike’s conception — that she would murder Coleen Slemmer eighteen years later. Would Senator Blackburn advocate, or approve, a preemptive abortion or would she let nature take its course? Clearly, the Senator has no qualms in punishing murder by state sanctioned execution of the offender. But, would she murder preemptively to prevent the murder — again, if it were humanly possible to know, with certainty, that such murder would ensue? That is a moral quandary, isn’t it? What does pro-life mean in such a situation?

Of course, this scenario is entirely hypothetical. Except, it is not. Christians — all but a relatively small contingent of open theists — assert that God knew the trajectory of Christa Pike’s life from before the foundations of the world. Her murder of Coleen Slemmer did not take God by surprise. And yet, God allowed for Pike’s conception and birth. God did not preemptively abort her, not even to prevent Coleen Slemmer’s murder. Multiply this one murder by six million, change the name from Pike to Hitler, and the same ethical dilemma applies; only the magnitude differs.

All this is a mystery beyond my understanding. And that suggests — I would say it demands — a certain humility, the humility of recognizing that the giving and taking of human life — both in abortion and in capital punishment — belongs solely to God and neither to the individual nor to the state. The preeminent Christian symbol — the cross — was Rome’s version of lethal injection or electric chair, of the power of the state to mete out the death penalty. It was used against the earliest Christians, not by them. Christians today should not blithely accept the use of its modern equivalents in the name of justice.