I hear two positions fought for on this.
First, I hear people say that ‘obviously’ poverty and unemployment cause crime, and that therefore this needs to be taken into account in handling sentencing. Let’s call this position ‘L’.
Second, that ‘obviously’ to say that poverty and unemployment case crime is to reduce the responsibility of the individual criminal, and therefore must be rejected. We’ll call this position ‘C’. C and L are chosen totally arbitrarily, of course, and any resemblance to any party, living or dead, is completely unintentional.
The fascinating thing is that these two positions are touted as opposites, when actually they are more or less on the same side – the side against Christianity. And it’s a mark of just how much our country has forgotten that no one challenges this.
The point, the essential point, is that both positions share the same model for guilt: a model known in the jargon as a ‘partitive’ model. This amounts to saying that there is a fixed amount of guilt for each crime.
Let me explain with an example from Shakspere.
Othello murders his wife Desdemona. Othello does so because Iago has led Othello to believe that Desdemona has been unfaithful. How do we allocate guilt to Iago and Othello ? Those who take either of the two positions above, and therefore use a partitive model, follow this method:
First, decide how much guilt to allocate for the murder
Second, distribute that guilt between Othello and Iago.
The only difference between the two positions is the proportion of guilt allocated to Iago and Othello ; the first would allocate a considerable amount to Iago – and therefore less to Othello – while the second would allocate none or very little to Iago – and therefore most or all to Othello.
Let me try a diagram:
Does that help?
The curious thing is that even those who proclaim this model won’t take it to its logical conclusion. Imagine…
A man is prosecuted for a crime; he pleads not guilty, but then just as the judge is sentencing him to two years in prison, he leaps to his feet, admits his guilt, but points the finger at his girlfriend as his accomplice. The police investigate further, and find evidence that the two were in fact equally guilty. Does the judge now split the two years’ prison equally between them, one year each, as the partitive model demands? No, of course not! He gives them both two years. In complete defiance of the partitive model of guilt.
Christianity denies this model. Let us look at the key passage (using the New International Version, but feel free to compare your favourite – none of them differ in any essential point: the reference is Gen 3:8-24) – but first a caveat.
This discussion does not depend on how literally or not you take the story of Adam and Eve. (Yes, I do have my own opinion, but this is not the time or place.) What matters only is that this is a description of a Christian approach to the situation, whatever the status of the situation.
Anyway, this is the situation: God forbids Adam and Eve to eat fruit from a particular tree. The serpent persuades Eve to take and eat fruit from the Tree that was forbidden. Eve gives fruit to Adam, who ate it as well. God finds out. Now read on…
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?”
The man said, “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living. The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.”
So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
(Yes, I know it’s a long passage, but I didn’t want to be accused of censoring it for my own purposes.)
OK. Now look again, and we can see the Iago – Othello pattern twice over; the snake (Iago) persuades Eve (Othello), and Eve (Iago) persuades Adam (Othello). And in each pattern, Othello tries to persuade God that He should use the partitive model, and therefore let them off – or at least reduce the penalty.
First Adam, challenged, says, “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” In other words, yes I did it, but some of the guilt isn’t mine - it’s hers.
Second, Eve, challenged, says, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” In other words, yes I did it, but some of the guilt isn’t mine - it’s the serpent’s.
And both C and L would acknowledge the force of both arguments, even if they disagree on the weights.
But God rejects both arguments. He punishes the serpent, Eve and Adam without regard for their pleas. How is this possible?
Well, it’s not because Adam and Eve are lying; what they say is completely true. It is because God is using a different model of guilt – a transitive one.
Let’s go back to Iago and Othello. Iago is certainly guilty to some extent – he has lied to Othello and deliberately caused a break between Othello and his wife. We therefore allocate some guilt in Desdemona’s murder to Iago (exactly how much we can discuss some other time). Now Othello is also guilty of the actual murder – but what happens to Iago’s guilt?
By committing the murder Othello takes Iago’s guilt on himself.
But doesn’t that mean that Iago’s guilt counts twice – once for Iago and once for Othello? Yes.
So there isn’t a fixed amount of guilt? No. And that is the point. Let’s try a picture again.
So Iago’s guilt is not separate from Othello’s – it is transmitted to Othello when Othello acts on it. But Iago’s guilt would remain the same whether or not Othello had murdered Desdemona. Only Othello’s guilt would have changed.
This is called a transitive model of guilt; transitive meaning that guilt can be transmitted from one person to another. It is the Christian model of guilt, and the Genesis passage shows it in action.
Look again, especially at what God says to Adam: “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
And later on, the man is banished from Eden. The full punishment for eating the fruit – plus an additional penalty for listening to Eve! (The penalty is, of course, because by listening to Eve and acting on what she said, Adam increased her guilt – what had been merely possible was now made real – and so he deserved punishment for that.)
It is also this model of guilt that Paul uses in the New Testament. When he uses phrase like ‘in Adam all died’, Paul is invoking a transitive model of guilt – we all inherit Adam’s guilt by realising it in our own sinfulness. And similarly the doctrine of Original Sin relies on this transitive model in order to be meaningful – you need to adopt the transitive model of guilt in order to say it is either right or wrong. I began this rant with two points of view that pretend to oppose each other. What is the Christian answer? What does the Christian say about poverty and unemployment as causes of crime?
The Christian says yes, poverty and unemployment are causes of crime, and therefore are guilty. But this merely provides the source for the guilt of each individual criminal. By allowing that guilt to be transmitted, the criminal takes that guilt up as the criminal’s own responsibility, and therefore the criminal should still receive the appropriate punishment.
Blaming poverty and unemployment for crime does not relieve the guilt of the criminal. Guilt is transitive, not partitive.