Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 15, 1995                   TAG: 9502160008
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DAVID COX
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BAPTISM

Late on Jan. 24, Dana Ray Edmonds was executed by lethal injection. A week earlier, he had asked to be baptized. The state, in the person of the director of the Department of Corrections, denied his request on the basis that once is enough.

That is a decision for a church to make. Not the state.

``He was baptized at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center in March of 1992,'' according to Ron Angelone, who made the final decision. ``If you read the Bible, it says that if you're baptized as a Christian, you only have to be baptized once.''

That is the sort of conclusion for a member of the clergy to reach. Not a bureaucrat.

I serve a denomination that affirms that one baptism is sufficient for salvation. Others hold differently. In some, such as Edmonds', subsequent baptism is an option. But whether or not that is legitimate is a theological and spiritual matter for churches to discuss. Not the state.

I am a member of the clergy. I serve a parish as its pastor. It is the role of the clergy (and their congregations, depending upon the denomination) to make as part of spiritual care the pastoral determination who is baptized, and when, and how, or even how often - not the role of the state.

Dana Ray Edmonds, for reasons right or wrong, believed his earlier baptism to have been invalid. Various churches provide means of aiding a soul struggling over the person's standing with the Almighty. Depending upon the tradition, baptism, confession (including the sacrament of penance for some) or such opportunities as renewing one's vows - which was in fact suggested to Edmonds by prison officials - are among the means of ministry to one with a conscience in crisis. But these rites are the responsibility of a priest or pastor, not a prison director. And the fact that an act of reaffirmation would not suffice, as Edmonds looked at his soul, is an acute and highly sensitive pastoral matter for an individual to explore with a chaplain - not a state administrator.

To be sure, some may manipulate the rites of the church for less-than-worthy motives, like delaying an execution. Yet according to news reports, this was not the basis of the state's refusal to allow this one. Indeed, with three pools at the Greensville Correctional Center, where he was executed, the facilities are readily available.

And some may say that Edmonds gave no such opportunity for his victim, Danville grocer John Elliot, to assess the state of his own soul. Murder cannot be justified. It was a hideous crime.

One need not sympathize with Edmonds, though, to recognize an enormous danger: The commonwealth made a theological statement and reached a pastoral conclusion. That becomes a gross intrusion into the relationship of church and state.

It also intruded into the most intimate concerns of the human soul. Ironically, at the moment of Edmonds' death, President Clinton was speaking to a House full of elected officials lambasting the intrusiveness of government. A few days before, the governor of Virginia in his state of the commonwealth address pledged to ``reduce the ... reach of government.'' Yet the government he heads, in determining a question of baptism, reached into the relationship of a soul to his God.

There are those who believe, for biblical and theological reason, that capital punishment cannot be justified. I am one. My church has opposed it from 1958 on. The death penalty is so ultimate, so uncorrectable if wrongly administered, that it must rely on a level of certainty that the fallible human race cannot presume to own without claiming an omniscience only God can have. In that sense, the state thus places itself in the role of God.

Moreover, while loudly shedding its powers in many aspects of life, government takes on increasing power when it comes to ending life itself, in this case of people convicted of an ever-lengthening list of crimes. That it should then involve itself with such a deeply spiritual issue should warn us of what a state that plays God with human lives can do with human souls.

Not everyone agrees with me on capital punishment, either in my denomination or in my parish, much less in Virginia as a whole. Neither do we agree precisely on baptism. So we will continue our theological and biblical debates within our churches.

But don't let the state make for any soul the decisions only a church can make.

David Cox is rector of R.E. Lee Memorial Chapel (Episcopal) in Lexington.