Could a killer be saved, but not his victims?

[ishnianqueen]

This question has been lurking in the back of my head for some time now. A high school classmate of mine was killed in the Virginia Tech University shooting last year. As far as I know, she was not practicing any faith, though of course I would not be the judge of that. To take it to a clearer black-and-white type argument, let’s say that one of the victims was a well-known, avowed atheist. However, the killer obviously had a mental illness and (possibly) did not fully comprehend his actions, therefore lessening if not completely releasing him from culpability.

Is it possible that the murderer of so many innocent victims could go to heaven, based on a technicality, while some of his victims are condemned to hell because they were killed in a state of sin or killed before recanting any of their false beliefs? Obviously, we are not God and cannot state with any certainty what would happen, but … is it possible? Every time I start thinking of it, I can’t get very far. Thanks for your help.

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

First of all, let me say how sorry I am for your loss and that I pray your friend died in God’s friendship. I hope that CAF members reading this will also pray for her and for all who died in that terrible tragedy.

As for your specific hypothetical: Yes, it is possible that a killer could be saved while his victims are not. It would depend on the state of the respective souls at the time of their deaths.

In the killer’s case: If a killer is not culpable for his crimes due to mental illness (which is not a mere “technicality”), or if he repents for having committed them before his death, he can die in a state of grace and be saved. In the case of a 20th-century Frenchman named Jacques Fesch, for example, Fesch not only repented for the crime of killing a police officer but, in the years before his execution, so progressed in holiness that a cause for his canonization has been opened.

In the victims’ case: We never know when the hour of our death is to be; when it will be immediately necessary to give an account of our lives to God (cf. Matt. 24:42-44). We may live to be 90 and die in a warm bed with plenty of time to put in order our temporal and spiritual affairs, or we may die unexpectedly tomorrow with no time at all to prepare, but we are responsible for the state of our soul each and every minute of the day. If a life is unexpectedly cut short, we may hope that the person died capable of salvation and that the Lord will have mercy; but if the person dies deliberately rejecting God and thus goes to hell, then it is his own responsibility that he does so.