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A thread on the death penalty: At the end of the flood narrative, God strikes a covenant with Noah promising that evil will never again reach it’s pretty-flood levels. Part of the mechanism God gives to hold back evil is human government. (1)
One power He grants human government is that of retributive justice—later expressed in the well-known “eye for an eye” passage, and including Genesis 9:8–whoever sheds blood may also have his blood shed. This is the beginning of the “death penalty.” (2)
Under the New Covenant, Jesus speaks of a vastly different ethic than retribution where individual relationships are concerned. Yet Paul still affirms the role of legitimate government in administering justice—including the power of the sword (Romans 13:4) (3)
Yet within 30 years of Paul’s statements, John will write Revelation, and will call the same Roman government Paul said was a force for good as the “whore of Babylon” (Revelation 17:1-18) (4)
A general summary of the Bible’s instruction on this matter is that government has a legitimate place in our present world, and that one of its legitimate functions in the face of obvious evil, is the ultimate retributive justice—the death penalty. (5)
But death penalty advocates (and I’m one of them) can’t simply stop at that point on days like today, because the Scriptural legitimizing of this government power is not absolute, and the authors of Scripture also warn repeatedly against unjust governments. (6)
When someone commits cold-blooded murder, I have a hard time being honest with Scripture and coming to any conclusion other than the penalty should be that the murderer pay with his/her life. (7)
But such action, to be truly just, must be administered by a truly just system. It is legitimate to ask whether a system that is demonstrably uneven in the way it seeks to administer justice....(7)
...a system which is so affected by economic disparity and in which either unjust punishment, or unjust pardon, is so often indexed to one’s ability to afford a good lawyer....(8)
...a system in which the aforementioned economic disparity correlates so obviously along racial lines, and which enables a “prison for profit”culture that has resulted in the US housing more prisoners than anyone else except North Korea...(9)
...and while I’m at it, a system that legalizes the killing of millions of its most vulnerable citizens every year through abortion...can such a system truly have the moral authority to decide who lives and who dies? (10)
For a truly Christian understanding of the death penalty, we have to take Scripture as a whole—not merely crying “stop the death penalty” on the one hand or ignoring the injustice of our own system and blindly advocating for it on the other. (11)
We need better conversations about this issue. Even more so, we need to work together to correct the inequities of our justice system in all these areas. The Old Testament prophets, Jesus, and the Apostles together, demand no less (12)
