So Saddam has been convicted and sentenced – to death. Immediately, the Western liberal human rights lobbies have galvanized themselves to try to prevent it. They know only too well that if the case for anyone – even a mass murdering tyrant - can be proved reasonable and right morally, then the case for the death penalty per se is also made out. But I have found the human rights lobbies together with woolly-minded liberal Christians to be less than logical when confronted by pure reason and the Word of God itself. That’s why they do their level best to avoid being confronted by cogent argument.
Though I am more than prepared to argue the case for the death penalty from pure reason - as I have in my book The Politics of Faith that is not my focus here. I have been asked rather to focus squarely on the biblical teaching on the subject and will confine my case to it. And what our review will plainly reveal is that the Bible, New and Old Testament, is unequivocal on the subject: the Bible not only teaches the case for the death penalty but shows that the state which carries executes for murder is actually doing God’s will. So let us straight away turn to the biblical evidence.
The Bible’s case for the Death Penalty.
To anybody who knows their history, including OT and NT history, it will be plainly apparent that the church, both pre- and post- Christ’s incarnation, has consistently held the view that society, though not individuals, has been granted the divine right to take human life or perform judicial execution. This has especially been granted for the crime of premeditated murder in pursuit of the Sixth Commandment (obedience to God) and its concern to defend the sanctity of human life and thereby the common good (care for one another).
Essentially, this is a simple divine affirmation of the fact that communal rights will always carry more weight than individual rights. As this is an essay on the subject and not an entire book, I will confine my argument here to four critical areas of Scripture which, collectively, contribute to a better Christian understanding and biblical worldview, and arguably the definitive moral case, on the subject. They are:
· The death penalty in the Old Testament context (Exodus 21).
· Christ’s teaching in Sermon on the Mount: the general NT context (Matt. 5)
· The divine authority given to all governing authority (Rom.13) and critically,
· Jesus before Pilate (John 19).
1. The Death Penalty in the Old Testament context
The Old Testament writings so plainly teach the principle of judicial execution that it needs little comment. Indeed, even those who disagree with its administration today would find themselves hard pressed to argue anything other than the general acceptance of the death penalty for a variety of crimes, including premeditated murder, in the ancient world generally and under the under the Mosaic Law specifically.
Perhaps first, however, we should deal with one old ‘chestnut’ that still occasionally is raised: that the Sixth Commandment precludes the taking of human life per se. It is true that the King James Bible version does translate the passage: ‘Thou shalt not kill’. This particular translation has been used by Quakers and pacifists of every Christian and non-Christian hue ever since. But this is simply to rip the passage from its biblical context and to misunderstand the nature and purpose of the Ten Commandments themselves. First and foremost the phrase is perhaps, as in most modern translations, better rendered: ‘You shall not murder’, restoring completely the missing key element of ‘premeditation’. But even if we choose to leave the translation as in the King James Version, then it must be understood that the Ten Commandments represent the totality of the moral Law of God for all humankind and in every generation of humankind. While Jesus repealed and abolished the rites associated with ritual and sacrificial laws, he did not abolish the Law of God (not ‘one jot or tittle’ of it) but came, as he himself said, to ‘fulfil it’.
For our purpose here, what we need to grasp is that the Ten Commandments are written specifically as Laws to govern the beliefs and actions of every one of us as individuals. Though they are commandments from which communal laws can, and have been, derived, primarily they were/are given to govern individual moral behaviour. This is plain enough, in that only an individual, not society, can be guilty of breaking the other Commandments too, such as adultery, bearing false witness, and so on. Thus the Sixth Commandment legislates against the individual taking of human life for private or personal motive. But it cannot be extrapolated, however, to place the same injunction on the community, on society. To do so is simply to set the Sixth Commandment adrift from its godly moorings by giving it, alone among the Commandments, a communal connotation (in exactly the same way as Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, as we shall see, also have their application) that it cannot bear.
This is very important because it has the consequent effect of separating entirely the individual’s responsibilities from that of the community. Thus, though we see that the individual is stripped of the right of premeditated, private retribution and vengeance, we can now see the full force of the Sixth Commandment’s thrust in respect of the sanctity of human life, as it is amplified in surrounding passages. The individual may not take human life as an act of private vengeance. But in pursuit of the practical outworking of the Commandment, the community, in the form of the civil authority, can and implicitly -- if it is not openly to despise the spirit of the Sixth Commandment -- should do so. In this the state is merely acting as God’s appointed agent to uphold the standard of justice he himself has laid down for all time. In this the state, on behalf of the individual, is upholding the spirit of the Sixth Commandment’s moral sanction against the taking of God-given human life (which the murderer has specifically despised and rejected). In this sense, the Commandment itself sees the social rejection of the use of the death penalty in respect of murder both an abrogation of the Law of God and its own rejection of the principle of upholding the sanctity of human life in practice.
There is, of course, as the OT itself elsewhere makes clear, a world of difference between premeditated killing for personal gain or private motive, and accidental unpremeditated killing (manslaughter), or killing in war, or even a crime of passion. There is also a vast difference between killing on behalf of, or for the good of, the whole community or nation and premeditated killing for personal reasons. However the Sixth Commandment is rendered, the Bible sets out fully all the various distinctions and the due penalties for causing the death of another human being. One passage which elaborates on the Sixth Commandment and the need for the adoption of the death penalty in society is Exodus 21, which says,
He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death. But if he did not lie in wait, but God delivered him into his hand, then I will appoint for you a place where he may flee. But if a man acts with premeditation against his neighbour, to kill him with guile, you shall take him from my altar, that he may die. By removing some killing from the private to the public realm in this way, ‘vengeance’ does indeed ‘belong to the Lord’.
Of course, while many Christians would accept that this is the OT position, the modern Christian often tends to the view that the whole moral Law of God (as well as the ritual law of the Jewish nation) was also ‘set aside’ by Christ (i.e. antinomianism: anti-law) when he abolished the other aspects of sacrificial laws and rites. Having asserted that the OT principle is plainly ‘pro-death penalty’, let us now briefly assess the position post-Sermon on the Mount.
2. The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chapters 5-7)
Because God forgives our sins (when the wages of all sin is death), he expects us to reveal that same character of forgiveness and mercy in our own personal lives and dealings, a level of mercy even higher than that practised by our OT believing counterparts (who did not know Christ in Person and consequently could know less than we can concerning the character of God). It was in the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus most clearly articulated this greater degree of personal forgiveness and mercy. He spoke of how each one of us is to approach issues including murder, adultery, oath-making, love, prayer and judging generally, among others. But again the context in which he is speaking is the private realm of individual, personal morality. Alerting us to our very human capacity to judge others, using scales of justice different from those which we would perhaps adopt towards ourselves, he warns us, as of first priority, to ‘remove the moat from our own eye’. What a more careful study of this whole passage reveals is Jesus’ overriding concern for the area of personal ethics, and not the quite separate area of communal or social ethics (though the former would undoubtedly affect the latter).
We only have to mention one or two instances to see that this is logically so. When Jesus raises the issue of ‘retaliation’ when ‘wronged’, he is concerned that each of us learns the higher principle of ‘turning the other cheek’ to the other person (Matt. 5:39). And where someone has stolen our tunic or clothing, we are told to ‘ let him have your cloak also’ (Matt. 5:40). But what if the ‘other person’ should beat you senseless? Or rob you of everything you own? Are you called simply to become a physical ‘doormat’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ to the extent that you ‘give him the keys to your house and car’, putting you and your family on the street? I do not think so. Clearly, this would make a nonsense of all Godly social order, and anarchy would soon follow. This is why God-given authority has been put in place, to act on our behalf to remove the business of upholding authority and the rule of the civil law, for the good of all, from the private and personal realm to that of the social and communal. For justice to be holy, it must be administered within the context of the personal realm -- where moral restraint and judgment is to be exercised, as God has exercised it daily for us in being slow to anger and quick to forgive us -- and more broadly by society, on our behalf, removing the associated sense of personal grievance and vengeance which can so dominate privatized response.
The fact is that the Sermon on the Mount is primarily concerned with individual Christian ethics, not social ones. This is plain from the context of the whole address as well as from its constituent parts. What the Sermon on the Mount does teach, among much else, is how the twin themes of forgiveness and mercy should become integrated aspects of our personal character and experience: noting that, as God has been slow to judge (condemn) us, so we should be slow to judge (condemn) others. But this does not mean that God does not ultimately judge, nor allow us to judge either. Indeed, not only does God judge or discern, but he also has Paul asking rhetorically, ‘Does not the spiritual man judge all things? (1 Cor. 2:15).
One of the major teachings most Christians would do well to recover from the Sermon is the fact that Jesus delivered this prelude to his teachings:
Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfil. For assuredly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Whoever breaks one of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matt. 5:17-19)
Far from removing the social injunction to obey the moral Law of God in the Ten Commandments, and all that flows from them, Christ himself reaffirms this divine instruction. Neither in his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, nor anywhere else, does Jesus deny or seek to affect society’s attitude towards upholding the sanctity of life and, thereby, the right to enforce the death penalty in the case of premeditated murder. It is clear from other areas of the NT that Christ does introduce a powerful element of forgiveness in respect of sins committed, where previously the death penalty had been authorized. In fact, it could be argued that he did so in just about every area except that of premeditated murder. As regards this single area, we must look further at the powers of God-ordained civil authority and, above all, to Jesus’ specific attitude to Pilate’s claimed right of life and death over him.
3. Romans 13: The Power of the Governing Authorities
The plainest NT teaching on the nature of the powers of the governing authority, which God gives to man, can be found in Romans chapter 13. Here the distinction between the responsibilities of the governing bodies and the individual are laid bare. Where Jesus taught the individual to ‘turn the other cheek’, even allowing the theft of not only one tunic but two, society is set an altogether different task. Indeed the whole tone of Paul’s teaching concerning the responsibilities of the public authorities is much tougher, as it is made abundantly clear that the individual is to fear the governing authorities as a ‘terror’ to all who do evil (v.3). Such authority, Paul informs us, has been ‘appointed by God’ himself, and anyone who resists that authority ‘resists the ordnance of God’ (v.2). In other words, disobeying governing powers is tantamount to disobeying ‘God’s minister to you for good’. And, if we ‘do evil’, then we are to be afraid of those who bear this God-given responsibility, ‘for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practises evil.’(v.4) We are to be in no doubt that the civil authorities, unlike us as individuals, bear God’s own authority when it comes to delivering (no doubt imperfectly) human justice.
We should note that the image of retribution relied upon here is that which affords final, not just temporary, justice, the sword. The sword is, of course, potentially an instrument of death and not of mere chastisement. It could have been described as a ‘whip of cords’ (which Jesus used to cleanse the Temple) or some other ‘gentler’ implement. But the retributive sword, and none of these others, is what the civil powers are mandated to bear and execute God’s wrath on evil.
As we reach verse 8 of Romans 13, however, once again the nature of the teaching changes focus and tone and turns to our personal responsibilities to one another. And we find all of the same key elements of forgiveness and mercy to the fore, just as Jesus expounded them in his Sermon on the Mount. What we must understand from all this is that personal and social ethics are not the same thing. And in one instance where the two are in high profile juxtaposition, Jesus’ trial before Pilate, the full extent of the powers of the state in respect of life and death issues, for the higher sake of the whole community, comes, as nowhere else, into sharp focus.
4. Jesus before Pilate
Without doubt the most telling biblical evidence in respect of Jesus’ view on the state’s use of the death penalty in the NT era comes from his own trial before the Roman Governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. Paraded before Pilate, the Jewish leadership were vociferous in their accusations against Jesus; charges which, under OT Jewish Law, carried the sanction of ‘ultimate justice’. But only the occupying power, and thus the Roman governor himself, was mandated to perform the act of judicial killing in Israel at that time. Being aware that he was being coerced by the Jewish leaders into finding guilty a man in whom he personally saw little or no guilt, and taken aback by Jesus’ apparent unwillingness to defend himself, Pilate asks Christ whether has understood that he, Pilate, has the power/authority to crucify (kill) him or to release him (John 10). Given that this exchange, on the key issue of the nature of the power invested in the state, would henceforth resonate around the world for millennia to come, here, par excellence, is the platform from which Jesus could denounce all human right to take not only his life, but any human life, henceforth. But he did not take it.
What we find instead is something radically different. Jesus’ concern was not for his own life, nor was it even to deny Pilate’s claim to wielding the power of life and death over him. Instead Jesus chose to make two very different, highly instructive points, answering Pilate thus:
“You could have no power at all against me unless it had been given you from above. Therefore the one who delivered me to you has the greater sin.” (John 19:11)
First, Jesus was perfectly content to cede to Pilate (as the due civil authority) the right of jurisdiction over his life. But where Pilate’s plain opinion was his by ‘Roman might’, Jesus sought to disabuse him by locating that right in a different and higher authority than Rome. Second, he also made clear that the Jewish leaders, his accusers, were more responsible than the Roman authorities for his crucifixion. Thus Jesus duly affirmed Pilate’s notion of rightful civil authority in matters of judicial execution, while taking pains to identify where, primarily, responsibility for delivering him wrongfully to that authority -- and thus taking his life -- actually lay. Jesus himself nowhere in Scripture denies, negates or amends the power of the governing authorities to administer justice, tempered in some areas and on some occasions with mercy, as they see fit. Indeed Jesus recognized only too well that in exerting this power, in his case over life and death, Pilate was merely acting as God’s agent. It was this that Christ wanted Pilate -- and, through the Scriptures, the world -- to know, as of greatest importance at this most critical moment in all of human history.
Not a hint anywhere here, when the matter could easily have been laid to rest for all time, that the use of the death penalty was an immoral, unchristian or, somehow, ungodly or unsanctified act, in God’s greater scheme of things. We should note that those who oppose the death penalty do not simply say that the death penalty is wrong: rather they say that the death penalty is wrong because of the danger of killing an innocent person. The same thing was true for Jesus, however, and could have been put forward as an argument in any age. Clearly it is not an argument that carries great weight in divine ‘circles’. All liberal thinking, Christian and non-Christian, regarding the death penalty, lacks the force of persuasive argument in terms of logic or biblical teaching. Instead it tends to be reduced to arguing against it in terms of mostly hypothetical, extreme, or worst-case scenarios to frighten us into banning it altogether. But if we operated on this principle in any other area of the law, the whole rule of law would simply collapse.
Liberals say, ‘ah, but the death penalty is different. Any mistake here cannot be rectified!’ But even if this fear may be true in an occasional instance, it simply lacks integrity to extend the argument to every case or even most cases. What of those individuals who are not only mass murderers, but who were caught on camera plainly committing the act? Those who openly admit their crimes and who claim they will kill again? Those for whom, through their vast financial resources, languishing in a prison cell will be no bar at all to authorizing yet more murders? And what of the large number of individuals who are freed and who do murder again? How, in such plain cases, does liberal reasoning make any sense at all? What liberal thinking does successfully is to neutralize the effect of the law at the very point that its concern to uphold the sanctity of life is most revealed, and is thus most threatening to the common good.
What is made clear from a thorough familiarity with the Scriptures on all of these points is that God, in the OT, made the death penalty a legal fixture in respect of murder and many other offences. What is clear from the New Testament is that Jesus sets a number of specific precedents which go a long way to assuaging the number of crimes for which the death penalty might in future be ordained which do not include premeditated killings. An examples of those offences for which the death penalty is no longer applicable would be adultery -- it was Jesus himself who forgave the woman caught in adultery, making clear her sin but telling her to ‘sin no more’ (John 8:1-11). But this in no way introduces that same degree of divine leniency and social clemency into the area of the most heinous of crimes, premeditated murder. Indeed, Jesus’ responses to Pilate at his own trial, dictate that the very opposite is true.
A Christian may take a contrary view for whatever philosophical or “humanistic” reason they wish. But they are faced with the simple reality that Jesus, given the opportunity to end the debate for all time, chose instead not to invoke a “you have no right” clause before Pilate, quite the opposite. One thing is clear, in a fallen world, where murderers despise the God-given sanctity of life God has not only provided the right, but has actually arrogated the duty of judicial execution (God’s vengeance) by the state for certain offences to the state authorities. Christians may take another view if they wish, but it will not be the view of a biblically-informed mind.
© Peter C Glover, 2006. For more of his writings go to www.petercglover.com
This article has been adapted from Saddam & the Death Penalty, chapter 1 of his book The Politics of Faith: Essays on the morality of key current affairs (Xulon Press, 2004). Also available direct from his website above.
