A word on Capital Punishment


Q: Is the scriptural prohibition against murder necessarily a prohibition against capital punishment?


In a civilized society, guilt and innocence of crimes is decided on by a justice system, rather than by the offended party. To say that it is wrong for one to murder is not the same thing as saying that a murderer should be executed by the state.


Murder is the taking of a life for personal reasons: revenge, robbery, general hatred, personal offense, et c. Capital punishment is one in a long list of penalties that can be handed down by the courts in response to legal criminal convictions.


In the former, the person doing the killing is being faithless: he believes that justice will not be done (taking it into his own hands); or that the victim has something he wants (money, property) that he desires but can’t have as long as the victim is alive; or that the victim represents some one or group that the murderer despises. In any of these cases, the commandment not to murder is a commandment to despise faithlessness: God is the one who brings justice, not I; God is the one who provides for our needs, not I, and God is the one who calls us to love even our enemies.


The arguments against capital punishment go that if we are not to murder individually, how can we justify killing another through the courts? Is that not simply murder as well, only through the government? If revenge is a bad motive for taking a life, isn’t doing it through the court system still revenge? And if murder is wrong for one because it is faithless, isn’t it wrong on the governmental scale for the same reason? Both ends the life of a person made in the image of God.


There are several reasons why these are not the same.


First, it is not revenge when the government executes a convicted criminal. Revenge is the action of the offended party – justice is the action of the government. The governmental court system is in place to protect the rights of the accused as well as to protect the rights of the offended parties. Just as it is unjust to allow victims to seek revenge, it is unjust to allow offenders to commit crimes without having to be called to account for them. In order for this justice to come about, dis-interested parties have to be called in to consider both sides of the issue, and we have decided that it is important that the prosecution prove (beyond a reasonable doubt) its case against the defendant – that is, that innocence is assumed. If the courts have convicted one of a capital crime, it is the result of justice, not revenge.


Second, it is not inherently faithless to execute a convicted criminal. If God has set the death penalty as just in the Old Testament, it needs to be proved that it is no longer just in the time of the New Testament.


Third, God has expressly said in the New Testament that we Christians are to obey – even submit to – the governing authorities (Rom 13:1-7). In verse 4 Paul writes, “For he (the authority) is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” This sword implies deadly force, that is, capital punishment.


It can be argued that while the governments are God’s servants to bring and keep justice, there may well be punishments that are cruel, or unjust inherently. Cannot punishments be changed to be more humane, and couldn’t it be argued that capital punishment is in need of change for these reasons?


This is a worthy question, and goes beyond the question of whether or not murder and execution are the same thing. What we need to argue here are (barring offense) what the reasons are in favor of capital punishment.

Many argue that capital punishment is indeed civilized vengeance. The courts side with the offended party, and in so doing allow that offended party to kill out of hatred. But this position ignores the spiritual aspect of the issue. Assuming that guilt has been rightly discovered by the courts, and that the convict’s sentence is death, the system is actually giving a message to the convict on two levels: first that his crime is worthy of the supreme penalty – that is, that our society is agreed that his sort of crime requires this sort of response for justice to be accomplished as best we can in this fallen world; and secondly that he is a soul, and that there are actually worse things than death that can happen to a person. If we were to give you the impression that your crime were not this serious, we would be doing damage to your eternal soul. If a dog injures a neighbor, the dog is killed – this is done so that the dog won’t injure anyone else. If a man murders a neighbor, it may be also good to end his life so that he won’t kill again, but that theoretically could be accomplished by a life sentence without parole, so why the death penalty? Because there is a person’s soul at stake – he needs to know that this murder is a sin against God and that he needs to repent and get right with God before he leaves this earth. The death penalty can do what no other penalty can do: force a convict to meet his own mortality. He knows when his life will end, while the rest of us can only surmise. He has only so many days, weeks, months left to put his soul in order. To confess, repent, and be forgiven. And THIS is more important to us as a society than revenge.


It can be argued that our culture is no longer Christian, so we cannot count on our civil secularized courts to think in spiritual categories any more. However, this is not a case against capital punishment any more at all – we should call our courts back to Christian thinking on all fronts, not just the question of capital punishment. We should be considering the souls of our drug dealers, our corporate embezzlers, and our domestic disturbers as well, fitting punishments that call them to consider the need for repentance, restoration, and apologies as well – it is just that the punishment must fit the crime. If you steal from your company, you should be required to restore all that was stolen and then some, PLUS have to right any broken relationships. There should be punishments that fit the other crimes as well, punishments other than imprisonment, which should be kept for the unrepentant. There are those who would grow from being forced to spend the next number of years working to pay back those he stole from. Or be forced to serve the family he offended.


But in the case of capital crimes – when one person is murdered by another – the penalty has to be as serious as the crime. This is not said with the vindictiveness of a victim, but with the disengaged wisdom of the community. There are some crimes that we won’t tolerate as a society, and the perpetrators of those crimes should know ahead of time that the punishment is death. This supports the last point in favor of capital punishment, that the death penalty can be a deterrent. It is true that many murders are committed in the heat of passion. However, many more would be planned and concluded if there were no fear of death.