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Christians and the Death Penalty

You can see it in the recent emergence of civil suits for damages from murders, and the congressional orders for changes in trial procedures to accommodate the victims’ families during the Oklahoma City bombing trials, and the provisions of every new bill for victims’ rights, and the kind of testimony increasingly allowed during sentencing hearings. […]

You can see it in the recent emergence of civil suits for damages from murders, and the congressional orders for changes in trial procedures to accommodate the victims’ families during the Oklahoma City bombing trials, and the provisions of every new bill for victims’ rights, and the kind of testimony increasingly allowed during sentencing hearings. You can see it, perhaps most of all, in the thought, expressed by nearly everyone at Michael Ross’ execution, that the state’s criminal-justice system was paying something back to the families of his victims. Even Michael Ross came to believe it–came, in fact, to demand it, fighting every attempt to save him–and it is a primitive and pre-Christian understanding of justice.

The divine right of kings was a short-lived political theory, swept under by rival theories in early modern times. A new understanding of the limited sovereignty of government emerged, and one of the primary causes was the gradually developing awareness that Christianity had thoroughly demythologized the state. But that is not, by itself, a stable condition. Without constant pressure from the New Testament’s revelation of Christ’s death and resurrection, the state always threatens to rise back up as an idol. And one sign of a government’s overreaching is its claim of power to balance the books of the universe–to repay blood with blood.

Dzung Ngoc Tu, Tammy Williams, Paula Perrera, Debra Smith Taylor, Robin Stavinsky, Leslie Shelley, April Brunais, Wendy Baribeault: These were real people, girls and young women raped and killed, and their blood cries out from the ground. But high justice for their deaths–the story of the killer killed, the narrative we want to give us closure–is something we cannot permit the State of Connecticut to wield. ~Joseph Bottum, First Things (courtesy of Orthodoxy Today)

Hat tip to Michael Brendan Dougherty.

Setting aside the schizophrenic and bizarre attitude of different First Things‘ editors towards the legitimacy of the state’s use of violence (aggressive war OK, capital punishment less so), one might say that Mr. Bottum’s article cries out for a response. Michael Dougherty of Surfeited with Dainties drew my attention to the article, suggesting that I might be moved to write a lengthy response. Actually, there is not much worth addressing, since most of the article is not so much a statement of the reasons why Christians should oppose the death penalty as it is a critique of secular pro and con arguments and the psychobabble of “closure” that has polluted the discourse about capital punishment. It should be self-evident that if “closure” were the real object of an execution it would be one of the most heinous things on earth. The purpose of an execution is justice, which properly understood is giving each his due and rendering to each proportionately according to his acts.

As the emperor Justinian laid out in the Corpus, the recapitulation of our Roman legal inheritance and even the source for modern law in much of Europe:

“Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives to every man his due. Jurisprudence is the knowledge of things divine and human, the science of the just and the unjust….

The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give every man his due. The study of law consists of two branches, law public and law private. The former relates to the welfare of the Roman State; the latter to the advantage of the individual citizen. Of private law then we may say that it is of threefold origin, being collected from the precepts of nature, from those of the law of nations, or from those of the civil law of Rome.”

There is only one appropriate punishment for a murderer, as C.S. Lewis laid out very simply many decades ago, and this is execution.
There is not some “normal justice” distinct from “cosmic justice,” and it requires no more special competence on the part of the magistrate to inflict the most severe punishment than it does for him to impose a lengthy jail term. We do not need reminders from Exegesis 101 that God alone judges or that God alone is just, and that anything man does in pursuance of God’s will and God’s law will be flawed without God’s grace. All remotely well-instructed Christians know this already. If Christ, the Lamb without spot, acknowledged that Pilate’s authority came from above, even at a moment of the most obvious and extreme injustice in punishing an innocent Man (the only perfectly innocent Man in history), why do we doubt that modern magistrates have their power from any other source?

Obviously, Mr. Bottum takes a roundabout way to defend the very newfound Catholic position that capital punishment is illicit and immoral. I say newfound because it was obviously not the view of St. Paul or the ancient Church Fathers, whose inheritance both Orthodox and Catholics share (though they may not always understand it in the same way), and it would be a stretch to find arguments for this position in any important Catholic theologians of medieval or early modern times. To take just one example from the East, which is representative of the Tradition prior to the schism, St. Theodore Studites, as I was reminded recently in my orals preparation reading, abhorred and stopped the execution of heretics in the reign of Michael I Rhangabe (it deprived them of a chance at repentance and salvation) but acknowledged the state’s legitimate authority to execute murderers. Since we are speaking strictly about murder, and not one of any number of crimes that were once considered capital offenses in earlier ages (e.g., adultery, brigandage, astrology, etc.), St. Theodore’s witness seems immensely important.

Sadly, Mr. Bottum spent more time sailing through ethereal clouds of “cosmic justice” and going on about the divine right of kings than he did in focusing on any patristic warrants for opposing the death penalty. I believe this is because neither he nor any other opponent of capital punishment can find explicit statements against the authority of the magistrate to execute criminals guilty of someone else’s blood. I would actually be astonished if any of them said so. There are likely accounts of saints in the ancient Church pleading for the lives of condemned men, but their extraordinary and sanctified mercy presupposes that the condemnations are just.

For their part, Orthodox theologians often like to cite Byzantine precedents where authorities preferred mutilation and exile to execution on the basis that the Byzantines regarded this is as the more humane alternative. Hard enough as it is to imagine opponents of capital punishment taking up the cause of having criminals blinded instead of killed, this Byzantine example does not prove that executions are unjust or beyond the competence of the secular authority. Even this Byzantine expression of mercy, strange as it may appear to some, assumes that the state has every right to execute the condemned men but chooses to let them off “lightly.”

Orthodox theologians often will also cite the opposition to capital punishment of Dostoevsky, who, great and amazing a writer and Orthodox thinker as he is, has no definitive say in the moral teachings of the Church. Dostoevsky, of course, was deeply affected by the last minute 1849 reprieve granted to him and some of his condemned fellows from the socialist Petrashevsky Circle in which he dabbled in his younger days. As many know, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment receives only seven years in Siberia for two brutal murders, one of which was completely premeditated in cold blood. The leniency and indulgence of the investigating officer, Porfiry Petrovich, really makes no sense in the story, unless one understands Dostoevsky’s aversion to capital punishment. Of course, Dostoevsky died just shortly before the assassination of the Tsar-Liberator Aleksandr II in 1881. It would have been very interesting to know what opinion Dostoevsky would have had about that most heinous act of butchery.

A sort of pupil of Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solovyev, a later convert to Catholicism in his ecumenist meanderings, gave a public address shortly after the surviving assassins were condemned to death and openly called for the new Tsar to commute the sentences of the revolutionaries to show his great Christian clemency. Needless to say, Tsar Aleksandr III was not amused. The Russian public was, predictably and correctly, outraged at the suggestion. Not only would it have been leniency for terrorists, but it would have been supremely unjust. It is ultimately Solovyev’s position that Mr. Bottum asks us to accept.

It would be particularly intriguing to know how Mr. Bottum squares his opposition to capital punishment with the all-too-militant and violent views of his fellow First Things editors, who would presumably see their way to endorsing executions of terrorists, if only as a “wartime” measure. What is more, if the state can legitimately kill traitors and deserters in its own defense (which may or may not have anything to do with the common good), how does it not have the same legitimate authority to kill those who murder civilians?

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