Capital Punishment and Justice

Genesis 9:6 is the oldest and most important text in the Christian debate about the death penalty, and it is worth reading slowly. In Hebrew the first half is a tight mirror, six words with the second three reversing the first: sheds, blood, man; by man, his blood, will be shed. The form is memorable and it is deliberate. The punishment matches the crime. Then comes the reason, which is not deterrence or social order but theology: for in His own image God has made mankind. The life of the murderer is answered with his own life because the life he took bore the image of God. This is the verse in which the doctrine of the first lesson of this module first does moral work in the Bible, and it does it by grounding the most severe penalty in the highest dignity.

The verse belongs to the covenant with Noah, which is made with all humanity after the flood, before there was any Israel or any law of Moses. Retentionists, those who believe the death penalty should be kept, draw a weighty conclusion from this. The many capital laws of the Mosaic covenant, for adultery, for blasphemy, for striking a parent, were given to Israel and are not binding on the nations today. But Genesis 9:6 was given to every human being and has not been withdrawn, so the duty to answer murder with death is not a piece of Israel's civil law but a standing word to every society. This argument is old; versions of it appear in Luther, in Calvin and in many Reformed writers since.

Others read the verse differently. Some note that its form is like a proverb, a statement of what happens, the kind of thing Jesus said when he told Peter that all who draw the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52), which is a warning, not a commission. Others accept that Genesis 9:6 authorises human courts to take life for murder but read it as a permission rather than a command, setting an upper limit on revenge rather than a requirement. Others again, the abolitionists, argue that God's own treatment of the first murderer, sending Cain away but protecting his life with a mark (Genesis 4:15), shows that mercy was possible even then, and that the purpose of Genesis 9:6, which is to protect the image of God, is better served in a world where the state can protect society without killing. Each reading is held by serious interpreters, and you should be able to state each one. What all of them share is the reason the verse gives: human life is precious because God made it in his image. The debate is about what that requires.

Notice too how much the law of Moses surrounds the death penalty with protection, as you saw in the inquiry. The cities of refuge protected the one who killed by accident from the avenger until he could be tried (Numbers 35:11-12). One witness was never enough (Deuteronomy 17:6). Judges were to investigate thoroughly, and a lying witness suffered the penalty he had sought (19:18-19). Children were not to be put to death for their parents' sins, nor parents for their children (24:16). Whatever a Christian thinks about the death penalty, the law that commands it insists that it may never be carried out carelessly, on weak evidence or by a crowd.

Before asking whether the state may ever execute, ask what any punishment is for. There are four main answers, and most systems of justice mix them. Retribution says punishment is deserved: the wrongdoer receives what his act merits, no more and no less. Deterrence says punishment is meant to discourage others, and the offender himself, from committing the crime. Incapacitation says punishment protects society by preventing the offender from doing harm again. Restoration or rehabilitation says punishment should aim at repairing the harm done and changing the offender so that he can return to the community.

Retribution is often misunderstood as revenge. The difference is that revenge is personal, unlimited and driven by anger, while retribution is public, limited and measured by the wrong. The law of eye for eye (Exodus 21:24) was not a licence for revenge but a limit on it: no more than an eye for an eye. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his Metaphysics of Morals (1797), held so strongly to retribution that he said even a society about to dissolve itself should first execute the last murderer in its prison, so that the guilt would not fall on the people. C. S. Lewis, in an essay of 1949 called The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, argued that punishment must be tied to desert, because once it is separated from what a person deserves and justified only by cure or deterrence, the state can do almost anything to anyone in the name of helping them or protecting others. Desert, he argued, protects the dignity of the offender as a responsible person.

Deterrence is the argument most often heard in public debate, and the evidence for it is weaker than its supporters usually claim. A committee of the United States National Research Council, reviewing decades of research in 2012, concluded that the studies did not show whether the death penalty increases, decreases or has no effect on murder rates. That does not settle the moral question, since a retributive case does not depend on deterrence, but it does mean that a Christian should not claim more for deterrence than the evidence supports.

Restoration has deep roots in scripture. The prophets looked for a justice that would heal the land, Jesus came to proclaim liberty to the captives (Luke 4:18), and the gospel itself is the story of God making right what was wrong by the reconciliation of the guilty. Christians have often argued that a just punishment should leave room for repentance and restoration. Retentionists reply that repentance and execution are not opposites: the thief on the cross said that he and his companion were being punished justly, receiving what their actions deserved, and Jesus promised him paradise (Luke 23:41-43) without suggesting that the sentence was wrong.

The case for keeping the death penalty for the gravest crimes, as Christian retentionists make it, rests first on Genesis 9:6, read as a standing command to all humanity. It continues with Romans 13:4: the governing authority does not carry the sword in vain and is God's servant, an agent of retribution to the wrongdoer. The sword in the Roman world was the instrument of execution, and Paul writes this to Christians living under a government that used it. When Paul himself stood trial before Festus, he said that if he had done anything worthy of death, he did not refuse to die (Acts 25:11), which assumes that some crimes do deserve death and that the state may impose it. And the repentant thief, as section 2 noted, called his own sentence just.

Retentionists add that the great tradition of the church stood with them for most of its history. Augustine, in The City of God, wrote that those who put criminals to death by public authority do not break the commandment against killing, although in his letters he repeatedly asked Roman officials to show mercy to condemned men. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, compared the execution of a dangerous criminal to the cutting off of a diseased limb to save the body. The Reformers agreed, and the Westminster Larger Catechism of 1648, explaining the sixth commandment, forbids all taking away the life of ourselves, or of others, except in case of public justice, lawful war, or necessary defence. In more recent times the Southern Baptist Convention, in a resolution in 2000, supported the fair and equitable use of capital punishment for those guilty of murder, and the Catholic philosopher Edward Feser and political scientist Joseph Bessette, in By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed (2017), argued that the death penalty is consistent with natural law, scripture and Catholic tradition.

Their moral arguments are serious. Justice requires proportion, and some crimes are so grave that any lesser penalty treats the victim's life as worth less than the murderer's. Taking murder with full seriousness honours the image of God in the victim. Retribution treats the offender as a responsible moral agent rather than as a patient to be cured. And the possibility of a just death sentence can be an occasion for repentance: facing death, many have turned to God, as the thief did. Retentionists usually also insist on everything the law of Moses insisted on: certainty of guilt, fair trial, two witnesses or their equivalent, no mob, no favouritism. Many would say that where those conditions cannot be met, the penalty should not be used.

The case for ending the death penalty, as Christian abolitionists make it, also begins with scripture. God protected the life of the first murderer (Genesis 4:15). He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked should turn from their ways and live (Ezekiel 33:11). Jesus refused to take part in the stoning of the woman in John 8, and whatever its textual history, the church has long heard in that story the character of its Lord. Above all, Jesus himself was executed by the state, condemned on false testimony by a legal process, and the cross, abolitionists argue, has shown once for all what the death penalty can be used for, and has also borne the punishment for all sin. Stephen, the first martyr, was executed by a crowd and died praying for his killers (Acts 7:60). Glen Stassen and David Gushee, in Kingdom Ethics (2003), argued that Jesus' way of transforming initiatives calls Christians to seek alternatives to killing, and Mark Osler, a former prosecutor, argued in Jesus on Death Row (2009) that the trial and execution of Jesus expose the failures of every death penalty system.

Abolitionists also claim parts of the early church. Lactantius, a Christian teacher of the early fourth century, wrote in his Divine Institutes that a just man may not even bring a capital charge against anyone, because killing itself is forbidden, whether with the sword or with a word. Others in the early centuries were uneasy about Christians serving as judges in capital cases. The case is not that the whole early church opposed the death penalty, which it did not, but that a strand of Christian conscience has always been troubled by it.

The modern Catholic Church has moved decisively to this side. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, as first published in 1992, allowed the death penalty in cases of extreme gravity. John Paul II, in Evangelium Vitae (1995), argued that modern states can protect society without executing, so that cases in which execution is absolutely necessary are very rare, if not practically non-existent, and the Catechism was revised to match in 1997. In August 2018 Pope Francis revised paragraph 2267 again, to teach that the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person, and that the Church works for its abolition worldwide. The Vatican described the change as an authentic development of doctrine. Not all Catholics agree: a group of Catholic scholars and clergy published an appeal asking the cardinals to urge the pope to withdraw it, arguing that it contradicts scripture and the constant teaching of the Church, and writers like Feser and Bessette argue that the Church cannot teach that something is intrinsically wrong which it once permitted. That argument within Catholicism, over whether teaching may develop in this way, is itself an important lesson about how churches change their minds.

Abolitionists' practical arguments are also weighty, and some of them retentionists share. Innocent people are condemned, as the next section shows, and execution is the one punishment that cannot be corrected. The death penalty falls most heavily on the poor, who cannot afford good lawyers, and in many countries on ethnic and religious minorities. Governments that execute often use the penalty against political opponents, and in some countries against religious minorities. In Pakistan, where blasphemy carries a death sentence, a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, was sentenced to death in 2010 and spent eight years on death row before the Supreme Court acquitted her in 2018. Christians in many parts of the world know what it is to be on the wrong end of a state's power to kill. Retentionists reply that the abuse of a just punishment is a reason to reform its use, not to abolish it, and that Genesis 9:6 does not depend on whether any state uses the sword well. Abolitionists answer that when the state's record is this poor and the error is irreversible, the burden of proof lies on those who would keep it.

Whatever their view of the death penalty in principle, Christians must face what happens in practice. In the United States alone, more than two hundred people sentenced to death since 1973 had been exonerated by 2026, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, cleared because of new evidence, recanted testimony, DNA testing or proof of misconduct. In many countries confessions are obtained by torture, the accused cannot afford a lawyer, and trials are short. The law of Moses required two witnesses, careful investigation and the punishment of false witnesses precisely because the danger of condemning the innocent was known. Exodus 23:7 says do not kill the innocent or the just. Proverbs says that acquitting the guilty and condemning the righteous are both detestable to the LORD (17:15). A Christian who supports the death penalty must care at least as much about the second half of that verse as the first.

In many places the more urgent danger is not the courts but the crowd. Mob justice, sometimes called jungle justice, in which a suspected thief or witch is beaten or burned to death by a crowd before any trial, happens in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and church members are sometimes in the crowd. Here Christians of every view agree. Mob killing breaks every safeguard scripture gives: no trial, no witnesses, no investigation, no distinction between the guilty and the innocent, and the passion of revenge that Romans 12:19 forbids. Whatever authority Romans 13:4 gives, it gives to the governing authority, not to a crowd. A pastor whose members join a mob, or cheer one, must say from the pulpit that it is murder.

Prisons are the other place where the image of God is tested. In many countries prisoners wait years for trial in overcrowded cells, without enough food or medical care, and some die there. Scripture tells the church to remember those in prison as if you were bound with them (Hebrews 13:3), and Jesus says that whoever visits the prisoner visits him (Matthew 25:36, 25:40). Prison chaplaincy and prison visiting are among the oldest Christian ministries, and they belong to Christians of every view on the death penalty. A man on death row is still an image-bearer, and so is a man awaiting trial for a crime he did not commit.

Christians have also helped to build what is called restorative justice, which puts the repair of harm at the centre. In 1974, in Ontario, Mennonite probation workers arranged for two young offenders to meet the people whose property they had damaged and make amends, and out of that grew victim-offender programmes around the world. The Mennonite criminologist Howard Zehr set out the vision in Changing Lenses (1990). In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu from 1996, offered amnesty to those who told the full truth about political crimes, and Tutu explained its Christian roots in No Future Without Forgiveness (1999). In Rwanda, after the genocide, community courts called gacaca heard nearly two million cases between 2005 and 2012, combining justice with confession and return to the community; they were also criticised for uneven fairness. Restorative justice does not answer the death penalty question on its own, and its supporters differ on that question. But it reminds every Christian that justice is more than punishment. The families of murder victims themselves differ: some seek execution as justice, and others, such as the members of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, founded in the United States in 1976, oppose it. Both deserve to be heard with respect, and neither should be used as a weapon in the argument.

Head a new page in your casebook Justice and punishment in my setting. Using the page from the inquiry, write in general terms how justice is done where you live: what crimes carry the death penalty in your country, if any, whether it is used, how long people wait for trial, what prisons are like, and whether mob justice happens. Find out the law this week if you do not know it.

Then write two short paragraphs. In the first, set out the case for retention as its Christian holders would make it, with Genesis 9:6 and Romans 13:4 and one argument from section 3. In the second, set out the case for abolition as its Christian holders would make it, with Ezekiel 33:11 and one argument from section 4. Read both back and ask whether a holder of each view would sign it. Then write which view your own church holds, if it has one, and one hard question the other side would put to it.

Finally, write one thing your church could do this year for justice in your setting, whatever its view of the death penalty: a visit to a prison or a remand centre, support for a prisoner's family, a sermon against mob justice, help for someone who cannot afford a lawyer, or care for a family that has lost someone to violent crime. Write who would lead it, by role, and when you will raise it. When you have finished this page you will have five pages on life and death, and together they are the first real chapter of your casebook.