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The Death Penalty on Trial
- 08/18/09
- 65
That the Bible advocates and even commands the enforcement of the death penalty seems almost like it should be beyond controversy. The dignity God gives to humans, created as they are in his image, demands the utmost penalty for those who would recklessly and deliberately destroy life. Yet controversy abounds with many of those who profess Christ insisting that a God of love and justice would never endorse the use of this ultimate human punishment.
Into the midst of this controversy wades Ron Gleason, pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in Yorba Linda, California in his new book The Death Penalty on Trial. Written primarily for Christians, so they can support the death penalty and do so coherently from moral, historical and biblical perspectives, this book offers a thorough defense of the death penalty and a defense against the arguments, both secular and Christian, so often lodged against it. Gleason sets the book firmly in the context of church history, looking first to the death penalty in history and then in the history of the church, showing how through the years the majority of Christians have believed that the Bible gives license to the state to execute those guilty of murder. He looks as well to the Old and the New Testament. Though it is difficult to deny that God supports capital punishment in the Old Covenant, many Christians have argued that it should no longer apply in the New. Arguing straight from Scripture, Gleason shows convincingly that this is simply not the case—the New Testament assumes capital punishment and insists upon the right of those in authority to enforce it. The government, after all, (as we learn in Romans 13) does not bear the sword in vain, but is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.
Gleason dedicates a chapter to answering the objections of secularists and another to answer the objections of Christians (though, surprisingly, many of the objections are not far removed from one another). Writing as an American to a primarily American audience, he questions whether the death penalty can be considered cruel and unusual punishment and shows how the framers of the Constitution clearly believed in the capital punishment. He answers objections that the death penalty devalues human life (showing that, in fact, the opposite is the case) and that it has not been proven to be an effective deterrent (to which he responds, in part, that at the very least it is a deterrent to the one who has been executed). When looking to the arguments of Christians he answers objections that Jesus’ new ethics removed the need for the death penalty, that those who are forgiven by Christ ought to be forgiven by men and that the death penalty is an affront to God’s justice. In each case he answers well from Scripture or from plain reason. It bears mention here that Gleason is Presbyterian and at times his book is a little more Presbyterian-friendly than Baptist-friendly. This is to say that he would acknowledge a level of continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament that many Baptists might deny. But though this may affect one or two of his arguments, it certainly does not detract much from the power of his arguments.
A theme that runs throughout the book is this: all murder is killing but not all killing is murder. Thus a person who murders another can be justly executed by the governing authorities without multiplying the evil. To kill a murderer is not to commit another murder. Rather, terrible though it is to have to take a life, it is an act of justice and a fitting penalty for one who would destroy a person made in God’s image.
This is the first book I’ve read by Gleason, an old family friend and my former pastor from his years ministering here in the Toronto area. I was impressed with the logic and the fluidity of his writing as well as with the power of his arguments. The book is well-researched and well-documented, drawing from a wide range of sources. And though, as a scholar, Gleason could easily have written an academic treatise, this book is suitable for the rest of us. His argument are as easy to follow and digest as they are to read. Though it deals with a niche topic, this book deals with an important one and I commend it to you.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at 
Releasing on April 1, The Next
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Comments (65)
“So you would put homosexuals to death. Got it.”
Why do you say it that way?
Do think God was wrong for putting homosexuals to death at Sodom and Gomorah?
Let me ask you, do you think the Ot law is good, holy and spiritual? Do you think God gives His law, and we are to honor it?
That’s what I’m getting at.
You don’t really want to discuss the Word of God I don’t think.
Here’s another part of God’s law, that I would imagine when you read it say to yourself, “This is dumb.” And I understand that.
Here it is: “”When men fight with one another and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand. Your eye shall have no pity.” Deut. 25:11-12
I think the laws God gave to Israel were appropriate to achieve God’s ends for the nation of Israel. I don’t think they’re something we should attempt to reenact, nor do I think they were ever intended to apply outside the specific circumstance of Israel.
So “thou shalt not murder”, “thou shalt not covet” were just for Israel?
JPH,I am well aware that Calvin had a waivering heart regarding Servetus, yet he still sought mercy. If you were to ask if heretics should be put to death, well yes, but not by us, but God. However God has given civil laws to and through nation Israel which give authority to governing powers from God.
I am so thankful for God grace, because I like Calvin have commited wicked sin in Gods sight. JPH, do you believe all mankind deserves to spend eternity in Hell, do you think most will, and that it will be the wrath of God upon them?
So “thou shalt not murder”, “thou shalt not covet” were just for Israel?
Those things are just as sinful today as they were back then. When I said “the laws” were for Israel, what I should have said was, “the system of civil laws and accompanying punishments”. God basically mapped out how Israel was to handle civil and criminal law. Its my opinion that this design was for Israel specifically and was never meant to be applied universally. So while homosexuality and adultery are still sinful, we’re under no biblical injunction to punish them in any particular way by means of our secular government.
I am well aware that Calvin had a waivering heart regarding Servetus, yet he still sought mercy.
He may have sought mecy, but he also vigorously defended the rightness of executing heretics. And he basically got a long-distance “high five” from other reformation luminaries of the day. The point being very few Christians seem to have taken issue with the practice. And yet we do now. And I think that’s a good thing.
do you believe all mankind deserves to spend eternity in Hell, do you think most will, and that it will be the wrath of God upon them?
Without getting into the “what happens when babies die” thing, yes, I accept that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That seems somewhat off topic, however.
“Its my opinion that this design was for Israel specifically and was never meant to be applied universally.”
Fair enough.
I see when Paul speaks of the Law, it includes the Big Ten, and every other law.
And Jesus says, “All the law is fulfilled in loving God, and loving your neighbor.”Paul says, “The Law id fulfilled in Love.”
In His love, your brother.
Curtis,
Back at #13 you give the answer of “submission.” How do you read the entire book of Acts when the followers of Jesus do nothing but disobey authority. They are routinely told by authorities to remain silent. Yet, they continue to preach. In fact, there is more than one prison escape!
To your comment about all the whole Bible being red letter. I agree that the Old and New Testament are scripture. Yet, I think they must be interpreted differently. Levitical law can’t be interpreted the same as the Sermon on the Mount.
Curtis,
In my previous comment I meant back at #20.
I mean submit to a point, we obey governing authorities until they cause us to disobey God.
Yes I agree, what I meant was Jesus is God, old or new testament, In the begining, Jesus created the Heavens and the Earth. That sort of thing.
JPH_ sorry to go off topic I was just asking a probing question. After all we’ve talked about, do you ever wonder how 2 or 3 generations from now, unless the Lord comes, will look back at our generation regarding abortion, which in itself is a death penalty or worse genocide. No need to comment, just something to think about.
I assume they’ll look back on today approximately the same as we look back on the 1850s, when the per-capita abortion rate in the United States was higher than it is today.
http://www.abort73.com/HTML/I-I-3-history.html
Olasky estimates that in the 1850s the U.S. abortion rate was approximately 100,000/year with a population of approx. 23 million. That’s 4.3 abortions per year per 1000 individuals. Today the rate is about 1.2 million per year with a population of 300 million, which is 4.0 abortions per year per 1000 individuals. If Olasky is right, then that’s a pretty amazing statistic.
Well, it clearly isn’t a deterrent to the one who is executed. It didn’t stop him committing the crime, ergo it wasn’t a deterrent. It was a punishment, to be sure, but not a deterrent.
I do find it odd that the biggest criticism was that it was perhaps “too ‘Presbyterian-friendly’”. The death penalty is nothing more than vengeance, blood-lust vengeance. Certainly the Framers of the Constitution approved of it and certainly the Constitution approves of it and if people want to get rid of it they should go through the constitutional, democratic route provided instead of using judicial activists to ban it as the Left keeps trying to do. However, it is just vengeance.
Is it surprising that the Jews, who have an easier job defending the death penalty than Christians, went out of their way to make it practically impossible to enforce? Even in Islamic societies there are extra rules to make it harder to use the death penalty. Perhaps this should tell us something.
The question is not whether there are crimes which are deserving of the sentence: of course there are. The question is whether the nation-state is capable, morally and practically, to utilise such a sentence without error and without bias. Clearly it isn’t. One innocent man put to death is reason enough not to have it.
And it’s hardly surprising that in a death-penalty saturated society like America that many, in the name of Christianity, have taken it upon themselves to enact their own justice on those they consider to have broken God’s laws.
However, as I said, it should be left to the people to decide and if the American people want to retain it that is their right but I don’t think we can start saying that Christians are under a Biblical mandate to support it. I know the arguments, and on almost ever other issue I am as solidly conservative, Republican and Biblical as can be. Yet my conscience will not allow me to support the death penalty.
As to Biblical support. God says that vengeance is His and Jesus, in the context of putting an adulteress to death- an acceptable punishment back then- tells us that he who is without sin is to cast the first stone. These two, simple statements are enough to tell me that the death penalty should not be allowed. I don’t have a complicated, theological treatise to defend this position. However, I think if we are meant to take Jesus’ words as more than just existential musing, in other words if they are to mean anything, then regardless of whether the crime merits such a penalty, it is not for man to give it. We need laws and we need prisons for civil society to function, but when we take it upon ourselves to decide who lives and who dies we have crossed a line.
Apparently Genesis 9:6 did not apply to King David…
“The question is not whether there are crimes which are deserving of the sentence: of course there are. The question is whether the nation-state is capable, morally and practically, to utilise such a sentence without error and without bias.”
Then we shouldn’t even put people in jail. Why even have a trial. Just let people murder poeple that hate. Torture poeple for the fun of it, and then kill them, and let them live their lives out as they please, because we can’t really judge them if they really did anything wrong with our biased and are “clearly” incapable.
We could do away with all the prisons, and save a lot of money.
Many of you have raised interesting points. Let me address the ones dealing with offenses that received the death penalty in the OT, but no mention is made in the NT. There is both continuity as well as discontinuity between the testaments. Hermeneutically, some things are abrogated, others modified, and still others remain the same. It is clear that the Rom. 13 reference to the sword certainly includes capital punishment.We also know, however, that the transition from the OT to the NT broke up the theocracy and the Church became universal. Based on the Noahic covenant (few understand just how important this covenant administration is), God’s demand for the taking of the life of the murderer is both universal and perpetual. The covenant with Noah is unilateral in every sense of the word. That being the case, the death penalty should still be enforced irrespective of how we might “feel” about it.Now, what about adultery? It was punished in the OT with the “lex talionis,” but in the NT setting it is seen as a vice, but not so much as a crime. Therefore, adultery should be dealt with in the ecclesiastical setting and murder should be handled by the state.Thanks for all of your provocative comments.
How do we feel about Matthew 5:38-39 in light of the Nohaic command?
From what I understand, “eye for an eye” is all about equal restitution. If you’ve taken life then the only thing you can possibly give up to match the “worth” of the damage you’ve caused is your own life. But Jesus seems to reject “eye for an eye”, enjoining believers not to seek restitution when wronged.
Or am I just reading too much into Matthew 5?