The Death
Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey, James J. Megivern, New York/Mahwah, N. J.: Paulist Press 1997, 641
pages.
By Wayne Northey
“In this important study, James Megivern
offers readers a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the West. He explores the development of the death
penalty chronologically through the early, medieval and modern periods while
also providing geographical surveys. He
concentrates on the debate over its use by theologians and philosophers, and
illustrates the inconsistencies in Western thinking on its merits.” This according to the back
cover. There is added on the
inside cover a claim that rings true: “The
Death Penalty includes more information on the history of thinking about
capital punishment than is available in any other English work.”
There are twelve sections to the book, each
taking us through an historical era since the time of Christ. There is also a “Preface” in which the author
explains that he had found it puzzling that no English-language standard church
history text asked “How it had come about that churchmen in the High Middle
Ages had adopted a position of staunch support of this singular practice of
deliberately destroying human life? (p. vii)” Hugo Bedau,
noted author/researcher on the death penalty, asks a similar question in the
“Foreword”: “How does it come to pass that the religion founded in the legacy
of Jesus of Nazareth would for centuries – indeed until a decade or so ago –
not merely tolerate but actively defend death deliberately and intentionally
inflicted as punishment as a right of the state and as a desirable and
necessary institution? (p. xi)”
Megivern indicates that there were clusters of centuries in which
particularly important historical developments of Christian attitudes towards
and practices of the death penalty occurred.
They were:
- The fourth and fifth centuries when the church adjusted to
post-Constantinian status as legal then sole
“established” religion of the Empire. - The eighth and ninth centuries when the church aligned with
newly ascendant Frankish barbaric powers. - The eleventh to thirteenth centuries that saw the emergence of
the “papal monarchy” and its resort to and support of increasing lethal
force. - The fifteenth to seventeenth centuries that saw the rise of
lonely protest movements (Lollard, Anabaptist,
Quaker) that resisted by then universal application of torture and the
death penalty by the church. - The eighteenth to twentieth centuries that began with
Enlightenment attacks on church practice and endorsement of the death
penalty, and continued from secular and Christian sources to the time of
the book’s writing.
In the prologue to the early church era (“On
Interpreting the Bible”), Megivern indicates that undoubtedly, the presence in
the Old Testament law codes of capital punishment for up to thirty-six offences
gave rise to “the kind of central position [of pro-capital punishment] that it
[gained] in Christian history (p. 10).”
And “In the history of Christian theological legitimation
of the death penalty, Genesis 9:6 has probably been cited more frequently than
any other text as basic proof of the propriety of humans executing fellow human
malefactors (p. 15).” That the entire pericope, Genesis 9:1 – 6, and verse 6 in particular,
fairly bristles with textual problems if forced to support the death penalty, Megivern
rightly indicates. He does so similarly
with the Romans 13:1 – 6 text. “This
passage vies with Genesis 9:6 as the most popular and frequent proof-text
invoked to justify the practice of state executions over the centuries (p.
17).” After again demonstrating the
textual difficulties with such a conclusion, he asserts: “There is widespread
recognition that texts… must be approached in a broader way than ahistorical
proof-texting (p. 18).”
In a collection of essays on the death
penalty the reviewer has read, the editor underscores the consistent pro-death
penalty voices throughout the Christian era as proof of divine
approbation. Megivern indicates the
contrary: the pre-Constantinian
church (pre-fourth century) was generally anti-death penalty, which
dramatically changed during the era of Constantine. The author summarizes: “Once Christianity had
become the state religion, the imperial values articulated in Roman law tended
to overwhelm gospel values… As a result,
the legacy of Constantinian-Theodosian Christianity
to subsequent ages was highly ambiguous on the ethics of killing, whether in
the case of war or capital punishment.
Less and less attention was paid to that most troublesome of the
teachings of Christ: the prohibition of the taking of revenge (p. 50).”
What began to bedevil the church, and for
centuries, was “The intractable problem of what to do about heretics [that]
gradually led churchmen into the quicksand of lethal repression (p. 55).” And with that grew not only massive
church-sanctioned exercise of capital punishment, but also its theological
justification despite univocal contrary New Testament witness.
The Waldensians
of the early 12th century first elicited the church’s rejection of a
“group” as heretics. Ironically, the
issue of their “heresy” was mainly opposition to the death penalty! “It is thereby one of the oddest legacies in
Western church history, resulting in a strangely skewed discussion that made
preachers of the ‘good news’ diligently elaborate arguments for the state’s
right to kill wayward members (p. 103).”
This is akin to American Southern preachers’ ubiquitous defence in the
19th century of slavery. (“The
parallels between approving slavery and approving capital punishment have
always been disturbingly close (p. 384).”)
As the medieval period wore on, “war” on heretics increased to fever
pitch. Otherwise great spiritual leaders
like Thomas Aquinas were drawn in. In a
comparison of the “body politic” to the human body that was repeated often by
Christian theologians, the Nazis, and many other totalitarian leaders, Aquinas
wrote: “Therefore, if any man is dangerous to the community and is subverting
it by some sin, the treatment to be commended is his execution in order to
preserve the common good (p. 117).”
The Protestant Reformation fared no
better. “While the major Protestant
Reformers called for change in many other things, they had no objection to the
death penalty as such (p. 141).” Luther
wrote: “Let no one imagine that the world can be governed without the shedding
of blood. The temporal sword should and
must be red and bloodstained, for the world is wicked and is bound to be
so. Therefore the sword is God’s rod and
vengeance for it (p. 142).” John Calvin
oversaw the execution of heretic Michael Servetus October 27, 1553 in Geneva, with overwhelming Protestant
approbation.
With the establishment of the auto-da-fé at
the 1215 Lateran Council, and the consequent Inquisition, administrators of the
Papal States devised ever more exquisitely cruel means of torture to accompany the
death penalty. In Catholic and
Protestant jurisdictions, a “Gallows-Pietism” developed as well, whereby the
condemned went to the gallows as “a special work of God, a providential
occasion where proper dispositions for a good Christian death were ideally
enacted in a grand public liturgy from which all could learn important lessons
in both living and dying as good Christians (p. 162).” Executions had become, throughout Protestant
and Catholic Christendom, part of upholding the “sacred order”. They were therefore as natural and
self-evidently legitimate as all other aspects of God-ordained society.
Megivern points to many minority voices of dissent, a fact
that “contradicts the popular idea that initial efforts to get rid of capital
punishment came as a relatively unexpected bolt from the blue at the time of
the Enlightenment (p. 193).” The first
voices against capital punishment during the long ascendancy of the Western
death penalty were in fact Christian and biblical. Yet, from the mid-18th century
“For the next two and a half centuries the secular proponents of a more humane
society were, ironically, to be the chief defenders of the dignity of human life
over against those who continued to invoke the Bible to justify the gallows…
(p. 218)” Megivern
details this history of growing rejection of capital punishment, clustered
around three considerations:
- Biblical/theological
- Humanitarian
- Pragmatic/operational
In turn, the most compelling Christian
arguments became: “(1) a fuller understanding of human rights,
especially the
right to life; (2) a fuller understanding of the gospel, especially the
teaching of Jesus on relating to one’s fellow beings and renouncing
revenge;
and (3) a fuller understanding of the need for consistency (p. 449).”
Megivern adds: “That [Christian] message
needs to be clarified and amplified in concrete terms: deliberate
killing of
human beings is not an acceptable option.
The magnitude of a crime, its hideous, heinous, gruesome, grotesque
circumstances and details, are not and cannot be the issue. Life is
the issue, and deliberately
destroying human life, all human life, any human life, is wrong,
period. Punishment, yes. Death, no. People are not to be killed –
not by any
‘right’ of the state, not in God’s name, not for revenge, not to deter
another,
not at all. That is the nature of the
right to life, the dignity of the human person, the law of God, and the
teaching of Jesus (p. 459).”
The book is a masterful blend of the
scholarly and the prophetic. Megivern charts
a sure course through 2,000 years of Western church history. He does
not miss the pathos either. Many times the text is punctuated with
comments like: “If the legitimacy of deliberately killing people for
having
different beliefs had not become a Christian cultural given, how
different
might Western history have been? (p. 186).”
His discourse is erudite, respectful, and unflinching. He might have
quoted Jesus with great irony
in response to the longstanding majority Christian support for capital
punishment and state-sanctioned violence in general: “Why is my
language not
clear to you? Because
you are unable to hear what I say.
You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your
father’s desire. He was a murderer from
the beginning… (John 8:43
& 44a).” He might also today advise
reading The Nonviolent Atonement (Eerdmans, 2001) by J. Denny Weaver as theological
corrective for this horrendous blot on Christian witness. Megivern says: “As is evident, the problem
being addressed extends far beyond the issue of capital punishment as such,
since this practice is symptomatic and only one piece of the much larger
puzzle, the puzzle of accounting for the oxymoronic phenomenon of ‘Christian
violence’ in its many forms (p. 4).” He
rightly points to the work of and inspired by Christian anthropologist René
Girard. (A masterful discussion of
Girard together with Søren Kierkegaard is found in Charles Bellinger’s The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on
Creation, Freedom, and Evil.
Girard’s most recent book is entitled, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.)
To Megivern
belongs the last word: “In the end, as in the beginning, the case for
respecting human life prevails: from a Christian perspective, the death penalty
has nothing to be said for it, and everything to be said against it (p. 489).”