Why I Oppose the Death Penalty: “The Talking Place: Discussing the Death
Penalty” Forum on the Death Penalty, Fairbanks
Alaska, March 22, 1997 – Part Two
[NOTE: I was invited to participate in a
statewide dialogue on the Death Penalty in Alaska, where capital punishment is off the
law books. The issue was heating up,
sadly because of Evangelicals in that state.
I, representative of Mennonite Central Committee Canada Victim Offender
Ministries at the time, was asked to “debate” the issue on biblical grounds
with Dr. Richard Land (read about him at: http://www.erlc.com/CC_Content_Page/0,,PTID314166|CHID600674|CIID,00.html),
then as now President
of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern
Baptist
Convention. I said I would not take part
unless the event was changed to a “dialogue” where winners are not
declared
like a gladiatorial contest, but participants are honoured in honest
dialogue. Below is the text I first spoke from in that
dialogue, held at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and
teleconferenced throughout Alaska, including to the Juneau
legislature. I reflect on this, including inserting a
letter I wrote Dr. Land years later in seeing that his support of the
death
penalty (he is after all a sixth-generation Texan, where Texas is the
most
killing jurisdiction in the Western world) had grown to support for
U.S. Empire
worldwide capital punishment (of vast numbers of innocents) in its War
on
Terror. You may read these reflections
at: http://www.clarion-journal.ca/article.php?story=20040721064535388.
A professional video was done at the
time, which one may borrow from me.
The initial presentation is divided into Parts One and Two. There is also Part Three where I adduced responses to specific biblical texts
usually (wrongly, I argue) adduced in support of the Death Panalty.]
Part II
In 1986 I was asked
to participate in a public forum on the death penalty organized by a community
college. In Canada we knew that the issue was
heating up. In fact, in 1987, there was
a free vote on the matter in the House of Commons. I think you are aware that the 1976 decision
to abolish the death penalty for our nation was upheld at that time.
The forum was not in
a Christian context. But the Fraser Valley
just east of Vancouver
is know as the “Bible Belt”, so the criminology
instructor who organized the event, invited a Christian view on the matter to
be given. I gave it as part of a panel
of four to speak to the issue. The disclaimer
was that of course I was only giving a Christian view. When the question time came, a man stood up
right away with a question for Mr. Northey.
He began by quoting Matt. 23:23 in the KJV: “… ye… have omitted the weightier matters
of the law, JUDGMENT!!!”
He thundered out that last word with all the gusto he could muster –
reminiscent of preachers who come to a point in their sermon notes where is
inserted: “Weak point. Thump pulpit loudly now!”
Then he proceeded with a diatribe against me and my kind for having
neglected the law precisely in this way in my opposing the death penalty. If “Christian expletive” is not an oxymoron
(contradiction in terms) he unleashed precisely that kind of violent
vituperative invective upon me and my ilk for the next several minutes. His strongest accusation was that I was not,
as I had claimed, an evangelical, rather a Liberal of the worst kind, who could
not see or accept the plain teaching of Scripture. He proceeded to call down judgment upon me,
and issued a warning of dire consequences for the safety of our nation if Canada
continued in its lawlessness by refusing to reinstate the death penalty. So vehement was he that I felt genuinely
embarrassed as a Chrstian to be associated with that
display of “Christian” sentiment. I
realized too with a sudden chill that he apparently would have wanted the death
penalty to be carried out on me for the offence of “wrongly dividing the word
of truth” according to him!
When he finished,
the moderator asked if I wished to respond.
I indicated, as I tried to lock eyes with him, that it would perhaps be
better if the two of us talked the issue over more at the end of the evening.
I looked for him
immediately afterwards. But he was
nowhere to be found. He had seemingly
come to dump on me (if I failed to take the right position) and had no interest
whatsoever in dialogue. Too often I have
found amongst Christians that kind of angry, judgmental, and mean-spirited
response to a NO position on the death penalty!
What I would have
raised with him, had he given me the chance, is the
following: First, he was quoting from the KJV where the Greek word, krisis used can have that connotation of
condemnation and judgment. But it can
also mean “justice” especially with reference to divine justice. In fact, most other translations use the word
“justice”. By this time (Chapter 23) in
the Matthew text, we know from Jesus that the Pharisees are a highly
self-righteous, judgmental lot. It is a
little hard to believe that Jesus would be challenging them on their failure to
show condemnation and judgment! Second, the text is misused
if a huge exclamation mark is placed after the word, “judgment”. In the KJV, the text says actually: “ye…
have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy
and faith.” There is already a hint of a
continuum or even a parallelism here, that argues
against the sense of this statement to mean “judgment” in the way my accuser
meant it. Jesus is quoting from Micah
6:8, which often is considered to be the high water expression of Old Testament
spirituality. Here is what the passage
says in the KJV:
Micah 6:8
8 He hath shewed
thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do
justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
The passage follows
a specific disavowal of mountains of sacrifice, in favour
of “justice, mercy, and faithfulness”.
It precedes God’s castigating his people for their failure to treat
others justly, compassionately, mercifully, caringly. Twice already in Matthew’s Gospel (9:13,
12:7), Jesus says explicitly: “I desire
mercy, not sacrifice” with reference to God’s way, God’s “face”. The Gospel is nothing if it is not about a
dismantling of the very scapegoating mechanism to be
found in all cultures and all times that lead in fact to putting Jesus upon the
Cross! The Gospel is nothing, in other
words, if it is not about denying capital punishment! The terse statement of Jesus about desiring “mercy,
not sacrifice”, slightly more fully reiterated here with reference to the Micah
6 text, is in fact the death knell of the death penalty! Third, one could not therefore have
chosen a better passage to put the point home that true spirituality sees a
face of God that is simply opposite to the face showed that night by such an
angry diatribe, a face that rules out capital punishment. It is a face that (Matt. 5:45) “Causes his
sun to rise on the evil and the good”, that (Luke 6:35) is “kind to the
ungrateful and wicked”, that says (Ezek 33:11) “ ‘As surely as I live, … I
take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from
their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house
of Israel?’
“ (NIV)
The Atonement
How can one, in just
a few minutes, touch upon a biblical teaching, the atonement, that has induced
the outpouring of rivers of ink and the felling of a forest or two to wrestle
with its expression, ever since Anselm in the 11th century attempted the first
systematic treatment of the subject in a famous treatise, Cur Deus Homo
-Why God Became Man? But I will raise
briefly the doctrine of the atonement – how we understand the significance of
Christ’s death on the Cross – to look at the whole dynamic of “scapegoating” and the Gospel’s response to it.
Last fall while
serving on a panel at a conference on the work I do, “Restorative Justice”, I
saw a man vigorously wave his head in affirmation as I alluded to the work of
literary critic and anthropologist, René Girard. I knew who the person was, and talked to him
afterwards. He is a Mennonite professor
of many years’ counselling experience, and author of
several books. His name is David Augsburger. He was
an avid reader of René Girard, and of several authors inspired by his work
spanning three decades on the origins of violence in human cultures. David Augsburger
said this to me in our brief discussion:
“I knew for years in my counselling that the
punitive ideas of the traditional view of the atonement did not work. But it took my reading of Girard to grasp theologically
why that was the case.”
If anyone is
familiar with Girard’s writings, or with the annual international conference of
interdisciplinary and inter- and non-faith scholars he has inspired, entitled “Colloquium
on Violence and Religion”, you will know that it is ludicrous to do justice to
the enormous volume of writing Girard and his theories have generated. Years
ago, Jacques Ellul, the now-deceased famed French
ethicist, indicated that Girard would never attract attention of biblical
theologians because of his non-systematic and non-sacrificial reading of the
Bible. But he was wrong. Several theological works alone have been
produced, engaging Girard’s cultural theories of scapegoating. And there is a growing body of literary and
social sciences literature too.
Girard began
developing his scapegoating theory while studying
literature. I will not attempt to
summarize some of his key understandings about concepts such as “mimetic desire”,
violence, the scapegoat, the scapegoat mechanism, etc. Girard eventually turned his attention to the
Bible. Not only did he renew his own
childhood faith commitment at this time, but he began to perceive the
astounding relevance of the Bible to his own study of violence. In his own words:
“The Bible was the first
to replace the scapegoat structure of mythology with a scapegoat theme that
reveals the lie of mythology
(“Discussion”, p. 118).”
And again:
“I certainly do not believe that the Bible
gives us a political recipe for escaping violence and turning the world into
utopia. Rather, the Bible discloses
certain truths about violence, which the readers are free to use as they see
fit. So it is possible that the Bible
can make many people more violent…
Religious truth and social usefulness do not necessarily go hand in
hand… In the Hebrew Bible, there is
clearly a dynamic that moves in the direction of the rehabilitation of the
victims, but it is not a cut and dried thing.
Rather, it is a process under way, a text in travail… a struggle that
advances and retreats. I see the Gospels
as the climactic achievement of the trend, and therefore as the essential
text in the cultural upheaval of the modern world (Robert G.Hamerton-Kelly,
ed., Violent Origins, Stanford:
Stanford University Press,1987, p. 140 – 141 – italics added).” The “lie of mythology”, according to Girard,
is the legitimization of officially sanctioned violence by any culture and
all cultures, by any state and all states.
We have in Canada
an organization called. C.A.V.E.A.T. It stands for “Canadians Against
Violence Everywhere Advocating its Termination”. If only!
In fact, it is a victims rights group,
advocating anything but the “termination” of violence! On the contrary, it advocates full recourse
to violence in the extermination of all who commit violent crime,
and it supports the return of the death penalty! Do you see?
No culture has ever really been against violence. Our Western culture
not the least! On the contrary, we fully
legitimize violence!
I participated last
week in a conference that attracted 300 delegates to discuss the Restorative Justice
work we do. It was organized by the
British Columbia Youth Police Network.
One word in there – “Police” – should already give a hint of where I am
going with this. The theme of the
conference was: “Youth Taking a Stand Against Violence”. Now how do the police in all our Western
cultures – and especially in the U.S. – deal with violence? By resort to violence! I believe the statistic is that fully one
third of American prime time TV is about “cop shows” using violence against
violence. They call it “crime time”. Our culture is fascinated not only with
illicit violence, but with legitimized violence. Only think of Rambo and whose favourite movie that was….. A former actor-President loved it! Why?!
Further, guess where
this conference was held? At the
Canadian Forces Base in Chilliwack,
B.C. The army hosted a conference
organized by the police that was looking at how to curb violence in
society. Yet, these are precisely the
two institutions in Canada
which are legitimized to use violence! And how is one going to talk at such a
conference about stopping that violence?
In the 1987 campaign
we held in Canada
against the death penalty, a very simple and effective slogan was used,
impossible of refutation: “Why kill
people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?” It could be stated more generically to the
issue of violence: “Why do violence to people who do
violence to people to show that doing violence to people is wrong?” Now the great irony is this: secular people
get the logic on first blush – even if they do nothing about it! But Christians have been brainwashed for
so many centuries to believe that there nonetheless is a biblical
differentiation between personal and state violence!., It is Christians, with
absolutely no biblical basis whatsoever, who most continue to hold out for the
legitimacy of state violence, of state scapegoating,
of state sacrifice of others, despite the Gospel revelation to the contrary!
According to Girard,
and to many biblical interpreters who read the Bible
in light of Girard’s insights about cultural and state legitimizations of scapegoating violence, Jesus’ death is the only place in
world literature that gives the lie to state-sanctioned, society-sanctioned
violence! For in the story of Jesus we see the
unmasking of the legitimization of religious and state violence. It promises to liberate from the myth of
sanctioned violence. In the very
convergence of the best religious tradition the world then knew, Judaism, and
the best legal system the world had seen to date, Roman law, to kill the “Prince
of Glory”, the Gospel story is a profound delegitimization
of religious and state sanctioned violence!
In fact, the Gospel revelation in its political implication is
nothing if it is not the bold refutation of legitimate state violence. As Girard says: “Jesus dies to put an end to sacrificial behaviour [by the state]; he does not die to strengthen
closed communities through sacrifice, but to dissolve them through its
elimination (quoted in Agnew,
Mary Barbara. “A Transformation of
Sacrifice: An Application of Rene Girard’s Theory of Culture and Religion.”, Worship 61 (1987): 493-509., p. 500).”
So Girard makes a
bold interpretative move of the significance of the death of Christ on the
cross, of the Atonement, one that is startling yet rings true to the biblical
data, to the picture of Jesus, and to the picture of God on the jigsaw box
cover: He says that Jesus is not “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of
the world” because God is the ultimate child abuser on a cosmic scale who
demands blood sacrifice of his very own Son for humanity’s wrongs! No, Jesus is the scapegoat alright, but
because all culture in all times, all states, all governments, legitimize
sacrificial violence. Girard says that
Jesus’ death on the Cross as the Lamb of God is the signal for the unravelling of the legitimization of religious and state
violence; it is the unmasking of a
societal scapegoating mechanism that in the end
always resorts to violence; it is the beginning of an anthropological
revolution in consciousness that two millennia later, wherever the Jesus Story
has taken root in various cultures, has elevated the victim of societal
violence to a status unprecedented in the entire history of the world. He says therefore: “When the death of Jesus is presented as
[legitimate] sacrifice its real significance is lost…. (quoted in Agnew, ibid, p. 500).” If God intended Jesus to be sacrificed, then
we are right back to the old scapegoating mechanism
of all cultures for all time. But the
breathtaking Gospel revelation is the denial of the sacrificial mechanism
through Jesus’ willingness to be sacrificed – but only as demonstration that
this indeed is the “political logic” of all who consistently would lead lives
opposed to sacrificial violence! They do
get crucified! – in all cultures whose hidden
basis is still scapegoating violence. Biblically, the anthropological (how
one understands being human) significance of Jesus therefore is a definitive NO
to all violence across the entire spectrum of personal and state devotion to
it. Jesus offers the world a new
community based upon reconciliation, justice, love, and forgiveness. And he invites everyone to join that new
community, that new humanity, to demonstrate such unity to the world that they
will know, just know, that God is real.
This is the first principle of mission strategy, the ultimate way to do
evangelism, as enunciated by Jesus in
the so-called high priestly prayer of Jesus in John 17, (John 17:21): “that all
of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they
also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (NIV) The
Church, in other words, is called to be now, what the world is meant to
become then – the Peaceable
Kingdom where the lion
lies down with the lamb, and violence is no more. The Church therefore has no business
endorsing violence now, when the world will not know it then! The Church is already to live out the
reality of Kingdom come, though it is not yet fully realized within
history (to say the least!) The Church must say no to the death penalty
therefore, and all other ways of legitimate violence.
An outstanding
anthropological study of contemporary culture was produced by Gil Bailie, who is openly indebted to Girard’s insights. In Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the
Crossroads, Bailie, following Girard’s cues,
explains that state and societal violence through the centuries has actually
established social cohesion, has drawn most people together, but at the
expense of destroying victims, and only for a limited time, before again state
violence is needed to be exercised.
He says: “… execution… ‘is a brutal act,’
but it is one carried out ‘in the name of civilization.’ It would be difficult to think of a more
succinct summation of the underlying anthropological dynamic at work: a
brutal act done in the name of civilization, an expulsion or execution that
results in social harmony. Clearly,
after the shaky justifications based on deterrence or retribution have fallen away, this is the stubborn fact that remains: a
brutal act is done in the name of civilization.
If we humans become too morally troubled by the brutality to revel in
the glories of the civilization made possible by it, we will simply have to
reinvent culture. This is what Nietzsche
saw through a glass darkly. This is what
Paul sensed when he declared the old order to be a dying one (I Cor. 7:31). This is
the central anthropological issue of our age.”
(Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, Gil Bailie, New York: Crossroad, 1995, p. 79)
“Punishing
wrongdoers or protecting society from them is an inevitable fact of
social life… And yet, vestiges of ritual sacrifice survive
in even the most ideal criminal justice systems. How morally
problematic future generations
will find these vestiges and how they might seek to eliminate them
remains to
be seen. Reversals in any historical development can be
expected, but, in the long-term, I haven’t the slightest doubt that the
exposure and renunciation of sacrificial violence will continue. In
which case, to the extent that societies
under gospel influence exploit their criminal proceedings for the
purpose of
venting their resentments, indulging their lust for vengeance, and
basking in
the glow of unearned moral rectitude, they will sooner or later have
the devil
to pay.
“When a culture or
subculture turns the system for protecting law-abiding citizens into a social
ritual for generating its camaraderie, it sets up a social pattern structurally
similar to the crucifixion. Eventually,
in such situations, the objective wickedness of the culprit will not be enough
to offset the moral misgivings aroused by that similarity. For obvious reasons, this is especially so in
the case of ‘public executions.’ This is
no doubt why of the very few Western societies that still impose the death
penalty, in none of them are the executions carried out ‘in public.’ “ (Bailie, ibid, p. 81)
At public executions
and lynchings in the past, as you know, it was an
occasion for all the family to come out and have a picnic with everyone else in
the community! It was a major social
unifier – at the expense of course of eliminating totally someone from the
community. When a black was lynched “legitimately”,
and everyone came to see, and felt warm towards everyone else, guess which
community was even more alienated, driven even further away from the cultural
mainstream, threatened even more by the sanctioned violence of the day!
Please listen to Gil
Bailie further:
“The experience of being morally shaken by a public execution is the beginning
of an anthropological and spiritual revolution for which the term ‘Christianity’
was coined decades after the public execution of Jesus… What Christ has in common with all those
against whom a unanimous mob has risen up will eventually outweigh the moral
differences, however vast, that separate them.
Societies under biblical influence will little longer be able to nullify
the empathy for scapegoats aroused by the Cross by reserving its righteous and
socially galvanizing contempt for certified moral failures [such as blacks back
then or murderers today – my addition].”
(Bailie, ibid,
p. 83)
“The gospel’s
insistence on forgiveness is both profound and pragmatic, but we cannot
fully
appreciate either until we realize how routinely moral indignation
leads to the
replication of the behavior that aroused the indignation. Moral
outrage is morally ambiguous. The more outraged it is, the less likely
it
is to contribute to real moral improvements.
Righteous indignation is often the first symptom of the metastasis of
the cancer of violence. It tends to
provide the indignant ones with a license to commit or condone acts
structurally indistinguishable from those that aroused the
indignation. When moral contempt for a form of violence
[such as murder] inspires so explicit a replication of it [such as
state
executions], there is only one conclusion to be drawn: The moral revulsion
the initial violence awakened proved weaker than the mimetic [imitative]
fascination it inspired.” (Bailie, ibid,
p89)
This is important
stuff. So I’ll let Bailie
continue a bit longer: “Even those who
support the institutional versions of sacred violence [, for example,
war, capital punishment] with the heartiest gusto will be morally
and politically distraught by its unofficial replicas, but they may be
less
able or willing to recognize the mimetic [imitative] relationship
between them. They will be reluctant to realize that we are
now living in a world in which flagrant displays of righteous violence
will
increasingly fail to achieve ritual effects – even when they achieve
their
penal or military purposes – and that as a result, the society once
made more
peaceful by these policies will now be made more violent by them. As a
result, each time we resort again to
violence, the cogs and gears of the sacrificial system – which can
operate
effectively only when shrouded in myth and mystification – are more
glaringly
exposed to view. Moral misgivings are
inevitable, their mimetic results are predictable, and the process in
irreversible. (Bailie, ibid, p.
91)
One can give as
examples Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Rwanda, or the
inner cities of numerous American cities which have turned into war zones.
Gil Bailie one more
time: “… the defining theme of
biblical literature was a gradually developing aversion for sacred violence and
the religious blood sacrifices that extended its purview, and a corresponding
tendency to see historical phenomena from the perspective of its victims. These themes… achieved their decisive
historical revelation at the crucifixion and their literary summation in the
New Testament. Anthropologically, this
was decisive: the crucifixion and the New Testament’s disclosure of its
universal meaning. The historical
convulsions of our age are an elaborate footnote to these things. Attempts to comprehend these convulsions that
fail to take into account the destabilizing effect of the Bible’s aversion for
sacrifice and its concern for victims will never get to the heart of the
present cultural predicament.” (Bailie, ibid, p. 114)
Sister Helen Prejean, the most noted opponent to the death penalty in America,
wrote in her book, Dead Man Walking, on which the movie is based: “I am
convinced that if executions were made public, the torture and violence would
be unmasked, and we would be shamed into abolishing executions (Prejean, 1993, p. 197).”
This precisely the insight of Girard and others! And this too was the basis for her
contribution to the production of the movie.
She was hoping that bringing a state execution into our movie theatres
and into our homes through video would incite moral indignation within America
on such a scale that Americans would rise up against that form of pre-meditated,
cold-blooded, first degree state torture and murder. Do you think she/the
movie was successful in this regard?
The state has no more biblical legitimacy to kill than you or I
have is the breathtaking revelation of Jesus!
This is precisely what Jesus’ unmasking of legitimizing violence, of scapegoating ways, of blood sacrifice, is all about!
Yet two millennia
after Jesus, the Church still does not get it!
And within a few centuries of Jesus’ time in fact, it turned around and
blessed the reinstitution of scapegoating violence in
the name of Christ who had so definitively disallowed it! One Church historian
refers to this phenomenon as Constantine’s
Judas kiss to the Church, “the triumph of ideology” over the way of Christ, the way of
the Cross. We might call it in this
context “doing violence to the face of Christ”, so that again only dark
blotches are seen. And so throughout all
centuries since Christ, the Church has been the primary carrier of scapegoating violence in the cultures where it has had
influence. What an indictment on the
Church in the light of Jesus’ NO to scapegoating
violence!
What is the biblical
testimony concerning Christ’s death?
Heb 10:12
But when this priest
had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the
right hand of God. (NIV)
The biblical
revelation says that Christ’s sacrifice was once for all – and undid “for all
time” all sacrifice! Remember Jesus’
words, in the picture painted of God?: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Can you see now that for Christians to
support capital punishment, they are holding out for the continuation of a
sacrificial system that in Jesus has been completely replaced by mercy! Can you see why the death penalty not only is
not consonant with the picture of God in Jesus I have been suggesting to you
this afternoon, but it is in fact the “undeveloped negative” – to use a
photographic image? The full revelation
of God in Christ is a revelation of mercy, not sacrifice. And this means a decisive NO for Christians
who might be tempted to support state-sanctioned violence! Church Father Tertullian was right: when
Jesus told Peter, the Rock in the early Church, to put up his sword, he thereby
disarmed the Church for all time – for which the story of Jesus’ death on the
Cross is the supreme example of God’s refusal to resort to violence in response
to violence and murder.
Christians through
the centuries however have given in to the temptation to do an end-run around
this disarming, and instead have mandated the state, or at least blessed it, to and in resort to
violence. Do you know that there is not
one war in the past two millennia where there have been churches that the
Church on all sides of the conflict has not called down blessing upon its
soldiers as they went out to kill – and often enough killed fellow Christians
wearing the wrong uniform? We all know
of the incredibly bloody religious wars fought over the centuries in the name
of Christ. And we anguish over a Church
that forced belief at the edge of the sword in the era of the Crusades, that
organized the Inquisition, blessed torture and capital punishment of the most
gruesome kind, supported pogroms against the Jews and a variety of less overtly
violent, though no less anti-Jewish ways throughout the centuries, culminating
in the Ultimate Scapegoating of millions of Jews this
century in the Holocaust.
Just read what
Martin Luther himself said about the Jews, and you will weep to think he has
been revered all these centuries as a great Christian leader of the
Reformation! Thankfully, after World War
Two, the Lutheran
Church officially
disowned Martin Luther’s terrible anti-Semitism. Did you know as well that Martin Luther,
based upon a similar interpretation of Rom. 13 to what has been presented
today, in response to a Peasants’ Revolt in the early 16th century wrote to the
Lutheran nobility: “Smite, slay and kill
all you can.
You thereby do God’s will.” And
thousands were indeed slaughtered with Luther’s blessing. (Incidentally, this is in the background of
Marx’ rejection of Christianity in his development of communism.) Did you know that Calvin likewise blessed the
slaughter of
Anabaptists for their rejection of the unity of Church and state
(which rejection of course is now enshrined in your Constitution), and
supported the drowning of them by the thousands in lakes and rivers? Did you know that Calvin also gave full
assent to the burning at the stake of Servetus, arch-heretic, in the name of
Christ and the state? Did you know that
the Roman Catholics on St. Bartholomew’s Day [….] wiped out in horribly
gruesome ways untold scores of French (Protestant) Huguenots, some claiming
that the slaughter rivalled or outdid the French
Revolution’s Reign of Terror two centuries later? I could go on indefinitely.
I suggest to you: in
all the examples given, Christians were only seeing dark blotches on the page,
rather than the true face of God in Jesus Christ. I suggest that they were directly inverting
the message of the Cross which was the ULTIMATE NO to state-sanctioned scapegoating violence.
I say that that is a heresy, which in Christian usage means: “false
choice”. False, because the jigsaw
puzzle began to be put together wrongly in the era of Constantine, based upon a
rejection of Christ’s ethical teachings, and the antichrist image of God that
has emerged as dominant throughout the ensuing centuries is at best of a
schizophrenic merciful heavenly Father, who, if not sufficiently propitiated by
blood sacrifice, in the end turns on a humanity he loves with a torturous
vengeance of such cosmic vehemence, that all the worst tyrants combined of all
history appear gentle and loving in comparison!
In the faith
tradition I was nurtured, as is the case with doubtless many of you, there was
one outstanding favourite verse we all memorized and
repeated constantly. And it is indeed a
wonderful text. Do you know what it
is? Let’s hear it in the majestic
KJV: (John 3:16) “For God so loved the world, that he
gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish,
but have everlasting life.” Did you
ever notice the footnote to that verse, however?…. No?…. It must be because you don’t read the KJV any
longer! Go back and check it out! The footnote actually appears in the verse
twice. I’ll read it again with the
footnotes in place: “For God so loved the world
[FOOTNOTE: except our enemies such as murderers, Iraqis, gays, lesbians,
Russians, “Indians”…. – the list has been terribly long and varied over the
centuries], that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever [FOOTNOTE: except
our enemies] believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” On the contrary, we have – we Bible-believing
lovers of John 3:16 – we have helped all kinds of potential believers in Jesus
perish – exactly what the text says should not happen! And we continue to do that with endorsement of
the death penalty and state killing in war, etc. So in the end, our favourite
verse does not encompass the “world” as the text says (kosmos in Greek – and think of the implications of that!), but only a
narrow
circle of those we are willing to count as “in”. And I call that “the
KKK mentality”. God in Christ drew a circle – and invited us
to do the same – God drew a circle of inclusivity
large enough to encompass even the cosmos, according to John 3:16.
When we argue in favour
of the death penalty, I ask simply: why do we deny the truth of that verse
and continue to draw circles of exclusivity in direct contradiction of the
Gospel revelation?
I was raised with an
understanding that the great anti-Christian watershed in the West was the
beginning of the Enlightenment when the authority of the Bible and the Church
began to be challenged openly by the academic elites and others. Certainly the godless Reign of Terror during
the French Revolution and Communism in the former U.S.S.R. and present-day China
do represent the tragic outcome of rejection of God. According to St. Paul in I Corinthians Chapter 1, “… the
message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who
are being saved it is the power of God (18).” (NIV) So it is right to point to Christ, over
against the challenge of the Enlightenment, as the Wisdom of God (according to
I Cor. 1), as the ultimate source of all our knowing,
all our “epistemologies” or ways of knowing.
For Christ is indeed the Wisdom of God – the only ultimate face of
wisdom we can ever hope to see.
But the same passage
tells us that Christ is also the “power of God”. And here we in the Church have faltered for
centuries. We affirm Jesus as the Wisdom
of God over against all ways of knowing, but we do not affirm Christ as the
Power of God – the merciful, non-violent way of the Cross of Christ – over
against all other ways of doing power, of doing politics, of exercising
authority in the polis – where our organized societies deal with
arrangements of power.
And the world has
looked on, and has simply turned away in revulsion. Arguably, more people throughout the
centuries have been lost to the Church that has presented only Jesus of the
Dark Blotches, than have been turned away by sophisticated arguments about the
historicity of the New Testament by people in the Jesus Seminar! Think of the Muslims’ revulsion to
Christianity alone! The key pre-Constantinian
strategy of Church growth was demonstration of loving unity within the Church
and compassionate caring for surrounding pagans. That art often seems lost in Christianity
Today.
It is ironic that,
in America where the Church is under no threat of persecution or of being
charged criminally for carrying out worship services, so few look to the “Bible-believing”
part of the Church for compassionate caring!
One journalist a few years ago entitled her study of evangelicalism: Faith,
Hope, No Charity!,
indication of what she failed to find in her looking into the tradition. A Canadian study 30 years ago of the
conservative Church concluded that in spite of Jesus’ own teaching and example
of love, the conservative Church was less loving than the non-devout. Remember my story of the man who apparently
would have exercised capital punishment on the spot on me had he had the
power? Was he showing the face of Jesus
when he did that – or only dark blotches?
I have learned from
the Eastern Orthodox tradition that our humanity is best understood as being “in
the image of God” in how God as Trinity is a True Self precisely in the Father’s
showing Himself in the Son, of the Son’s being seen in the Spirit, and so
on. Likewise we are only a true self
when we “love our neighbour as our self” – when we
discover that our neighbour is ourself
– which can only mean exegetically, when we discover constantly our true selves
in the other. And we know Jesus’ test
case here: the “enemy” whoever that may
be. Failure to do so is in the end “metaphysical
suicide” – we destroy our very humanity, we simply never discover who we truly
are. In other words: though we may have
gained the world, we lose our very soul/self.
I learned from Mother Theresa in the Roman Catholic tradition, based
upon Jesus’ teaching in Matt. 25, that whatever is done to the “least of
these” is done to him, that we have no hope of finding Jesus, despite our
loudest religious protestations (remember Shakespeare here) if we do not
find Jesus in the well-being of the neighbour near at
hand – and far away, who is our “enemy”.
Put those two
profoundly biblical insights together, and we have this: The only way to
find one’s true self, the only way to find Jesus, the only way of salvation, is
in our constant working for the well-being of the other, especially the enemy:
who today in this forum is the murderer!
So I say, will the death penalty for the murderer, and we will, finally,
the death of our true selves, the death of Jesus himself. In fact, we show ourselves in league with the
devil who was (John
8:44) a “murderer from the beginning”. More chilling: we show ourselves still willing participants in
the crucifixion of the Lord of Glory. For in our yen to kill the murderer, we
crucify Jesus all over again!
The biblical
doctrine of salvation understands that God’s gracious act in Jesus of love
towards us, and
our gracious act
in Jesus of love towards the other – the neighbour near and the enemy
far away – are two sides of the same coin. The great secular heresy
(false choice), as
we know, is people thinking they can love the other without loving God. The great Christian heresy, as we often do
not know, is people thinking they can love God without loving the other. In the context of this dialogue this
afternoon, failure to love the murderer, the willing of his death at the hands
of the state, is failure to love God.
Conclusion
So I say in
conclusion: the question of capital punishment is in the end the question of
what face emerges from the jigsaw puzzle of the biblical data as we the
believing community interact with it and tradition. I suggest that if, throughout all our
biblical work, we keep looking at the face of Jesus on the Gospel box, then we
will say no to all forms of state-scapegoating, since
they were once-for-all brought to an end in Jesus. And this means saying no to the
state-sanctioned violence of capital punishment. If Jesus is for us the Power of God, then the
death penalty stands in direct contradiction of Jesus. Seek it, and we seek to crucify the Lord of
Glory again.
A Mennonite theologian
puts the matter thus: “The Bible’s
witness on these [ethical] matters is a long story, not a timeless, unchanging
corpus of laws or of truths. What
matters for us is not the cultural substance of where the story started (with
its racism, its superstition, its slavery, its holy warfare, its polygamy, and
its abuse of women), but where it was being led. That direction is toward Jesus; toward
validating the dignity of every underdog and outsider, of the slave and the
foreigner, the woman and the child, the poor and the offender. This is done not on the grounds that this or
that outsider [such as a murderer] is an especially virtuous person, but on the
grounds of God’s grace.
The culmination of
the story for our purposes is that the Cross of Christ puts an end to sacrifice
for sin., (House and
Yoder, 1991, p. 159)”
References
Agnew, Mary Barbara. “A
Transformation of Sacrifice: An Application of Rene Girard’s Theory of Culture
and Religion.”, Worship 61 (1987): 493-509.
Bailie, Gil, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at
the Crossroads, New York:
Crossroad, 1995.
Hamerton-Kelly,
Robert G., ed., Violent Origins, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1987.
House, H. Wayne and
John Howard Yoder, The Death Penalty Debate: Two Opposing Views of Capital Punishment (Issues
of Christian Conscience), Dallas: Word Books, 1991.
Prejean, Helen Dead Man Walking: An
Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States. New York: Random House,
1993.