Can a Christian support the death penalty?

I own (but have not put on my car) a bumper sticker that says: “I’m against the death penalty/ Look what happened to Jesus.”

I have not put it on my car because I worry that people who see it might take it as a flippant statement. My father, when I showed it to him, stiffened and pointed out that since Jesus engineered his own death for the salvation of mankind, the reference was meaningless. I argued that the point of Jesus’ death is partly that this is the fate that the righteous who obey God’s word meet at the hands of the evil in the hearts of men, that Jesus repeatedly compared his own upcoming death to those of all the prophets who had come before him (which were clearly caused by human evil), that in the parable of the tenants and the vineyard he made it clear that it was by the evil of men that he would be undone, and I argued further that the system by which a man could be legally deprived of life was not only exploitable by evil men but also fallible in and of itself, and therefore lent itself to the kind of abuse by which God himself on this earth could be legally and systematically destroyed. However, that would make a very long bumper sticker, so I have refrained from putting the more glib version on my car for fear of being misunderstood, and also because I have a much more important reason, as a Christian, to object to the death penalty, which I also have not figured out how to fit on a bumper sticker.

Some Christians support the death penalty on the grounds that God, in the Books of the Law, repeatedly ordains and endorses it for all manner of wrongdoing from murder to adultery to blasphemy to incest to lack of filial respect. The Israelites, of course, had neither the extra resources nor the leisure time necessary to conceive of prisons; punishments consisted of fines (or exculpatory sacrifices), temporary exile from the camp, or death. In our modern society, the death penalty is used in far fewer circumstances, mostly being replaced with jail time or with the decriminalization of the offense in question. I do not intend to discuss all of the economic or cultural influences on our view of the death penalty, since most of them pale to irrelevance in the face of the most important question: Is the death penalty in accordance with the teachings of Christ?

Christ stated that he had come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. There are many interpretations of this statement, including: that he was talking about one specific, all-important law (the law that blood must be spilled in punishment for sin) and that Christ would become the fulfillment of this law by offering himself as a blood sacrifice for our sins; that in addition to this, Christ came to live the only human life that would fulfill all the requirements of the laws of God’s righteousness and thus become the pure and spotless sacrifice required by God; and, of course, that while Christ may have appeared to alter and update some of the laws given to the Israelites by Moses (particularly in his speech, in the Sermon on the Mount, wherein many of his sentences follow the “Moses told you… however, I say to you” template, which particularly enraged those who felt he was setting himself above Moses, which of course he was), he was actually explaining to his children, who had grown up a little bit in the thousand years since their trials in the desert, the rationale behind those laws, so that they might live not merely as obedient slaves carrying out their master’s incomprehensible commands out of fear, but as obedient children striving to please their father out of love. For example, although the law taught that an adulterous woman was to be stoned to death, Jesus said to those who had gathered to stone her that the one of them who was without sin should cast the first stone, indicating that since our earthly justice, unlike divine justice, is fallible, we should temper it with mercy so that we ourselves may be shown mercy.

The question we need to ask ourselves, therefore, is: given the lessons Christ taught us concerning mercy and judgement, is the execution of convicted criminals pleasing to God?

I don’t hear this argument very often, but it’s the one that makes the strongest impression on me. After the crowd dropped their stones and went away, Jesus said to the adulterous woman, “Go, and sin no more.” Presumably she did (although I don’t think we hear anything more about her, unless she’s one of the many unidentified women who hung around Jesus for the duration of his life and death). She was redeemed. Now, although Jesus did not speak a great deal about the afterlife, he spoke enough about it that Christians now have a very firm belief in at least some aspects of it, which was completely lacking from the Old Testament cosmology. As far as the patriarchs were concerned, death was death. It didn’t matter who you were; you “went down” into “Sheol” or “the grave,” from whence spirits could occasionally be summoned by black arts (e.g. Samuel’s summoning by the witch of Endor) but from whence, according to David, no one could praise God. It wasn’t a place of torment or of glory, just a shadowy hinterland akin to the Hades of Greek mythology, but with no Tartarus or Elysium for special cases. As far as I know, Judaism is unique among religions in that they really have no dogma concerning what happens after death.

With Jesus’ coming, heaven and hell entered the Christian cosmology. Salvation meant accepting Jesus’ sacrifice and his gift, and damnation meant choosing to go it alone and thus receiving just recompense for your sin. One of Jesus’ favorite themes (illustrated in the parable of the prodigal son, of the shepherd with one lost sheep, of the woman with ten silver coins, and several others) was the sorrow of God over even one lost soul– no matter how many he had gathered to himself– and the joyous celebration in heaven when that one lost one was found again. If you believe Jesus (and, later, Paul), God would earnestly seek, and pursue at the cost of his own life, one single lost soul out of all humanity if everyone else were saved and taken to heaven, and would mourn for the loss of that soul.

Every day of a man’s life, considering that he has free will, is an opportunity to give that life to God and be saved. If a man has not yet given his life to God, and we deprive him of the remainder of that life, we are depriving him of any chance for salvation and depriving God of one of his beloved children. Given that Jesus told us the greatest commandments were to love God and to love one another, isn’t the execution of an unsaved person the ultimate act of rebellion against both those commandments?