The Biblical View of the Death Penalty
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008[Bishop Doss was an early and influential opponent of the death penalty in Louisiana. He worked with Sister Helen Prejean before she was made famous by the movie Dead Man Walking. Here is a major analysis of what the Bible says about the death penalty.]
The Ongoing Interpretation of Scripture
The story of God’s people is a continuing one that must be taken up by each generation. The scriptures relate that story from the beginning of creation and the spread of sin though to the redemption in Christ Jesus and the establishment of his church. The Bible is a library of separate books with a baffling variety of literary forms, composed by numerous and different kinds of authors over many centuries. Some of the writings are quite ancient; some of the earliest are versions of a prehistoric oral history. Various editors and redactors have re-written, edited and re-edited, or supplemented much of the material as each generation made its contribution. Even so, from the very outset the scriptures are headed somewhere. They contain a particular logic and share a common aim. The logic and the aim reveal certain grand themes about God’s will for human life. Each of the books has to be read and interpreted within the context of the general themes and the conclusions at which the aim is taken. Nothing can be read out of that context, and certainly nothing can be used against the aims and purposes of the scriptures. According to Christians the whole of scripture is aimed at the incarnation, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This is definitive of the entire story of the people of God. From the first words, scripture is going somewhere and it arrives. Good news.
The scriptures do not make each and every issue God’s people must address in succeeding generations entirely clear, especially on specific matters of morality and justice. The early Christians found themselves embarrassed by certain matters in the Hebrew scriptures, including several of the ways God’s nature is depicted. They had to re-interpret them, and explain how they were part of a process of coming to an ever more complete discernment until the fullness of that understanding is defined in Christ Jesus. But the problem has not simply been with what Christians began to call the “Old Covenant” books. The church has discovered itself waking up to an awareness of wrongful positions and actions from time to time, forcing the reinterpretation of certain scripture. It is as though we were not ready to see the matter in its clarity until the time was ripe. When we do so we find that the call to right action is indeed inherent in our scriptures; it simply becomes clear to us. It is as though a fuse has been set within scripture and only in due course does it explode. Once this happens we may well wonder how we ever could have missed this.
Painful examples in European history include the inquisition and the crusades. The striking example in American history is slavery. During the course of the nineteenth century the meaning of scripture was changed for the American church from one that was viewed as favorable, or at the very least tolerant, toward the institution of slavery, to a testament ringing with clear denunciation of it.
Among the factors that required the church to see things differently was the evolving sense of decency and right in Western culture. Christians discovered the mind of Christ with new clarity. Christians must always be open to this. At this point in the continuing story of God’s people the ecumenical church has reached a relatively new consensus in its teachings about the use of the death penalty in human society. We shall examine the way scripture has led the church to this consensus.
