Joseph Bottum reflects on the forthcoming execution in Utah of double murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner, and wonders whether there is justification for this punishment. These paragraphs — especially the sections I have put in boldface — stand out for me:
A government has two legitimate goals in its justice system: the protection of the state’s existence, and the maintenance of ordinary, common justice for its people. And sometimes these may require the death of criminals—as in treason, for example, or when citizens cannot be protected from someone except by that person’s death.
But where comes the other kind of justice, the particular kind of justice that would justify the execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner—not the ordinary justice of the social contract but high justice, the justice of God, the balancing of the cosmic scales? We want to see good people find good ends and bad people find bad ends. And God, and God’s agents, could carry out this justice.
Of course, the foundation of a modern democratic state, born of a social contract, is exactly that the state is not God’s agent. The early modern thrones got around the problem with a theory of the Divine Right of Kings, but we rejected all that. The ancient pagan cities held the sword of punishment because, in however confused a way, they believed in the supernatural foundation for the earthly city, but that, too, we dismissed. Ancient Israel had direct revelation, but modern nations refused to hold revelations for themselves.
Without some form of the divine, who has the right to pay blood with blood? Who has the authority to undertake high justice? Not us.
I myself am not necessarily a proponent of capital punishment, due primarily to its irrevocability in the not unlikely case of a miscarriage of justice. However, I strongly disagree with Bottum’s reasoning above. True, we may live in democratic states claiming to be based on a social contract, but there is ample reason — both biblical and otherwise — to question this claim. St. Paul writes to the believers in Rome:
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due (Romans 13:1-7, emphases mine).
With all due respect to Mr. Bottum, those who believe, with the church of the ages, that our world belongs to God cannot simply accept at face value the foundational claims of democratic theories of governance. We may very well agree that democracy as a mere form of government is the best currently on offer, yet this need not entail a rejection of the Pauline understanding of government as servant of God, which it continues to be irrespective of the changed procedures for attaining public office. Nor does it call for acceptance of a contractarian understanding of government, which I would argue is an inadequate account of its origins. (See my 10 March post: Unlocking Locke.)
Forms of government come and go, but the divine mandate that government do public justice is a perennial one that is part of the very created nature of government and thus does not change with the times. This mandate on occasion may call for the shedding of blood, e.g., in cases of justified warfare and of the restraining and punishment of criminals. Again there may be good reason not to shed blood, and one hopes it will not be done too often. Nevertheless, one ought not to deny government the legitimate power of the sword based on a highly disputable contractarian account of democratic government.
June 14th, 2010 | 4:33 pm | #1
I think you meant “does not change with the times” in the last paragraph.
I also thought it was an odd reasoning in the OtS essay, one that would have benefited from additional clarification.
June 14th, 2010 | 5:12 pm | #2
Thanks, Albert. I’ve made the correction.
June 14th, 2010 | 9:26 pm | #3
David
Almost the entire vocal part of Catholicism really does not like most of the OT on the violence topic in my opinion and they think as Pope John Paul II did in section 40 of Evangelium Vitae:
” Of course we must recognize that in the Old Testament this sense of the value of life, though already quite marked, does not yet reach the refinement found in the Sermon on the Mount. This is apparent in some aspects of the current penal legislation, which provided for severe forms of corporal punishment and even the death penalty. But the overall message, which the New Testament will bring to perfection, is a forceful appeal for respect for the inviolability of physical life and the integrity of the person.”
What Old Testament was he reading as to the inviolability of life? And have we ever had a Pope who really loved the Old Testament and knew it as Jerome and Augustine did. And why not?
So when God commanded the death penalties in Leviticus for personal mortal sins in the First Person singular, John Paul really didn’t accept it as coming from God at all but from culture of the time.
When God commanded both gentiles and Jews to use the death penalty for murder in Genesis 9:5-6, John Paul II did not accept it but saw it as really coming from unrefined Jewish culture.
There are literally blogs dedicated to his mindset which really comes from modern biblical scholarship’s tendency toward eliminating politically incorrect passages on historico-critical grounds. This chaos will continue until a great figure arises within the Church who synthesizes that which is valid within modern hermeneutics and that which is valid prior to it. Don’t wait for it to happen. It could be a thousand years from now.
Elijah slit the throats of 450 prophets of Baal in I Kings 18 and Elijah will return prior to the day of judgement…Malachi 3:23
” Lo, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, Before the day of the LORD comes, the great and terrible day,.”
But he…if my theoretical figure does not arrive… will be pilloried by thousands of Catholic clergy who have turned the Bible into a
Hallmark Card by simply deducting all violent passages from inspiration really. The violent passages like Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes are kind of inspired… like….well like the letters of all of us write now and then. That is the prevalent tide you are up against and to me, it is worse than the one caused by BP in the Gulf.
June 14th, 2010 | 9:56 pm | #4
This gets social contracts wrong anyway. At least with a Hobbesian social contract, there’s nothing wrong with the members of the contract implementing a death penalty to prevent the most severe forms of murder. Hobbes does say that once the state declares a death sentence, you have no obligation to remain under the contract and ought to seek to escape, breaking as many laws as necessary to protect your life. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for the government to impose the death penalty. It just means imposing the death penalty puts them back at war with those sentenced to death. But seeing as how they have death-row criminals at their mercy, it hardly matters to the well-being of society if some of its criminals are back in the state of nature with respect to their own society.
June 15th, 2010 | 8:29 am | #5
If one were to look in the Hebrew version of the Bible, the fourth commandment is:
“Not shall you murder”. Murder, the shedding of innocent blood.
June 15th, 2010 | 8:54 am | #6
Jeremy Pierce wrote:
This is correct, but I would take out the prescriptive word ought. Hobbes sees himself making an empirical statement that this is what human beings actually do when faced with a threat to their lives.
I am not necessarily making a case for capital punishment here. I believe that the state has the right to impose the death penalty for serious crimes such as murder, although there are good reasons to question whether it ought to exercise this right.
As an aside, I find it interesting and somewhat incongruous that virtually all westerners disapprove corporal punishment while many accept the legitimacy of the death penalty, which is a far more severe punishment. There is at least reason to question whether this is a coherent position to hold.
However, my principal purpose here is to question Bottum’s appeal to the social contract as an adequate account of the origins of government. I agree with “Paul” who commented beneath Bottum’s post:
June 15th, 2010 | 6:40 pm | #7
This reminds of the trial of Charles I of England where he asked by what authority he was brought to trial. And he was right. By the legal practice of his day there was no lawful authority to bring him to trial. But they cut off his head without it.
It is all well and good to talk about authority, but it is power that makes the ultimate decisions. A political, to say nothing of a religious body can claim all the authority it wants, going back to the Big Bang, but give someone enough divisions and that authority will count for nothing.
June 15th, 2010 | 10:43 pm | #8
Even if any particular contractarian account is highly disputable, won’t it be at least as highly disputable that the “Pauline understanding of government as servant of God” entails that the state of Texas, for example, is acting with God’s full authorization when it executes people?
June 16th, 2010 | 6:09 am | #9
Janice,
Texas does execute with God’s authorization whenever it does so with care. Japan, the 4th safest country in the world in terms of murder rates, executes also with God’s authorization whenever it proceeds with care. You would be far safer there in Japan on vacation than you would be in any Catholic predominant country except Liechtenstein (and yes I believe in Catholicism).
Watch this interchange between Christ and Pilate in John (and Pilate was not proceeding with care):
Jhn 19:10 Pilate therefore said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?”
Jhn 19:11 Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore he who delivered me to you has the greater sin.”
So that is Christ saying Pilate had power over men which was given Pilate from above as one can see in Genesis 9:5-6.
A separate question is what high degree of evidence should be required in capital cases. In one murder case, one has multiple witnesses and video; in another capital case, one has only accumulated circumstantial evidence. This difference is often obscured in these discussions as though all cases have room for error.
June 16th, 2010 | 1:32 pm | #10
Bill Bannon,
Surely you don’t endorse the following type of argument:
1. X’s has power to kill people only because God allows X to have that power.
2. Therefore, X’s power to kill people is given to X by God.
3. Therefore, it is appropriate for X to kill people.
June 16th, 2010 | 4:25 pm | #11
Janice
Spell out your objection to anything I wrote.
June 16th, 2010 | 4:29 pm | #12
Sword power must be tied to authoritative office. The mere power to do something is insufficient to claim authority to do it. There is ample biblical warrant for recognizing that the civil magistrate legitimately occupies an office authorized by God to wield sword power.
June 16th, 2010 | 4:52 pm | #13
Bill Bannon,
I was hoping you could spell out the argument for, and the implications of, your claim that “Texas does execute with God’s authorization whenever it does so with care.” I was hoping you might do this in a way that avoided both of the ridiculous inferences in #10.
June 16th, 2010 | 5:52 pm | #14
Of course, it’s one thing to believe that some civil magistrates have sometimes been authorized by God to kill people under some circumstances.
It’s quite another thing to believe that the state of Texas is currently authorized by God to kill incapacitated citizens through a judicial process that is prone to biases, of dubious deterrence value, and extravagantly expensive (about “three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years”).
June 16th, 2010 | 6:00 pm | #15
Janice,
This is a Catholic website. If you are Catholic, Romans 13:3-4 reads this way in the NAB Bible:
” For rulers are not a cause of fear to good conduct, but to evil. Do you wish to have no fear of authority? Then do what is good and you will receive approval from it, for it is a servant of God for your good. But if you do evil, be afraid, for it does not bear the sword without purpose; it is the servant of God to inflict wrath on the evildoer.”
“Sword” is a synecdoche for all punishments up to and including what a sword does: kills. Otherwise the passage would have used the word for “scourge” as the synecdoche in order to fall short of execution.
The trend in modern times for decades in Catholic magazines was to disrespect anything in Paul one did not like by implying that that particular passage was Paul and not God. And that tendency was as much in the clergy as in the laity. Hence wives obeying husbands is six times in the epistles and no where in Vatican II or in the present catechism or in the pulpits. Likewise with Romans 13:4 on the death penalty.
But I am not there in that attitude nor was Vatican II on inspiration when you actually read the texts ” both Testaments in all their parts have God as their author”. No….I don’t believe that is about scientific or historical things but about moral and spiritual injunctions.
The Romans passage presumes a rational government
which the Roman Empire at Paul’s time could be or not depending on the season and the issue and the region… just as the 4th commandment presumes rational parents whom you had to obey as a child. The 4th commandment as to children obeying parents does not presume criminal parents as authorized by God so that a child has to obey drug dealing parents when they say to the child to deliver drugs to grandma even though she is dying from same. But if those drug dealing parents say something rational like ordering the child to clean his room, then they are speaking with authorization from God.
Likewise Romans 13:4 is not presuming a criminal or even greatly flawed government as rewarding good and punishing evil. But should even those governments act with reason, they become in those moments authorized by God.
Several months ago two young girls in two different Southern states were raped and strangled by two different men and left in the woods. Let’s take a vicious government like North Korea who might execute for press criticism of its regime which executions would be mortal sin. But when North Korea executes a child rapist-murderer; despite its habitual evil as a government, it nevertheless acts with God’s authorization when it executes the truly evil like the rapist murderer whether North Korea believes in God or not. What about the repentance of the rapist murderer? The death penalty is more likely to bring that about than growing old in prison and watching TV. Think of the good thief on the cross. Mark’s gospel said he reviled Christ also on the cross with the bad thief. So that we know that time elapsing and the end drawing near made him change even right there on the cross. That is a 50% repentance rate. Not bad. And hopefully the bad thief did the same in secret as time went further. In Dickens time, they took condemned prisoners to Church every week for months to nurture repentance. I suspect that is better for repentance than a life sentence of part time work and TV and sleeping next to one’s toilet. bowl.
June 16th, 2010 | 6:12 pm | #16
Janice
Execution is not expensive. Lawyers are. Deterrence does require speed of punishment which is absent here in the US and for example in California where appeals are 20 years on average. Japan delays as much as we do though and Japan is the 4th safest place in the world in terms of murder. Their execution is fearful though since it is hanging rather than lethal injection.
June 16th, 2010 | 6:24 pm | #17
Bill Bannon,
Are you afraid that the passage reads any differently for a non-Catholic?
Look, we’re all happy to concede that when the state of Texas executes someone, it has a purpose. But this doesn’t mean that this purpose justifies executing the person.
Just in case this distinction is too subtle in the abstract, let’s flesh it out with an example. Suppose right now I slap you upside the head with the purpose of getting you to think straight. You might cry out, “Hey, what right did you have to do that?!” Now I could easily respond with the following true statement: “I didn’t slap you upside the head without purpose.” But, although this response is true (i.e., my action was not without purpose), this doesn’t demonstrate that my slapping you upside the head was justified or appropriate.
June 16th, 2010 | 7:07 pm | #18
Janice
Then killing a man who rapes and murders a 5 year old girl is without purpose? And what if that were your 5 year old?
June 16th, 2010 | 7:15 pm | #19
Shame on you Bill Bannon–after I made the simple point in #17 and even illustrated it with a concrete example!
You’ve some re-reading to do!
June 16th, 2010 | 7:24 pm | #20
Janice
Nice avoidance of the question. Bye bye.
June 16th, 2010 | 7:46 pm | #21
Retributive Justice and the social contract
exemplified by the following exchange, perhaps?
Janice: “Shame on you Bill Bannon…!”
Bill: “Janice
Nice avoidance of the question. Bye bye.”
June 16th, 2010 | 9:15 pm | #22
Truth Unites…and Divides,
Bye bye means bye bye.
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