There was recently a big blow up when the American government announced that a certain individual would be executed by firing squad the possibility of live-streaming the event was floated.
Public executions are nothing new and there was a time when many of our cities had a place for the public to watch executions. What I was more interested in was the Christian response.
There were Christians who asserted that capital punishment (public or private) goes against the teachings of Jesus and other Christians celebrated the idea, asserting that capital punishment is commanded in the Bible.
I will not go into the entire debate on capital punishment. Personally, I am open to capital punishment in certain extreme cases but am not confident that we can prevent innocent people from being executed or preventing bias from determining who is executed and who is not.
What I was intrigued by was what this said about how we read the Bible. For some, it is clear: The Bible commands us to execute criminals and therefore we should execute criminals. No further discussion required.
And yet…
First of all, we need to determine if something commanded to Israel is the same thing as it being commanded to us today. The church is not the same as Israel and we do not live in a theocracy (although some Christians wish we did).
But we also have to look at what the Old Testament says about capital punishment. What activities were capital crimes? Murder, of course. I won’t list them all but it also includes rebellious sons and those who work on the Sabbath.
I am quite sure there are people in favour of capital punishment who have rebellious sons and would not want the biblical punishment. I also suspect they have worked on the Sabbath, whether defined as Saturday or Sunday.
This does not mean that capital punishment is wrong. But basing it on what the Bible says about capital punishment when we are picking and choosing what is a capital crime is problematic.
There are probably some good arguments for capital punishment but citing the Bible is not one of them. This is a reminder that we are tempted to not start with the Bible and determine our position but start with our position and find a Bible verse to support it.
