FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Gallows Matters

Rant Number 446 29 June 2011

‘How can you, a Christian, be in favour of the death penalty?’ So asked my sweet friend Alexandra. Indeed. A hard question, fitting a hard, perhaps the hardest subject. Angels fear to tread here but...ducking this challenge would be cowardly. The priest will not expose himself to such reproach.

Having just watched on YouTube Mr Abdullah al-Bishi, the official, suave executioner of Saudi Arabia, giving a calm and sensible rationale for his job, I kind of envy his certainties. He quoted the Qur’an – an impeccable procedure for a Muslim. The Christian revelation is more complex.

The Old Testament does permit, even enforce, capital punishment. Pacifists who quote the Decalogue, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, ignore that the same holy law demanded death for a whole lot of offences. Further, the Lord of Hosts permitted his chosen people to fight and kill in war. Hence the Anglican Prayer Book translates the above command as ‘Thou shalt do no murder’ – it is unlawful killing, the killing of the innocent that the Bible forbids, not the dispatching of the guilty.

My brother -a lifelong Communist atheist - however, once reminded me that immediately after Creation God forbade the slaying of mankind’s first murderer and fratricide, Cain. A sevenfold vengeance is threatened on any slayer of Abel’s brother (Genesis 4:13), whose punishment is to be ‘a wanderer and a fugitive upon the earth’. Thanks, brov! I’ll pray for you!

The New Testament does not destroy the Old but fulfils it and perfects it. St John the Baptist, the forerunner, does not tell soldiers to give up soldiering, only to be content with their wages and to wrong no one. Jesus, the Messiah, incarnates and sublimates the spirit of the Law. True, his teaching seems incompatible with any type of killing. Parables where the wicked suffer a violent ending are misunderstood if taken au pied de la lettre – that is not how parables work. And references to swords and violence – ‘the Kingdom of God suffers violence and men of violence take it by force’ – have nothing to do with earthly judicial punishment.

The Book of Revelation offers some frightening and bloody images but his dazzling logic is that of allegory and paradox, e.g. Christ the Lamb slain for the salvation of the world is also called the Lion of Judah – how can a lamb also be a lion, eh?

Above all, Christ’s self-sacrifice on the Cross is the iconic, supreme example of an unjust execution - he was an innocent victim.

St Paul in Romans 13 enjoins his converts to obey the state authorities as God’s representatives. (That rules out Christian anarchism a la’ Leo Tolstoi, by the way.) The Apostle invokes the power of the sword. NT scholars debate whether it was a war sword or a police sword. Anyway, Paul is saying is that a judicially imposed penalty – even death, perhaps – does not contradict divine law: it is actually permissible and just.

Christian revelation encompasses the teachings of Church Fathers. Saints like Augustine and Aquinas defended the power of the sword, meaning necessary killing in a just, defensive war. The example of Christ, however, was always there as a warning, hence Aquinas forbids prelates and clergy to shed blood – a sacramental argument now perhaps obsolete. The Doctor Angelicus conversely pulls no punches about the direct execution of sinners. Groan...medieval monks were tough. Too tough, perhaps.

The Church of England, when she was still serious and meant something, taught that ‘the laws of the realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences’ (Article XXXVII in BCP). Today she seems to bleat the opposite but then...who really gives a damn?

Heinous and grievous offences. I guess that includes the rape and murder of young girls. A monster guilty of that last week got a life sentence. It prompted the distressed sister of one of the victims to proclaim on TV that justice had not been done. She spoke of ‘an eye for an eye’. Cries for the culprit to be ‘unofficially’ punished in jail were also heard. All that emphasises how Britain is today a sub-Christian, even a non-Christian society.

‘An eye for an eye’ embodies a principle of justice, proportionality. Only one eye to be taken, not two. It looks simple but it is not. How do you punish someone guilty of rape, for example? Do you really want the brute to be violated in return? Or an arsonist? Will you have him burnt alive? But it depends on the case. A court in Iran recently sentenced a man to have acid poured into his face. He had thrown acid into a girl’s face, disfiguring and blinding her. The usual suspects, the ubiquitous ‘human rights’ agitators, raised a protest and the sentence was, I believe, suspended. Yet, looking at the destroyed face of the poor girl, I do not feel like condemning the Iranian court. Not at all. Can’t help it.

Alexandra brought up a standard objection to capital punishment: what if a mistake is made and an innocent person is hanged? It has happened. My response invokes the analogy with war. The human rights fanatics clamour for humanitarian interventions. But they know how in any war the innocent get killed. Collateral damage is the euphemism for that. Yet, they believe war is for a greater good, like, say, in the case of the bombing of Libya. Similarly, the possibility of an occasional mistake cannot invalidate the argument for the death penalty.

Does fear of execution reduce crimes by deterring would-be culprits?

Terrorists won’t be deterred, of course, they would call it martyrdom. But potential rapists and violent killers? I am not so sure. Islamic countries under shari’a are said to have low crime rates.

To conclude. All the empirical and pragmatic arguments pro or con capital punishment are never decisive. Objections invite counter-objections and so on and so forth. The crux of the argument, if there is one, is deeper. Namely, not physical but metaphysical. Let me give a hint. I would suggest that the loss of confidence in a life beyond the grave is at root of the problem. If life is only for this world, death is horribly final, ultimate. But if it is not, as Christ and Qur’an teach, if there is another world, if Mors Ianua Vitae, if death is not the end, maybe another, transcendent light dawns upon the gallows...