One of our beloved Christian leaders,
Chuck Colson passed away on this date, April 21, 2012. In loving memory of him, we, the comrades of Unit 1012, will post the Christian article for the death penalty from
him. This Article is also dedicated to all the victims and their families too.
PAGE TITLE: https://www.rutherford.org/
ARTICLE TITLE: Capital
Punishment: A Personal Statement
DATE: November 11, 2002
AUTHOR: Chuck
Colson
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Charles "Chuck"
Wendell Colson
(October 16, 1931 – April 21, 2012) was a Special Counsel to President
Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973, and later a noted Evangelical Christian leader
and cultural commentator.
Once known as
President Nixon's "hatchet man," Colson gained notoriety at the
height of the Watergate scandal, for being named as one of the Watergate Seven,
and pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for attempting to defame Pentagon
Papers defendant Daniel Ellsberg. In 1974, he served seven months in the
federal Maxwell Prison in Alabama as the first member of the Nixon
administration to be incarcerated for Watergate-related charges.
Colson became a
Christian in 1973. His mid-life conversion to Christianity sparked a radical
life change that led to the founding of his non-profit ministry Prison
Fellowship and to a focus on Christian worldview teaching and training. Colson
was also a public speaker and the author of more than 30 books. He was the
founder and chairman of The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, which
is "a research, study, and networking center for growing in a Christian
worldview", and while he was alive included Colson's daily radio
commentary, BreakPoint, which was heard in its original format on more than
1,400 outlets across the United States.
Colson received 15
honorary doctorates, and in 1993 was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress
in Religion, the world's largest annual award (over US$1 million) in the
field of religion, given to a person who "has made an exceptional contribution
to affirming life's spiritual dimension". He donated this prize to further
the work of Prison Fellowship, as he did all his speaking fees and royalties.
In 2008, he was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President George W.
Bush.
URL: https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/oldspeak/capital_punishment_a_personal_statement
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Charles Colson
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Capital Punishment: A Personal Statement
By Charles W. ColsonNovember 11, 2002
As
we Christians grow and cultivate the disciplines of reading and study, we
sometimes alter our views. Sometimes these views even change dramatically. No
one knows this better than I, having been dramatically converted to Christ and,
subsequently, having my entire worldview turned upside-down. There was a time,
for example, when I thought John Locke's understanding of social contract was
the ultimate theory of government. I now see that government draws its
authority less from the consent of the governed than from a sovereign God. I
have come to another of those points in my spiritual pilgrimage in which my
views have undergone significant change. I owe it to those who have followed my
work and to the constituency of Prison Fellowship to give the reasons.
For
as long as I can remember, I have opposed capital punishment. As a lawyer I
observed how flawed the legal system is, and I concluded, as Justice Learned
Hand once remarked, that it was better that a hundred guilty men go free than
one innocent man be executed. I was also influenced by very libertarian views
of government; I distrusted government too much to give power to take a human
life to the judicial system. Then as I became a Christian, I was confronted
with the reality of Jesus' payment of the debt of human sin. I discovered that
the operation of God's marvelous grace in our lives has profound implications
for the way we live.
Naturally,
as I came to deal increasingly with ethical issues, I found myself seriously
questioning whether the death penalty was an effective deterrent. My views were
very much influenced by Deuteronomy 17 and the need for two eye-witnesses. I
questioned whether the circumstantial evidence on which most are sentenced
today in fact measures up to this standard of proof. I still have grave
reservations about the way in which capital punishment is administered in the
U.S., and I still do question whether it is a deterrent. (In fact, I remain
convinced it is not a general deterrent.) But I must say that my views have
changed and that I now favor capital punishment, at least in principle, but
only in extreme cases when no other punishment can satisfy the demands of
justice.
The
reason for this is quite simple. Justice in God's eyes requires that the
response to an offense—whether against God or against humanity—be
proportionate. The lex talionis, the "law of the talion," served as a
restraint, a limitation, that punishment would be no greater than the crime.
Yet, implied therein is a standard that the punishment should be at least as
great as the crime. One frequently finds among Christians the belief that
Jesus' so-called "love-ethic" sets aside the "law of the
talion." To the contrary, Jesus affirms the divine basis of Old Testament
ethics. Nowhere does Jesus set aside the requirements of civil law.
Furthermore, it leads to a perversion of legal justice to confuse the sphere of
private relations with that of civil law. While the thief on the cross found
pardon in the sight of God ("Today you will be with me in Paradise"),
that pardon did not extend to eliminating the consequences of his crime
("We are being justly punished, for we are receiving what we deserve for
our deeds").[1]
"What
about mercy?" someone is inclined to ask. My response is simple. There can
be no mercy where justice is not satisfied. Justice entails receiving what we
in fact deserve; we did in fact know better. Mercy is not receiving what we in
truth deserve. To be punished, however severely, because we indeed deserve it,
as C.S. Lewis observed, is to be treated with dignity as human beings created
in the image of God. Conversely, to abandon the criteria of righteous and just
punishment, as Lewis also pointed out, is to abandon all criteria for
punishment.[2] Indeed, I am coming to see that mercy extended to offenders
whose guilt is certain yet simply ignored creates a moral travesty which, over
time, helps pave the way for collapse of the entire social order.[3] This is
essentially the argument of Romans 13. Romans 12 concludes with an apostolic
proscription of personal retribution, yet St. Paul immediately follows this
with a divinely instituted prescription for punishing moral evil. It is for
eminently social reasons that "the authorities" are to wield the
sword, the ius gladii: due to human depravity and the need for moral-social
order the civil magistrate punishes criminal behavior. The implication of
Romans 13 is that by not punishing moral evil the authorities are not
performing their God-appointed responsibility in society. Paul's teaching in
Romans 13 squares with his personal experience. Testifying before Festus, the
Apostle certifies: "If...I am guilty of doing anything deserving death, I
do not refuse to die."[4]
Perhaps
the emotional event that pushed me over the (philosophical) edge was the John
Wayne Gacy case some years ago. I visited him on death row. During our
hour-long conversation he was totally unrepentant; in fact, he was arrogant. He
insisted that he was a Christian, that he believed in Christ, yet he showed not
a hint of remorse. The testimony in the trial, of course, was overwhelming. I
don't think anybody could possibly believe that he did not commit those crimes,
and the crimes were unspeakably barbaric. What I realized in the days prior to
Gacy's execution was that there was simply no other appropriate response than
execution if justice was to be served. There are some cases like this—the
Oklahoma bombing a case in point—when no other response is appropriate, no
other punishment sufficient for the deliberate savagery of the crime.
The
issue in my mind boils down ultimately to just deserts. Indeed, just punishment
is a thread running throughout the whole of biblical revelation. Moreover,
there is divinely instituted tension that exists between mercy and justice—a
tension that, ethically speaking, may not be eradicated. Mercy without justice
makes a mockery of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. It ignores the fundamental
truth of biblical anthropology: the soul that sins must die; sin incurs a debt
that must be paid. Punitive dealings provide a necessary atonement and restore
the moral balance that has been disturbed by sin. Purification, one of the most
central of biblical themes, reveals to us both the temporal and eternal
perspectives on mankind. Purification comes by way of suffering; it prepares
the individual to meet His Maker. God's redemptive response to the sin dilemma
did not—and does not—eradicate the need to bear the consequences of our
actions.
Which
leads me to a second observation. The death penalty ultimately confronts us
with the issue of moral accountability in the present life. Contemporary
society seems totally unwilling to assign moral responsibility to anyone.
Everything imaginable is due to a dysfunctional family or to having had our
knuckles rapped while we were in grade-school. Ours is a day in which
"abuse excuses" have proliferated beyond our wildest dreams. We
really have reached a point where the Menendez brothers plead for mercy—and get
it!—because they are orphans, after acknowledging that they made themselves
orphans by killing their parents.
Non-Christians
and Christians alike are not absolved from the consequences of their behavior.
Whether or not faith is professed, penalties for everything from speeding to
strangulation apply to all. In American society today, people are literally
getting away with murder, and the moral stupor that has descended over our
culture reflects a decay, an utter erosion, of time-tested moral norms—norms
that have guarded generation after generation. Can anyone really wonder why
evidence of a moral dry-rot is everywhere?
I
come to this view with something of a heavy heart, as some of the most blessed
brothers I've known in my Christian walk were on death row. I think of Richard
Moore in particular and, of course, Rusty Woomer, about whom I've written in
The Body. I think of Bob Williams in Nebraska and Johnny Cockrum in Texas. I
have a heavy heart as well because I do not believe the system administers
criminal justice fairly. It is merely symbolic justice to execute twenty-five
people a year when 2,000 are sentenced. (Obviously, the system needs to be
thoroughly revamped. Nevertheless, revamping the system, in order that
punishment be both swift and proportionate, would accord with biblical
guidelines and demands the Christian's engagement.) But in spite of the flaws
of the system, I have come to believe that God in fact requires capital
justice, at least in the case of premeditated murder where there is no doubt of
the offender's guilt. This is, after all, the one crime in the Bible for which
no restitution was possible.[5]
Lest
we believe the Old Testament was characterized by indiscriminate capital
justice, Old Testament law painstakingly distinguished between premeditated
murder and involuntary manslaughter; hence, the function of the cities of
refuge. Israel's elders, we can be assured, would have adjudicated well at the
gate. In the case of involuntary manslaughter, deliverance out of the hand of
the avenger occurred. In the case of murder, the convicted criminal was put to
death. Personally, I still doubt that the death penalty is a general
deterrent—and strong evidence exists that it is not likely to be a deterrent
when it is so seldom invoked. But I have a hard time escaping the attitude of
the biblical writers, that judgment—both temporal and eschatological—is a
certain reality for those who disobey or reject God's authority. We'll never
know how many potential murderers are deterred by the threat of a death
penalty, just as we will never know how many lives may be saved by it. But at
the bare minimum, it may deter a convict sentenced to life from killing a
prison guard or another convict. (In such a case no other punishment is
appropriate because all lesser punishments have been exhausted.) And it will
certainly prevent a convicted murderer from murdering again. In this regard, I
find wisdom in the words of John Stuart Mill:
As
for what is called the failure of death punishment, who is able to judge of
that? We partly know who those are whom it has not deterred; but who is there
who knows whom it has deterred, or how many human beings it has saved who would
have lived to be murderers if that awful association had not been thrown round
the idea of murder from their earliest infancy?[6]
So
in spite of my misgivings, I've come to see capital punishment as an essential
element of justice. On the whole, the full range of biblical data weighs in its
favor. Society should not execute capital offenders merely for the sake of
revenge, rather to balance the scales of moral justice which have been
disturbed. The death penalty is warranted and should be implemented only in
those cases where evidence is certain, in accordance with the biblical standard
and where no other punishment can satisfy the demands of justice. In the public
debate over the death penalty, we are dealing with values of the highest order:
respect for the sacredness of human life and its protection, the preservation
of order in society, and the attainment of justice through law.
The
function of biblical sanctions against a heinous crime such as murder is to
discourage the wanton destruction of innocent life. Undergirding the biblical
sanctions against murder[7] is the utter sacred character of human life. The
shedding of blood in ancient Israel polluted the land—a pollution for which
there was no substitute—and thus required the death penalty. This is the
significance of the sanctions in Genesis 9 against those who would shed the
blood of another. It is because humans are created in the image of God that capital
punishment for premeditated murder was to be a perpetual obligation. To kill a
person was tantamount to killing God in effigy.[8] The Noahic covenant recorded
in Genesis 9 antedates Israel and the Mosaic code; it transcends Old Testament
law per se and mirrors ethical legislation that is binding for all cultures and
eras. The sanctity of human life is rooted in the universal creation ethic and
thus retains its force in society. Any culture that fails to distinguish
between the criminal and the punitive act, in my opinion, is a culture that
cannot survive. In this way, then, my own ethical thinking has evolved.
I'm
well aware that sincere Christians stand on both sides of this issue. One's
views on the death penalty are by no means a test of fellowship. While we take
no pleasure in defining the contours of this difficult ethical issue, the
Christian community nevertheless is called upon to articulate standards of
biblical justice, even when this may be unpopular. Capital justice, I have come
to believe, is part of that non-negotiable standard. A moral obligation
requires civil government to punish crime, and consequently, to enforce capital
punishment, albeit under highly restricted conditions. Fallible humans will
continue to work for justice. But fallible as the system might be, part of the
Christian's task is to remind surrounding culture that actions indeed have
consequences—in this life and the life to come.
Charles Colson is an author and Founder & Chairman of
the Board of Prison Fellowship
and Prison Fellowship International.
He served in the Nixon White House and was convicted of obstruction of justice
during the Watergate investigation. After serving prison time in Alabama,
Colson founded Prison Fellowship ministries which, in collaboration with
churches of all confessions and denominations, has become the world's largest
outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners, crime victims, and their families. Colson
has spent the last 25 years as head of Prison Fellowship Ministries. His most
recent book, How
Now Shall We Live?, is a challenge to all Christians to understand biblical
faith as an entire worldview, a perspective on all of life.
Prison
Fellowship© 2002
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