Capital Punishment, Part 5 -- Steve the Builder

Why does God allow imperfect and fallen human beings make life and death decisions? Have Christians permitted the atheists to define our doctrines? Who has a greater problem justifying being against the death penalty, the Christian or the atheist? What does iconography have to do with the death penalty? All this and more...

Last week we essentially looked at the historic Christian view of the relationship of the Church to the State in general.  It is clear that both East and West see the state having its own realm of authority ordained by God and does not need the Church to validate or direct its operation in order for it to be an agent of God’s will for humanity.  However, it is also clear that the Church is called to be leaven and there is no prohibition of the Church influencing the State’s decisions in matters moral and ethical. 
So, I believe that a big part of the tension about capital punishment is that we have a muddled mix of our “personal convictions” or what we feel compelled to do in individual relationships and our understanding of how the State should function for the good of society. If we accept the essential separation of the gospel’s demands on the Church and the State, the issue boils down to these questions: Can I, as a Christian, personally participate in killing a human being? And, am I by default participating in it by not protesting the act through the political system? (And of course a larger question is, can a Christian keep his soul and participate in the political arena at all?)
At another level, if we accept that civil authority is God ordained and human beings are invested with the powers of life and death, we have to ask:  How does an individual who is finite and imperfect whether a Christian or not, perfectly join justice and mercy within civil order? If an individual cannot accomplish that, how can society or systems of government do that when the offices are occupied by fallen, finite humans? If civil authority cannot be trusted to judge justly in every capital case, what is our responsibility as a Christian? 
I’ll address the second question first, because it lays a foundation for our discussion of personal convictions.  It is undeniable that human beings are neither personally nor collectively omniscient, but does that mean necessarily that we can only take a life if we can know everything that only God knows?  If we accept that as a legitimate boundary against the use of the death penalty, then we have to ask, if God knew we could not know what only He knows, why then did He ordain civil authority for both believing and unbelieving pagan societies and give it the power to judge and punish evildoers by death?  We might ask, “Is God concerned about the possibility of injustice due to human limitations and even human evil occupying authority?” And the real bottom line is, if someone dies unjustly under a flawed civil system, which is one of the primary arguments against the death penalty, is that an eternal issue? 
I don’t think it’s an accident that the groundswell of anti-death penalty activism began predominantly in Europe on the heels of WW II and the experience of the gross abuse of power manifested in the Nazi regime, and in the context of post enlightenment Western Europe’s decline of faith. Avery Cardinal Dulles, a noted Roman Catholic Jesuit theologian, observes that without a belief in the afterlife, humanistic and utilitarian philosophy has essentially defined physical death as the ultimate evil and insult to human worth and dignity.  (And this could easily segue into several discussions of the parallel rise of abortion, the utilitarianism of de facto eugenics, and the cult of youth, health and virtual immortality)…but regardless of the self contradictory manifestations of the humanist’s view of the value of the human being and death, it remains a fact that the decline of Christianity and a belief in eternal life, went hand in hand with the rising opposition to the death penalty in Europe by humanist activists.  Cardinal Dulles notes in a 2001 article in “First Things”, that “many governments in Europe and elsewhere have eliminated the death penalty in the twentieth century, often against the protests of religious believers. While this change may be viewed as moral progress, it is probably due, in part, to the evaporation of the sense of sin, guilt, and retributive justice, all of which are essential to biblical religion and Catholic faith. The abolition of the death penalty in formerly Christian countries may owe more to secular humanism than to deeper penetration into the gospel.” 
So, in the end, I believe that the issue has been largely framed for modern Christians by the atheists.  Christians have accepted the Godless categories of secular humanists (and I use that term not pejoratively, but with exactitude) and their reframing of the death penalty as unjust, contrary to the dignity of the human being, and cruel and inhuman in the face of the biblical rationales for the validity of the use of the death penalty.  It is clear from the Biblical witness that it can and should be applied even in the fallen order, it is applied precisely BECAUSE of the dignity of human life, and cannot be defined as “inhuman” because the creator of humanity, God Himself, not only commanded it but exacted it Himself.
So the root of the issue comes back to what we discussed in the second podcast: a definition of death.  If death is the end of the human being then yes, it is to be avoided at any cost (or on the other hand, it can be dealt out without fear of any ultimate consequence beyond it.)  But for the Christian, death, in the end, is NOT the final affront to the dignity of our humanity, it is the loss of our humanity in eternity separated from its true source and definition in God.
Thus, the philosophical waters of the death penalty get even muddier when we begin talking about “life”.  The humanist will attempt to frame the definition of life and point up that it is inconsistent to believe in capital punishment and be “anti- abortion” or in other words, “pro life”.  Some Christians have accepted the humanist’s philosophical definitions and would hold Christians to the false categorical equality of “Christian pro-life”, anti-abortion, and “anti-capital punishment”.  This ignores several underlying qualifying assumptions of Christian theology regarding definitions of life, evil, guilt, innocence and justice.  The taking of an innocent life through abortion or eugenics and the taking of the life of an evildoer are not categorically the same based on a right understanding of Genesis 9:6 in which God requires the life of the murderer because man is created in the image of God.
So, again, we cannot let the humanist define the categories of life and death for the Christian. Being “pro-life” because we believe the human being is created in the image of the “Living God” does not necessarily mean one must believe in the prolonging of the life of the evildoer any more than not believing in God and man in His image means someone should be de facto pro death penalty. As we mentioned, one can be anti capital punishment and an atheist and much of Western Europe is anti-capital punishment but pro abortion derived from secular humanistic philosophy. But it seems to me that the atheist has a harder time justifying being anti death penalty than the Christian. If one is a true materialistic atheist, the bottom line is that murder is merely one mechanically materialistically determined biological unit doing something driven by his chemicals to make another biological unit to cease functioning. “Justice” and “mercy” are merely chemically determined brain constructs that ultimately have no objective teleological meaning or purpose.  One cannot even say they are utilitarian or the marks of an enlightened society because then that would become a metaphysical statement requiring an objective standard for defining what is or is not enlightened or morally and ethically progressive.  In the grandest scheme of deterministic materialistic atheism, murder doesn’t matter and neither does murdering the murderer. Any meaning attached to any of it (or to anything or everything for that matter) is a personal fantasy created by my chemicals in MY head.  But if we take even a small philosophical step out of the boundaries of materialistic determinism and into the realm of “something more”, then we are forced to define what that “something more” is, where it comes from outside the material order, and what it does. Is it malevolent, disinterested, engaging, controlling, mad (in both senses of the word), or in love with us?  In other words, we have whole ‘nother thing going on here.
To the Christian, because we believe that the “Whole ‘Nother Thing” is a personal God who is indeed in love with us, ultimately retributive justice is about love, even under the Mosaic Law which demanded capital punishment.  At the root of it, because we believe in objective love, the killer is killed because more than mere biology has been violated, something more than just a mass of chemicals has ceased to function, and our reaction to that is more than just vague evolutionary sentimentality and another mass of chemical interactions in my head. Objective love has been violated. At the core of our existence because we are created in the image of God who is love, we know that if we have no love, we have no life. Whether we affirm a Judeo-Christian theology and ethic or not, we must still must come to terms with the innate human notion of “Society”.  Even a secular humanistic definition attempts to define society by love in some way.  What is society? ...an amalgam of beings that economically join together in a community mutually respecting and affirming life for the wellbeing of all: which is really a dim definition of “love” at a primeaval level. This is what makes murder and other heinous crimes inhuman even within a humanistic framework: The killer exhibits no love and kills someone who is loved by someone else thus not just violating the individual but also the community.
From a Christian theological perspective that community includes God.  However, it is in the Orthodox theology of iconography that we have the fullness of the exact exposition of Genesis 9:6.  It is on the basis of the Incarnation of God in Christ that we believe that the honor given to a material icon passes to the person whom the icon depicts.  Materiality and the spiritual are not divorced.  It is in, by and through the material that we ultimately honor the spiritual. God ultimately honors the image of Himself in man by becoming man.  It this reality that Genesis 9:6 points us to: Murder is not merely the ending of a material existence.  It is a sin against the entire man created in love by God in His image, thus, and this is the crux of the matter, the disregard for and destruction of the image passes to the one in whose image man is created: it is ultimately a rejection and desecration of God Himself.  The murderer rejects the entirety of the order of the cosmos both external to himself and within himself.  It is because of this that God ordains civil authority with the power to condemn and kill the ones who are so un-human and anti-social that they do not live according to their own created image in respect and honor for the love of God and the love of man in others.  In short, the death penalty honors the image of God in both the perpetrator and the victim by holding the perpetrator responsible, AS A HUMAN BEING in the image of God, for his actions.
So now we go back to the original question, why does God allow fallen, finite human beings to make life and death decisions? When we are discussing the pragmatics of human justice, both the Christian and the atheist will acknowledge that the world is not just.  (And just to let the listeners know, I am very aware of the research regarding the wrongfully convicted and executed, the racial and poverty issues surrounding the justice system, but more on that later.)
That said, I don’t believe we can interpret scripture according to a hermeneutic based on statistics of injustice. We cannot say, “the death penalty is categorically wrong” because of travesties of justice.  We CAN say, “a particular person was unjustly executed”.  Those are two different issues for the Christian. So, what we are discussing at this point is the scriptural validity of the death penalty in the fallen world, not specific cases of injustice and how the Christian can or should respond to human failure within a particular civil order. (More on that later too.)
So no one has any illusions about the perfection of our justice systems in this world, including God. Why did God command the human race to execute evildoers?  Because, like us, God has no illusions of either the human potential for evil nor of the possibility of humanity to achieve a perfect justice system.  The fallen human condition is bent toward sin and virtue is an uphill struggle. Unrestrained, and dare I say, unpunished, evil generally results in greater evil.  While we affirm the image of God in the human being is never lost, it seems God is more realistic than most humans about how deeply that image can be buried in evil, and as St. Thomas Aquinas noted, how that leaven can influence society.  Hence God requires the death penalty. The corollary, that God has no illusions about the possibility for humans in the civil arena to rise to perfection either individually or corporately is important.  No matter how meticulously crafted a system of justice is, even the American legal system that has 28 separate processes and steps and within them hundreds of procedures before an execution, it will never rise above human failure.  There will be injustice, both purposeful or through negligence and ignorance.  The hard fact of the matter is innocent people will die, both directly from evildoers and as a consequence of the limitations of humanity in this fallen order.  The Christian world view includes the tragedy of random injustices and does not cringe from the possibility of it occurring due to human error for greater purpose of the curtailing of even greater evil and the stability and order of human society.  In the end, both the atheist and Christian must come to terms with an imperfect world. Legal injustice is not the only affront to our sensibilities of “what is fair”. The world is full of “normal” injustices like being a victim of random human evil, natural calamities, poverty or handicap by virtue of birth, and tragic accidents visited on the undeserving or innocent.  Civil injustice is merely another sorrowful reality of the fallen order. Within the civil realm, unlike the “natural realm”, there are avenues for righting purposeful injustice, which includes war, righteous civil disobedience, and the use of the civil order and the political structures of a particular governmental system.  For the Christian, if all these things fail, there is a higher justice that will deal with the ones in authority who abuse the power or use it in an evil way.
The humanist on the other hand, because of his materialistic concept of death as finality, the Romantic philosophy of the upward evolution of humanity, and having no theology of a fall appeals to the necessity of the achievement of perfect human justice and construction of perfect restraint instead of exacting the death penalty. Christians on the other hand, because of our understanding of death and the consequences of the fall, should have a higher tolerance level for the fact the world will NEVER be perfect and human beings are fallible.  Christians have no illusions that imperfect and even evil men occupy places of God ordained authority and they make life and death decisions for members of society.  The best we can hope for is that those in authority are sober, humble and fearful of the great burden of the sword they are bearing. The fact of the matter is many are not. I read an estimate that in the 20th century over 160 million innocent people have been killed by despotic rulers or governments. The call to abolish the death penalty for justly tried and guilty evildoers is a separate issue, and the abolition of the death penalty would not keep despotic rulers from genocide or rule by terror. So the Christian call for justice notwithstanding, death, even an unjust death, is not the end of the story.  The Cross of Christ, and the two crucified with Him, is a microcosm of the divine order.  It is the ultimate witness that the power given from above is, in human hands, both just and unjust, but that gross injustice in the providential hand of God in a much grander scheme of the universe than we can imagine, is in the end redemptive in some way.  It is with this understanding that the Saints could command us to submit to unchristian, imperfect and even unjust civil rule.

thanks to Steve and Ancient Faith Radio:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/stevethebuilder/capital_punishment_part_5

Capital Punishment, Part 4 -- Steve the Builder

 

What are the pitfalls of a "Christian State"? Can or should the State govern according to the Gospel? Can "forgiveness of enemies" be a valid principle of civil order? What do the Fathers of the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches say about the relationship of Church and State in regard to civil order and capital punishment?



Welcome to the fourth installment of the ongoing series on Capital Punishment. To begin this week, I’d like to respond to a couple of emails that said essentially, “As Christians we shouldn’t be promoting capital punishment.”  Basically the purpose of these podcasts is not to PROMOTE capital punishment as much as to defend it as a legitimate Christian doctrine which has been held from the beginning by many prominent Church Fathers, east and west, and not by just fringe elements of the Church. Among modern activists and scholars, there seems to be aspects of the issue that are completely ignored, not fully explored or downplayed.  The issue is too critical to be discussed in sound bytes lifted from scripture, patristics and social research, not only for the sake of the life of the evildoer facing execution but also for the lives of the innocent and the wellbeing of society.
So, last week we began talking about the Church and the state which are both ordained by God and their mutual and exclusive roles in the world.  As we noted the theocracy of Judaism which included capital punishment based on the covenant with Noah is fulfilled in the Church through the Gospel. However, we also noted that civil government outside of Judaism’s theocracy is also ordained by God.  Nowhere in the Old or New Testaments do we find the State held to the standard of the Gospel in how it orders society, nor do we find any evidence that the covenant with Noah has been abrogated in the divine order of civil authority. 
So this week I want to continue the discussion of some of the relevant nuances of Church and State relations and their God ordained roles in the fallen order.  We’ll also examine some of the patristic and modern church’s writings about the Church’s relationship to the State.
Bill Gould and I were having lunch last week and were discussing the concept of the possibility of a “Christian State” and what that might look like.  Would civil authority be utopian (or at least more perfect) under Christian rule?  Bill had quite a few good things to say that I’ll summarize here:
The ancients understood that their moral and religious frameworks were not easily divorced from civil concerns, and throughout Church history it has always been considered, by most Christian expressions, a possibility to have a Christian State. Israel’s history is the story of the “Christian State” imperfectly administered by a series of kings that would bring either blessings or curses upon the people at large depending on their actions. It was never Utopia, but it was most assuredly an integration of Church and State.

In light of this, the prophet/king relationship, the patriarch/emperor relationship, Pope/Monarch etc, and the wielding of power in their respective spheres is quite natural - and it has yielded, at times, good outcomes for citizens even up to the modern era.  But it is also clear from Church history that religious coercion by the State does not generally yield good results. The Church AS the State is untenable and cannot be justified either scripturally nor pragmatically. As an example we can look at what John Calvin established in Geneva to see how his theology of Church and State got worked out in praxis, (which included capital punishment to Severus’ chagrin)…and a Christian Taliban essentially describes his church/state experiment.  But this does not mean that the State cannot or should not align itself with the Gospel.  However, we must understand that there are boundaries between the roles of the Church and the State and not ALL of the Gospel’s demands on the Church and the individual Christian can be integrated into a civil order . The soteriological mission of the Church in the world does not cancel God’s divine order that the evildoer is restrained by means of the State.  The Christian State is one that promotes freedom and justice for all, and not the conversion of souls by its civil powers, and the Church within the secular State does not seek to use the State for its own ends. The Church understands that the State is in and of itself a manifestation of God’s wisdom that does not need the Church’s meddling or even direction for it to be at work for the good of the people. 
So if we reject the Church AS the state as an unscriptural and unworkable concept, the Church influencing the State is another matter entirely. The monolithic witness of the Church fathers is that Christian influence on anyone is a matter of persuasion, not coercion. The question is, do Christians especially in a free society such as the USA and other democracies, have an obligation to engage the civil dimension of their existence? Should we use our influence in the political realm for “good” as defined by the Gospel, and admonish evil as a prophetic voice, flawed as we are and regardless of the fact that, in an ultimate sense, it is doomed to fail because of the Fall?
There’s a lot here in Bill’s comments and we’re going to unpack some of them in this podcast.
So for the sake of this week’s discussion we need to flesh out a point I made last week: What if the state actually governed unbelieving society by the selected Christian ethic of forgiveness of enemies as some Christian anti-death penalty advocates seem to imply it should?  Let’s use this as an example (and bear with me, this is not going to be a straw man argument):  Say a Christian forgives an unrepentant pedophile for raping and murdering his child, and the state sets him free because he has been “forgiven by his enemies”.  He is still a pedophile and will now victimize other kids. Whose responsibility is it to see that the “forgiven” evildoer does not victimize others and does the one who set him free bear any responsibility for the evil he perpetrates after being freed? (This is not a hypothetical, by the way…there are plenty of stories of people who, through the help of activists, have had sentences commuted who have raped and murdered after getting out of prison but more on that later…) If we take forgiveness to the ridiculous extreme of removal of all consequences, the only restraint of the evildoer is the individual…me, my gun and my definition of justice.  And if that was the case, we’d STILL have the same issues of evildoers, restraint, retribution, punishment, death penalty and protection of the innocent, only boiled down to an individual level instead of a corporate one. But, if we equate “forgiveness of enemies” to removal of the death penalty, which is a legitimate God ordained consequence for capital crime, then the question is, where DO we draw the line and by what principles and authority do we draw it at one place or another? 
So the issue is not, as I mentioned before, “forgiveness”, but “what does forgiveness look like” in the context of civil order and the State.  Nor is the issue, as Bp. Seraphim seems to imply, that those who believe in the death penalty are not upholding Christ’s command “to forgive one’s enemies”.  It is clear that forgiveness cannot always mean removal of consequences or removal of the state’s responsibility to protect the innocent from the evildoer.  So really, all Christians, when it comes down to pragmatics and belief, do not hold that forgiveness means removal of consequences for sin or evil, and most will actually acknowledge that. The Church may forgive the sin of embezzlement by one of its members, but it cannot commute the sentence of restitution.  It forgives adultery, but it does not pay the child support of the adulterer. It forgives the negligent homicide but it cannot serve the prison sentence for the drunken driver.  It forgives even premeditated murder, but in doing so does not commute the civil sentence. So while we all essentially agree that consequences are not always abrogated by forgiveness, for some reason when it comes to the death penalty, some people make a categorical leap and connect the removal of the death penalty to “the forgiveness of enemies”.  It is clear that this is bad rhetoric at best and bad thinking at worst.  The discussion is really then,  “Is the death penalty a legitimate consequence?”  Not, “Christian forgiveness of one’s enemies”.  In summary, to be blunt, do not lay “unforgiveness” at the feet of those who believe in capital punishment.
But, on the positive side of the coin, as Bp. Seraphim admonishes, and I would agree wholeheartedly with, the Church IS called to visit those in prison, and to preach Christ crucified to the incarcerated sinner.  The Church can affirm life, repentance and forgiveness, and at the same time permit the State to deal with the good order of the society within which the Church functions…and there will be more on that later, but for now,  the bottom line is, the State might be INFLUENCED by the Church, but it cannot BE the Church.  It is only the Church that is held to the gospel.  No Christian who supports capital punishment believes the Church should execute the evildoer, or even its own sinners and heretics or apostates (although in the Church that has been the case at times in the past). We all agree (this includes me), that the Church exists for the redemption of the human being and an agent of the Gospel of forgiveness, the giver of the sacraments, the bearer of grace to the fallen race.
So we are still left with, what are the boundaries and inter-relationships of the Church and State when it comes to capital punishment? 
The historic concensus of the great theologians of the Church, both East and West uniformly affirm the existence of the State as a God ordained power separate from the Church, and its authority to exact capital punishment as an option for the good of society.
One of the quotes from St. John Chrysostom that is usually put forth by anti war and death penalty advocates is, “in our case (as Christians) the wrong-doer must be made better, not by force, but by persuasion”.  However, the full quote is from “On the Priesthood”:
“Christians above all men are not permitted forcibly to correct the failings of those who sin. Secular judges indeed, when they have captured malefactors under the law, show their authority to be great, and prevent them even against their will from following their own devices: but in our case the wrong-doer must be made better, not by force, but by persuasion”
St. John is not denying the authority of the State, nor its responsibility to punish and restrain the evildoer.  What he is saying is the Church does not use force to convert souls.
In the Christian West, St. Thomas Aquinas sums up the consensus of the Western Fathers in his commentary on I Corinthians 5:  “if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since ‘a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump’ (1 Corinthians 5:6)” (ST II-II q. 64, art. 2).

The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church states in section 2267 :
“Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.” 
The Lutheran Church in America, in a statement issued by the Third Biennial Convention in 1966 states that Martin Luther and its historical confessions recognized the inherent authority of the State to resort to capital punishment in order to protect society. 
I cite the Roman Catholic and Lutheran traditions because they are still essentially rooted in and refer to many of the pre-schism traditions of the historical Church. Both of these reflect not just isolated quotes from their respective Fathers, but the corpus of both pre-schism and post schism patristic witnesses.  However, the statements I quoted are not the full story and they have both, in the last few decades, issued statements essentially saying there is no good warrant for the state to exercise its authority in this realm for various reasons.  And I will address those issues and reasons in later podcasts.  The point for the purposes of this topic is to show that the universal Christian witness from the beginning points to the State’s divinely ordained permission to execute evildoers if it deems it necessary for the common good.
On the Orthodox side of things, in the “Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” the Russian bishops underscore St. John and Bill Gould, and essentially concur with the Catholic and Lutheran statements.  It says,
“The Church should not assume the prerogatives of the state, such as resistance to sin by force, use of temporal authoritative powers and assumption of the governmental functions which presuppose coercion or restriction. At the same time, the Church may request or urge the government to exercise power in particular cases, yet the decision (to do so) rests with the state…. There are no indications to the need to abolish (the death penalty) in the New Testament or in the Tradition, or in the historical legacy of the Orthodox Church either….  Keeping in mind that mercy toward a fallen man is always more preferable than revenge, the Church welcomes these steps by state authorities. At the same time, she believes that the decision to abolish or not to apply death penalty should be made by society freely, considering the rate of crime and the state of law-enforcement and judiciary, and even more so, the need to protect the life of its well-intentioned members.”
One might argue that the patristic witness supporting the death penalty was written in the context of a predominantly “Christian world view of the inherent value of life” and therefore may not be fully applicable within our modern “culture of death” as Pope John Paul wrote. I don’t believe that holds up in the face of the covenant with Noah, the fact that the Church at times in its history executed people for heresy under the rubric of “the value of life”, and most importantly that the words of St. Paul were written in the context of a pagan culture and government that had far less regard for human life than our modern era.
“The state does not bear the sword for naught”, St. Paul says. St. John Chrysostom comments on this passage in Romans 13 and says: For he bears not the sword in vain. You see how (God) has furnished him with arms, and set him on guard like a soldier for a terror to those that commit sin. For he is the minister of God to execute wrath, a revenger upon him that does evil.” 


Thanks to Steve and Ancient Faith Radio:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/stevethebuilder/capital_punishment_part_4

Capital Punishment, Part 3 -- Steve the Builder

In Part 3 of the series, Steve begins a discussion of the Church and State. How do we view Judaism as a theocracy? Is Jesus anti-death penalty? What is the purpose of civil authority? Is the State constrained to function on the level of the Gospel and should it?


CAPITAL PUNISHMENT PART 3
Welcome to part three of the ongoing series on capital punishment. Before I begin this week’s thoughts, let me say that I’ve gotten a lot of very kind and well thought out responses to the series so far, on both sides of the issue.  Several people emailed me about last week’s podcast and the general thoughts were that while God may have killed Ananais and Sapphira, He didn’t kill David or St. Paul, and Jesus does not stone the adulterous woman to death.  Hence, we can conclude that Christ is not in favor of the death penalty, but rather uses people’s sins to bring them to repentance.  A couple people noted that no where in the NT does God justify one human being taking the life of another for any reason. 
The last comment is what this whole series is about, so I’ll just have to say stay tuned. That said, I completely agree that it is an inescapable fact that a lot of people “got clemency” in both the Old and New Testaments, and that God is ultimately a God of love. However, His acts of mercy are not the only expression of God in either Testament, there’s plenty of death to go around.  Jesus in His ministry did the same things God did in the Old Testament, He showed mercy on some sinners. Even though Jesus never “personally killed” someone during His ministry, in His parables of judgment, He likens God to an angry King who kills the evil vineyard keeps and warned the Jews of the coming judgment of God on Israel which resulted in the deaths of thousands. So I don’t think we can say “Christ is by nature anti-capital punishment” solely based on His earthly ministry any more than we can say God is based on His forgiveness of David etc..  If we isolate the ministry of Christ from the realities of God’s death dealing activities with evildoers we run the danger of bringing a raft load of problems into our theology of the unity of the Trinity. If we divorce Christ from the Father and say He had nothing to do with the coming Roman demolition of Jerusalem and Judaism, that would put us in danger of becoming Marcionites, separating the “God of the Old Testament” and the “God of the New” (another point that will have to be more fully explicated in a future podcast). 
Ultimately, our theology does affirm that God desires the death of no man and desires the salvation of all. However it also affirms that the death of the all, including the evildoer, is in the hands of God as an event within the providential Love of God… even if He deems to kill them personally or permits them to be killed while still impenitent, like the thief on the left.  (And that too is another whole issue worth exploring…nothing about this topic is simple).  So if we accept the reality of God’s direct and permissive dealings with the death penalty in human history, the issue does at one level boil down to WHO is making the decisions of life and death and does any human being in the “gospel age” have the wisdom, right (or responsibility) to do that according to Scripture.
So, last week we looked at God’s dealings with fallen human society before and after the Flood, which, as I indicated seems to be a sharp line of demarcation in how the world functions in terms of death and fear both among the animals and humans; and it also introduces a subset of that new order among humans: capital punishment for capital crimes on the basis of the Creation story.  The covenant with Noah was not abrogated by the Mosaic Law and, I believe, neither by the Gospel.  Under Moses, the world still functioned as it did after the flood, but what the Law did was introduce a new level of revelation of God into the world through a national structure rather than through a family structure.  The Mosaic Law taught an ethical and moral structure that lifted Israel out of the cruelty and evil of the surrounding nations.  Specifically the laws of crime and punishment set boundaries that explicated further the reasoning given to Noah regarding a life for a life because man is created in the image of God. When Christ manifested God in flesh, the reasoning is brought to its full exposition in the person of Jesus: Without a doubt, the human being IS in the image of God because God becomes flesh. But we have to remember, this is God’s revelation of Himself to mankind. However ignorant WE may have been of the depth of meaning of being in the image, God has dealt with the human race on the basis of that fact from the beginning. He made it clear in the pronouncement to Noah that the rationale FOR the death penalty is that man is in the image of God, everything since then has merely been further explication of some aspect of that truth and what that means to God and for us. We know what that looked like under Moses, so the issue now is what does that mean to the Christian and how does that work in the world since the revelation of God in Christ?
What is different now is the presence of the Church within the world.  But what we have to unpack is the fact that, as Christ said, His kingdom is not of this world. Even though it is called to be leaven on the earth, the world in fact is not the Church nor does it submit fully to God nor to the Church; and the Church is in the world but not of it.  And therein lies the problem we need to unpack today.
So what IS the role of the Church and its relationship to civil authority? Christians, spiritual pagans and atheists all agree that the human being somehow innately understands something of the necessity and value of societal order and justice that supercedes the anarchist individual. Social order reflects some sort of “collective conciousness” that rises above any single individual’s level of perfection in an imperfect world.  This has been philosophized and theologized about for several millennia.  But the point here is, no matter how we frame it or explain it, it undeniably exists. 
The Christian and the atheist would basically agree that one individual with unchecked power does not generally work well as a system of government because we know “absolute power corrupts absolutely”.  According to Scripture, all “governmental systems” and civil authorities are established by God and are a necessary concession for the good order of the world due to the fall.  But “systems of government”, even if ordained by God, are run by fallen human beings.  This fact is not lost on anyone who knows anything at all about government and politics. St. John Chrysostom in his commentary on Romans 13 talks about how we should regard civil authority and evil politicians:
For do not tell me of some one who makes an ill use of (the institutions of government), but look to the good order that is in the institution itself, and you will see the great wisdom of Him who enacted this law from the first….whether in punishing, or in honoring, the state is a Minister, in avenging virtue’s cause, in driving vice away, as God wills. 
“Systems” of government and societal order are a collective hedge against individual human anarchy which tends toward evil, and it also provides more or less for some definition of “the common welfare” of the members of society. And, realistically, some systems might be better than others, but NO system however elegant, if occupied by evil people will keep people from doing evil things. 
The specific issue of the “common welfare” that we are concerned with is the protection the innocent from the evildoer. Regardless of comparative degrees of due process and specific definitions of what is a capital offense among different societies, the common denominator is a recognition that there is good and evil and there is a necessity to isolate evil from society somehow.  If nothing else, the atheist can at least grant that the God of the Bible is a realist: there are real evil individuals who need restraint by the collective …and I’ll add so I don’t sound like Judge Roy Bean all the time, on the other hand, mercy is also a virtue.
So when we talk about God and societal order, the Scriptures do not say that Judaism was the ONLY civil order or government established by God. It was however, specifically a nation formed and its governance was directed by God for a foreshadowing of the Gospel.  Its laws and rituals were tutors until the fullness of the revelation of God was realized in the gospel of Christ, which is unconditional love for our neighbor, which includes our enemies who are in the image of God. And it is here that the real issues get knotty.
Bp. Seraphim (and every other Christian anti-death penalty advocate I’ve read), calls for society to “forgive our enemies” because Christ calls on us to forgive our enemies. I agree that I as an individual Christian am called to forgive my personal enemies, which I struggle to do.  (And of course in a future podcast we’ll have to unpack “What is the nature of forgiveness” and does it necessarily mean removal of consequences …)  But if we say the state must forgive because Christians are called to forgive, then we are also commanded to turn the other cheek and give to those who ask without question and take no thought for food, clothing or tomorrow in that same sermon. The question is do all or any of these commands extend to civil order? Should human society, regardless of belief in the gospel, be universally constrained to forgive the enemies of all human beings who have been violated by evil? Why should this only be applied to the death penalty?  Why then prisons at all if we are to forgive 70 times 7? It seems we are cherry picking from the commandments and applying them according to some vague (or at least unarticulated) principle of Church/State relations.  Is the State called to forgive every evildoer in the name of the Christians within the State who were not personally violated by them? Should secular civil authority govern and order itself according to the law of Christ as applied to individual Christians?  I think not for two reasons:
The Theocracy of Judaism is fulfilled in the Church, not the secular State.  The call of the Gospel is ultimately to persons, not institutions. Living according to the gospel requires belief in it, not MERELY following legislation.  That said, I believe it is entirely appropriate to legislate against evil for the same reason Noah was commanded to institute the death penalty: because we are created in the image of God. The God ordained order of the State, at some level, reflects the image of God in that it exists for the “good of society” which calls for defining good and evil through civil law. However, the question at hand is, “is the death penalty intrinsically evil”?  Even if civil institutions were filled with Christians, those institutions would still have to deal with the fallen order and unbelieving members of society who indeed do evil…which begs the question: What does forgiveness look like and what is really demanded by it if Christians were the sole civil rulers? 
In Old Testament Judaism God dealt with human beings on a revelatory moral and religious level, but the Jews at that time had no knowledge of the fullness of the revelation of Christ.  Judaism, even if it is viewed as a shadow of the Gospel, was still God ordained.  Apart from its unique religious rituals, it was a revelation to the world of universally applicable moral and ethical precepts, and it included the death penalty. I would conclude that these aspects of the Law of God, which included capital punishment apart from the fullness of knowledge and belief in the Gospel of Christ, is still a functional way to order a non-Gospel based human society.  The modern world may disagree with the Bible about WHO should be put to death for what, and how.  But from Genesis to Revelation the overarching principles of law and order that include justice, fear of consequence, punishment and restraint that deal with evil are universally recognized to be necessary for civil order, even by atheists. 
This brings me to my second point. As I read it, nowhere in the New Testament do we see the State held to the standard of the Gospel in how it orders society. 
Since its establishment, the Church has existed and functioned within many political systems. We don’t find the New Testament writers confusing the roles of the Church and state in the lives of human beings, probably because the state in NT times was either indifferent of hostile to the Church. Thus the apostles held up no political system as “the one true gospel party”, and Christians were constrained to pray for all civil leaders, godly or not. Jesus Himself told Pilate as he was condemning Him that he had no power except that which was given him from God. In Romans 13, St. Paul, who suffered unjustly under both Jewish and Roman law, teaches that the state has the God ordained responsibility to punish the evil doer and even to exact capital punishment if it deems it necessary. St. Paul, in spite of the injustices he personally suffered, does not even deal with the possibility of civil law being unjustly administered. St. Paul does not seem to have an issue with the possibility of the State being in error or unjust at times between the parentheses of the loss of Paradise and the fulfillment of the Kingdom. Both he and Christ personally stood above the civil order and the injustice they suffered and in doing so personally transformed the world around them without legislating “Christian values” through governmental systems.  While the Church exists within the context of a state, it is interesting that the Church flourished the most when it had no state support or political influence for the first 300 years of its existence. 
So, next week we’ll talk about utopian societies, Church/state political systems, personal convictions, and why God ordained civil authority knowing human beings are imperfect.
Let me say if you want to mull all this over, there are transcripts of all these podcasts on the Steve the Builder page at Ancient Faith. And as always your comments and thoughts are welcome.


Thanks to Steve and Ancient Faith Radio:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/stevethebuilder/capital_punishment_part_3

Capital Punishment, Part 2 - Steve the Builder

In the second part of the series Steve discusses the Flood as the dividing line in human history in regard to the meaning of death, fear and capital punishment. Did the Mosaic Law abrogate the covenant with Noah? What do the atheist and the Christian have in common in regard to capital punishment? 

This is part two of the series on Capital punishment.  I’ve already received quite a bit of listener feedback (for and against) and I’ve not even gotten into the meat of the issue.  So before I begin, let me say this IS a work in progress.  I am already revising future podcasts and adding more material based on comments I’ve received, so it is kind of taking on a life of its own.  Depending on how it goes I may go through all my material and then do a Q and A and response to comments podcast at the end of the series.  The other thing I need to say is, I am not past changing my mind on this topic even though I’ve wrestled with it for years.  I’m too old and have changed my thinking too many times on too many important issues to be absolutely sure I have it all nailed down.

So…with that, I will say up front, I am going to deal with the issue from a Christian and atheistic perspective because both have anti-death penalty advocates and the arguments converge and diverge at different points worth exploring.  I am not going to deal with all the current manners of amorphous “spiritualities” that amount to ambiguous and often self contradictory philosophies and personal feelings and sentimentalities rather than a coherent world view about ultimate issues.  It is my experience that the well thought out Christian position against capital punishment generally expresses the general substance of the arguments of those who oppose it because they are loving, compassionate and “spiritual” but would not claim to be Christian.
So, let’s begin our walk through the issue.  To begin with, the question of capital punishment often is framed as:  restraint or deterrent versus retribution and punishment.  For the most part the argument about capital punishment whether one is religious or not, boils down to life in prison or execution and which is, from a moral or ethical perspective, more humane or just.
Some arguments will appeal to a utilitarian consideration regarding which is less economically burdensome and risky to society in some long run, but no one uses this argument exclusively.  Since the Christian (and even most humanistic atheists, though there are notable exceptions) do not believe that human life is ultimately defined by economic burden on society but by the intrinsic value of the human person. (This is not the place to get into the pro-abortion stance which amounts to human life defined by its convenience and burden on parents). But in the realm of the death penalty, very few people solely argue dollars and cents in decisions to preserve human life. On the other hand, in Arizona a jury just sentenced a serial killer to life in prison and when the verdict was announced the talk show phones lit up. Several of the pro-death penalty folks who called in yesterday said, “I don’t want MY tax dollars keeping that piece of garbage alive.”  I don’t know how many of those people would have claimed to be Christians, however.  That’s about all I’m going to say about the economics of the death penalty because I don’t think it is truly a fundamental issue for anyone. But if it can be shown its cheaper to keep someone alive or to kill him, it is just a bonus point for the sake of argument because well, money matters to us. 
So on to the more fundamental issues.  If one is a Christian (or generically “spiritual”), it seems like the answer to capital punishment is simple: the gospel (or gods, or THE God) are ultimately about mercy, forgiveness and affirmation of life, hence capital punishment is antithetical to what God is or wants for human beings. Thus, “life in prison” is then the only permissible humane restraint in order to avoid death as a consequence of a capital crime.  But I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not quite that simple, nor is God quite that easily or simply defined.  It doesn’t matter how you define God or the gods, God may be love but God has been intimately involved with death since the beginning of the human race.  We cannot deal with the nature of God without dealing with a definition of the nature and meaning of death because ultimately if God defines all things, who God is (or for the atheist, what the universe is) defines what death is for the human being.
So, can a spiritual person who believes in a loving God view death as restraint? It is true that life in prison restrains the evil doer. But then so does death. When you really get down to it, “life in prison” is really “living in prison until one dies”.  So the question is not “life or death”, it is really about “life until a death by legislation or death by natural causes.” 
Here is where the definition of death needs some precision. Both the Christian and the atheist know two things: We ALL know (both Christians and atheists) that people do evil things, and some do grossly evil things.  And we all know everyone and everything dies.  How we explain those two things and their relationship is the key to everything else about the universe. A coherent theology of a fall, or a coherent philosophy of the nature of matter is the key to understanding both evil and death. From a Christian perspective, the scriptures tell us that death is our ultimate enemy and a consequence of the fall. The Orthodox Church clearly teaches that death is unnatural, even death by “natural causes”.  Death is foreign to our nature, we were not created to die, and nature was not intended to be our enemy and kill us.  ANY death whether by an act of evil, mandated by laws of man or a consequence of the laws of nature is unnatural for the human being.  According to the Fathers of the Church, death and evil are inter-connected.  Death IS the ultimate constraint on evil. Death is actually called by the Fathers “the blessed curse” and it was added to humanity because it cuts short the days of man so he cannot wax grossly evil. In the days of Noah, God cut the lifespan of man short to 120 years to cut off the human decline into ever more pervasive evil.  The Old Testament is replete with stories of both God and man dealing out death to the grossly immoral and ungodly. Contrary to Bp. Seraphim’s division of the God of the two Testaments, the Christian must deal with the same God of Moses in the New Testament.
A recent document called “The Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church”  http://orthodoxeurope.org/page/3/14.aspx which was signed by all the Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church summarizes the Church’s historical view of the death penalty in the Old and New Testaments and subsequent “Church age”.  It says,
“The death penalty as a special punishment was recognised in the Old Testament. There are no indications to the need to abolish it in the New Testament or in the (capital “T”) Tradition or in the historical legacy of the Orthodox Church either.”
In the same document it mentions that under the influence of the Church capital punishment in the period from the mid-18th century to the 1905 Revolution in Russia, it was applied on very rare occasions.  It is notable that Prince Vladimir abolished the death penalty in Kiev when he converted to Christianity in the 10th Century. But I found the Russian Church’s bishop’s statement interesting because it seems to indicate that Holy Russia, in spite of Prince Vladimir’s influence, was not uniformly anti-death penalty across its 900 year history.
So, back to the original point…is there a difference between the God of the “Law” of the Old Testament and the God of the “Gospel” in the New… or perhaps more accurately, does God deal with the human race differently in the two Testaments?
I think part of the answer is in Acts 5, shortly after the establishment of the Church.  This is the story about how God immediately strikes Ananaias dead before the congregation for lying about his tithe. When his wife, Sapphira shows up, the Apostle Peter asks her a loaded question which she answers wrong, and he tells her that her husband was struck dead for lying to God and the same fate awaited her for participating in her husband’s lie and she is struck dead too. While it was God who did the killing, St. Peter did not pray to God for mercy, clemency or life in prison for either of them.  And St Luke records that the result was great fear came upon the Church and all who heard about it.  I take that to be biblical language for “public capital punishment for lying to the apostles and the Church was a deterrent”.
In one sense death is indeed fearful, but it is also referred to in our readings for the Saints during the Vigil services as a blessing: God takes the righteous early so that they will be spared the evil days to come. So the real question surrounding capital punishment is not “death or no death”, the question is “death by whose hands” and “when” and “for what purpose”? In the final analysis both the atheist and religious person will agree, death is inevitable, we will all die.  How death comes to anyone is at the bottom line inequitable and a tragedy, whether a person dies because a god personally killed them, or of cancer, a random accident or even if it is at the hands of an imperfect juridical system that seeks to maintain a “civil society”. 
So, according to the Christian faith and its scriptures death is a mixed curse or mixed blessing depending on how you look at it.  So when we consider capital punishment as a form of death, we have to look at it as more than a one dimensional evil. The concepts of death as penalty, or as just retribution, deterrent and consequence did not come from the gods of paganism or from atheistic philosophy. 
If we look at the biblical history of capital crime beginning with Cain (though one could argue the first human capital crime was Adam and Eve’s sin since it resulted in death)…God’s response to Cain in Genesis 4 was essentially solitary confinement and a warning to the rest of humanity to not participate in his murderous ways lest God take vengeance on Cain’s murderer sevenfold.  But murder became part of human society anyway.  In Genesis 6 God exacts capital punishment on the whole human race which had become exceedingly evil except for Noah and his family.  In Genesis 9, after the flood the “culture of death” comes to full fruition on the earth.  Man is allowed to kill and eat the animals and the animals will now fear man, but more importantly God now requires capital punishment for murder. 
There is a lot to think about there, but most interesting statement for our discussion is in Genesis 9:6: “ Whoever sheds man’s blood, By man will his blood be shed, FOR IN THE IMAGE OF GOD HE MADE MAN”  The rationale FOR the death penalty is exactly the rationale used against it by most modern Christians, that we cannot kill someone because they are in the image of God. It seems to me that God is saying to Noah, “I require that you kill the murder because he has violated the image of God in his fellow humans, and perhaps more importantly within himself.” This predates the Mosaic Law and seems to initiate a new era that will be the way the universe works from then on.  The promise to not destroy man by a flood and the status of man and the animals is still true… why not capital punishment? It seems we have a lot of unpacking to do. 
So we fast forward to Moses.  Capital punishment is undeniably commanded by God to His people under the theocracy of Judaism.  There are arguments that capital punishment under Mosaic Law, though it seems administered for slight or even non-offenses by modern standards, had more stringent boundaries and checks and balances of justice than the surrounding pagan nations.  That may be true, but it does not shed any light on the issue at hand…why capital punishment AT ALL? 
I think we could legitimately ask, IF Israel was a type of the Church and a foreshadowing of the ministry of Christ, why didn’t God tell them: passive resistance to evil, no death penalty, no armies, negotiate everything and let evil run over you…you are to be a type of the forgiving, Crucified Savior.  Not to second guess God or His powers and ability to bring good from evil, but it seems to me that He could have gotten Jesus born of a virgin just as easily in that scenario as the one we find in the Scriptures if He so willed.  But we have the reality that God commanded death, both on an individual level and a national level, and He Himself killed the disobedient and unrepentant, and through His permitting the Assyrians and Babylonians to punish idolatrous Israel was responsible for a lot of collateral damage to the innocent and righteous within Israel. 
I have heard it argued that even though God commanded capital punishment that it was rarely carried out and reconciliation and forgiveness were more the focus of Mosaic justice in practice.  That might be true, I don’t know…but it seems to beg the question that perhaps it is precisely because they disobeyed God’s law is why Israel was idolatrous, spiritually adulterous and immoral and had so many evil kings.
So, it seems clear to me that fear and death, and the death penalty are not just a Mosaic institutions but universal principles under which the cosmos and the human race now functions because of the nature of mankind after the fall.  The Mosaic Law foreshadows the Gospel and yet demands capital punishment.  And if we think about it, it is through capital punishment unjustly administered through both Moses and the Gentiles that our salvation comes and through which one thief is saved,… but more on that later.
So, next week, civil authority, secular laws, the Church and the State, and utopian society.  Until then, I welcome comments, suggestions, challenges and clarifications on what I’ve presented so far.  There’s a lot more left to come… thanks for joining me.  See you next week on Steve the Builder.


Thanks to Steve and Ancient Faith Radio:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/stevethebuilder/capital_p

Capital Punishment, Part 1 - Steve the Builder

Steve begins a four part series on "Capital Punishment". In Part One he chronicles his work with emotionally disturbed children and the beginning of his shift from radical pacifism to a reconsideration of the death penalty.


I spent most of my high school years and part of my early adult life as a radical pacifist. I registered as a concientious objector during the Vietnam War.  I was anti war, anti self defense, anti death penalty, and when I became a member of a Bible Church, I gathered scriptures to justify all my convictions.  Years later, when I finally got to a point that I could be brutally honest with myself, it was about the 60’s and being cool with my friends in the art department and a “Jeremiah” to the “establishment” in my Church …and it had more to do with Woodstock sentimentality adorned with scriptures than true personal conviction. My hazy philosophical views started shifting when I began living in the real world and not in the dazed and confused world of the hippie subculture and seeing the world from penthouse view of the ivory tower of theoretical theological speculation culture of my protestant seminary.
I know for certain the concrete shift in my thinking happened when I took a job running a residential treatment center for severely emotionally disturbed boys who had tendencies toward uncontrollable rage or calculated sociopathic violence. Soon after I arrived, the teacher in our self contained classroom on campus called me from the office because one of the boys had gotten angry and picked up a baseball bat and was demolishing the classroom. I was all of 110 pounds and despised athletics, and it showed.  I opened the door of the classroom and Terry looked at me and shook the bat at me.  “You come near me you (blank blank) and I’ll bash your head in!”  The rest of the kids stood outside the door and watched to see what I would do. 
Non-violence and pacifistic non-resistance might make good classroom discussion and arm chair philosophizing, but being faced with being beaten to death with a baseball bat by a 180 pound hyperactive kid with rage issues and an IQ of 65 is not an abstract discussion question on an essay test, it is real.  I was too new at the job to make the wise decision to just call the police (who I later found out in other situations don’t believe in passive non-resistance), so I went in the room and started trying to talk him down.  I got close to him and he raised the bat over his head to hit me. He was big and slow and I managed to get under the bat and tackle him and I took him down.  Fortunately for me he didn’t try to wrestle with me.  He got up and ran away like he always did after a physical confrontation… and he always returned by suppertime because he got hungry and was afraid of the dark.  The public confrontation laid a foundation for my reputation as the director of the home.  But it also laid a foundation for my shifting view of the world.
The incident was told and retold by the kids over the next few days.  It eventually became mythical over the next five years. Because I’m half Chinese, the apocryphal story that was always told to the new kids who entered the program eventually took on Bruce Lee fighting Chuck Norris proportions. The fear of being wheel house kicked into the year of the Ox kept most of the new kids from some violent behaviors, at least while I was on campus. Once a new kid decided to take me on and took a swing at my wife with a pool cue. Fortunately there were several staff people in the house at the time and we managed to restrain him. The next week, I signed up for street fighting classes at a karate studio. I had finally and pragmatically faced the fact that fear of retributive violence was a deterrent at least for some people.  Someone once told me, “Principles are what you have until you have real needs”.  The world of the treatment center was a microcosm of the fallen universe.  I lived with kids who were damaged, some perhaps incurably.  I watched a kid beat another one so mercilessly his calculating coldness and brutality was frightening. (I truly believe he is probably a sociopathic serial killer by now.)  The rules and culture of the treatment program was also a microcosm of how society deals with fallen human beings.  I realized that radical pacifism in the end is the open door to anarchy and proliferation of evil.  In a societal structure if there is no fear of retribution, innocent people WILL become victims.  Fear of punishment protects the innocent from the evildoer.  So, I could have, out of pacifistic conviction, let Terry beat me to death, but when faced with a snap decision the visceral response was, out of love for 12 other kids and a teacher, I could not stand by and let him beat them to death.  It was my Woodstockian seminary classroom philosophy versus my gut.  Which was right? 
For the next few decades I wrestled with my position of being anti-death penalty.  Across the years I’ve mentally collected stories of all manner of human evil, heinous and horrific and perverted destruction of human lives.  Beneath the weight of the evil of the world, and through what I believe is the clear Biblical witness that human beings are indeed capable of unimaginable evil, I’ve changed my view on capital punishment. 
In August 1989,  the OCA 9th All American Council issued a statement against the death penalty based on an affirmation of life, the inhumanity of execution and the call of the gospel.  In a pastoral letter published in “The Orthodox Church” magazine in January 1999, Bp Seraphim, the OCA Bishop of Ottowa and Canada, said:
“I am saddened whenever I hear Orthodox Christians defend capital punishment, even though I know that there are, were, and always will be various and opposing opinions in our Church, and that these opinions may be justifiable within their own systems of logic. I cannot square capital punishment with any of my Christian experience. The Old Testament may be quoted, but I do not see it in the New. I cannot square it with the introduction to the Ten Commandments. I cannot square it with the Gospel. I cannot square it with the words of the “Our Father.” I cannot square it with “The Beatitudes.” I cannot square it with my knowledge of our canonical tradition. I cannot square it with my knowledge of the teaching of the Fathers. I cannot square it with my reading of any one of our saints. And most certainly I cannot square it with the teaching of Saint Silouan, that the real test of a Christian is being able to forgive one’s enemies. Since we Christians stand for repentance, and are called to live this daily, it is perhaps our responsibility to help the persons incarcerated for serious crimes to move in that direction also. Perhaps we Orthodox Christians should at last take seriously our call to visit those in prison, to become qualified for a prison ministry, even, and to bring some hope, consolation, and witness of something better to these persons who otherwise could well die without knowing anything else except misery. We always say “Talk is cheap.” Perhaps it’s time we proved we are Christians by doing something instead of philosophizing.”
I find it personally ironic that Bp Seraphim says “talk is cheap” and Christians should visit prisons instead of supporting the death penalty.  It was because of and exactly the realities of my involvement with such ministries that my philosophical views of capital punishment have changed. Since my days at the Boy’s Home I’ve hired and worked with ex-everythings, and have a former drug addicted employee who is currently on death row for the brutal murder of his mother and girlfriend.  These reflections are not written from a safe distance from human evil.  They are because I’ve been in the trenches with it in various ministries for the last 40 years. I wholeheartedly agree with him that we should bring the hope of the gospel to those in prison, but I do not believe that automatically translates to being against the death penalty.
So, I’ll say up front that this discussion is not an attack on Bp. Seraphim, but his statement can be viewed as the creed of the anti-death penalty position.  His statement succinctly summarizes the arguments against capital punishment, not just within the Orthodox Church, but within the broader Christian tradition. His statement and the one issued by the OCA’s All American Council might lead one to believe the Orthodox Church uniformly and universally stands opposed to capital punishment, or at least leans heavily in that direction and those who support it lie on the fringes of the Tradition. But it is interesting that the Coptic Orthodox Church of the Diocese of the South on its website supports capital punishment.  St. Theodore the Studite in the 8th century argued against capital punishment for heresy but supported it administered by the state for capital crimes. I am not a Church historian but I think I’m safe to say that at the height of “Byzantium” (and I would also conjecture in “Holy Russia” in its heyday, and in every other “Orthodox country”) where the Church has had the most influence on the State in matters civil, the States have practiced capital punishment for capital crimes.  I am not in a position to judge who is more holy in regard to capital punishment, the OCA or the Coptics, America or Byzantium, Bp. Seraphim or St. Theodore, but it is clear historically that the issue has more wiggle room within the Church than Bp Seraphim implies.



Thanks to Steve and Ancient Faith Radio:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/stevethebuilder/capital_punishment_part_1

Quote by Socrates ~ Death

To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.”
― Socrates


thanks to:

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/259632-to-fear-death-gentlemen-is-no-other-than-to-think

Miracles or Deceptions? -- Steve the Builder

I don’t know when my skepticism of miracles began.  I was raised hearing Biblical stories of miracles and I never doubted their authenticity or reality.  I still don’t. I don’t buy into the Jesus Seminar deconstruction of the Gospel miracles or the scientific speculations of the parting of the Red Sea etcetera etcetera etcetera.  The rationalistic and scientific explanations always seemed more contrived to me than the original story as it is told in Scripture. 
So, in 1969 when I was seventeen,  I “converted” from Catholicism to the Jesus Movement and shortly after that I got involved in the churches of Christ which is a cessationist tradition. They believe that the power to perform miracles through human agency ceased when the last Apostle died, though God is still capable of effecting one directly. 
I always felt like an outsider in the Jesus Movement. I prayed for the gift of tongues when all my friends were speaking in tongues, but I wasn’t willing to fake it. So, I never spoke in tongues. I would sit on the floor as a long haired, glassy eyed Bible study leader talked about audibly hearing the voice of God leading him to do this or that and everyone would close their eyes and raise a palm toward heaven mumbling “Thank you Jesus, praise Jesus, thank you Lord”.  Even though I also had long hair and John Lennon glasses, I felt faithless and like a judgmental jerk because I was sitting there thinking, “C’mon people, this guy has dropped more acid than a pool cleaning service, he’s so fried and wouldn’t know the voice of God from a K-mart blue light special announcement.”  I remember one story in particular about a church picnic football game where someone knew a friend who was at the game where someone got tackled and had a compound fracture of his leg (the bone was STICKING OUT!) and the players gathered around, laid hands on him and prayed and the bone WENT BACK IN! and THEN he got up and played the rest of the game with no ill effects!  I never asked why 90% of the miracles happened to people who knew someone who was “there” when it happened, but they were never ”here”.  Not that I thought they were consciously lying (after all, why would they lie?), but I just couldn’t bring myself to believe them for some reason. 
Over the years now and then, I prayed for an undeniable miracle to happen before my eyes so I would not be so doubting and perhaps even faithless. By the time I became an Episcopalian at about age 40, I had heard dozens of second hand and a few firsthand accounts of miracles but still had not personally witnessed or experienced anything that was undeniable as a divine intervention like a polio victim being straightened or a blind man seeing instantaneously.  I’ve heard lots of the more garden variety of miracles like cancer disappearing, people getting “premonitions”, survival stories and “wild coincidences”, all attributed to divine intervention.  But the problem for me was that most “garden variety miracles” were things that happen even to unbelievers, but were attributed to Christians’ prayers or faith in God.  It always seemed to me to be somewhat triumphalistic when atheists experienced spontaneous remission of cancer, unexplainable recoveries and wild coincidences too. Over the years I could not force myself to rationalize a miracle out of an unexplainable event, or some “normal” anamoly of science or medicine that happens to some people regardless of religious affiliation or even belief in God or a god.
So I had left the rationalistic churches of Christ and had been reading the great Mystics of the Church and was more open to the possibility of divine intervention than ever in my life. I joined the Episcopal Church and the priest at our parish was into the charismatic healing movement.  He was big on the Vineyard ministries and Francis MacNutt, a Roman Catholic faith healer.  One weekend we had a “healing event” which featured Francis MacNutt, a local Vineyard pastor and our parish’s “healing ministry team”.  A couple hundred people showed up for the mini-Benny Hinn fest.  During the course of the night people got whacked on the head, slain in the spirit, fell down, cried… all the usual things you see on TV.  It seemed like it was almost scripted it was so “usual”.  Several people in our parish came and were “healed”.  A child’s leg grew, a man’s club foot “felt like it was getting better”, various illnesses and traumas were removed. During the session, a middle aged man in shorts and a short sleeved shirt came forward for healing. He twitched uncontrollably and looked around the room as if he was surrounded by Ninja assassins.  He had a red, scabby skin condition, perhaps a case of severe eczema, as close to looking like a leper as you could imagine. The healing team sat him in a chair up on the altar area, and they all gathered around him and laid hands on him (on his clothing, actually, no latex gloves for faith healers). One woman on the team stood behind him. Her breasts sat on top of his head as she laid her hands on his chest from behind. She had her eyes closed, her face raised to heaven and spoke in tongues. Every once in a while someone on the “healing team” would ask him, “Do you feel the Spirit moving?” The man would say, “Yes, yes…” then timidly, “….I think so.” My unbeliever friend Joe who was looking for a miracle too leaned over and hissed loud enough for half a pew all around us to hear, “Of course he does, I’d feel the spirit too if her ***** were on my head.”  The man walked off the stage, still twitching, still scabby and we never saw him again. Four weeks after the” healings” no one talked about our members who were “healed”… the still clubbed foot, nor the surgery to correct the child’s short leg, nor the ongoing treatments for various ailments.  So, the six years of Vineyard and Francis McNutt ministry experiences in the Episcopal Church only reinforced my skepticism.  I vacillated between feeling faithless and like a wet blanket on the tongues of fire of the Holy Spirit, and feeling smugly superior to the “healers” that I perceived as deluded, or egoists, or marginal and weak and trying to fit into an elite club in the parish.
Then I became Orthodox.  And I found out the Orthodox Church believes in miracles.  I mean, it REALLY believes in them. The Church has “wonderworking” saints, icons, relics, oil, and elders. The Holy Spirit is alive and well in the Church. So “BAM!” my issues with the miraculous just got kicked up several notches.  It seemed I had to buy into all kinds of miraculous occurrences that I’d never heard of in my Protestant experiences: icons that weep myrrh, dead people that don’t rot and smell like roses, relics that heal people, dead saints that wear out the shoes put on their feet, fire that spontaneously appears and lights candles on Pascha night in the Holy Sepulchre.  And, again… I heard the stories (why would people lie?), and I know just about everyone believes them because well… just about everyone believes them. If someone doesn’t, they sure don’t speak up, at least not in public. But like before, I’ve never seen any of it with my own eyes.  And my feeling of being a fringe dweller and a curmudgeonly faithless jerk kicked up several notches as I read and listened to people tell stories about this wonderworking icon or the oil they were anointed with that healed them and I felt like I had to play “pious” and mumble “Thank God”, which seemed to me to be the Orthodox version of the lifted palm to heaven breathily chanting “Thank you Jesus”. 
I finally connected those two dots and I figured out the real issue for me. It was not that I disbelieved the possibility of miracles, it was that I doubted the judgment and discernment of the people who were claiming or reporting them.  How DO we know we should be thanking Jesus or God for what we think we saw or experienced?  Just because it was “miraculous” doesn’t make it “from God”.  But I knew that from the Bible.  But even with that clearly in the Scriptures, I never saw anyone in 40 years of Church experience question whether or not something miraculous within a Church was of God or Satan. 
So when I delved further into the miraculous in Orthodoxy, I discovered something I really liked about Orthodoxy: The Church actually encourages us to view the miraculous with caution even if individual Orthodox people don’t.  It teaches us to be skeptical and to be discerning of alleged miracles because it takes seriously the Gospel and the warnings of Christ and the apostles of the possibility of demonic delusion and “lying wonders”. 
My best friend (who is also a former church of Christ miracle skeptic) was at an Orthodox summer camp where icons started weeping.  Even though he called me the night it happened, the news of it didn’t spread like the spiritual wildfire one would think, and when the priest in charge of the camp was asked about what it meant he just said, we don’t know what it means, we’ll see what fruit it bears.  I liked that a lot. Of course “fruit bearing” can also be a tough thing to discern.  It assumes the spiritual qualifications to judge fruit. A couple years ago I heard of a “monastery” in Texas that had a phony “weeping icon” that drew thousands of pilgrims and helped them raise hundred of thousands of dollars and basically funded their monastic pedophilia ring.  I wondered how could thousands of pious people and even clergy be duped over a period of years?  If one is a skeptic of these things, by the reaction one gets sometimes it seems that gullibility is a fruit of the Spirit.
So in my area recently it was announced that there was a travelling priest with a piece of the “True Cross” WITH the blood of Christ on it.  He is from Cyprus (or several other places depending on who I talked to).  He was appearing at a local monastery and then at a local parish doing healing services with it.  (I didn’t go, it sounded too much like Steve Martin’s “Leap of Faith” the way it was promoted). The story was he was given the relic by a woman who handed it to him and told him God told her to give it to him. Another story is that his mother gave it to him. Both stories are from people who claimed to have talked to him personally. I think this is how some hagiography gets written… Anyway, he eventually discovered its healing powers and began travelling doing healing. The relic is embedded in a heavy, large gold cross and when he puts it on people’s bodies it “sticks” to the places that need healing.  He can remove his hand from it and it stays put, defying gravity.  Hundreds of people flocked to the monastery and then to the parish for healing.  There are things that I was told that sent my skeptic meter into the red zone. One thing was that he seemed to “know” things.  But according to the Fathers, “knowing things” isn’t always a good thing.
About 20 years ago a group of buddies and I paid five bucks to have our Tarot read by a street gypsy one Sunday night on Mill Avenue, just for grins.  As she turned over card after card, she revealed my life… way too specifically to be mere “astrological coincidences”.  I didn’t know how she did that until I became Orthodox years later.  You see, the demons know what “is”. They cannot tell the future, but they can reveal real events that have happened to people and what they are doing.  She clearly knew what I was doing. In the writings of the desert Fathers, there are dozens of stories of monastics who were drawn into delusion because they thought they were clairvoyant, but in reality they were being fed information by the demons so they would fall through pride and their desire for followers and admiration.  The stories usually go that everyone around them was fooled and drawn away from the faith by the deception except for one person who saw the imperceptible signs of delusion and demonic captivity.  So, as St. Ignatius warns, not even clairvoyance whether it is a gypsy or an “elder” is a sure sign of godliness, it can be demonic manipulation.
Anyway, those who attended the “True Cross” healing sessions said they were moving. They were amazed.  They were uplifted.  They “felt the grace”.  OK, so you felt something you thought was “grace”. So does that make it of God?  No. It just means that’s how some individuals perceived it.  Am I willing to accept the witness of someone “feeling the grace” as affirmation of the presence of the Holy Spirit? Frankly, no.  (And as an aside, I would not even accept MY OWN feelings as affirmation of the presence of the Holy Spirit. I’ve felt a lot of things in my life that turned out to be passions rather than piety. I’ve had plenty of spiritual feelings and leadings in my life and after living the with consequences of acting on them, I hope to never have one again.) The Scriptures and the Fathers say that Satan sends a strong delusion into the Church to lead people astray.  Of course the “most convincing demonic miracles” would happen in the Church.  Satan appears as an angel of light, not like Batman. Why send a strong delusion to unbelievers when a weak delusion will do the trick, save the real work for those who have faith. 
So, as for me, I’m perfectly content to not praise God prematurely and sit back and wait twenty or thirty years to see what kind of fruit some miracle brings forth. In the meantime if God wants to kick the skepticism out of me, I’m sure He knows where to kick me and how hard.  The thing is, I don’t feel deprived of any “spiritual joy” nor do I believe the Gospel any less because I am skeptical of miracles, even ones affirmed by thousands of pious people.  I am content to believe if God did a miracle in someone’s life it doesn’t matter if I believe it or not.  It is what it is and it is between that person and God. We’ll see what fruit it bears in the long run.  It doesn’t make me any more in awe of God or any more or less faithful one way or the other.  I do know that when it comes to miracles, there is safety in caution and dire consequences for gullibility.  There is a big difference between attributing everything to God, or everything to Satan, and being unwilling to make pronouncements one way or the other because one doesn’t trust one’s own judgment nor the judgment of other people to discern the difference.  Of course I realize that I could be wrong and its my own fault if I am missing out on a blessing because of my “rationalism”. But, I’ve never been one to go out of my way to seek out special or extraordinary “blessings”. I believe mine come in my day to day walk with God, all I have to do is pay closer attention.
I’ve always liked G.K. Chesterton’s take on miracles.  He sums up my thoughts very nicely. He says:
No religion that thinks itself true bothers about the miracles of another religion. It denies the doctrines of the religion; it denies its morals; but it never thinks it worth while to deny its signs and wonders.
And why not? Because these things some men have always thought possible. Because any wandering gipsy may have psychical powers. Because the general existence of a world of spirits and of strange mental powers is a part of the common sense of all mankind. The Pharisees did not dispute the miracles of Christ; they said they were worked by devilry. The Christians did not dispute the miracles of Mahomed. They said they were worked by devilry. The Roman world did not deny the possibility that Christ was a God. It was far too enlightened for that.
In so far as the Church did (chiefly during the corrupt and sceptical eighteenth century) urge miracles as a reason for belief, her fault is evident…. It is not that she asked men to believe anything so incredible; it is that she asked men to be converted by anything so commonplace. What matters about a religion is not whether it can work marvels like any ragged Indian conjurer, but whether it has a true philosophy of the Universe. The Romans were quite willing to admit that Christ was a God. What they denied was the He was the God - the highest truth of the cosmos. And this is the only point worth discussing about Christianity.
And I thank God nothing more or less than this is required of me to be truly Orthodox.



thanks to Steve and Ancient Faith Radio:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/stevethebuilder/miracles_or_deceptions