Why I Support Capital Punishment

3/22/2018 Why I Support Capital Punishment
Why I Support Capital Punishment
FEBRUARY 21, 2017 | Charles Colson
Lightstock
Editors’ note: Last month a unanimous jury sentenced Dylann Roof to death
(https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/why-christians-should-support-
rehabilitation-for-the-charleston-church-shooter) for killing nine black
churchgoers as they attended Bible study in a Charleston, South Carolina,
church. The reaction to Roof’s sentencing has rekindled discussions—even
among victims’ families—about whether Christians should support capital
punishment. To consider both sides of the debate, TGC is presenting personal
essays on the death penalty by Matthew Arbo, assistant professor of biblical
and theological studies at Oklahoma Baptist University, and by the late Charles
W. Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship.
Why I Oppose Capital Punishment
(http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/why-i-oppose-capital-
punishment) (Matthew Arbo)
As 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 do, 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.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/why-i-support-capital-punishment/ 1/13
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 the judicial
system to take a human life. Then as I became a Christian, I was confronted with
the reality of Jesus’s 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
eyewitnesses. I questioned whether the circumstantial evidence on which most
are sentenced today in fact meets this standard of proof. I still have grave
reservations about the way in which capital punishment is administered in the
United States, and I still do question whether it is a deterrent. (In fact, I remain
convinced it’s not a general deterrent.) But my views have changed, and I now
favor capital punishment, at least in principle, but only in extreme cases when
no other punishment can satisfy the demands of justice.
Mercy Requires Justice
The reason 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 (“law of the talion”) served as a restraint, a limitation, to ensure the
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’s 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 he set aside all requirements of
civil law. Further, 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”), the
pardon didn’t extend to eliminating the consequences of his crime (“We are
being justly punished, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds”).
“What about mercy?” one may be 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
deserve. To be punished, however severely, because we indeed deserve it, as C.
S. Lewis observed (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HU5NG6S?
tag=thegospcoal-20), is to be treated with dignity as human beings created in
God’s image. Conversely, to abandon the criteria of righteous and just
punishment, as Lewis also pointed out, is to abandon all criteria for
punishment. Indeed, mercy extended to offenders whose guilt is certain yet
ignored creates a moral travesty that, over time, helps pave the way for
collapse of the entire social order. This is essentially the argument of Romans
13. Romans 12 concludes with a proscription of personal retribution, yet 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, authorities aren’t performing
their God-appointed responsibility in society. Paul’s teaching in Romans 13
squares with his experience. Testifying before Festus, he certifies: “If . . . I am
guilty of doing anything deserving death, I do not refuse to die” (Acts 25:11).
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 anyone could possibly believe he didn’t commit those unspeakably
barbaric crimes. 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 is a case in
point—when no other response is appropriate, no other punishment sufficient
for the deliberate savagery of the crime.
The issue boils down ultimately to just deserts. Indeed, just punishment is a
thread running through the whole Bible. Moreover, there is divinely instituted
tension 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 disturbed by sin.
Purification, one of the most central of biblical themes, reveals to us both the
temporal and eternal perspectives on humanity. 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.
Need for Moral Accountability
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. We really have reached a
point where the Menendez brothers plead for mercy—and get it!—because they
are orphans, after acknowledging 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 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 been guarded for generations. 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 (https://www.amazon.com/Body-Charles-W-
Colson/dp/0849935792?tag=thegospcoal-20). I think of Bob Williams in
Nebraska and Johnny Cockrum in Texas. I have a heavy heart as well because I
don’t believe the system administers criminal justice fairly. It is merely symbolic
justice to execute 25 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
system’s flaws, I’ve come to believe 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 (Num. 35:31, 33).
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. In the case of involuntary manslaughter, deliverance from the
avenger’s hand occurred. In the case of murder, the convicted criminal was put
to death. Personally, I still doubt the death penalty is a general deterrent—and
strong evidence suggests it’s not likely to be a deterrent when it’s 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’ll 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, since 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?
God’s Non-Negotiable Standard
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, but to balance the scales of moral justice that 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. And undergirding the
biblical sanctions against murder 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 God’s image that capital
punishment for premeditated murder was to be a perpetual obligation. To kill a
person was tantamount to killing God in effigy. The Noahic covenant (Gen. 9)
antedates Israel and the Mosaic code; it transcends Old Testament law per se
and mirrors ethical legislation 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 is called on to articulate standards of biblical justice, even when it
may be unpopular. Capital justice, I’ve 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.
This adapted essay was used by permission of Prison Fellowship
(https://www.prisonfellowship.org/).
Charles W. Colson was the founder and chairman Prison Fellowship and Prison
Fellowship International, the world's largest outreach to prisoners, ex-
prisoners, crime victims, and their families.
TAGS
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT • CRIME • DEATH PENALTY • ETHICS
‘The Jesus Storybook Bible’ Turns
10: The Story Behind the Bestseller
FEBRUARY 20, 2017 | Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra
A R T S & C U LT U R E
Sally Lloyd-Jones, author of the bestselling Jesus Storybook Bible
(https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Storybook-Bible-Every-
Whispers/dp/0310708257/?tag=thegospcoal-20), never wanted to write a
children’s Bible.
But after a year of struggling to find work as a children’s author, she wasn’t in
the financial position to turn down Christian publisher Zondervan when they
asked for a new Bible.
“I needed the money,” she said.
So Lloyd-Jones started in on a story Bible that would take three years of work
and a mountain of editorial challenges. Gradually, she fell in love with it, and so
did everyone else. Over the last decade, The Jesus Storybook Bible has sold 2.5
million copies, been translated into 33 languages, and spun off an audio
(http://www.sallylloyd-jones.com/books/jesus-storybook-bible/animated-dvds-
vol1/) and video (http://www.sallylloyd-jones.com/books/jesus-storybook-
bible/animated-dvds-vol1/) version, a curriculum (http://www.sallylloyd-
jones.com/books/jesus-storybook-bible/curriculum-kit/), and an adult book
(http://www.sallylloyd-jones.com/books/the-story-of-gods-love-for-you/). The
book has picked up multiple awards
(https://www.harpercollinschristian.com/the-jesus-storybook-bible-reaches-
two-million-copies-sold/) and has been given 4.9 stars
(https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Storybook-Bible-Every-
Whispers/dp/0310708257) by more than 3,000 Amazon reviewers.
This March, The Jesus Storybook Bible turns 10, and Lloyd-Jones
(http://www.sallylloyd-jones.com/) is celebrating by kicking off a stories and
songs concert tour (https://www.storiesandsongstour.com/) with Amy Grant
and Compassion International.
Catching Fire
The Jesus Storybook Bible, which is often given at baby showers or baptisms,
has a fascinating birth story of its own.
Lloyd-Jones started somewhat reluctantly, prepared to do a good job and then
get on to the next thing.
“I’m four months into researching it, and I went to a party with a friend,” Lloyd-
Jones said. “A friend’s husband . . . told me the story of Martin Luther
translating the Bible into German. He said Luther’s advice was not to go into
the academy to listen to how the professors spoke; instead, go into a home and
listen to a mother speaking to her children.”
Lloyd-Jones was hooked. “I had a narrator,” she said. “I started writing like a
mother speaking to her child.”
That voice allowed her to put in quirky lines. For example, after God confused
the languages at the Tower of Babel, Lloyd-Jones wrote, “You could be saying
something like ‘Such a lovely morning!’ and then get a punch in the nose
because they thought you said, ‘Hush up, you’re boring!’”
Having a narrator also let her end each story with a glimpse of what is to come
(“I love cliffhangers”).
She listened to the sermons of Tim Keller and Martin Lloyd-Jones—“No relation;
it’s a fairly common name in Wales”—and took a course on progressive
revelation, the idea that God reveals himself in Scripture to humanity over time.
But it was C. S. Lewis who finally flipped the switch for Lloyd-Jones.
“I thought, What would C. S. Lewis do if he had to write a children’s Bible?” she
said. “The Holy Spirit used that. Before, I knew I would do a great job. But after,
[the vision was] something that was given to me. My imagination caught on
fire. At that point, I had to give it everything I could, no matter how long it
took.”
No longer reluctant, Lloyd-Jones threw herself into the work.
Battles
Getting the words on the page was only half the battle.
“Back then, I was unknown, and I had no power,” Lloyd-Jones said. She turned
in her manuscript to Zondervan, but it wasn’t greeted enthusiastically. The book
broke the mold in many ways, and both Lloyd-Jones and also her publisher
wrestled with how to move it forward.
“They questioned everything,” she said. One big sticking point: the sentence
fragments.
The Jesus Storybook Bible was written to be read aloud; the language on the
pages includes phrases such as “Nothing to hear. Nothing to feel. Nothing to
see.”
The publishing team told her to change them to complete sentences, so she
did. Until a friend said, “It’s not going to work. It’s turning into a big mess.”
Lloyd-Jones insisted on her fragments.
Another debate came over the illustrator. Lloyd-Jones, who majored in art
history and worked with illustrators in previous jobs, had a vision for how the
book needed to look.
Zondervan overrode her and picked an artist, who had to turn the project down
for health reasons. Then they overrode her and picked a second artist, but the
sales department rejected that one.
Finally, everyone headed back to the drawing board.
Lloyd-Jones had her eye on Jago (https://jago-silver.squarespace.com/), a
children’s book illustrator from Cornwall, England, with a pile of awards of his
own. She remembers sitting in a meeting, looking at a table full of “brown-
looking, old-fashioned art” where Jago’s work was “a bright spot.”
She was silent, worried that voicing her opinion (again) would turn the tide
against her. But then a young designer said, “I think Jago is right for this.”
“They all listened to her!” Lloyd-Jones said. “I was thrilled.”
The team asked Jago for samples, then talked among themselves about how
they’d like an unscrolled parchment to be the illustration on the first page, and
how a dotted or dashed spiral could represent the promise of blessing.
When Jago’s samples arrived, the first page showed hands holding a
manuscript. He had illustrated blessings with—you guessed it—pale swirls.
“The editor said, ‘Well, I don’t know how many more clues God has to give us to
pick Jago.’”
Lloyd-Jones credits much of the book’s success to the illustrator, whose
depictions of Jesus are “fresh and multiracial and so perfect.”
Then, about five years ago, a director at Zondervan told Lloyd-Jones he was
sorry for the resistance they put up. “He said, ‘I need to apologize to you,
because you knew what we had before we did,’” Lloyd-Jones said. “I thought
that was an incredible thing. I don’t know any publishers who do that.”
“If the Lord hadn’t been in charge, the book would never have come out. All the
pieces had to work together.”
Never-Ending Love
One of Lloyd-Jones’s best-known lines from the book is the
repeated description of God’s“never ending, never giving up, unbreaking,
always and forever love.”
It’s a line meant to counter the weight of expectation that Sunday school and
children’s Bibles can sometimes put on children, Lloyd-Jones said.
“When I was 6, I went to a Sunday school where I got the idea that it was all
rules and coloring inside the lines,” she said. “I hated it. I remember walking to
church holding my dad’s hand, and from the outside we looked lovely, but
inside I was making a vow that when I grew up, I was never going to church
again.”
When an editor suggested she add the story of Jesus in the temple as a boy,
with the moral to obey your parents, Lloyd-Jones “had a reaction like a tiger
with her cub: ‘I will not allow that in this Bible.’”
“If the Bible tells you all the things you have to do right, and I’m not doing it
right, God can’t be pleased with me,” Lloyd-Jones explains her 6-year-old
reasoning. “When I go to churches and schools and say, ‘How many people here
think you have to be good for God to love you?’ they’re raising their hands.
These are children who know the Bible stories.”
It’s the weight given to God’s love that has caused the relatively small amount
(http://www.challies.com/articles/the-bestsellers-the-jesus-storybook-bible) of
criticism for The Jesus Storybook Bible.
The book “emphasizes the primacy of God’s love in an imbalanced manner,”
New Testament professor Charles Lee Irons wrote (http://www.upper-
register.com/papers/jesus-storybook-bible-review.pdf). “[B]y completely
avoiding God’s judgment and by putting a deliberate emphasis on God’s love
for his children ‘no matter what,’ Lloyd-Jones distorts the character of God in a
way that, in the end, makes it logically impossible to believe that he is a God of
holiness, wrath, or judgment.”
But child psychologist Brent Bounds, who helped Lloyd-Jones write The Jesus
Storybook Bible curriculum, disagrees.
“Developmentally, it’s hard for a really young child to own their sin and realize
they need to be rescued,” he said. “Later, in adolescence, you realize what a
dark thing sin is.”
Life is made up of seasons, he said, and “kids at [a young] age are in a season
where we want them to understand the bigness of God, and the wonder of his
love, and to start getting a taste of the idea that God loves me and I’m part of a
huge story. I don’t think many kids get that.”
Donald Guthrie, professor of educational ministries at Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School (TEDS), doesn’t see any distortion of God’s character in Lloyd-
Jones’s bestselling work.
“The theme of the terrible lie [of sin]—which has everything to do with ‘we
don’t need to be saved’ or ‘I can save myself’—was carried pretty well,” he said.
The book shows “plenty of consequence to sin, plenty to build on as you take
your kiddo through other resources.”
Lloyd-Jones is firm: “You have to know you’re loved first. Rules don’t have the
power to change your heart; God’s love does.”
For Children and Adults
The book is aimed at children younger than 8 years old, but Lloyd-Jones said
she began to think the book was going to do really well when “it seemed to be
fathers who loved it.”
She sent the book to her sister’s children, but it was her brother-in-law who told
her how powerful he found it. A male friend—a pastor—wept over the
manuscript.
“And I thought, Oh, this is a bit different,” she said. The book caught fire
gradually, by word of mouth as “fathers or pastors who really loved its robust
theology were recommending it.”
Guthrie was one of them. He began including The Jesus Storybook Bible in a
required class on educational ministry at TEDS.
“The students say, ‘This is a better way to understand than I’ve ever seen,” he
said. “You wouldn’t believe how many master’s students—MDiv students—say, ‘I
use this to help me remember the storyline.’ Over the years—countless.”
Building the Church All Over the World
TEDS isn’t the only one to use The Jesus Storybook Bible in a required course.
At Covenant Seminary in St. Louis, professors hold it up as an example. Madison
Square Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, based an ongoing series for both
children and adults on The Jesus Storybook Bible. And missionaries are using
the book all around the world.
One teacher working with indigenous aboriginal children in Australia wrote to
Lloyd-Jones:
You have no idea what a blessing your Bible has been. In a very
conservative Christian environment that emphasizes “living right” and is
rather lacking in grace and Jesus, the kids are in wonder. They also just
can't get over the fact that they can read the Bible for themselves. It is
immensely powerful.
I see kids who are virtually illiterate carrying your Bible around the school
grounds every day and reading it every time they get a chance. Some of
them had read it all the way through within a week of receiving it. Some of
the older girls in the boarding house read it together with the younger girls
every night before they go to bed. They come to school and love to tell me
what they’ve been reading about and where they’re up to.
In the United Kingdom, the London City Mission passed it out to as many as
they could in the poorer parts of the city, former chief executive John Nicholls
said. In fact, they handed it out so often to at-risk adults that they asked for—
and got—an adult version titled The Story of God’s Love for You
(https://www.amazon.com/Story-Gods-Love-You/dp/0310736021/?
tag=thegospcoal-20).
Reformed Theology
Lloyd-Jones grew up in Africa, where her father worked for Shell Oil. She was
saved at the age of 4, after first turning down her father’s question of “Do you
want to become a Christian?” with a polite “No, thank you.”
As an adult, Lloyd-Jones let her friend Eric Metaxas talk her into visiting Tim
Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.
“I knew the Lord, but I’d never heard grace preached like that,” said Lloyd-
Jones, who would drive an hour and a half into the city from her place in
Connecticut each Sunday morning.
She also admired the way Keller “never uses jargon, but always finds a way to
say it in a different way, and always uses metaphor. In my business, that’s the
way you get truth across.”
“The Lord was training me theologically and also teaching me to find ways to
say things differently,” she said. “I feel such a debt to him and to [Tim’s wife]
Kathy.”
Tim is the first person Lloyd-Jones thanks in the book’s acknowledgements: “To
Dr. Timothy Keller, whose teaching informs every story and from whom I have
liberally borrowed: for his wisdom; for giving me a vocabulary of faith; for
opening my eyes to the wonder of Grace.”
“Tim didn’t have a clue it was being written,” said Kathy, who reviewed the
book’s theology for Zondervan before it was published. “The first time we saw
it, it was a finished [manuscript].”
“We were overjoyed that someone had taken the theology they heard in Tim’s
sermons and produced a work of art,” she said. “People grow through what
you’re feeding them, and to see what Tim had been saying processed and
incarnated in a children’s book made us so happy. . . . I bought 40 of them and
handed them out to anyone who would sit still long enough.”
Kathy still weeps every time she reads the introduction. “I really do. It’s for the
same reason I cry reading Tolkien or Narnia—it’s the truth made beautiful.”
Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra is senior writer for The Gospel Coalition
and contributing editor at Christianity Today. She earned her master’s
degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
TAGS
BIBLICAL THEOLOGY • CHILDREN'S LITERATURE • JESUS STORYBOOK
BIBLE • TIM KELLER • ZONDERVAN

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