Gordon Clark: Capital Punishment (Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics)

1973. In Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics. Carl F.H. Henry, ed. Washington D.C.: Canon Press. [Reprinted in 1988 by Baker Book House.] Capital Punishment

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT. See also Punishment; Retribution. Capital punishment is specified both in the OT (Gen. 9:6) and in the NT (Rom. 13:4). It is implied in Gen. 4:14 and approved in Acts 25:11. Capital punishment is therefore an integral part of Christian ethics.

Contemporary efforts to abolish capital punishment proceed on a non-Christian view of man, a secular theory of criminal law, and a low estimate of the value of life.

The low evaluation of human life occurs in the liberal penology that holds criminal law to be solely for the purpose of rehabilitation. Not only does liberalism think that the murder of a human being is too minor a crime to justify execution; the theory consistently implies that no crime should ever be punished. Just and punishment are deprecated as "irrational vengeance." This is a basic difference between Christ and liberal ethics. As such it can be resolved only by a decision on ultimate principles, to wit, whether ethical norms are established by divine decree, and secondarily what obligations God confers on civil government.

The liberal arguments are superficial. One is that capital punishment does not deter. Obviously it deters the executed criminal. If it does not deter others, the reply is that the law may not deter, but its enforcement will. In 1968 there were 7,000 murders and no executions, in 1969 there were about 8,500 and no executions, and in 1970 some 10,000 and no executions. But if the law had been enforced, and 5,000 murders had been executed in 1968, and 7,000 in 1969, could anyone doubt that there would have been fewer than 10,000 murders in 1970?

A worse argument is that only the poor are convicted and the wealthy escape. Actually the courts are so lenient and the public so permissive that nearly everybody escapes. If the objection were true, however, the answer would not be to abolish capital punishment and let the number of murders keep on soaring, but it would be to put honest judges on the bench and in the box jurors who are more compassionate toward the victim than toward the criminal.

The most impressive argument is that sometimes an innocent man might be executed. Once again, with our present courts, this never or almost never happens. Even murderers like Sirhan Sirhan, whose act was seen by a dozen witnesses, are not executed. Yet if just one innocent man is executed...? The consider: Do you prefer 10,000 murders to save one innocent man rather than one tragedy to save 5000 lives? But of course this type of argument is superficial and irrelevant. God have the right of capital punishment to human governments. He intended it to be used wisely and justly, but he intended it to be used. Abolition of the death penalty presupposes the falsity of Christian principles.

Gordon H. Clark