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Rebuking the spirit of vendetta
As evangelicals engage in dialogue about the death penalty, we should keep in mind two parallel streams of biblical thought about crime and punishment: One of them focuses on justice, the other on ending violence, while both of them are designed to break the cycle of vengeance.

The justice-oriented stream of thought emphasizes limiting vengeance. There, for example, we hear Moses utter the famous "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth"—a law designed to limit reprisals by keeping them proportional.

Human nature inevitably escalates the measure of our retaliation above our loss in order to show who is boss. As Lamech boasted: "I have slain a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me" (Gen. 4:23). But the law of God always seeks to limit punishment to the proper proportion and the proper agent. Thus Paul recognized a legitimate role for the admittedly oppressive Roman government (Rom. 13:1-5): the magistrate bears the sword as a terror to evildoers.

The law of Moses put the brakes on vengeance, but the other stream of biblical thought calls for its end. God's first, and perhaps most characteristic, response to murder was not law but grace: he placed a protective mark on Cain, protecting him from those who would avenge Abel's blood, and warning others of a dangerous man.

In Leviticus, the Lord commanded: "You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people." Here the Old Testament anticipated Jesus' teaching: "You have heard it said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." Paul likewise proclaimed that vengeance is reserved for God and that Christians should feed their enemies, overcoming evil with good (Rom. 12:19-21).

Jesus' counsel of nonresistance has as its goal not only crushing the spirit of vendetta, but also reconciliation (a goal embodied in victim-offender reconciliation programs that have proved effective where tried).

Jesus' teaching of nonresistance is difficult to live out on a societal level. Not all evangelicals (indeed, not all evangelicals who edit CHRISTIANITY TODAY) agree on how to apply Jesus' teaching of nonresistance to public policy. But it seems clear that the gospel demands that in ministry, Christians work more for reconciliation than for retribution, and that in public life we work against the spirit of revenge so cruelly displayed by the crowds outside many sites of execution.

When the death penalty becomes a political football, partisan rhetoric tends to stress justice—a code word for payback—and appeal to our carnal appetite for revenge. Whatever public policy we deem wisest, we must resist that kind of rhetoric. For while murderers clearly deserve to lose their lives, Christians know that we all deserve death, and the ethic of Jesus drives us to spend most of our limited energies in the relationally complex and costly task of reconciliation.

Jesus' own life and death show the cost of a ministry of reconciliation. His sacrifice was not only an act of justice, a substitute for the all penalties richly deserved by the sinful world God so loved, but was also an act of reconciliation, absorbing in himself the shock of all the world's vengeance.

However we learn to apply these biblical themes of reconciliation and the abhorrence of vengeance in the public sphere, it seems clear that the death penalty has outlived its usefulness. It has not made the United States a safer country or a more equitable one. The potential of life imprisonment without parole and other protective measures, however, offer better options for the state, which must continue to deal with 20,000 murders each year.

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April 6 1998, Vol. 42, No. 4