Human Dignity After the Flood: How Capital Punishment is Pro-Life

This post was written by Flynn Evans, a recent graduate of Boyce College and Southern Seminary.

The Catholic conscience in America has been perennially conflicted concerning its relationship with abortion. While the church’s social teaching clearly militates against its support in popular legislation, its doctrine of subsidiarity as ratified principally by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) simultaneously upholds a love for “the least of these” (Matt. 25:40) throughout the breadth of the human community. Thus, an accounting for elective abortion’s role in preserving the common good produces such attempts like that of the Kennedy family in the “Hyannisport colloquium” in 1964, which sought to elucidate a theologically-permissible and politically-expedient compromise in how one could be “personally opposed” to abortion but nevertheless endorse its legalization. 

For Joe Biden, this via media has not been as fruitful in his attempts to remain an ostensibly faithful communicant. A South Carolinian priest already faced some flack for withholding communion to the then-former Vice President in 2019 due to his doggedly pro-choice commitments. However, a nationwide consideration of doing so is quite clearly on the sacerdotal table, and it’s been a catalyst for reinvigorating the conversation within Christian public theology as to how an ethic in support of life in all its forms in America should properly be advanced.

And with it also comes forward plenty of unwieldy ways of going about it. Enter Shane Claiborne: 

This emphatic denial of the moral acceptability for the death penalty represents a paradigm shift regarding grounding one’s pro-life stances in American Christianity. It is most eloquently captured in the writing of Elizabeth Bruenig, who stated after witnessing an execution of a death row inmate that “There was nothing, nothing there." Those such as Claiborne and Bruenig argue that true justice cannot possibly be found by injecting a fatal cocktail into a convict’s veins. In this moral framework, to deny the right to life for any necessarily entails undermining an effort to ensure it for all. Only the Lord, not the state, takes away a person’s life from this side of glory, since he is the sole Sovereign over the mortal ends of his image-bearers. For these thinkers and activists, life exists for life’s own sake, sacrosanct in its preservation at all costs. 

Yet this ethic fails to offer any robust exegesis in vindicating its proposals. Not only does it significantly weaken the demands of God’s moral law, it fundamentally circumvents what is definitively the locus classicus for biblical justice after the fall of mankind: the Noahic covenant.

In his recent work Politics After Christendom: Political Theology in a Fractured World (2020), David VanDrunen outlines his proposal that God’s covenant with Noah as recorded in Genesis 9 solidifies capital punishment’s centrality in upholding both pro-life initiatives and the common good. At its core, the Noahic covenant codifies the lex talionis (or “law of retaliation”) as that which sees homicide as a transgression worthy of the death penalty. As found in verse 6,

“Whoever sheds the blood of man,
    by man shall his blood be shed,
for God made man in his own image.” (Gen. 9:6, ESV)

The Lord of heaven and earth discerns no disjunction when it comes to capital punishment and human dignity. When image-bearers are not treated as true ends in themselves and unlawfully robbed of life, those who commit this misdeed rob themselves of the permission to persist in that same state of being. Of course, Scripture has plenty of provisions for protecting those guilty of manslaughter, specifically in allowing for “cities of refuge” so that they might flee to them without fear of unwarranted harassment or untimely demise at the hands of disgruntled relatives until they have the chance to potentially be exonerated (see: Joshua 20). However, the only just desert awaiting those who maliciously violate a human being’s innate worthiness in attaining toward a self-directed existence in the presence of God is confronting the opposite end of that moral arc of justice they attempted to elude. Whereas suicide might be the assertion of a false prerogative to end a life not truly one’s own to begin with, homicide is the arrogation to another the false privilege to end a life they themselves never began. 

To be pro-life in America demands valuing life as a property so precious that infringing upon it brings with the harshest of punishments. While Claiborne and Bruenig might claim to be sufficiently contending for all of life, they ultimately bring about its depreciation in disputing with the capacity of the state to employ its penitential powers in discouraging its ravaging. For the Catholic church to act in accordance with some of its most fundamental teachings on human anthropology by denying one of its professed members access to its holiest sacrament is an act of ecclesial integrity, not doctrinal disingenuousness. This is especially the case when that individual stands as one expressly accountable in guaranteeing provisions for all American citizens, which includes those within the womb as well as those outside of it. 

When we uphold the civil and theological legitimacy of the death penalty, we say to a society awash with the idolization of ridding our consumptive capital of the enfeebled among us that even the strongest man should be bound at some point. The fact that all image-bearers are precious compels us to protect everyone, especially the unborn, from any undue harm. Guarding persons from having their basic right to life infringed upon by sinful, self-interested agents necessitates holding the weight of the jurisdictional sword high, requiring the presence of the death penalty at the very least as a penultimate means for defending the common good.

By decrying the taking of life in the murdering of those who have yet to sign onto the social contract as well as those who already have, the church makes the strongest proclamation of its pro-life ethic possible: in light of the flood, no man has the right to treat life as he pleases, and he will render his own forfeit should he ever vainly act as if he can. Life’s end is for its Creator alone to dictate, and those who attempt to take his place must bear the full brunt of the fatal futility of their aims.