Opinion of this justification for the death penalty

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Awful politically and morally and barely coherent theologically.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Agree to the extent that those convicted of capital crimes, if they really want to prove that they are repentant, should be willing to follow Jesus’ example and give up their lives for the sake of reconciliation.

It doesn't matter what they "should" do. The question is whether it's moral of an earthly judicial system to demand it of them.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Agree to the extent that those convicted of capital crimes, if they really want to prove that they are repentant, should be willing to follow Jesus’ example and give up their lives for the sake of reconciliation.

It doesn't matter what they "should" do. The question is whether it's moral of an earthly judicial system to demand it of them.

Given Genesis 9:6 and Romans 13:4, I would say that the Bible implores the earthly judicial system to demand it of them.

Oh, this tired talking point again. If we're going to pull gotcha prooftexts out of hats we'll both be here all day.

The literal sense of these passages prescribes an up-or-down lex talionis for murder (in the Genesis passage) or possibly even a Bloody Code mentality (in the Romans passage), conclusions so obviously contrary to both the teachings of Jesus and the practice of Rabbinic Judaism that a death penalty apologist bringing up these verses is almost as tell-tale a sign of crankishness as a conspiracy theorist bringing up the Knights Templar.

You'd think people with blue avatars would be hesitant to bring up Romans 13 in particular after Jeff Sessions's use of it last year to argue that no law is ever unjust, but we live in a cruel and degenerate age. C'est la vie.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Agree to the extent that those convicted of capital crimes, if they really want to prove that they are repentant, should be willing to follow Jesus’ example and give up their lives for the sake of reconciliation.

It doesn't matter what they "should" do. The question is whether it's moral of an earthly judicial system to demand it of them.

Given Genesis 9:6 and Romans 13:4, I would say that the Bible implores the earthly judicial system to demand it of them.

Oh, this tired talking point again. If we're going to pull gotcha prooftexts out of hats we'll both be here all day.

The literal sense of these passages prescribes an up-or-down lex talionis for murder (in the Genesis passage) or possibly even a Bloody Code mentality (in the Romans passage), conclusions so obviously contrary to both the teachings of Jesus and the practice of Rabbinic Judaism that a death penalty apologist bringing up these verses is almost as tell-tale a sign of crankishness as a conspiracy theorist bringing up the Knights Templar.

You'd think people with blue avatars would be hesitant to bring up Romans 13 in particular after Jeff Sessions's use of it last year to argue that no law is ever unjust, but we live in a cruel and degenerate age. C'est la vie.

If I can’t quote Bible verses to defend my position on the Bible, I don’t see where this conversation can go.

Well, for starters, you could make an affirmative argument for why these (and only these) verses are of dispositive relevance to this issue. My instinct is to suspect someone who brings up these (and only these) verses in a discussion on this subject of being a tedious crank trotting out a shamelessly cherry-picked interpretation like a sideshow okapi, but nobody died and made me debate moderator.

RFayette, yeah, I tend to interpret it parabolically, although I'd be receptive to an argument otherwise from somebody who wasn't disingenuous about the fact that counterarguments existed. Later on there obviously are undeniable, indisputable impositions of capital punishment under the Sinaitic Covenant, but the intellectual and moral center of gravity even in Orthodox Judaism holds that those sanctions aren't applicable today and it would be a serious mistake to try to impose them outside the setting of "Bible times" Israel. This is what I was referring to by alluding to obvious incompatibility with the practice of Rabbinic Judaism; I wasn't trying to imply that Old Testament Israel itself had already repudiated the death penalty (which it very obviously had not).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Well, for starters, you could make an affirmative argument for why these (and only these) verses are of dispositive relevance to this issue.

Because they're excerpts from the Noahide and Christian covenants, one of which preceded the Mosaic covenant and one of which succeeded it, pertaining to the same message: that even if a criminal can be forgiven by God and man, it is not the place of the law to mete out forgiveness, but to disburse just recompense for crime. Condemning a man to die isn't akin to condemning him to Hell; a man can lose his body but keep his soul. You may have heard that once or twice before.

Thank you. This is a coherent argument, although I disagree with it, partly because I think it's far from self-evident that the sideshow okapi verses are normative rather than descriptive and partly because (and it's not just me who says this; the magisterium of the Catholic Church has also developed in this direction) historical example after historical example after historical example shows that retributive punishment simply does not accomplish anything.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Well, for starters, you could make an affirmative argument for why these (and only these) verses are of dispositive relevance to this issue.

Because they're excerpts from the Noahide and Christian covenants, one of which preceded the Mosaic covenant and one of which succeeded it, pertaining to the same message: that even if a criminal can be forgiven by God and man, it is not the place of the law to mete out forgiveness, but to disburse just recompense for crime. Condemning a man to die isn't akin to condemning him to Hell; a man can lose his body but keep his soul. You may have heard that once or twice before.

Thank you. This is a coherent argument, although I disagree with it, partly because I think it's far from self-evident that the sideshow okapi verses are normative rather than descriptive and partly because (and it's not just me who says this; the magisterium of the Catholic Church has also developed in this direction) historical example after historical example after historical example shows that retributive punishment simply does not accomplish anything.

I would hesitate to say that the magisterium has decisively ruled on the death penalty. While recent popes have clearly opposed it, they have not authoritatively declared the argument over. And in the case of Pope Benedict, stated fairly directly that there could be a legitimate difference of opinions on the death penalty amongst Catholics. While Pope Francis has forcefully denounced it, he has only done so in a sort of backward way (e.g. changing the text of the catechism) that avoids making an authoritative declaration.

I think, to truly come out and authoritatively declare the death penalty to be wrong regardless of circumstances the Church would have to:
1. Deal with the problematic verses of Scripture.
2. Deal with the Church's own history on the topic that strongly suggests it can, under some circumstances be licit.
3. Deal with the problem that most of the arguments against the death penalty implicitly deny the importance of retributive justice (see mopolis's post) and jettisoning retributive justice would capsize our understanding of justice when applied consistently.

These are real problems, and my position on them is that the death penalty can be morally licit; however it is still inadvisable to carry out. That seems like a fairly weak conclusion IMO, but it's my best attempt at consistency of worldview. I am open to alternatives, but again, I expect consistency with a lot of things pulling different directions on this.

Yeah, my use of "has developed" was intended to soft-pedal what I was saying a little bit, since I'm aware that the Catechism (which is where most of the Catholic kabuki theater regarding the death penalty has played out in recent years) isn't actually as authoritative as most people assume. Sorry if that didn't come across. "Is developing" would have perhaps been better.

I'm not nearly as convinced that 2. is a problem as a lot of conservative Catholic thinkers are, because I think there's a difference between traditional views that over the course of Christian history have been assumed or adhered to but not set forth in an authoritative way and traditional views that have been set forth authoritatively and can't (or, at least, shouldn't) be countermanded. (For example, as I'm sure you're aware, it's pretty clear even to otherwise liberal Catholic theologians that the traditional condemnation of abortion and euthanasia is final.) Traditional Catholic acceptance of institutions like slavery and torture has been jettisoned through much the same processes through which Catholic acceptance of the death penalty is currently being chipped away at. There's a bull from the 1830s condemning the slave trade that uses language ("the manners of barbarous peoples having been softened"; focusing on concepts like "the light of the Gospel" and the theological virtues of faith and charity rather than the "intrinsic evil" language used for practices that Catholicism has rejected all along anyway) that could have come straight from the framing used in the recent Catechism change.

1. and 3. I'll grant you, and I'll admit that I might have granted them to mopolis too if I hadn't read his bizarre, borderline-scandalous exchange with afleitch about anal sex immediately before responding to him. I still think focusing too much on those two specific verses constitutes prooftexting, though (and, as Kingpoleon just demonstrated, my own side of this issue is more than able to do that too), and I really don't think rejecting retributive justice as implemented by human political structures at all necessitates rejecting it as imposed by God (see also my post in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer thread that brought up Bonhoeffer's rejection of the "two kingdoms" model of Christian political theology).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This article by Cardinal Dulles is one of the better discussions of the Catholic view of capital punishment that I know of.

I've read this article before and found it well-put but not dispositive. I have a lot of respect for Cardinal Dulles as an expositor of traditional Catholic viewpoints on a variety of subjects, but I tend to think he takes an excessively high view of small-t tradition on these sorts of issues. iirc he halfheartedly tried to excuse the long- and rightly-abandoned distinction between just and unjust enslavement too, which is just unconscionable.

On another note, I do think retributive justice can be justified as an exercise in empathy, but it requires seriously and consistently abandoning the concept of revenge in a way that I've never known an actual advocate of retribution in the context of criminal justice to do. There's a scene in the Chronicles of Narnia book The Horse and His Boy where Aslan, in disguise as a normal lion, claws the back of a character called Aravis one of whose family's slaves was whipped after Aravis drugged her to escape a forced marriage; I thought the way this plot element was handled was kind of tacky in the book, but Aslan's "you needed to know how it felt" justification when he confronts Aravis a few chapters later strikes me as a much better and more sensitive rationale for retributive justice than the ones that get thrown around in The Death Penalty Debate, if we're going to have rationales for retributive justice at all. The problem is that I don't think anybody "needs to know" how death at the hands of a political authority feels.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I was thinking about this thread while I was driving around doing errands today and I think what's so uniquely offensive about this justification for capital punishment, on top of the idea that policy in a pluralistic democracy should or even can be set according to the idea of Jesus dying for our sins, is how many other things it could applied to. Could it be applied to torture, since Christ was tortured? Could it be applied to targeting civilians in war, because if you take Joshua and Judges as literal history the Israelites practiced total war against the populations of Canaan? Could a right-wing Buddhist apply it to the existence of abject poverty as such, since in the traditional story of Shakyamuni Buddha's enlightenment becoming aware of the plight of the poor and sick was an important part of his journey?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

God tells the prophet Ezekiel, not one time, not two times, but at least three times: “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? ... Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?”

I know not your faith, but I know my own. The word of the Lord unto His prophets is law. I will answer unto Him if I have condemned a man to die, or if I am silent as he is executed. His bones shall condemn such actions, and his body shall denounce my very silence.

I think you’re confused about the kind of person that gets executed in America in 2019. We aren’t hanging pickpockets anymore. The only “turning away and living” that exists for a man who abducts, rapes, and murders a four-year-old girl consists in accepting the justice of his own execution.

I'm so glad we finally figured it out in 2019.  Now we only execute the abductors of 4 year old girls who rape and murder them!

I knew there just had to be a line that God didn't really point out but that we would find anyway!

Thank you, I always seek the inspiration of the Holy Spirit when judging who does and does not deserve to be executed.

Given the general thrust of your posts in this thread, I'm legitimately unsure whether or not you're being sarcastic.