death penalty: God's timeless standard for the nations?, The

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2000 by Ballard, Bruce W

Others have claimed that the penalties reflect God's indulgence toward the hardness of heart of the Israelites, that the penalties themselves are brutal. Jesus tells us that the allowance for divorce in Mosaic law was a concession to the Israelites' hardness of heart (Mark 10:5), for instance. But we should note that the OT law of divorce regulated a practice which is itself counter to the intention of Genesis 1-2, to which Jesus appeals in his comments on divorce. And there is no general command to get divorced, a practice God "hates" (Mal 2:16). The regulation of slavery in OT law might show a similar allowance for hardness of heart (again to return to Genesis, people were created free). Yet God commands Israel, regarding the death penalty, to show "no pity," as though to correct an Israelite disposition to lessen the penalties from the very outset. The supposed "brutality" of the laws is pretty hard to square with the obvious equity in the law of talion and the high praise of God's law found in both OT and NT. As Greg Bahnsen also argues, the alternatives to Biblical penal law are themselves subjective, incoherent, and often not just non-Biblical, but counter-Biblical."

Still others, including Christians, will argue that we ought to keep religion separate from the laws of the state, in order not to "force" one religious view on those who do not share it. But at least with reference to the offenses listed in our conclusion, the idea in Scripture seems to be that these wrongs are known through the natural law of conscience, that Israel's laws are a model for other nations, and that the penalties therein are "just" in an unqualified sense. To pretend that the law is or can be "neutral" is also untrue. The law, for instance, is hardly neutral when it declares and protects a "right" to kill the unborn or partially-born and then criminalizes those who protest.34 The general role of law as an educative and socializing force that contributes, positively or negatively, to the creation of a moral climate is also overlooked here. Just as children in public schools learn a practical atheism by the absence of God throughout their studies, citizens can learn a similar lesson from the laws.

We ought also to remember that the Common Law we inherit is full of Christian influences, not at all "neutral." As Christian historian Harold Berman notes, "much of the medieval canon law has been secularized and has passed over-often unnoticed-into the law of the state."35 Indeed, even basic aspects of our law owe a large debt to Christianity.36 And many of the individual states practically established Christianity by their laws in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, requiring Christian belief for office, penalizing blasphemy, requiring public schools and universities to teach the Christian religion, etc. 37 Again, as Berman observes:

It is in the last two generations that the Enlightenment concept of law as something wholly instrumental, wholly invented, as contrasted with the pre-Enlightenment concept of law as something ordained, something partly invented but also partly given, has penetrated not only the ideology of the intellectuals but also the social consciousness of virtually all classes of the population. 38