PL, it makes no difference to me. As far as I'm concerned, as a Christian my standard is Jesus. Can I imagine Him calling for the execution of people? No - in fact, as I have demonstrated, He did exactly the opposite.
But as we have repeatedly pointed out, the situation was different. You will not recognize that for some reason.
To my mind, what does the doctrine of Capital Punishment say to the one convicted?
"There is no hope for you--you are not redeemable, you are not worth saving. You are beyond God's power to forgive and save you in this life. Therefore, all that is left is death for you.
No, what it says is that we honor life and you didn't. IT says nothing about redeemability. Even a murderer can be saved. But that doesn't remove the consequences. As I poitned out, you are very inconsistent in this. This is not about salvation.
This is almost exactly the conclusion I have come to as well, although I think of it in social terms: "You will never contribute anything positive to society no matter how long you live. You will never change. Therefore we are going to kill you."
It has nothing to do with that.
I refuse to even attempt to make that kind of determination about another person, and I wonder at how others seem to think they can. I believe capital punishment is about revenge, no matter how many additional justifications get trotted out.
It has nothing to do with that either.
People here talk about man being in the image of God. That being so, how can we contemplate the taking of a life made in His image?
That is exactly the point. Because the image of God was stamped out, it requires capital punishment. Matt, God is the one who said it. This was not the creation of some man. It was God who said this. He said to honor life.
IF someone steals your car, should they be able to get off by paying you fifty cents? Of course not. That is not justice. It does not honor the crime. The same is true with capital punishment. It is about honoring life as God commanded.
I read the scriptures with what I call the "Jesus lens"... I start with Jesus himself-- what He said, did, taught-- then I compare everything else in the Bible to Jesus' direct teaching. If there is contridiction, I default to Jesus. I don't know if this way of thinking is heretical, but it's how I make sense of things.
Heretical is too strong a word, but it certainly isn't sound. It creates a "canon within the canon." It creates a "really important part" of Scripture, and then the rest. Scripture allows no such distinction, and neither should we. There is no contradiction between what Jesus said and did and what Scripture teaches us to do. The fact that you (or we) see a contradiction is a testimony to our fallibility, not to his.
