A plea to the church: denounce the execution of Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein is on death-row, just as President Bush and a majority of Americans wanted. But for those who identify themselves with Jesus Christ, who bear the name “Christian,” whose primary loyalty is (or at least should be) to the church, Hussein’s death in the name of “justice” should only be a source of great discomfort and shame. In fact, I propose that as the church, it is our duty as followers of the Crucified One to denounce the execution of Saddam Hussein—just as we must denounce the execution of any person.

This is a wildly unpopular claim in the United States today. Even those who are generally opposed to the death penalty view such a punishment as “just” when carried out against someone like Hussein. But it is precisely this kind of unpopular claim that I believe the church needs to make in order to truly be the community that witnesses to the sovereign grace of God.

Karl Barth made it clear in Church Dogmatics III.4 why Christians cannot support the death penalty. His arguments are summarized well by John Howard Yoder in his excellent book, Karl Barth and the Problem of War:

There are logically three possible kinds of ground for judicial penalties. The first is the protection of society. But a protection which is so absolute as to require the absolute elimination of any menace is justifiable only if the state which is to be protected, or the nation which intends to protect itself, is also an absolute. The absolute value of the state or the human social order is, however, something which the Christian cannot affirm. The second general reason for penalties is the expiation of an offense against the moral order; yet the Christian knows that there can and need be no more expiation since the cross of Christ. The third general ground for judicial penalties is the argument that through punishment the criminal may be rendered a more useful citizen. In this case killing is conceivable only if we are sure ahead of time that no improvment is possible; this also is something which a Christian may not affirm. Thus Barth concludes that the death penalty normally is never acceptable; capital punishment may not legitimately be a state institution. (22-23)

Yoder does a fine job summarizing Barth’s arguments against the Christian support of capital punishment, but it is well worth our time to read Barth himself on this subject. It is also worth taking into consideration the fact that Barth laments the history of the church, in which Christians have almost always supported capital punishment and eschewed careful theological reflection on the subject. In what follows I will quote Barth on each of the three positions summarized by Yoder above in the same order. The three supports for capital punishment (CP) that Barth articulates are: (1) CP protects society; (2) CP is morally necessary for the criminal to atone for his crimes (sins); and (3) CP makes the criminal more beneficial to society by removing her from it.

1. Barth writes of the first ground of support for capital punishment:

It belongs to its nature as an orderly society that its measures can have only a provisional, relative and limited character, that they must always be in a position to be transcended and corrected. But in punishing by death, it does something unlimited, irrevocable and irreparable. Again, it belongs to its nature as an orderly society that its actions must be designed to secure and maintain the life of its people. But to punish by death is to destroy life. ... [I]n capital punishment the state leaves the human level and acts with usurped divinity. It destroys life instead of maintaining it. It deprives of right instead of upholding it. (CD III.4, 444-45)

The United States government, in the hands of a president who senses a divine calling, has left the human level and usurped divinity in a way unprecedented for nations claiming to be democratic. I live in a country which has given itself the divine prerogative to take as many lives as it deems necessary in order to destroy radical Muslim leaders and take revenge on the loss of American lives on 9/11. The U.S. has absolutized—i.e., deified—itself, and we see this most clearly now in the condemnation of Saddam. The humiliation and destruction of Saddam Hussein is, at the same time, the glorification and divinization of America. The U.S. has essentially become the instantiation of the supreme being of theism: omnipotent in war, omniscient in intelligence (e.g., the Patriot Act and wiretapping), and omnipresent in the deployment of troops, the proliferation of bases and interrogration centers around the world, and the global spread of media and technology. The one major attribute unaccounted for is omnibenevolence.

2. Against the second ground of support, Barth writes in opposition to the view that the death penalty is a kind of expiation for sin:

[O]n the Christian view the retributive justice of God has already found full and final expression, the expiation demanded by Him for all human transgression has already been made, the death sentence imposed on human criminals has already been executed. God gave His only Son for this very purpose. In His death He exercised judgment according to His wonderful righteousness, and He did so once and for all for the sins of all men. Is not the result of this just judgment mercy and forgiveness for all? Who, then, is not included? (442)

The sacrifice of Jesus Christ is the end of all sacrifices. In his death, the expiatory deaths of all others are included and therefore finished. No other sacrifice is necessary. In fact, no other sacrifice is even possible. The death of Jesus is unique in kind and excludes the possibility of imitation. Since Jesus was nailed to the cross, all other expiatory deaths are nullified. Consequently, every death penalty exacted upon criminals is a mockery of Christ’s all-sufficient sacrifice as the sacramentum mundi.

3. Finally, Barth writes the following regarding the third ground of support:

The death penalty obviously assumes the very different verdict that improvement, education and rehabilitation are out of the question for [the criminal], and therefore the proposition that the responsibility of others towards him is at an end. His punishment can no longer have any positive character for him. Among others who offend daily, this person has done something which is so evil as to make life with him intolerable. And since he fortunately has no power to remove us from the world, we remove him from the world. ... It declares society to be inwardly powerless in relation to him. All that it can do is to confront him with outward superiority, to decide to put him to death and therefore to live on without him. ... From this standpoint already the death penalty incontestably means that society arbitrarily renounces the obligation which it has towards the criminal too. (440-41)

Even if Christians in support of the death penalty reject the deification of the state and the expiatory nature of a criminal’s death, it remains incontestable that capital punishment is a surrender of responsibility. By putting a person to death, society in general and the church in particular renounces any obligation to that person. The church (for the most part) recognizes the necessity of caring for the marginalized and the oppressed. So why the rejection of the criminal whom God embraces, whose sins are covered by the blood of Jesus? There is no justification for such rejection.

Eberhard Jüngel makes quite clear in his ethical writings how essential it is for the church to demonstrate Christian responsibility toward the criminal. Jüngel expounds his ethics from a center in the doctrine of justification, which carefully differentiates between person and work, thus embracing the person while (if necessary) condemning the work. Such a distinction ensures that we are more than our acts, whether good or bad:

We are still waiting today for a reform [of the state penal system] that would make a fundamental split in the undisputed connection between person and deed by addressing prisoners as people who are separable from their deeds. ... What are we [the church] doing to say that they are more than the sum of their deeds, that even as prisoners they have value—a value that is hardly noticed and yet is inalienable, the value of human beings justified by God? ... Will we stretch out our hand [to them]? Or would we prefer the judgment and punishment of the law to have the last word and the unjust stay unjust? (Justification 270)

The question to the church, to the United States, and to the world is clear: Will we stretch out our hand to Saddam Hussein? Even if he refuses to receive our embrace, will we refuse to offer it? Can we see Saddam as a person apart from his deeds, however barbarous? Can we dare to see him in the shadow of the cross as the one for whom Christ died?

The church that witnesses to the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ must be a church that has a profound and perhaps unpopular “reverence for life,” as Schweitzer declared. We must be a church that demands true justice—not justice as the world understands it, but justice as defined by the triune God, who came to the world in Jesus Christ while we were still sinners to reconcile us to God. We must embody the mystery of divine love, that gives of itself and overflows even to the least of all people. We must have our vision shaped by the gospel of justification, which refuses to see people in terms of their good or bad deeds and instead sees people in terms of God’s eternal and insurmountable ‘YES’ to each person in Jesus Christ.

Saddam Hussein is one such person. No matter the extent of his crimes against humanity, he is still loved by God, for such is the inscrutable depths of God’s being—a being who loves unconditionally, gives unceasingly, forgives eternally, and redeems completely. This is why we confess that God is love. The question for the church is: Will we demonstrate this kind of love?

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. (1 John 4:7-11)