Christians & the Death Penalty

From Commonweal-

I would be lying if I claimed that my initial approach to By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed was an unprejudiced one—I am firmly convinced that no Christian who truly understands his or her faith can possibly defend the practice of capital punishment—but I was not unwilling to give the book a fair hearing. My convictions on the matter may be fixed, but they are not always passionate. There have been various occasions over the years when I have found myself desiring the deaths of some especially vicious criminals, including two who casually murdered an exceptionally gentle friend of mine when I was in college. And I have never shed a tear over the Nazis executed by the Allies after the Second World War. I am quite able to be heartless toward the heartless. But this book would exhaust the ruthlessness of Torquemada.

I might have guessed that something was terribly amiss just from the title. There is nothing especially mysterious about it: it is more or less inevitable that any substantial attempt at a Christian defense of capital punishment will repeat two tediously persistent exegetical errors—a misuse of Genesis 9:6 (hence the title) and a misreading of Romans 13:1–7. But it makes some difference which of the two is accorded priority. If the latter, then in all likelihood the argument being made is merely that the death penalty is theologically licit; if the former, that it is morally necessary. And so it is in this case: the claim Feser and Bessette advance is not simply that Catholics may approve of capital punishment, but that they must, and that it actually borders on heresy not to do so. Needless to say, an assertion that bold requires a formidable array of corroborating evidence, and this Feser and Bessette fail to provide. What they have produced instead is relentlessly ill-conceived. Its arguments, philosophical and historical, are feeble. Its treatment of biblical texts is crude, its patristic scholarship careless. And all too often it exhibits a moral insensibility that is truly repellant.

More here-

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/christians-death-penalty