as hedged with serious restrictions and reservations. But the Old Testament contains another perspective that is relevant to the death penalty. The Hebrew concept of justice was much more comprehensive than our own. It focused on "righteousness" and right relationships and was aimed at the shalom community where people live in right relationships with one another. In the Old Testament view, unequal wealth and power and unequal justice were as much a sin as were crimes. Any of these offenses -- including treating the poor unfairly -- were contrary to justice and to shalom. Given this holistic concept of justice, the death penalty as administered today seems incompatible with Old Testament justice for two reasons. First, our death penalty laws focus only on the crime without attempting to deal with the larger inequalities that may, in fact, have created the background for the offense. Second, the death penalty is administered unequally, falling most heavily on the poor and the powerless, again in contrast to the Old Testament vision of justice. In its application, therefore, the contemporary death penalty is fundamentally contradictory to the spirit of the Old Testament. What is the New Testament perspective on capital punishment? In the Old Testament, life was sacred. Life could only be taken in certain exceptional circumstances, ringed with restrictions, and then primarily for ceremonial or sacrificial reasons. In the New Testament, Jesus' answer to capital punishment was to undermine the penalty by demanding that both judges and executioners be sinless. On one occasion, Christ was asked to rule on a death penalty case (John 8). His response: "Let one without sin cast the first stone." And this was consistent with Christ's other teachings. He reminds his listeners to beware of condemning others because God's judgments do not necessarily coincide with our own (e.g. Matthew 25, Luke 6). If our judgments are so fallible, how can we make th...
