Sunday, October 11, 2026
Sunday Reflection: Government Killing
On Friday, I was hard at work in the library on my clemency book. A call came in from a New York Times reporter, so I stepped outside to talk to him for a minute, leaning against a blaze-red maple. He didn't want to talk about clemency-- he wanted, instead, to discuss what is going on with the death penalty: specifically, the failed attempt to execute Christa Pike in Tennessee and the planned public execution by the federal government of Nidal Hasan. In that article, Executions are Again on the Mind of a Divided Public, I said this:
“What we’re seeing is the brutality of the institution of the death penalty coming back into public focus,” said Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis who has studied the death penalty. “Tennessee didn’t intend to do that; the federal government does.”
“Given that there has been a rise in executions,” he added, “it’s a good time to have that debate.”
I'm glad that the Times included the word "brutal," because it is a brutal process. Yes, the crimes were brutal, but the cycle of violence needs to stop-- and the rational actors, the governments, need to be the ones to model that.
Later in the article, I was gobsmacked by this quote:
Josh Howerton, the pastor of Lakepointe Church, an evangelical congregation with locations in and around Dallas, argued on social media that executions in the Bible were carried out publicly as deterrents.
“I do not think you can say it’s unbiblical or automatically wrong,” he said of public executions, noting passages that described public stonings.
Yes, in the Old Testament, people were stoned to death. But in John 8 we have Jesus himself brought to observe a legal stoning (of a woman caught in adultery) and he told the people holding stones "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"-- he literally tells them they don't have the moral authority to kill her!
I continue to be shocked at the way Christians can pluck things from the Old Testament and ignore the teaching and example of Jesus.
