NOTICE:
I
will post a quote or article from a Christian in favor of capital punishment
every fortnight. I chose this as the article, as on this date, 22 July 2011, is
the 2011 Norway attacks.
PAGE
TITLE:
http://www.desiringgod.org/
ARTICLE
TITLE:
Life Is Cheap in Norway: C. S. Lewis on the Sentence of Anders Breivik
DATE: Monday 27
August 2012
AUTHOR: John
Piper
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: John Stephen Piper (born January 11, 1946) is a Calvinistic
Baptist Christian preacher and author who served as Pastor for Preaching and
Vision of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota for 33 years. His
books include ECPA Christian Book Award winners Spectacular Sins, What Jesus
Demands from the World, Pierced by the Word, and God's Passion for His Glory,
and bestsellers Don't Waste Your Life and The Passion of Jesus Christ. The evangelical
organization Desiring God is named for his book Desiring God: Meditations of a
Christian Hedonist (1986).
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| John Piper |
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Salute: For the second day in a row, killer Breivik
clenched his his fist in front of him as he entered the Oslo courtroom (SOURCE:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2130881/Anders-Behring-Breivik-trial-Norway-killer-boasts-spectacular-attack-Europe-WWII.html)
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Anders Breivik’s sentence for killing 77 people in
Norway on July 22, 2011 is outrageous. He was deemed sane and sentenced to
serve 21 years in prison “in a three-cell suite of rooms equipped with exercise
equipment, a television and a laptop.” That’s 100 days of posh prison time for
each person he murdered, with a legal release possible at age 53. Life is cheap
in Norway.
The news agencies explained that such a sentence
is consistent with Norway’s general approach to criminal justice. Like the rest of Europe . . . Norway no longer has the death penalty and considers prison more a means for rehabilitation than retribution.
They explained that “many Europeans” consider
America’s criminal justice system to be “cruelly punitive.” And the blog post I
am now writing, naturally, would fall into the category of vindictive.
Do you see the error in this? C. S. Lewis did.
He wrote an essay in 1949 exposing the tyrannical
folly of “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (Essay Collection and
Other Short Pieces, London: HarperCollins, 2000, 698-705). This theory
reigns in Norway today.
Lewis explains that treating criminals not with a
view to punishment, but only with a view to remediation and deterrence is the
end of justice and the seedbed of tyranny. It is dehumanization with a gentle
face.
It is essential to oppose the Humanitarian theory of punishment, root and branch, wherever we encounter it. It carries on its front a semblance of mercy which is wholly false. That is how it can deceive men of good will. (704)
He explains that the moment you disconnect
punishment from what a person deserves, you disconnect it from justice; because
“the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and
justice.” (699)
Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case.’ (699)
If a criminal’s sentence does not have to accord with
what he deserves, it does not have to be just. At that point we are all at the
mercy of those who are in power to call anything we do a crime and give it any
therapeutic or remedial solution they choose, including gas chambers and
medical alterations. “The Humanitarian theory of punishment will put in their
hands a finer instrument of tyranny than wickedness ever had before.” (703)
In fact, the news story explains that, after his
21-year smack-on-the-hand for killing 77 people, Breivik “could be kept there
indefinitely by judges adding a succession of five-year extensions.” There it
is. The issue is not what he deserves. The issue is not justice. The issue is
power in the hands of judges who will decide if he has been “rehabilitated”
sufficiently, and if his detainment has served the community to a suitable
degree.
This is the seedbed of tyranny. To be sure, there
is a place for rehabilitation and deterrence. But only under the humanizing
sway of justice. Lewis explains the relation:
I am ready to make both protection of society and the “cure” of the criminal as important as you please in punishment, but only on a certain condition; namely, that the initial act of thus interfering with a man’s liberty be justified on grounds of desert. . . . It is this and (I believe) this alone, which legitimizes our proceeding and makes it an instance of punishment at all, instead of an instance of tyranny — or, perhaps, of war. (“On Punishment: A Reply by C. S. Lewis,” Essay Collection: And Other Short Pieces, 707)
And what of mercy? We are Christians. We don’t
treat each other merely on the basis of justice, but of mercy, since we have
been treated that way by God in Christ. Yes. And the Christian — the biblical —
concept of mercy toward wrongdoers only exists in relation to justice. Showing
mercy, in relation to wrongdoing, means treating someone better than they deserve.
If the concept of ill-desert, and with it the
concept of justice, is lost, mercy ceases to be. It is replaced by sentiment
and caprice. As Lewis observes, “The essential act of mercy was to pardon; and
pardon in its very essence involves the recognition of guilt and ill-desert in
the recipient.” (704)
There may be good reasons for commuting or
mollifying just sentences, but those reasons, if they are merciful, will give
an account of themselves before the bar of precious and unimpeachable justice.
Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice; transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed. (704)
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