What is Punishment For Pacifists?

This section is entitled "Punishing Christians: A Pacifist Approach to the Issue of Capital Punishment" by Stanley Hauerwas. As this is an essay about Christian pacifism, Hauer referenced Yoder, "Yoder rightly thought those committed to Christian nonviolence cannot avoid providing an account -- or even more important, alternative practices -- of and for punishment" (Hauerwas 58). Many think that Christian pacifism cannot provide a space for punishment but Hauerwas disagrees. The author is not found of the most popular theories of punishment and especially capitol punishment such as rehabilitation or protection from society. He writes that they only obscure what is really happening unless those theories are grounded in Christian theology. The most compelling aspects of that theology are the ideas of forgiveness and hope. Hauerwas believes those ideas can be transformative and their absence destructive, "Absence of hope and forgiveness means 'prisons become human warehouses and both offenders and those who operate the criminal justice system have great difficulty in seeing their experience and their work as significant and meaningful" (Hauerwas 61). Keeping this in mind, we can understand the proper role of punishment in society and the church. Hauerwas brings up the position of Oliver O'Donovan on Pope John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae to show that humanistic ideologies are the wrong reason to abolish the death penalty. O'Donovan believes that the death penalty should remain because the crucifixion exemplified the linkage between judgement on sin and death. Hauerwas disagrees saying that the end of punishment has been transformed by Jesus's crucifixion. He writes, "Christian punishment is properly understood to be excommunication, or binding and loosing...To be excommunicated is not to be 'thrown out' but rather to be told that we are already 'outside'" (Hauerwas 71). This is how the author believes we can form a Christian community in the world that can punish in a way appropriate, "for a people who believe that we have been freed" (Hauerwas 72).

I really appreciated O'Donovan's thoughtful and theologically based position on the death penalty although like Hauerwas, I still oppose the death penalty. Most of the "biblical" justifications for the application of the death penalty have involved Old Testament references or 1 Peter 2:13. O'Donovan was the first justification I have heard that was not a superficial reading of the Bible. Hauerwas writes about O'Donovan, "All Christians have to say that death is not part of God's 'original created order. Death is not just death, but judgement on sin. Without such a view on the linkage between judgement and death Christ becomes another victim of injustice rather than one that bore our sins and suffered our death" (Hauerwas 67). This is a very thoughtful interpretation although I have to agree with the author when he noted that the crucifixion transformed punishment and death, it was not a static symbol for sin and judgement. I also think the ideas of integrating hope and reconciliation into our prison systems can be very effective. Without such ideas, there is not bridge between prison and life after prison. A prisoner cannot enter back into a community in a positive way without hope of a better life and reconciliation with its members.