The campaign by political blogger Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) for the restoration of capital punishment has a strong Christian case behind it.
It is worth asking why Christian nations have historically enforced the death penalty whereas societies that are de-Christianising, such as Britain in the 1960s, tend to abolish it.
The answer lies in that society’s changing attitude to the authority of the Bible.
That is not to suggest that support for capital punishment is a cardinal doctrine of Holy Scripture. The Bible is centrally about eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of sins he died to bring all mankind, including those guilty of murder. But it is to argue that the Bible leans strongly towards the death penalty for murderers.
In Genesis 9, God establishes a binding agreement – ‘covenant’ - with Noah, in which famously the rainbow is the sign that God will not destroy the earth again by flooding. That covenant includes the following stipulation: ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man’ (Genesis 9v6 – King James Version).
The fact that mankind, male and female, is created in the image of God has been established in Genesis chapter 1. The institution of the death penalty for murderers in the Noahic Covenant is thus a practical moral consequence of the fact that their victims are made in the image of God. They are guilty of murdering God's image-bearers and so their fellow men have the God-given responsibility to execute the death penalty upon them.
That does not mean that the image of God has been eradicated in the murderer; it means that his or her accountability to the God who has made them in his image involves punitive retribution by death.
