Crime, Punishment, and Christianity

Review of Joe Boot's The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society (part 6 of 10)

Is there a “Christian” way to punish crimes? Has “cheap grace” been exported from the Church to society? Why do we no longer think of Law as a blessing? What discernment might we need when applying (or not applying) Biblical laws to the penal system today?

In light of the discussion thus far, one may be wondering, if some form of Christian theocracy was worth pursuing in order to bring hope to society, what on earth would it look like? In chapter 9, Boot unpacks a Christian understanding of ‘penology’ as a first step in this direction. It is indicative of just how little we can even imagine Christians wielding any sort of political influence these days that few Christians will have even heard of the term ‘penology’ (I certainly hadn’t!).

Essentially, penology is the theory of punishment according to civil law. Boot asks a series of insightful questions which set the stage well:

How did Christendom move from the one state of affairs to the other? How did we go from punishing abortionists, rapists, perjurers and sodomites with criminal sanctions, and protecting the Lord’s Day as liberty for people under God, to endorsing the killing of unborn children, removing legal protection for the family, trivializing perjury, re-defining marriage in favour of homo-eroticism, and declaring the Sabbath Day unconstitutional? (295)

For Boot, whilst there may be numerous socio-political answers to these questions, the root cause is theological, in the gradual acceptance of ‘cheap grace’ in the churches, and its overflow into wider society. Here, unsurprisingly, he engages with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who argued strongly against Marcionite thinking in the Church.

Cheap Grace and Costly Law

For Bonhoeffer, an abstract idea of grace and love often introduces a dangerous antinomianism into the church, where Christians ‘logically and steadily cease to believe in the need for real justification before a holy God’ (297). We have become so accustomed to perpetually telling people that God forgives them that some have ceased to believe it was truly necessary (‘legally’ speaking) to be forgiven as a result of breaking God’s Law.