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Per Fidem Intrepidus means "Fearless Through Faith". My courage isn't my own, it comes from the Holy Spirit, it's my faith in God and my personal savior Christ Jesus that calms my fears and allows me to move forward in this fallen world. Personally I'm afraid of a lot of stuff, but having the faith that Jesus adopted me as his little, sin filled, brother keeps me going.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

WWUTT Wednesday - The Hand That Wields The Sword

Martin Luther wrote that "the hand that wields the sword and strangles is … no longer man's hand but God's." Executioners, he believed, are "very useful and even merciful," since they stop villains and deter crime. 

Dr. Albert Mohler, the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary said "I believe that Christians should hope, pray and strive for a society in which the death penalty, rightly and rarely applied, would make moral sense. This would be a society in which there is every protection for the rights of the accused, and every assurance that the social status of the murderer will not determine the sentence for the crime,"

On the other hand Jay Sekulow, who heads the conservative Christian advocacy group the American Center for Law and Justice said "the taking of life is not the way to handle even the most significant of crimes." and "Who amongst anyone is not above redemption? I think we have to be careful in executing final judgment. The one thing my faith teaches me — I don't get to play God. I think you are short-cutting the whole process of redemption…I don't want to be the person that stops that process from taking place."

So who is right? God is:


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3 comments:

  1. NeilOctober 12, 2016 at 7:18 AM

    Yep.

    "I think you are short-cutting the whole process of redemption…I don't want to be the person that stops that process from taking place."

    Sekulow and those who use his argument don't realize how it would make the crime of murder even worse. If God wasn't sovereign over reaching the convicted murderer -- who, by the way, gets ~10 years of appeals in this country -- then He wasn't sovereign over the victim, either. That means the crime of murder is even worse than Sekulow et al imagine it is, because the murderer may have cost the victim his temporal life AND his eternal life.

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  2. Carl VehseMay 14, 2018 at 8:37 AM

    Do you have a reference for the quote attributed to Martin Luther?

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    1. Doug EvansMay 16, 2018 at 10:34 AM

      I only have second hand sources, I have to depend on them because I can't find the original text. The one I used was from https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/march/rethinking-capital-punishment.html
      But there's many articles that use that quote

      Historian Joel Harrington (The Faithful Executioner , Macmillan, 2013) called Luther’s comment “a celebrity endorsement for the profession.”

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