the New Pantagruel

Natural Law, the Death Penalty, and Political Theology: An Editorial Response to First Things

by Caleb Stegall

The Return of the Naked Public Square?

omething strange, and potentially very revealing, is going on at First Things. The latest issue contains a hidden, yet striking contradiction only a few pages apart between its new editor, Jody Bottum, and its editor emeritus, Fr. Richard Neuhaus.

First, Bottum answers a slew of angry letters responding to his earlier essay against the death penalty. In his response (not yet available online), Bottum clarifies his earlier unique argument in important ways. Bottum had made a distinction between “cosmic” or “high” or “historical” justice and what he calls “normal” justice. Cosmic justice is what we might call “natural justice.” Its function is to restore society to order under the law of nature. Cosmic justice presupposes the existence of a narrative, historical arc from the introduction into society of a disordering pressure—a serial killer in this case—all the way through to the capture, conviction, and execution of the killer. This dramatic arc, according to Bottum, “gives the feeling of rightness and a sort of balance restored to a universe gone wrong with the taking of innocent human life. It aims, as satisfying stories must, at what we used to call poetic justice: the killer killed, the blood-debt repaid with blood, death satisfied with death.” High justice balances the “cosmic books” and stabilizes “a shaken universe.”

The only problem, says Bottum, is that the dramatic arc which tells the story of man seeking order under the law of nature has been trumped, reversed, and demythologized by the Christian story. Therefore, capital punishment and indeed all imposition of cosmic justice must take place in a specifically pagan story. The effect, through time, of the Christian reversal of the pagan story has been, according to Bottum, the gradual “demythologiz[ing] of the state” resulting in modern liberal democracy. Lacking a dramatic cosmic political narrative of order and disorder, the modern state can no longer afford to impose any form of high justice, such as capital punishment, which, lacking any anchor in myth, can only be seen as the exercise of raw power and perversion of the “normal” justice supplied by modern states.

In his response to the many letters he received, Bottum clarifies his central argument in important respects. First, he clarifies what he means by the demythologizing effect of modernity: “[W]e lack in ordinary discourse these days the vocabulary to speak of a morally interconnected universe in which great events and great disturbances are echoed even across the stars.” Second, Bottum clarifies exactly what happens to justice in a demythologized state: “When, in the great movement of modern liberalism, we demythologized the state and rejected most of the metaphysical foundations of politics, we gained much—but we also lost something, and one of the things we lost is any coherent theory about the nation’s continuing authority to enact such metaphysically fitting punishments as the death penalty.” Finally, Bottum backs away from his earlier implication that the “Christian story” requires the advent of modern democracies incapable of rightly imposing cosmic justice. Instead, Bottum takes the more modest tack that though there may have once existed a Christian political theology capable of sustaining cosmic justice—he cites the divine right of kings specifically—such is no longer the case and honesty demands that we acknowledge this reality. What we are left with is a demythologized arrangement which possesses authority only through the social contract of its citizens. The state is therefore limited to “normal social justice” which can only vindicate the prosaic order of the social contract rather than the more vast metaphysical order of the cosmos. As such, Bottum urges Christian theology to both recognize this situation and acquiesce to the limitations of the modern political form. Modern contractual liberalism has given up any right to partake in the cosmic drama of history, which includes the drama of order and disorder under nature.

All Pages | 1 |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5