Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
Neither. Jesus focused on the individual person....which both of those above statements are supposed to be applied towards.
Romans 13: 4
|
See, I guess I would interpret that as "God will take care of vengeance. Worry about your own conscience and let God worry about the evildoers." Which would seem entirely more consistent with Christ's general philosophy.
In fact, you'll note that it doesn't refer to "government" or invest the power of vengeance in the ruling class in any way. And why would it? That would be totally inconsistent with the whole fomenting resistance to the Jewish ruling class and to the Romans that Christ was kind of big on.
I for one HIGHLY doubt Christ would be down with capital punishment. In fact, there's this story about casting stones and being without sin.... it's pretty famous. What that points to, for me, is the hypocrisy behind capital punishment--punishing others while ignoring the sinful nature of the self, which as you point out was his chief concern.