A few weeks ago I posted about the killing of Osama bin Laden and said Christians shouldn’t celebrate it. A number of people strongly disagreed, arguing that it is right to celebrate justice and his assassination was just.
Both Christianity Today and Christian Century have weighed in the subject–on my side. (Great minds think alike!) CT quotes Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler as saying “Retributive justice is sober justice. The reason for this is simple–God is capable of vengeance, which is perfectly true to his own righteousness and perfection–but human beings are not. [Celebrating in the streets] looks far more like we are simply taking satisfaction in the death of an enemy. That kind of revenge just produces greater numbers of enemies.” (June, 2011 issue) Amen to that.
Christian Century (May 31, 2011) contains an entire article on “The killing of bin Laden: justice or vengeance?” by Tobias Wright who quotes St. Augustine as saying that “A mournful mood should accompany even justified violence.” Wright also quotes John Paul II who wrote in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) that “not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this.”
Christian leaders from a conservative Southern Baptist seminary president to the pope oppose Christian celebration of death–even the death of a murderer. Those who disagree and support celebration of execution and assassination need to explain themselves in biblical and Christ-centered ways in face of the overwhelming and across the spectrum Christian criticism of such celebrating of death.
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