Punishment | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 7, 1883

Punishment.

IN considering the word punishment, we naturally inquire: (1) what punishment is, and (2) what is its purpose; but these two questions may be considered together under the following remarks:—

1. Punishment implies law, and law implies authority. No law can have any binding force unless it be sanctioned by a penalty. Punishment is the infliction of this penalty upon the transgressor by the same authority from which the law proceeds. The penalty threatened must be something that tends to protect the law from violation. It may be the infliction of pain of whatever sort the offender is capable of suffering, or the deprivation of any pleasure privilege, or possession he might otherwise enjoy.

When there is no law or authority, there can be no penalty threatened, nor punishment inflicted. One person may threaten retaliation or injury upon another; he may inflict pain or loss upon one who has offended him, but if he has no authority over him, he cannot punish him. Such an infliction cannot properly be called punishment. Pugilists are said sometimes to punish each other severely; but this is a low and false use of the term. A man who shoots, or beats, or otherwise injures a person who trespasses upon his rights, if he does it without the authority of law, does not punish him. Neither can a ruler, or officer, or magistrate punish one who is not under his jurisdiction. Nor could a parent inflict punishment upon a child who had passed entirely from under his authority. If a parent were to give away, or disinherit and disown a child, so as to relinquish all claim to him, and the child were to pass completely from under his care and authority, he would not only have no right to punish him, but he could not punish him according to the true meaning of the word, whatever injury he might inflict on him. For punishment implies law and authority, and reciprocal obligations. To be subject to punishment one must owe allegiance to the authority or power that punishes him. Power alone cannot punish, but only power under the authority of law violated can inflict punishment, and that only upon one who owes allegiance to that law, and has the right to claim its protection. Power may inflict vengeance, suffering, loss, torment, upon an irresponsible victim, but that would not be punishment.

The reason why we are liable to divine punishment is not because God possesses supreme power, but because we are the subjects of his government; we are under the protection of his law, and owe him allegiance. He is not only the source of all the blessings we enjoy, but the author and sustainer of our lives. It is possible for us to forfeit, not merely these inferior blessings, but the boon which includes them all, even life itself, and to become liable to what is called, under human government, capital punishment. The criminal that is condemned to imprisonment for life, is still under the protection of the government that is inflicting punishment upon him; and he has the right to claim its protection against any one who should treat him unjustly. But if, instead of capital punishment or imprisonment for life, the government were to expell him from her domain, confiscate his property, and withdraw from him all protection of law, he would be no longer amenable to that government, nor any more liable to her punishment than any other alien.

The same is true of the divine government, after which all human governments should be modeled; and yet the popular theology teaches that God proposes to continue to inflict perpetual and unending torment upon sinners after he has judicially, finally, irriversibly and forever withdrawn from them all protection and favor, and cut them off absolutely and entirely from his government! That our lives are in his hands, and that we are momentarily dependent on him to sustain us in sustaining power and let us drop out of being, or to inflict upon us capital punishment if we shall forfeit our lives, no one can reasonably doubt; that he has the right, because he has the power, to cut off the offender from all relation to his government; to take from him everything implied by life, and then to perpetuate that life solely for the sake of torment, and to pursue the helpless victim with perpetual and unending vengeance, cannot be shown. Such an imputation strikes every reflecting mind with horror. Such a procedure could not be called punishment. It would deserve the severest epithet of which our language is capable; for it would outrage every principle of right and justice in the human soul.

During past ages of darkness and barbarism, inhuman monsters of tyranny have essayed to practice on these principles, and have pleaded the example of the Supreme Ruler, as set forth in the doctrines of the church, for their devilish abominations. But even in those days their names were held in universal execration, and they have come down to us loaded with infamy.

2. Punishment is retrospective, and not prospective in its action. In this it differs from penalty, or the penal sanction annexed to every law. This is prospective. It is threatened for the purpose of protecting the law from violation. It is to show the estimation in which the law is held by the lawgiver, and the importance he attaches to obedience. The penalty is minatory in its character. It must be made known with the law, that those to whom the law is given may understand the importance of the law, and the consequences of disobedience.

The penalty of every human law is always announced with the law and defined within certain specified limits, and must be, or there could be no just punishment; for punishment is the infliction of the penalty. It is to be inflicted after the law has been violated, and never before the deed, in anticipation of its infraction. Nor can a heavier penalty be inflicted than was threatened. These are well-known principles of equity, applicable to all human jurisprudence, and no reason can be shown why they are not equally applicable to the administration of the divine law.

The penalty for violating the divine law was definitely announced when the law was given. It was DEATH—not imprisonment, nor torture, much less perpetual and endless imprisonment, with eternal torture; but DEATH. This must have been what Adam understood by it. It is just what the word imports, no more, no less. It would be the way in which every one who had no conflicting theory respecting the deathless nature of man to support, would understand it. But we are told by our popular theology that God conceived in His own mind of a penalty entirely different from the death he threatened; infinitely more severe—a penalty directly the opposite of that which he threatened, namely, a life of misery eternally perpetuated. Then, we ask in the name of reason and justice: WHY DID HE NOT SAY SO? Even the creature has the right to demand of his Creator truth and honest dealing. It cannot be shown that it would be any more right for the Almighty to say one thing and to mean another, to change the nature of the penalty threatened, and infinitely to increase its severity, than it would be for a human ruler to do it.

In order somewhat to relieve the character of God of the imputation of cruelty and deceit which this doctrine casts upon it, we are told that sinners are sentenced to endure endless misery because they will sin forever. But punishment is, and must be, altogether retrospective. It cannot in its very nature be anticipatory. It would no more comport with divine than with human justice to anticipate the crimes one may commit, and to include the future as well as the past in one sentence of punishment. But more than this, it is no more possible for a sinner to violate God's law after he has been entirely severed from God, and cut off absolutely and forever from his government, and made a complete alien, than it is for one to violate the laws of any human government that has cast him out and withdrawn all protection from him.

3. Punishment has primary and special regard, not to the offender, but to the law. It is inflicted not for the purpose of doing him harm or good. What the transgressor may actually deserve, or what may be the effect of the punishment upon him, are considerations not to be entirely disregarded, especially in cases of minor offenses under human government, and for this reason some latitude of discretion, within specified limits, is allowed to the administration, but the penalty, such as it is, must be inflicted, for it is for the sake of the law, and not for the sake of the criminal, that there is any penalty to be inflicted. If we go back of the law, and find that it is for the good of those to whom it is given—as we shall, if the law is just—then we may say that the punishment, which is the infliction of the penalty that sustains the law, is in its ultimate design for the good of those who are under its protection. But in no case can it have special reference to the transgressor himself.

"Evil inflicted for the sake of discipline, is generally supposed to be punishment, and parents say to children that they punish them for their own good. But if that be the sole end, the infliction of evil has no reference to law, and cannot properly be called punishment.—Punishment is the infliction of a previously declared penalty, by the will of the lawgiver, for the sake of sustaining the character of the law." (Dr. Mark Hopkins, Christian Ethics.)

It was not because Major Andre deserved to die that the penalty of death was inflicted upon him. Washington wept when he signed his death-warrant, and would gladly have saved him, if it had been possible to sustain the law without this terrible penalty. The British honor Andre's memory, and, indeed, so do all men. On the other hand, there are others who are known to be traitors at heart, and as ill-deserving as possible, whom the law cannot punish, because they have committed no overt act of transgression. Nor could God himself punish them, did not his authority extend to the hearts as well as the acts of men, and all transgression of his law is from the heart.

But even under the government of God the sinner is not punished on his own account. While in life he is under the discipline of God's providence and grace, and the evils imposed upon him as a transgressor are for the sake of reforming and saving him. They are sometimes called "disciplinary punishments," but they are chastisements, corrections, and not punishments in reality. But the final punishment which will be visited upon irreclaimable sinners at the last day will have no such purpose.

Here we see the fallacy of the reasoning of those who hold that eternal punishment must consist in the eternal conscious suffering of the victim that is punished. Their ideas of punishment are such as prevailed in the dark ages of the world among barbarians, when government meant tyranny, and those who were invested with power taxed their ingenuity to invent tortures to be inflicted upon the subjects of their wrath. Those truer notions of the administration of justice that are now recognized by all human governments throughout Christendom, are still rejected by our conservative theologians. They still seem to suppose that the special object of punishment is to inflict misery upon offenders; or, at least, that it is so under the divine government, if not under human governments, and that the true measure of punishment is to be found in the amount of agony inflicted, and the length of time during which it is protracted. This is the sum of Dr. Bartlett's reasoning in his "Life and Death Eternal." On this ground he holds that extinction of being would be no adequate punishment for sin under God's law, and possibly no punishment at all to some brutal natures. He says:—

"Even extinction, in so far as it would be punishment at all, would be so only so far as the expectation of it and the process would be productive of suffering." (p. 289.)

According to this theory, capital punishment should be made as agonizing and protracted as possible under human governments, or rather the death penalty should entirely give place to lifelong and ceaseless torture. But in his anxiety to make good his theological arguments for the endless torment of the unsaved, he overlooks and misconstrues the real object and nature of punishment. It is not for the sinner's sake—neither to do him good nor to make him wretched—but for the maintenance of God's righteous government. We may be assured that whatever is just and good, and necessary to this end, God will do.

"It is important to remember that the final punishment of the irreclaimably wicked will not be for their own sake. The superficial remarks, therefore, that are frequently made about the destruction of the wicked having no terror for those who are without spiritual desires, simply fall to the ground. As long as punishment is correction, that is, inflicted for the good of persons punished, it is essential that they should feel its bitterness. But when it is purely retributive, that is, inflicted with no hope of benefiting the guilty, but solely to vindicate the majesty of law, it is not of the smallest consequence whether they care about it or not, so long as it is something which the innocent would dread. Now, whatever may be thought of any preliminary punishment that the wicked may have to undergo, it is quite certain that the last stroke, which blots them out of existence, must be for the sake of others. Their destruction will be necessary, first, that the universe may be reconciled to God; and secondly, to make them an 'example' of the destructive nature of sin; to show to all intelligent creatures throughout eternity that evil cannot continue; that in Christ all things consist, and that, therefore, they cannot live apart from Him." (Minton's Glory of Christ, p. 155.)—From "Life Everlasting," by Prof. J. H. Pettingell.