Leaving Lapidation (or, how to love God without stoning people to death...)

Do you know what 'lapidation' is? Neither did I.

But a whole lot of people in the Southeast Asian country of Brunei are terrified that their about to find out...

Let me back up for a moment; 

Five years ago I wrote a piece for the Feast of St. Stephen (26 December).

Since Stephen is described in the biblical text as a young man stoned to death for holding different religious beliefs than the majority (Acts of the Apostles 7), I used the day to reflect on the global issues of torture, prisoner abuse, and cruel and unusual methods of capital punishment.  

The news that Brunei has become the latest nation to declare that it will use stoning as a method of execution for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality brings the issue back to critical importance once again. 

It’d be difficult to think of a more brutal way to execute someone than by throwing rocks at them until they succumb to blunt trauma. Yet stoning (or, if you want the fancy name, ‘lapidation’) is a legal method of execution in 14 countries, and an extrajudicial method in several others. 

In practice, the practical process of stoning someone to death usually involves burying a man upright up to his chest (or a woman up to her shoulders). Islamic law dictates the stones be of a size not so large as one or two strikes would result in death, but not so small that the stoning would take an undue amount of time. Preferred stones are therefore about the size of a hand; the process can take up to 20 minutes.

Although the countries and legal systems which utilize stoning are predominantly Muslim, this is by no means simply an issue within Islam. Several extremist Christian groups in the US and elsewhere, as well as individual clergy, laypeople, and politicians (posting or commenting on social media where, bizarrely, they seem to think no one can hear them) have expressed their desire to reinstate stoning as a 'biblical' punishment for a raft of crimes. 

Needless to say, actual pro-stoning Christians are rare. But in browsing around the internet for Christian views on stoning, it appears that, because stoning is mentioned in the Bible- as a divinely-inspired method of execution, no less- few Christians seem willing to completely rule it out.

One site called ‘Got Questions’ put it this way:

Stoning is a horrible way to die. That particular manner of execution must have been a strong deterrent against committing the sins deemed offensive enough to merit stoning. God cares very much about the purity of His people. The strict punishment for sin during the time of the Law helped deter people from adopting the impure practices of their pagan neighbors and rebelling against God. The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), and Israel was given a stern commandment to stay pure: “You must purge the evil from among you” (Deuteronomy 17:7) 

That a Christian commentator could, after the 20th century’s totalitarian horrors of genocide, mass deportation, and ethnic cleansing, so blithely write about the need to ‘purge’ and ‘purify’  almost perfectly encapsulates the type of theology Walter Wink bluntly dismissed (in 1973, no less) as ‘bankrupt’:

I use ‘bankrupt’ in the exact sense of the term. A business which goes bankrupt is not valueless, nor incapable of producing useful products. It still has an inventory of expensive parts, a large capital outlay, a team of trained personnel, a certain reputation, and usually, until the day bankruptcy is declared, a facade which appeared to most to be relatively healthy. The one thing wrong — and the only thing — is that it is no longer able to accomplish its avowed purpose for existence: to make money. It is in this precise sense that one can speak of the historical critical method generally... It is bankrupt solely because it is incapable of achieving what most of its practitioners considered its purpose to be: so to interpret the Scriptures that the past becomes alive and illumines our present with new possibilities for personal and social transformation.

Another site called ‘What Christians Want To know’ put it like this:

To look back at the Mosaic Laws and to ask why God allowed certain things is to make ourselves the judge of God and I won’t go there. These seem harsh to our thinking but in a society where there were no civil police forces that patrolled the nation of Israel, God had to institute His laws as a device to check or prohibit crime from ever happening. The severe punishment of stoning was instituted for this nation to deter crime and was intended to prevent it from becoming rampant and keep the entire nation from self-destructing or imploding upon itself. If we don’t understand something in the Bible or what God taught, we must simply trust the Creator Who has every right to govern in the way that is best to Him for who can question God. I can’t. 

So… God instituted stoning because there were no police? By that logic, why didn’t God just institute police rather than stoning? Plus, stoning people to death was ‘to deter crime’ and ‘keep the entire nation from self-destructing’? Does the author honestly think that is a proper prescription for crime prevention and national security, then or now? Are we to assume the author thinks it’s still an effective method of doing both?

He or she doesn’t explicitly answer that, falling back instead on the weak exegetical trope whenever coming across something horrific in the biblical text and not wanting to question it for fear that this entails throwing out the entire Bible as a whole:

‘Oh well, God must have known what he was doing’…

Theology can do better. When people are being cruelly murdered for being who they are- being who God created them to be- it must do better. 

When Jesus was confronted with a woman that Jewish law deemed worthy of stoning, he transformed the entire issue, refusing to confirm the sentence and instead forcing the crowd to reflect on who could possibly think themselves able to commit such an act;

‘Let the one who has never sinned cast the first stone’;

If you, being the person you know yourself to be, could inflict this on another, throw…

Many over the years have mused about what Jesus was writing in the dirt when confronted by the mob wanting to stone the woman to death.  

We’ll never know, of course.

I hope it was ‘don’t stone people to death, ever.’

Please support Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in their efforts to ban torture, cruel and unusual punishments, and the death penalty worldwide. 

Holy St. Stephen, pray for us...