Well, let me clarify once again that I don't personally support the death penalty for heresy. But no doubt Justinian was thinking of verses like this:
Then Elijah commanded them, “Seize the prophets of Baal. Don’t let anyone get away!” They seized them, and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there. (1 Kings 18:40)
Justinian was a Christian Taliban, just like Calvin and Pope Leo. Evil men who killed other men for disagreeing with them on religious matters.
Elijah was commanding Jews under the Torah. We're not Jews. Justinian, Cauvin, Pope Leo, you and I are Christians, living under the law of Jesus.
Justinian could no more justify what he did under Jesus' law than you can. He was wrong, and BECAUSE he was wrong, he left a legacy of evil within the church and the mind of the West so deep that it ended up being the primary reason that Christianity has been demoted and sent off to the woodshed. BECAUSE the Christian Church very confidently went around killing heretics for 1400 years - from the late 300s until the 1800s - it became a legitimate object of disgust, such that when people seized control of their governments through popular revolutions, EVERYWHERE they did so they ripped any residual power out of the hands of the church. And they were right in doing so. The Church failed, because it would not renounce bloodshed to get its way. Remember, the reason that the formerly Christian East went over so rapidly to Islam was that the Christian East was still the Roman Empire, and despite being Christian, the Christian Romans would not give up the enslavement of their fellow Christians. They had all sorts of elaborate Christian defenses of a practice that cannot be defended under the law of Jesus. (So did the Confederates.)
When the Muslims swept in, they offered freedom from slavery to Christian masters for anybody who renounced Christianity for Islam. And thus Christianity swiftly lost half of its members in the East - because Christianity meant continuing to groan in the chains of slavery, to another Christian no less - and all of it justified legally by the established Catholic Church of the Byzantine Empire - while Islam meant freedom.
The Muslims of that time were closer to following the law of Jesus than the Byzantine Christians they conquered. Or the Confederates for that matter.
The law of Jesus has been around since the First Century and is very clear.
What Justinian did defies it.
What Leo and Cauvin and Luther and others of that era did defies it.
What the Confederates did defies us.
What we do in our own day defies it.
It's been clear since Jesus said it, and for any Christian to devise a way around it so he can wield greater political power over other man than God gave to men is always, and always has been, evil and perfectly obviously so. The Quakers managed to get this right in the 1650s, before Cromwell and his Puritans went and burnt down Ireland, and half a century before Salem's Christians hanged their witches.
Christian violence has been indefensible since Jesus.
Cultural defenses and "time, place and manner" defenses are unavailing.
Christians should man up, face down the evil in themselves, acknowledge the evil of their own past actions and repent them, and also acknowledge the evils done by their countries, their cultures, their governments and churches, cease to try to defend it, admit it was wrong, repent it, and move forward determined not to REPEAT it, and not to try to JUSTIFY evils past.
And to not let each other getting away with trying to let the past off the hook.
It was sin, and they knew it. If they DIDN'T, then how can ANY Christian look back at them as teachers at all. If they were so incapable of reading Jesus and knowing they could not put men into the fire and follow him, then they were complete morons, and violent thugs, who have NOTHING AT ALL to teach us today, other than how NOT to be.
That George Fox and the Quakers, simple peasants, managed to understand this completely way back then puts the lie to the cultural argument. The culture itself was bad, and it produced bad fruit, and there were Christians in the middle of it who knew it and who followed Christ and didn't justify any of it.
That means that it was ENTIRELY possible, even for little, relatively uneducated people, to get it right.
Which means that a lawyer like Cauvin, or a highly educated grandee like Pope Leo, have NO EXCUSE.
And it means that Christians should STOP trying to excuse them. "The times" doesn't cut it. Jesus PRECEDED their times, and people DURING their times DID get it. They have NO excuse, and they shouldn't be accorded any. They were criminals, they did great evil to other men, and to the Church, and to the reputation of God all around the world. Their evil thoughts contaminated their theologies and left them weak and useless. If we're going to insist on listening to theologians of the 16th and 17th Centuries as the basis of anything, then we have no excuse - if we're going to follow Christ anyway - to not just dump all of them and listen to George Fox. He's a bit of an earnest simpleton, but at least he heard the Holy Spirit and FOLLOWED it, and he and his'n at least acted the way Jesus said to act. The Quakers were better than the Catholics or Protestants of that violent era, so if we're going to pick a theology from the 1500s and 1600s to follow, if we don't want to run out on Jesus in the process then we should all be following the Quakers of back then. They didn't kill anybody, which makes their religion more Christian than the other "Christians" that modern day Christians are trying to excuse.
There is no excuse for what Cauvin did. It was evil. Pure and simple.
