What is Christian Justice?
10/29
When I was a child in Sunday school, I was taught that “justice” was a quality of God’s kingdom manifest in acceptance and equality. As the years have passed I have become dismayed by how, both in the church and in our national discourse, this beautiful word has seemingly lost its meaning. Instead of representing acceptance, it seems to have slid more into the realms of vindictive revenge.
In light of a new survey that reveals how most Americans believe religion is fuelling negative views and bullying of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, I was curious to answer the question: What is justice for Christians? After all, better understanding our Christian idea of justice could help us better understand whether or not the church’s judgment of LGBT people fits into that definition.
I found that in Scripture, justice is associated with vengeance, retribution, judgment and punishment as well as uprightness, blamelessness and righteousness. Both the Greek words, “dikaios” and “ekdikos,” their related derivatives, and the Hebrew words, carry these nuances.
This is most definitely different from my Sunday school memories. However, there are a couple of keys aspects of justice in Scripture that also stand out to me.
The first is that justice — from beginning to end in Scripture — belongs to God and all the nuances associated with justice also belong to God. Jesus makes this clear in the Gospel of John. He says, “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me.” (John 5:30) In other words, justice is God’s will active in the world. It belongs to God and not to us.
The second is that God’s justice in Scripture changes over time. In the early history it is squarely in the realm of vindictive retribution. However, as generations pass, God’s requirements for slaughter of women and children that are common in Judges and 1 Samuel are replaced by the prophetic promise that God stands with the people of Israel and Judah in the face of empires.
The special care for the widow, the orphan and the foreigner that comes to be required by God in the Old Testament is fully in place in the New Testament. Uniformly, justice becomes what Catholic teaching calls, “the preferential option of the poor,” in order to establish an equitable society in which power is shared rather than abused. In essence, justice becomes the acceptance and equality I learned about many years ago.
As I reflect on all this, it strikes me that maybe so many Americans believe religion is fuelling negative views and bullying of LGBT people because some of our churches are teaching a justice of judgment and punishment rather than a justice of equality and acceptance. It’s easy to see how these teachings might not include the idea that this kind of judgment belongs only with God.
I see elements of this in my own church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Because the church does not fully accept LGBT people it has deemed them unqualified for ordination and therefore they have no voice or vote on major decisions. This sets up an unequal — and unjust — dynamic within the church and the Biblical meaning of justice sustains the cry of LGBT Presbyterians for a place at the tables where decisions are made.
In the end it’s God’s just power that sustains the less powerful to meet the powerful in the church. God’s Spirit fuels the cry of LGBT Christians for equality and acceptance in both church and society. This is Christian justice and it is great news!
Peace,
Reverend Janet
13 Responses
Dear Janet,
As I read the Bible and continue to learn about the “old testament” God, I always seem to view God’s actions as one attempt after another after another to be in communion, i.e., companionship, with creation. If we take ourselves out of the picture and view God’s struggle with us as God’s struggle, perhaps we can see a reasonable image of God akin to a frustrated parent (who has a rebellious child) who shakes his head and says: “I didn’t raise you to be this way.” In the Old Testament, we can see over and over and over again that God is forgotten, taken advantage of, and easily forsaken. Still, God persisted in His endeavor through prophets and messengers who did all they could to express God’s good intentions. When it seems in those stories that God is “vengeful” I think “no wonder.” God gave us a basic set of commands which we willfully choose not to follow. God keeps the covenant and we don’t. We rebel, worship other gods, we lie, we break all the commandments. Eventually, though, God did the unthinkable, took one more step toward us, and became one of us in order to save us.
The problem, I think, is obvious: we are not as faithful or as loving as God, and, God, like that parent, was not able to understand how we could choose anything other than God. Maybe that’s heretical thinking – that God could not understand God’s own creation and needed to learn for Himself – except that we know Jesus (God) suffered all that we suffer, even death, and the result is the same: in the Old Testament, God insisted on the convenant, and in the New Testament Jesus is the new covenant that is based on and fulfills the old. Through Jesus, God turns from a punishment mentality to one of love and forgiveness, while keeping the covenant intact. Through Jesus, God finally gets His point across: the entire covenant hinges upon the first two commandments, as Jesus says in Matthew, to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. The basis is love, in God’s new actions through Jesus: in healing, in inclusion, in turning the other cheek, in helping the poor, and so on.
What does all of this mean in terms of justice? Justice rests in the covenant, in loving God and neighbor. All else has changed: God’s actions, God’s mind, God’s being (through Jesus and the dispensation of the Holy Spirit), worship, ritual, and the expansion of the covenant to all humanity. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the covenant, those ten commandments, which brings everyone together on equal footing and into the same commitment: to love, through Christ, without exception. It is the covenant to which we are bound and the covenant by which God will judge all of us, and therein lies justice. Any other meaning of justice being preached, I think, is just half the story.
Forgive me this very long way of saying that I agree with you…
Donna
Dear Donna,
Thanks for sharing so deeply with us, Donna!
I said this week that Justice is God’s will made active in the world. Since God is love, this also means that Justice is God’s love made active in the world.
Throughout my ministry I have come back, as if to home base, to the simple line of the Gospel song, “They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love. Yes, they will know we are Christians by our love.” We fail so often. But you articulate so well the Biblical and theological substance that supports this chorus.
Peace, Janet
Janet
I will likewise commit to learning/memorizing the Ten Commandments. They need to be written on our collective hearts.
Dear Jean,
Let’s do it, and anyone else who is inspired to join us is fantastic!
The Ten Commandments embody loving God and loving our neighbor. They are what God asks of us to do so that God may use us to create God’s just community of acceptance and equality in this world.
When I pay close attention to the Ten Commandments, as memorizing them and remembering them each day will help me do, I see clearly how often we fail to live by them in our daily lives. Attention to keeping the Sabbath is one reason I have committed my self, this year, not to watch the Pittsburgh Steeler games.
Thanks for practicing with me this spiritual discipline of writing the Ten Commandments on our hearts.
Peace, Janet
Obviously I need to, too… 🙂
Point of clarification:
Matthew 22:36-40 (New International Version)
36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Footnotes:
a.Matthew 22:37 Deut. 6:5
b.Matthew 22:39 Lev. 19:18
Dear Donna,
Thanks for these references. They are great food for thought, reflection and prayer.
Peace, Janet
what a wonderful conversation! i love when discernment meets education and the two interact.
personally, i can’t help but blush when i compare our “justice” system to God’s justice. i see a most wonderful example of God’s justice in the conversation between He and abraham over the disposition of sodom. as abraham pleaded, God kept revising, in the direction of love and compassion and in the end….His justice was realized.
we have “minimum sentencing guidelines”, making no pretence at arriving at anything like that kind of justice…kind of seems more like a tit for a tat thing. we seem to forget the root of the english word “just”.
we have given up even any pretence of such a concept. in our eagerness to condemn and punish we have totally lost sight of what’s “fair and just”.
we still want our kings. we want it all written out for us so that we don’t need to discern….burn so many doves or kill so many bulls…there, it is done.
God didn’t share His Holy Spirit with us that we might ignore Him and just do the paperwork. my conception of the new covenant is that we are now asked to be grownups. we need to take responsibility for making the hard decisions, to take the risk of discernment. we are gifted with love and compassion…and it’s meant for more dispersal than just our own loved ones.
a tit for a tat….we’ve all heard it said, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will eventually leave us all blind and malnurished.”
by the way, janet…having many friends in the pittsburgh area, giving up watching the steelers games is a sacrifice i’m not even sure God might ordain.
much love and hope. pj
god doesnt exist
Dear pipo,
That’s quite a bold and blunt statement. On what grounds do you claim it and what prompted it in connection with the ideas put forward here?
Thanks for sharing. I hope you are willing to elaborate.
Peace, Janet
The problem, I think, is obvious: we are not as faithful or as loving as God, and, God, like that parent, was not able to understand how we could choose anything other than God. Maybe that’s heretical thinking – that God could not understand God’s own creation and needed to learn for Himself – except that we know Jesus (God) suffered all that we suffer, even death, and the result is the same: in the Old Testament, God insisted on the convenant, and in the New Testament Jesus is the new covenant that is based on and fulfills the old. Through Jesus, God turns from a punishment mentality to one of love and forgiveness, while keeping the covenant intact. Through Jesus, God finally gets His point across: the entire covenant hinges upon the first two commandments, as Jesus says in Matthew, to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. The basis is love, in God’s new actions through Jesus: in healing, in inclusion, in turning the other cheek, in helping the poor, and so on.y no soy argentino
you are good people
God does not accept sin within the church. If a gay person wants to join the church he or she must first repent of their sin. You cannot remain in sin, which in this case is homosexuality, and be part of God’s church. The Bible says we are to purge the church of people who are living in sin. Homosexuality is an abomination to the Lord. He is NOT going to change His mind on this…He is the same yesterday, today and forever. If a church allows an unrepentant person as part of their church, then they are sinning also because they are condoning sin. God’s standard is what we are to go by…not man’s agenda. We conform to God not the other way around. The very reason the church is in a weak state is because the world, and sin has infiltrated the church. So called preachers that allow the LGBT community to dictate the standard of the church will give an account to Almighty God…the Holy One.
Dear Janet,
It is a pleasure of everyone to be accepted equally in every society and to mingle them that nothing bars them on any occasion or gatherings. God’s justice is based on divine precepts as the book of revelation describes who are those in heaven or who are those who were save(revelation 22:1-10).
Justice does not only mean acceptance of those who did not follow God’s word but it corrects who did not do it as what St. Paul emphasized in his letter to the Corinthians. Meaning, we should accept it to ourselves that we must bear the suffering here on earth in order to cleanse ourselves so that we will belong to heaven.
Your friend in Christ,
Alfred