I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the connection between justice, judgment and love in Christian theology.
When I was in litigation practice, I always felt a bit of awe when I received an order from a Judge, even regarding something mundane like the exchange of documents in a civil case. That piece of paper represented the power and authority of the United States government compelling some person or corporation to behave a certain way, on pain of sanctions for contempt of court. When is the exercise of such authority legitimate and just? This is perhaps the most important question any legal system must address.
In my little corner of Christianity, American evangelicalism, we tend to focus quite a bit on God’s final judgment — the ultimate eschatological question of “who’s in and who’s out” of heaven. I’m worried that this typical faith narrative of ours lacks much meaningful representation of how justice, judgment, and love relate to each other or to God’s character. As I see it, the problem with this narrative isn’t that God judges; it’s that the god who is depicted as judge seems to lack any sense of justice or any attribute of love. Here is a god not unlike the gods of ancient mythology — arbitrary, distant, angry, petty, bent on destruction.
It seems to me that our Evangelical god sometimes isn’t really the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ. As my theologian friend Scot McKnight notes in his book A Community Called Atonement, “[j]ustice . . . cannot be reduced to revenge or retribution. Instead, it is the redemptive grace of God at work in God’s community of faith that preemptively strikes with grace, love, peace, and forgiveness to restore others to selves, and to restore selves to others.” God’s justice portrayed in the Christian scriptures is a justice of restoration. It is not arbitrary, but rather flows from the relational character of the Triune God, which is a relationship of perfect fellowship and love.
A United States federal district court judge’s orders are legitimate because and to the extent that they are constructed within the communal framework of our constitutional social contract. God’s judgments are legitimate because they are the extension of the communal life of God into the world He created to share in that life. But if God is love, why would his justice ever exclude anyone from enjoying the benefits of the restored community?
I think Hans Boersma, in his rich book Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross, offers a helpful (and very Augustinian) response:
Just as divine hospitality requires at least some violence to make it flourish, so also God’s love requires that he become angry when his love is violated. For God not to get angry when he is rejected by people made in his image (and redeemed in Christ) would demonstrate indifference, not love. . . . Love, it seems, requires passionate anger toward anything that would endanger the relationship of love.
Justice motivated by love requires a sort of “violence.” If God is to restore the community of peace, He must melt away that which opposes peace, just as the refiner melts away that which corrupts the strength and beauty of the metal. “For he [God] is like a refiner’s fire” (Mal. 3:2).
But how does this particularly Christian and Trinitarian understanding of justice, judgment and love translate into theories of culture and of positive law? We Christians obviously have a dark history of presuming license to employ physical violence against others — particularly our Jewish neighbors, but also fellow Christians with whom we disagree on matters of faith and practice — in order to establish what we think God’s community of peace should look like on this earth. Indeed, St. Augustine’s tract against the Donatists itself represents the temptation to appropriate the mechanisms of state violence in the service of a specific Christian view of the peaceable kingdom.
On this point I envy my Catholic friends who can point to Balthasar and the nouvelle theologie behind the Second Vatican Council for a rich contemporary understanding of justice, judgment, and pluralism. I don’t think the usual evangelical default to Kuyper and “common grace” helps very much. In fact, for Christian scholars of the law and culture in the evangelical tradition, I think developing a meaningful theology of justice and judgment in a pluralistic world is one of our most pressing tasks.
One reply on “Justice, Judgment and Love”
I’ve been thinking a lot about judgment and love and holiness lately, and less about justice, and I’m also worried about the narrative. If Jesus is truly our revelation of God, then our rhetoric about sin and punishment and holiness doesn’t seem to reflect how Jesus treated people. I don’t see much “sin separates us from God” or “God can’t tolerate sin in his presence” in Jesus’ seeking out and apparent comfort with sinners.
The Boersma quote doesn’t convince me for, as a parent, I know that anger is not the only legitimate “love” response to my kids’ failures. I can feel pity at their lack of understanding, frustration at my inability to communicate more clearly, or even a sort of wonder at the fact that my child has gotten to the point in their development that this particular type of disobedience or rejection of my authority is possible. I don’t see “violence” as a requirement, or a lack of anger or violence towards a four- or twelve-year-old as a necessary sign of indifference on my part. I have the right to extend mercy or patient correction instead of violence if I so choose — at least for those crimes that are against me.
Anger or violence has to be reasonable or appropriate for the parties committing the wrong, whether they be children, the mentally ill, or perhaps humans infected by the sin disease and incapable of curing themselves. Unfortunately, the “soul-sort” judgment narrative that we have both lived with doesn’t seem particularly nuanced — again, in contrast to Jesus’ remarkable tolerance for moral ambiguity from those he loved, and pitied, and wept for, and was perfectly willing to associate with.
Not to denigrate the cross, mind you. I think the cross was necessary to take away the sin of the world. I’m really not one of those wishy-washy, kumbaya God Christians. But the Jesus in the gospels doesn’t look much like the just God whose “character leaves him no choice” but to pour out eternal wrath on anyone who doesn’t get it right. I suspect there is a better way to understand God’s justice. And if I had to choose, I’d like to think that it’s a better gamble to trust in the Jesus of the Bible than in the tradition or doctrine of a church. One of those two has a far worse track record for getting it right.