Justice, Judgment and Reconciliation

The Sunday service on July 4 at my church was excellent. One of our younger pastors preached on the theme of “hope.” He managed to tie together some thoughts about hope rooted in our national history in the U.S. (there was a stirring reading from the Gettysburg Address) with his recent experiences on a missions trip in Cambodia. He observed how the Church in Cambodia is starting to produce little pockets of culture out of the ashes of totalitarianism, including economic and artistic renewal, in places where the gospel of freedom in Christ is being heard.

The ashes of Cambodian totalitarianism, of course, include Pol Pot’s killing fields, which our pastor visited. He described how the rains every year expose more and more of the bones of the estimated 1.3 million people who died during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. We are grateful that, for all our ills, nothing like the Killing Fields presently exists in the U.S., in no small part due to some of the moral and legal principles we inherited, however imperfectly and haltingly, from Christian, Jewish, and other religious sources. And we are grateful that there are communities in places like Cambodia where the Church is shining the light of the Gospel in its fullness.

At the same time, we may wonder: where is the answer to the bones that cry out for justice? We are painfully aware of the limits of justice in this life. Very few of the perpetrators of this sort of violence are ever identified, judged and convicted. Often they remain in power, or simply dissolve into anonymity. We cry out to God with the Psalmist: “How long will the wicked, O LORD, how long with the wicked be jubilant?” (Ps. 94:3). We look for the final judgment, the terrible “Day of the Lord,” when the “white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True” is unleashed — “With justice he judges and makes war.” (Rev. 19:11).

But how does this final judgment restore the victims of Pol Pot? My Evangelical Christian tradition in particular has emphasized that the final judgment is ultimately a sorting out of all those who have, during life, exercised faith in Christ from those who have not. The vast majority of Pol Pot’s victims were not professing Christians. Most had probably never heard of Christ. Are they condemned to Hell with their tormentors? Where, then, is “justice” for them? If final justice is mostly about one’s access to Christian teaching during life (or in Reformed theology, about one’s election by God), how does this provide any foundation for attempts to do “justice” during this life? Was Qohelet right after all: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity”? (Eccl. 1:2).

One contemporary Christian theologian who has wrestled with these issues is Jurgen Moltmann. His most recent book, Sun of Righteousness, Arise!: God’s Future for Humanity and the Earth, summarizes his many decades of brilliant, if sometimes controversial and perhaps even heterodox, theological writing. I commend the reading of Moltmann to everyone, particularly to Evangelicals and others who are perhaps a bit too wedded to neat theological formulas, and this latest book of his is a great place to start.

Moltmann lived through World War II — he was a reluctant German soldier, became a POW, and returned to post-war Germany as a pastor and theologian — and as a result he has a keen eye for the problem of justice. For Moltmann, God’s “final judgment” must be conceived of as “not the great reckoning, with reward and punishment” but rather “the victory of the creative divine righteousness and justice over everything godless in heaven, on earth, and beneath the earth.”

Moltmann’s theology often wrestles with the meaning of history, hope, and freedom, and even “final” judgment, he believes must be “open” to the future: “Because the judgment serves this new creation of all things, its righteousness is not a righteousness related to the past, which merely establishes what is done and requires it. It is a creative righteousness related to this future, a righteousness which creates justice, heals and rectifies.” This is a judgment of restoration and reconciliation, akin to a truth commission in which the perpetrators of violence “must listen to [their vicitms’] accounts and learn to see themselves with the eyes of their victims, even if this is terrible and destructive.” The intention of this judgment is “to put right the disrupted relationships between people and nations; its intention is not to reward or punish individuals. . . .” The last judgment, then, should be imagined as “a peaceful arbitration whose purpose is the furtherance of life, not as a criminal court which decides over life and death.”

Here is a compelling vision of hope for the dry bones in Cambodia’s killing fields. They will meet their murderers in the eschaton — and they will be reconciled to each other, and all in the end will be saved.

It will be difficult for most Christians in Augustinian traditions — including most Evangelicals — to accept much of Moltmann’s vision, not least his universalism. Personally, from my theological perspective, I desire to do my best to account for the fullness of the Biblical witness in a way that coheres with the Tradition, reason and experience. Rev. 20 does not seem to me a picture of universal reconciliation, and the Tradition, reason, and experience suggest that some people will refuse to be reconciled. And yet, Colossians 1:2 seems tantalizingly inclusive: the Christian hope is that Christ will “reconcile all things to himself.” Perhaps those of us in Evangelical Augustinian traditions cannot rely on Moltmann, but I believe we can at least learn from him that the cosmic scope of salvation must be bigger than our limited horizons if there truly is to be final justice. And maybe this can lead us to learn from our Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters, from the early Greek Patristic writers and from contemporary Catholics such as Balthasaar and Ratzinger, a bit more about the meaning and hope of salvation.