What Exactly is Justice?
God’s concern for justice unfolds in a sweeping arc from the Bible’s first stories to its final images. When Cain kills Abel unjustly, the victim’s blood cries out to God from the ground (Gen. 4:10); when God later discloses to Noah a broader prohibition on murder, it is based on the divine image that every human bears (Gen. 9:6). God becomes primarily identified with the Exodus event; this identification is on full display in the Psalms (see Ps. 103, 146), and it is so strong that it has led many to declare justice a chief attribute of God.
This thread is carried on through the prophetic tradition into Jesus’ teachings and ministry in the New Testament (e.g. Luke 4:16-21). And in the vision of the new heaven and new earth, John the Revelator leaves us with a society completely free of pain, mourning, and tears—where everyone lives in peace in the very presence of God (Rev. 21-22).
We see and hear about justice, then, throughout the entire witness of Christian Scripture. But what does this important concept mean? Let’s draw from some contemporary ethicists (namely, Stephen Mott and Miguel De La Torre) and consider three ways we can think of justice: as love in a social context, as a people’s righteousness before God, and as the liberative struggle against principalities and powers.
Justice is love. Or, to use Mott’s creative language, love is “the fabric of justice.” As we love people, we see or declare their worth; as we feel the worth of others, we are compelled to ensure they have rights. And this drive to guarantee and protect others’ rights, a drive fueled constantly by love, must work itself out in acts of justice. Because societies are unjust and do not actually provide benefits equally, our love for everyone will cause us to see these injustices and work specifically to help those whom society is disenfranchising—our impartiality (loving everyone) causes us to ultimately become partial (helping those in the margins).
This all rests on the assumption that we are called to love everyone. This is pretty obvious in both life and, for those who care about it, the Bible, but in brief: we love because God first loved us, and our love is to mirror God’s love (1 John 4:10, 19). Lest we try to worm our way out of this calling by asking who, exactly, is to be our beloved neighbor, we can recall either Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) or philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s assertion that “everyone is our neighbor, because everyone is absolutely equal before God.”
If we are truly called to love all people, and if love in an unjust society demands that we work toward justice for the dispossessed, then we might follow De La Torre to the bold conclusion that “a call to justice and a call to love can be recognized by all who call themselves Christians.” Every person who identifies as Christian is called to work for justice, because love—the single most identifiable quality of the Christian God and value system—requires it. De La Torre is so sure of the entwinement of love and justice that he equates love with the dismantling of systems “that prevent people from the full potential of abundant life in Christ.”
We might close our reflection on justice as love with De La Torre’s powerful observation that it is not only human-human love, but human-divine love, that is at stake in our decisions for justice. As we live alongside and love the marginalized, we express our love for Jesus and open up the possibility of life with God. This thought reaches its most powerful expression, perhaps, in the words of liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, who claims that “when justice does not exist, God is not known; God is absent.”
Justice is a society’s righteousness before God. As scary as it is, let’s also say the converse: a society’s injustice is its unrighteousness before God. In the Old Testament prophets we see how resoundingly true this is. The Isaiah tradition rails against those “who join house to house, who add field to field,” building their own empires and forcing the poor into homelessness or enslavement. This pattern of injustice enrages God, the prophet says, and the consequences will include military defeat, exile, and Sheol (Isaiah 5:8-30). The prophet Amos issues a harsh warning that God will not accept any of Israel’s sacrifices or listen to any of their musical worship until justice rolls down among them like waters (Amos 5:21-24). He says the reasons for this divine shunning include trampling and overtaxing the poor, corrupt practices like bribery, and ignoring the needs of the disadvantaged (Amos 5:10-13).
In other words, righteousness—though in the “enlightened” West a concept pertaining only to an individual person’s guilt or innocence—can be construed corporately and measured by the presence or absence of justice. This connection—justice and righteousness—is even true linguistically in the biblical languages. Mott suggests that when we translate the corresponding Greek and Hebrew words into English, we should choose between “righteousness” and “justice” based on whether the verse refers to an individual or a society! Someone might retort that while an individual person’s righteousness might be adjudged by their deeds, it is much more complex—perhaps even impossible—on the level of society as a whole. To this, Mott insists that we can determine how just a society is: we simply evaluate how the poorest people are being treated.
A final protest might be lodged by those who would resist justice as a people’s righteousness before God. Many of the “one another” texts in the New Testament (e.g. Rom. 12:10, Eph. 4:32, Gal. 6:2) seem to be speaking specifically to churches. So commands to care for one another, perhaps, simply mean for Christians to support and protect other Christians. This is subject to the same arguments above for universal love on the basis of the imago Dei; Mott adds another answer rooted in the inescapability of systems of oppression. Even if we for some reason granted that we are only socially responsible to other Christians, we would still need to work for justice in society! For the poverty and other disadvantages of the very Christians we would seek to help stem from society-wide problems that demand society-wide solutions—solutions “that would affect all in the community, whether Christians or not.”
Justice is the liberative struggle against principalities and powers. As soon as we read this idea, there is an elephant in the room: what are these “principalities and powers”? Do we mean literal demons? Here Mott provides a helpful overview of Paul’s writing about evil. By the first century, Jewish mystics had already developed a robust view of fallen angels who sow injustice in the human social order. Paul (see Eph. 6:10-20) combines this idea with a more Greek notion of impersonal forces at work behind the scenes of everyday life when he writes about social evil; there is something at work, a spiritual force that is perhaps caused by fallen angels, that influences political and social bodies. The important thing for our reflection now is not the metaphysical explanation of evil but its location: to Paul, evil is found both inside and outside the person, and the evil out in the social order exerts an influence on the people living in the society.
If the forces, powers, and principalities are largely invisible, where can we see the evil influence they exert? For theologian Jurgen Moltmann, it is easy enough to see the demonic, whether one believes in literal demons or has demythologized them, because of “vicious circles”: “hopeless economic, social, and political pattern formations” that lead to death. Whereas these patterns are marked by hopelessness, over against them we believe in Jesus’ resurrection—and this event, standing at the center of our understanding of human history, gives us hope that every vicious circle of oppression might be broken. Indeed, this may be what Paul has in mind when he exults that on the cross, Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it” (Col. 2:15).
To join God’s unfolding victory over the powers is to join in the work of liberation. Remember, Paul urges us to arm ourselves for this fight with the breastplate of righteousness (Eph. 6:14)—or, as Mott would render it, the breastplate of justice! This certainly lines up with Luke’s theological emphases: he presents Jesus as the Spirit-anointed servant of liberation and narrates how that same Spirit is poured out on all believers to empower their works of liberation.
But liberation requires difficult work, because cosmetic changes to oppressive systems do not avail anything; as De La Torre declares, “liberation can only occur through radical structural change.” It is in moments of intense struggle against outrageous social evil that the decision for or against justice reveals whether a congregation or religion has decided to join Jesus the Liberator.
As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said in his day, we might venture that only a religion that removes fetters instead of using them is faithful Christianity.
Suggested reading:
Stephen Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change
Miguel De La Torre, Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins
Frederick Douglass, any of his three autobiographies
Emilie Townes, et al. Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader
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