Justice: just practices and just communities
Are conceptions of justice necessarily adversarial? If justice is nothing other than a person getting their just desserts, an inevitable division between “winners” and “losers” is made. In adversarial justice the winners are rewarded with certain goods and the losers are deprived of them. In contrast to the previous two conceptions of justice, the British philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre developed a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which Western theories of justice emerge from traditions and practices.19 He is adamant that justice is based not on rights, arguing instead that “the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns . . . natural or human rights . . . are fictions.” For him, no one is born with rights. Rather, they are born into communities with traditions that make natural rights possible. MacIntyre’s proposal suggests a useful and yet incomplete way of evaluating competing claims about justice. His approach nonetheless validates the peculiar practices of the Christian community as one, enduring and plausible tradition capable of defining and pursuing justice.
The English moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan rightly identifies the philosophical importance of a Christian “stance” with respect to questions of justice by arguing that “non-committal stances . . . create the illusion of settling questions justly, without needing to determine the truth of them.”20 His conception of justice as judgment will be significant for the discipline of naming described in chapter three. Two features are worth noting here. The first is his argument that justice is right-order which means that God’s order and God’s rights take precedence over human social ordering and human rights. A recent critic of O’Donovan’s “justice-as-right-order” is Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff who does not think that obligations precede rights. His alternate grounding for justice promotes a conception of “justice-as-rights” which, he argues, is more fundamental to the flourishing of human community.21 The second feature of O’Donovan’s work worthy of noting is his “stance” against a “secular” age of possessive individualism. His argument must, therefore, be understood in the context of five centuries of secularisation described in detail by Charles Taylor.
The approaches commended by Volf, MacIntyre, and O’Donovan do not amount to a single or comprehensive ideal that can be promoted under the banner of “God’s justice” in the public sphere. Their value is in offering an account of justice that takes seriously the histories of Christian communities: those who have faithfully followed the restorative Christ. A theologically grounded concept of justice needs to consciously avoid endorsing the notion “that the justice of the dominant is the dominant justice.”22 It rejects accounts of justice relying upon coercive force employed by those possessing power. Such tactics are common in the slums and on the streets and in the backrooms and the boardrooms. They are used by the police and are upheld in the courts. None of this constitutes justice because, I would contend, justice renounces retaliation (chapter 2). It is crucial, therefore, that a vision of divine justice revealed in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and practiced by Christians and their communities comprehensively rejects coercion and domination. I will argue that justice—expressed as enemy-love—constitutes the justice of the restorative Christ. The four central chapters of the book detail one dimension of his justice: justice with reconciliation; justice without retaliation; justice with repentance; and, justice with repair.
Core samples from Luke-Acts
After surveying the literature, a comprehensive biblical theology of justice grounded in the life, death and resurrection of the restorative Christ is yet plainly to be developed. I want to remedy this omission by examining four key passages from the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. The Lucan material provides the basis for a genuinely biblical vision of the restorative Christ. First, Luke-Acts not only comprises one-quarter of the New Testament, more significantly it encompasses the breadth of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, as well as the lives of Jesus’ followers and those within the early Christian communities.23 Second, as Luke-Acts originates from a single author, it is well suited to contemporary literary approaches to the interpretation of Scripture.24 A variety of approaches to the interpretation of Luke-Acts are considered in the first chapter, all of which are employed to varying degrees in this book. The primary mode of interpretation will, however, be biblical-theological and practical.25 Third, the Christological issues raised in Luke-Acts are illustrative of what the restorative Christ means for a discipleship of justice. Fourth, Luke’s theological interests are no longer considered by theologians to be mutually exclusive of historical considerations. The passages from Luke-Acts acting as core samples include: Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32); Jesus’ teaching on enemy-love (Luke 6:27–45); Jesus’ death by and for his enemies (Luke 23:26–49); and, the risen Jesus’ encounter with Saul (Ac. 9:1–31). Because my focus is on “enemy-love,” a number of potentially significant passages have been deliberately excluded, namely: Jesus’ inaugural sermon (Luke 4:16–30); Jesus’ predictions about his death (e.g. Luke 9:21); Zacchaeus’ reparations after encountering Jesus (Luke 19:1–10); Jesus’ action in the Temple (Luke 19:28–47); and the risen Jesus’ encounter with the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 28:13–53). These and other Lucan texts only serve to deepen the portrait of the restorative Christ. Jesus’ inaugural sermon includes a reading from the scroll in the synagogue from Isaiah 61, concluding “today this word has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Isaiah’s prophecy and its fulfilment is a strong them in Luke’s gospel. Luke’s account is enriched, of course, by the reader’s familiarity with significant portions of the Hebrew Scriptures such as the Psalms and Isaiah’s prophecies. This claim is not controversial and is simply assumed at various points of the biblical material.26 Understanding Luke’s portrait of the restorative Christ, however, does not finally depend on this familiarity. The apostle Paul’s writings contain a wealth of material that would add another angle of vision of the restorative Christ. Here I rely on the trajectories apparent in Saul’s initial encounter on the Damascus Road. Douglas Campbell has drawn attention to the kind of possibilities in a number of innovative proposals about Paul’s “noncoercive and nonviolent” soteriology that depend on the apostle’s own writing.27
Jesus is a Prophet of Justice in Luke (Luke 4:16ff)
Jesus was a prophet who cared deeply about injustice. In Luke’s gospel Jesus told stories about loving neighbors and welcoming prodigals. In Luke’s gospel Jesus was more than a prophet: he is the Savior, encountered through his saving death and resurrection, and he is the Lord to be followed in the life of discipleship. What does it mean for Luke to tell the story of Jesus as a prophet?
Jesus the prophet hosted meals between debtors and debt collectors (Luke 5:27–32)
Luke 5 recounts the calling of the first disciples—including Levi—and the large and diverse gathering at his house for a banquet. Jesus the prophet sharing meals between debtors and debt collectors. The social and economic scandal is that debtors and debt collectors are brought together around the meal table. It is easy to miss this kind of detail in Luke’s stories: Jesus’ prophetic action.