Restorative Christ. Geoff Broughton

in the context of restored relationships: justice with reconciliation. This means justice without retaliation, just with repentance and justice with repair. My definition does not, however, represent a clear consensus among leading restorative justice theorists and practitioners. There is, I might add, some common ground with the approach taken in Restorative Christ in relation to the following two principles: “first, justice requires that we work to heal victims, offenders and communities that have been injured by crime. Second, victims, offenders and communities should have the opportunity for active involvement in the justice process as early and as fully as possible.”50 Accordingly just outcomes are primarily relational. The intersecting concerns apparent in the definition of restorative justice offered by three of its leading proponents demonstrate the ways in which the principles outlined above have been worked into Howard Zehr’s definition based on his experience as a practitioner; John Braithwaite’s definition from within the Australian context; while Desmond Tutu speaks as a pastor-theologian:

Zehr: Restorative justice is a process to involve, to the extent possible, those who have a stake in a specific offense and to collectively identify and address harms, needs, and obligations, in order to heal and put things as right as possible.51

Braithwaite: Restorative justice is not simply a way of reforming the criminal justice system, it is a way of transforming the entire legal system, our family lives, our conduct in the workplace, our practice of politics. Its vision is of a holistic change in the way we do justice in the world.52

Tutu: [in] restorative justice, the central concern is not retribution or punishment . . . in the spirit of ubuntu, the central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offence.53

These definitions highlight some of the concerns already mentioned. They include working to put things right within a context of multiple stakeholders (justice with reconciliation); responding to wrongdoing in everyday contexts transcending legal frameworks and approaches (justice with repentance); and the pastor’s perspective of Practical Theology (justice without retaliation; justice with repair). Each definition marks an approach to justice involving a community comprised of victims, wrongdoers and others in relational proximity. It may be contrasted with the distance and enmity between stakeholders in more adversarial approaches identified by Taylor, who describes three possible relational stances taken in the face of wrongdoing. First, “no-one is to blame.” This is the slogan of those with a “disengaged stance to reality” that Taylor aligns with much of secular humanism. He refers to this as “the therapeutic outlook.” Second, “the enemy is to blame.” Taylor identifies this as “the practice of religious violence.” This is the cry of the self-righteous who find their power to act by scapegoating the distant other. I will argue that Jesus’ enemy-love directly confronts the injustice of blaming of the enemy on religious grounds. Third, “we are all to blame.” This is the “restoration of a common ground . . . [that] opens a new footing of co-responsibility to the erstwhile enemy.”54 Taylor identifies the third relational stance with the approach taken by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996–98) convened to deal with apartheid-era violence in South Africa. Taylor contends that it satisfies the dual requirements of justice and truth because it is able “to bring terrible deeds to light, but not necessarily in a context of retribution.”55 Taylor admits that “no one knows if this will ultimately work [because] a move like this goes against the utterly understandable desire for revenge by those who have suffered, as well as all the reflexes of self-righteousness.”56 His analysis of wrongdoing explains why neither the so-called “closure” offered by therapeutic process nor the “revenge” offered by religious righteousness is actually able to restore justice in contexts like post-apartheid South Africa. My principal aim is to demonstrate that the centre of Christian theology, namely Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, informs and enables Taylor’s third response to wrongdoing. My central argument depends on interpretive commitments as I read the biblical witness to Jesus Christ, as well as convictions about Christian practice as a way of life that is reflected in my approach to both.57 Once more it was the street was the classroom where, with scant regard for either technique or process, I learned what it means follow the restorative Christ.

      Jesus and justice: are they compatible ways of life?

Discipleship is faithfully following the way of Jesus Christ. Some Christians ground their discipleship in the practical, earthly life of Jesus who taught victims to love their enemies. Others in the suffering death of Jesus on behalf of wrongdoers. Still others understand it as the gifts and fruit of the Holy Spirit. Regrettably, many neglect the connection between Jesus’ resurrection and discipleship although it is only through the risen Jesus that we are able to remember and follow Jesus at all.58 How does imagining a new way of life, speaking about that way of life and putting it into practice inter-relate? Although the complex connections between human thinking, speaking and acting cannot be fully described here, I would argue that theology has not always recognized the critical dialogue that needs to be manifested between beliefs and practices.59 I believe a correlation exists between Jesus’ teaching and the imagination; between Jesus’ death and the language of faith and discipleship; and, between Jesus’ risen life and embodied action and Christian living.

The concluding section of each chapter will describe the marks of Christian discipleship and community that emerge from the preceding discussion of Luke’s Jesus (his life of “enemy-love,” suffering death for others and risen life of reconciliation). The practical disciplines of what the restorative Christ means for us today. Volf admonishes many Christian disciples for their “unwillingness to walk the narrow path. When someone has violated us or our community, we feel the urge for revenge and set aside the explicit command to love our enemies, to be benevolent and beneficent toward them.”60 Jesus enemy-love is the basis for the disciplines imagination, conversation and embodied action that conclude each chapter.61

      I will conclude with a prophetic and, I trust, hopeful tone. The church can be a community where the disciplines of the restorative Christ—imagination, conversation and embodiment—are practiced, albeit imperfectly. neighborhoods). The discipleship practices are applied to the unfinished business of the Australian Anglican Church’s relationship with Indigenous people in the hope that the justice of the restorative Christ prevails.

1. Oldenburg, The Great Good Place; Lederach, The Moral Imagination; Katongole, The Sacrifice of Africa.

2. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 196–207.

3. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 122.

4. Passmore, “Civil Justice and Its Rivals,” 25.

5. Kamenka, “What Is Justice?,” 3–4.

6.