Violence, reconciliation, and the justice of God.

I MUST BEGIN WITH A CONFESSION: I'm tired of hearing about justice. Of course, this is really not something one should say when one's livelihood includes teaching Moral Theology. I teach at a Catholic university-Jesuit, to be specific. And for better or worse the Jesuits have rediscovered the joy of justice-talk. Since the Santa Clara Conference of 2000, when Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, issued his call for the promotion of justice in American Jesuit higher education, the word has been on everyone's lips. Indeed, it has become clear that if you want to propose a new initiative, a new program, even a new course, you will fare well if you can give it a "justice spin." If you can include "service learning," all the better! Yet, while justice is being talked about more and more (on our campus at least), it strikes me that our conceptions of justice are no clearer than they were before, and indeed all our talk simply masks some very basic underlying disagreements about what just ice is and why we should seek it.

Whose Justice?

Absent any agreement about the substance of justice, the term comes to function like a cipher. This may be part of why so many today greet justice talk with cynicism. We suspect that calls for justice are, at least at times, simply arbitrary appeals to the self-interests of some over the self-interests of others. The abortion debate in this country has highlighted the contested nature of justice. In so far as both pro-choice and pro-life positions claim to have justice on their side (couched in terms of the rights of the woman or the rights of the unborn), the argument reflects deep, though often unspoken, disagreements about justice itself. Does justice mean maximizing personal freedom? Or giving each person what they deserve? Or assuring equal distributions? Is it based on rights or results? Does justice require us to support impartial hiring and admissions practices or affirmative action? Is justice "equality of opportunity" or "equality of outcome"? Even an appeal to a supposedly neutral "procedural justi ce" must either smuggle in some substantive description of what mode of life or state of affairs constitutes justice or risk being useless precisely insofar as it cannot help us adjudicate disagreements concerning issues like abortion, capital punishment, or war.

The question of justice has become all the more compelling and complex since September 11. In fact, it has become a matter of life and death. In the face of such horror and evil, what are the demands of justice? If a war on terror is justified, how do we apply just war categories when the enemy cannot be defined as a nation or even as a discreet (and thus targetable) entity? Does justice always demand retaliation? Can there be a just response to violence that does not include violence? Is justice best thought of as punishment or revenge? Is it primarily restorative or punitive? Shortly after September 11, the Bishops of the Episcopal Church called on their flock to "wage reconciliation." But is reconciliation a form of justice, an abdication of justice, or something we do in addition to justice? Again we are forced to admit that our disagreements about the war on terror are not only about this war but about the nature of justice itself. Yet all our pundits (including theological ones) are quick to speak about justice as if we all agreed on what it meant. For instance, in their December 2001 issue, the editors of First Things stated that "the rule of justice is that it is the first duty of the state to protect its citizens." (1) While this is stated as self-evident, it is not at all clear why this should be accepted as a rule of justice. Augustine, for instance, would disagree, since he argued that the rule of justice is that it is the first duty of the state to offer right worship to God. Perhaps the post-September 11 pressure to "take a stand" or to "take action" has mitigated against the patience necessary to ask basic questions. Or perhaps we avoid conversation about the substantive core of justice because we assume such a discussion would be interminable and thus pointless.

I want to suggest that we cannot agree on what justice is, in part, because we cannot find agreement on what goods we hope justice will serve. Justice, like all virtues, requires a context to be properly understood. We must locate it within a story of who we are and what we want to be; in other words, we have to name the goods we seek in common as a people. Further, we cannot think about justice in abstraction from the other virtues that we think necessary to help us achieve the goods we have named. Part of the problem, then, with discussing justice in our current political context is that the on]y good we can agree on is the pursuit of individual freedom. But again, as the abortion debate has taught us, we have no clear means of determining justice when all we can appeal to are conflicting personal liberties.

I think it is instructive to try to find links between the two very different kinds of "justice" conversations going on today. The first, the "social justice" conversation represented by Kolvenbach's call to "promote justice," seems most concerned with issues like poverty, racism, and oppression. The second, the "just war" conversation represented by the debates following September 11, focuses around questions of legality, criminality, and the legitimate use of military force. All too rarely are these different justice conversations drawn together. While we would not doubt that both conversations are about justice, it is not clear precisely how to name the common thread that unites them. I would suggest that in order to name the unifying element we will have to give a more substantive account of justice--that is, to name the state of affairs that would count as just and to begin to locate the means by which we could justly achieve such a state.

Justice and the Reign of God

Christians can contribute to our public debate by seeking to name the goods and goals proper to us as God's creatures. Which is to say, we have a conception of what human flourishing would look like, and it is our responsibility to bring this to the table and to situate our own justice-talk within the wider context of this vision for human fulfillment. Justice must mean more than adjudicating between conflicting individual, or even national, rights and interests. It must serve that set of goods that Jesus taught us to hope for, the goods we name as the Reign of God.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul describes the goods we seek as a church in terms of our service to God's message of reconciliation. (2) He writes:

[God] reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation: that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the dikaiosyne [justice] of God. (2 Corinthians 5:18-21, NRSV, modified)

Though the Greek term dikaiosyne can mean both "righteousness" and "justice," it is almost invariably translated as "righteousness" in this passage. Unfortunately, this translation occludes the powerful social transformation that Paul is describing. It is through God's reconciling work, and our reconciling work on God's behalf, that we become a community of justice, that is, we become the very justice of God. And such a community is primarily identified as a community of reconciliation.

For Christians, then, reconciliation names that central concern that unites all justice issues. The classical definition of justice as "giving to each his due" simply fails as a Christian formulation. While we want to give to each what is right, this "rightness" must be judged by its ability to promote reconciliation, especially the restoration of those who are at the edges of our communities: the impoverished and oppressed as well as the criminal and the enemy. We worship a God who does not count our trespasses against us, who gives us not what is due to us but rather what is good for us, and this, not as entitlement, but as grace. And so we understand that whatever else we say about justice it must serve this central good, this central goal, of the reconciliation of all things. For Christians, then, all justice must be restorative justice. This makes it difficult to imagine using violence, especially killing, in the service of justice, since presumably reconciling with your enemies precludes killing them.

The parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25 further illustrates the unity of justice and its reconciling goal. Jesus tells us in this parable that when we give food, clothing, and care to "the least of these," we have "done it to him." So, we are told to see in the poor, the sick, and the marginalized, the face of Christ himself. True enough. But there is more. We must remember that among "the least of these" Jesus included not only the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, and the sick, but also the prisoner. And he made no indication that he meant only those unjustly imprisoned. Even those who have committed crimes, who have harmed others and are paying for their wrongs, they, too, constitute those to whom we must extend reconciling care. We see the face of Jesus not only in the poor and the suffering, but remarkably and frighteningly in the criminal, the enemy, the one who has wronged us. For Jesus there can be no division between distributive justice and legal justice. In both cases to " justify" is to make right, to reconcile, to bring back a proper ordering of human life and relationships. The unity of justice, then, lies in its overarching pattern of reconciliation. Such justice cannot be dispensed at a distance, but must be embodied in communities that bear the message of reconciliation and thereby "become the justice of God."

Justice Among the Virtues

Within this narrative context of God's reconciling work, the virtue of justice can be fleshed out by placing it alongside the other virtues that Christians believe are necessary in order to live into God's kingdom. These would include, among others, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. The mere recognition that the truly just person must also embody these other virtues means that there are limits to what we can do in the service of justice. In other words, we cannot be just in such a way that we cease to be faithful, hopeful, or loving. To do so would only show that we had in fact failed to understand what justice requires of us.

First, we keep faith with God by hearing and obeying God's word, even when it seems odd or counterproductive. In other words, for Christians the faithfulness of our justice cannot simply be judged by the effectiveness of our actions. And while violence and coercion are in a certain way effective (a dead enemy can no longer do harm), that effectiveness is purchased at the price of ignoring Jesus' commands to love enemies, turn the other cheek, and bless those who curse you. Daniel Berrigan once said, "To act biblically is to know very little about the outcome." To do violence in the name of justice seeks precisely to determine the outcome rather than to determine to be faithful and to trust the outcome to God.

Second, this "faithful justice" must be shaped by Christian hope. Indeed the faithfulness that does justice without violence requires the hope that even though we refuse to take up arms to right the wrongs of the world, they will be righted by God in God's time. When we have hope that God holds the future, we can release the desire to coerce the world's future through violence. God does not need us to force the world to turn out right; God has not asked us to do this. Such hopefulness exhibits itself in our ability to be patient, though not passive, in the face of wrongs. Justice demands action, but faithful and reconciling justice also demands patience so that we do not too quickly enforce a resolution that denies God's ultimate reconciling work.

Third, justice, Christianly understood, must not trespass on the command to love. Of course, as Paul Ramsey notably argued, the command to love can be read as a justification for violence in the service of justice. On this account, the love of innocent neighbors justifies our using violence to defend them. And if "love your neighbor" were Jesus' only command such an argument would be compelling. But Christians are told not only to love our neighbors or to love the innocent, but also to love our enemies. Lacking some strong warrant for reading love of neighbor as a negation of the command to love enemies, we must assume that Jesus understood these commands as part of a single calling to charity. There is, then, a limit to our efforts at attaining justice; we cannot show love for our neighbor at the expense of the enemy, nor can we love the enemy at the expense of the innocent neighbor. Jeremy Taylor, a seventeenth-century Anglican bishop denounced times such as his when "Christian charity ends in killing one another for conscience sake, so that faith is made to cut the throat of charity." (3) If faith may not cut the throat of charity, neither may justice. The virtues, like a harmonious quartet, constitute a whole in which each note sounds rightly only in relation to the others. Certainly a love that denies justice is a farce, but so is justice which does not love. The often noted biblical antithesis between God's justice and God's mercy may not, in fact, turn out to be an antithesis at all. Rather, God's justice (though it may have a punitive element) seeks the merciful reconciliation of the offender.

Becoming the Justice of God

What does it look like in practice to become the justice of God? Perhaps it looks like a small church in Ibillin, Palestine, 1966. Fr. Elias Chacour pastors a Christian congregation that is divided by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the Palm Sunday Eucharist Chacour locks the doors to the church and challenges the congregation to kill each other or reconcile! (4) After an awkward period of silence an Israeli police officer stands up and asks forgiveness. There follows an outpouring of love and peace, embracing and weeping. The community begins to reconcile.

Perhaps the justice of God looks like the village of San Juan Chamula in Chiapas, Mexico, 1992. After years of tension between Catholics and Evangelicals and after the expulsion of Evangelicals in huge numbers (over 35,000 in 25 years) by Catholic political bosses, the Catholic Bishop Samuel Ruiz begins an outreach ministry to the Evangelicals who have been expelled. He mobilizes Catholics to help the refugees return, build homes, and start over. Now Juan Portillo, a Catholic, works to build houses for returning refugees alongside Salvador Collazo, an Evangelical whom he once ordered to leave the town or be killed. (5)

Perhaps the justice of God looks like South Africa, 1994. Archbishop Desmond Tutu steers a post-Apartheid nation away from either a "national amnesia" which forgets the horrors of its racist past or a "victors justice" on the model of the Nuremberg Trials. Instead he leads the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which a post-Apartheid South Africa determines to seek justice not through vengeance or forgetfulness but through truth-telling, forgiveness, and reconciliation. (6)

Or perhaps the justice of God looks like Jerusalem, 1999. After a three-and-a-half-year pilgrimage, 2,500 American and European Christians end their "Reconciliation Walk" in Jerusalem, having retraced the path of the first crusaders 900 years ago. This time, however, the walk is a journey of peace and ends with Western Christians seeking forgiveness and reconciliation with Jews, Muslims, and Eastern Orthodox Christians. (7)

Such reconciling work requires imagination, trust, and hope. It also requires patience and risk. But in the end it exemplifies for us what it means not just to do justice but to become the justice of God.

Notes

(1.) Editorial, "In a Time of War," First Things, December 2001, <http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ftftO112/opinion/editorial.html> (June 7, 2002).

(2.) That the context presented here is confessionally Christian does not, I think, make this proposal any less applicable to wider national issues like the war on terror. It does, however, mean that such application will be necessarily analogical and ad hoc.

(3.) Cited in Rowan Greer, Christian Hope and Christian Life: Raids on the inarticulate (New York: Crossroad / Herder & Herder, 2001), 209.

(4.) Cited in L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 180-181.

(5.) Paul Jeffrey, "Evangelicals and Catholics in Chiapas: conflict and reconciliation," The Christian Century, v. 114, Feb. 19, 1997, 195-99. First Search: WilsonSelect <http://newfirstsearch.oclc.org> (June 5, 2002).

(6.) Desmond Tutu tells the story of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in relation to his Christian vision of justice as reconciliation in No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999).

(7.) Tomas Dixon, "An apology, 900 years in the making," Christianity Today v. 43 no. 10, Sept. 6, 1999, 24; FirstSearch: WilsonSelect <www.newfirstsearch.oclc.org> (June 5, 2002).

Scott Bader-Saye is Assistant Professor of Theology/Religious Studies at the University of Scranton. He is the author of Church and Israel After Christendom: The Politics of Election.