Tim Stafford's Blog, page 35

Justice and Love

I’ve been reading and thinking about justice, because I’m heading up a major new project–a Bible with notes that call out God’s justice, his “setting things right.”

One persistent doubt about justice is whether it is opposed by love. By all that’s just, the criminal should be punished; but love forgives him. Love undoes justice.

This is the fundamental conflict in Les Miserables. Javert, the police inspector, represents justice. As such he is obsessed over Jean Valjean, the criminal who is freed by a bishop’s forgiveness and who learns, more and more, to extend grace to others–ultimately to Javert. There is no possible resolution between Javert and Valjean–only death to one or the other.

Victor Hugo dramatized what we feel as an inner tension in our relationships. If we truly forgive a wrong done to us–choose not to hold it against the offender–it’s painful. And we are not 100% sure that we have done the right thing. Shouldn’t we have taught him or her a lesson? Shouldn’t we have stuck to our principles, making him or her pay? We all have an inner Javert, I think.

In this way of thinking, the only just ground for forgiveness is what theologians call substitutionary atonement: Jesus was punished on behalf of sinners, so they could be forgiven. Somebody has to pay for wrong–so Jesus suffers in our place.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, in his book Justice in Love, makes a case that this misunderstands justice–or understands it in a narrow way that Jesus specifically abjures in the Sermon on the Mount. If justice is an eye for an eye, a kind of accounting-style double entry system that balances one offense with another, then indeed forgiveness disrupts the system. But Jesus spoke specifically for another kind of justice, the justice of forgiveness–even forgiveness of an enemy. And Jesus specifically offered this kind of justice as superior to the justice of retribution. (See Matthew 5:38-48)

Wolterstorff points out that forgiveness actually depends on a concept of justice. If there were nothing owed, then nothing could be forgiven. Justice tells us that you have wronged a certain person and owe him or her to make it right; forgiveness, working within that conception of justice, decides not to make you pay for it. Forgiveness is grounded on another kind of justice: that the offender has great worth because he is created by God and loved by God. That worth should be honored. It is fundamentally just to honor it.

That is the story of the Prodigal Son. The Father was wronged, and has a right to see his son punished. But the Father also has every right to forgive. The older brother was not wronged; in trying to hold on to “justice” that he thinks his father should impose, he is actually wronging his father. And so with us: if our Father sees the sins of the world forgiven to all who repent and live in the Messiah, we are wrong if we try to hold them to account. The party who was most wronged–God himself–is willing to forgive.

Here, perhaps, substitutionary atonement comes into it. For the Father, in clasping his son in his arms, absorbs the full pain himself. He has been wounded, and he takes the wound instead of putting it on his son. There is a substitution, a suffering on behalf of another, but it is a relational one, not a judicial one.

These are deep waters. Who really understands forgiveness? But the point is, Javert was wrong. Forgiveness may be a kind of justice, indeed the best kind.

The Spirit

I just finished reading N.T. Wright’s Justification–a book I’ve had on my list for some time. I’ve read quite a bit of Wright, including all his big, synthetic scholarly works, and I appreciated Justification even though I’m not sure I got it all. As somewhere C. S. Lewis asked, would it have been too much to ask of Paul that he write more clearly? I’m looking forward to reading Wright’s big book on Paul, when it comes out. (We’ve been waiting for a long, long time!)

One element that struck me is Wright’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit and its comparative neglect within the traditionally reformed scheme of justification and salvation. He claims Paul’s theology doesn’t work if you neglect the Spirit, because justification makes a present judgment that we belong fully in the covenant family, but the Spirit equips us to live the kind of life that will affirm that in the final judgment.

What also struck me is how Wright thinks of the Spirit. Here’s a quote from page 189:

“The more the Spirit is at work the more the human will is stirred up to think things through, to take free decisions, to develop chosen and hard-won habits of life, and to put to death the sinful, and often apparently not freely chosen, habits of death….[Freedom in the Spirit is] a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being able at last to choose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the Spirit is at work within, that God himself is doing that which I too am doing.”

More normally, I think of the Spirit as…. fluffier. The Spirit in much theology-lite overwhelms us, takes our breath away, makes us giddy, makes us happy. Not so much the way that Wright describes the Spirit.

But–this is my thought–what would we expect from the Spirit of Jesus? Jesus was not fluffy. He was a tough-minded dude. So the Spirit of Jesus must be a tough-minded dude. Jesus made his disciples think; life with him was no swoon. So life with the Spirit will be hard-thought and carefully lived. Jesus expected a great deal from his disciples. He accepted all people on their terms, but those who followed him were challenged to live bigger. So the Spirit of Jesus will lift us to be bigger than we would be without him.

I’m deeply grateful for the way Pentecostalism has re-awakened Christians to the living, powerful Spirit. But Wright made me think of myself, Your Spirit is too small. 

Cape Town

I’ve been in Cape Town this week. This is my fourth visit, and beforehand I found myself idly wondering if I would find it as beautiful as I remembered. The answer is yes, it remains the loveliest land I have ever visited.

My first visit came in 1982, in the thick of apartheid. Popie and I found it very painful to visit then, because South Africa’s physical beauty contrasted so starkly with the awful soul sickness of the racial regime. We couldn’t reach anybody–whites were miserably guilt stricken and tightly defensive, and blacks, such as we could talk to them at all, seemed to keep a closed book.

It’s very different now, a normal country in which people complain about the government and fret about the economy. Existential agony has passed.

Clearly South Africa has a long way to go. Every morning when I went running from our hotel I faced into a steady stream of cars entering the next-door business park, all driven by whites, and a steady stream of walkers, all black or colored. There is no legal segregation any more, but economic segregation runs along strongly racial lines, and that seems likely to continue for a very long time. It probably doesn’t help that the government does not seem to have made the transition from a revolutionary mindset, which inevitably acts on the basis of friends and enemies, and a democratic government that inevitably tries to turn enemies into allies. If you criticize the ANC, I understand, you may be accused of something near to treason. Nobody I talked to–admittedly a non-representative sample–seemed to be very happy with the government. But people overall are very loyal to the party that fought for their freedom, and whether happy or not, people are nowhere close to voting the ANC out of power.

Quite oblivious to politics and economics, the land remains–towering purple mountains, visible for many miles over the open plain, shining crescents of white sand and aquamarine water, vineyards climbing the hillsides and snaking through the mountain valleys.

Kenyan Elections

I’ve been in Nairobi this past week, where elections are pending in March. As you may remember, Kenya’s last election five years ago resulted in violence that nearly led to civil war. Since then, Kenya has a new constitution which significantly changes the shape of government. So not only is this the first election since the violence, it is also the first one conducted under the new constitution. Politics is everywhere and almost everything.

I would say the situation is hopeful, even though people are plenty nervous. Most people think that major violence will not recur. They typically say that having witnessed the horrors of the last election, people won’t behave that way again. That includes politicians, who unquestionably whipped up the violence.

There are many signs of political vitality– a lively free press, multiple parties contesting for power. The electoral commission which so botched the last election, aiding and abetting in rampant theft–has been strengthened.

Nevertheless the political culture still clearly has a long way to go. As one of my informants said, Kenyan politics remains tribal in shape but class based in reality. A tiny elite manipulates their tribal followers but uses politics mainly to enrich themselves. Kenyan Members of Parliament have made themselves the best paid parliamentarians in the world, and that doesn’t begin to count all the money that they steal.

Until that generation passes on and until voters focus on issues more than tribal factionalism, things will only slightly improve, I think. That said, with a few more elections–peaceful ones–Kenya really could change in a dramatic way.