Fiona and Terryl Givens in their book “All Things New” wrote:
And what of justice? Sin may be an errant step, but it is still a violation of a law. And does the violation not warrant punishment? “Every transgression of the law deserves punishment,” declares a representative Protestant handbook.1 As far back as the early fifth century, Pelagius was lamenting the direction in which such thinking was taking the church: “Oh, horror!, we ascribe iniquity to the righteous and cruelty to the holy, . . . so that God . . . seems to have sought not so much our salvation as our punishment!”
As mortals we have a strong sense of justice, which is often just a thin veneer covering our own desire for vicarious retribution. Sometimes there isn’t even a veneer; as the English theologian William Paley wrote, “by the satisfaction of justice I mean the retribution of so much pain for so much guilt; which . . . we expect at the hand of God, and which we accustomed to thing as the order of things that perfect justice dictates and requires.”3 Of course Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out, the perverse logic of this mathematical conception assumes that the pleasure of retribution is needful to cancel out the pain of the offense.4 Worlds hang in the balance when definitions of justice are at stake. One scholar notes how a definition of justice as retributive punishment is deeply imagined in our cultural practices: “The criminal justice system of the United States operates on the principle of retribution. This system operates under the assumption that doing justice means to inflict punishment, which is understood as violence. The assumption is that small crimes require small penalties, while a big crime requires a big penalty. The biggest penalty, namely death, is reserved for the most heinous crimes. . . The assumption of retributive justice, that doing justice means [meting] out punishment—is virtually universal among North Americans.”5 And the roots of retributive justice, as we have seen, are thoroughly religious, embedded most particularly in the Protestant theology of atonement (see chapter 13).
There is something mean-spirited about the way we generally employ the term justice, not only because it often conceals a human thirst for retribution but also because we use it as a form of self-validation. Christian theologians and preachers openly professed that part of heaven’s joy would include to see the suffering of the damned in hell (“in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned,” wrote Thomas Aquinas).6 Alerting us to related motivations, Jesus warned against the elder-brother-of-the-prodigal-son syndrome. In the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) we see the petty indignation of long time workers who are resentful that the latecomers receive the same pay. In the story of Jonah, we see the prophet on the front row to witness Nineveh’s destruction (Jonah 4). Both of these stories are about the demand for recognition, status, or preeminence, masquerading as the call for “justice.” Owen Barfield sees what is happening here: Jesus is deliberately “outraging” our “deep rooted feeling for the goodness of justice and equity . . . because we are being beckoned towards a position directionally opposite to the usual one; because we are invited to see the earth, for a moment at all events, rather than as it must look from the sun; to experience the world of man as the object of a huge outpouring of love, in the flood of whose radiance such trifles as merit and recompense are mere irrelevancies.” 7 ~Fiona and Terryl Givens, All Things New (Copyright © 2020 Fiona and Terryl Givens, Fifth Matters Publishing, Meridian, ID) 113-14
outraging. . . gerund or present participle: outraging. arouse fierce anger, shock, or indignation in (someone). “he was outraged at this attempt to take his victory away from him”
