From Punishment to Restoration by Fiona and Terryl Givens. . .
And what of justice? Sin may be an errant step, but it’s still a violation of a law. And does the violation not warrant punishment? “Every violation 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!, . . . so that God . . . seems to have sought not so much our salvation as our punishment”2
As mortals, we have a strong sense of justice, which is often just a thin veneer 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 are accustomed to consider as the order of things that perfect justice dictates and requires.”3 Of course, as 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 offense.4 Worlds hang in the balance when definitions of justice are at stake. One scholar note how a definition of justice as retributive punishment is deeply ingrained in our culture 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 punishment while a big crime requires a big punishment. The biggest punishment, namely death, is reserved for the most heinous crimes. . . . The assumption of retributive justice—that doing justice means [meting] our 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.
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 our ability to see the suffering of the damned in hell. . . . 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 the 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 a 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 as it must look from the sun; to experience the world of man as the object of a huge, positive outpouring of love, in the flood of whose radiance such trifles as merit and recompense are mere irrelevancies.
Dostoevsky pointed out the fruitlessness of justice as retribution. As his character Ivan cries out to his brother, “What use is vengeance to me, what use to me is hell for torturers, what can hell put right for me again? . . . I don’t want anyone to suffer anymore.”8 ~Fiona and Terryl Givens, All Things New (Meridian, ID: Faith Matters Publishing, 2020), 113-15 (continued)
