27
2009
God’s Justice – Punishment or Restoration
An article by 
The following is reprinted with permission from the author, Dr. Howard Zehr, Professor of Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University’s graduate Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and the editor of The Little Books of Justice and Peacemaking series. I have read the book in that series titled “Restorative Justice” which was authored by Dr. Zehr and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good introduction to the topic.
Dr. Zehr also serves as part of a six member Victims Advisory Group appointed by the U.S government and is considered one of the pioneers of the modern restorative justice movement. This post originally appeared on his blog that is aptly titled – Restorative Justice Blog. It is worth following.
I have personally found Dr. Zehr’s approach to justice to be very affirming of where my own thoughts and studies have lead me.
May the following be food for thought for you also.
“My soul cries out, let the fires of your justice burn,” the congregation sings on this Sunday. I lean over to my wife: “What does that mean?” “Maybe it means God is passionate about justice,” she whispers with a twinkle in her eye.
True enough, but she knows that I think there’s more to it. She suspects my hidden-assumption alarm has gone off again.
The hymn reminds me of the unexamined assumptions we often make about biblical justice. Wrongdoing is a sin against God and God’s laws. Those who break those laws will get what they deserve: God will judge and punish those who sin. Justice is hard edged: lawbreaking must be avenged, wrongdoers will surely perish, the fires of justice will burn.
This hymn, like most of our references to biblical justice, focuses mostly on the wrongdoer and says little about the needs of the victims of injustice.
This is similar to what happens in our criminal courts and the legal dramas on television: presided over by a stern judge, the legal system decides whether a law was broken, who did it, and what punishment the offender deserves. Wrongdoing pits the offender against the governing authority. Justice is offender-centered, preoccupied with establishing guilt and meting out punishment.
The victim often gets little attention in this scenario because legally, the offense is against the state. It was Timothy McVeigh versus the US government in the case resulting from the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The hundreds of people who lost loved ones or were injured had to get an act of Congress just to sit in on the trial of the person accused of harming them.
The parallels between these secular and religious approaches to justice are no accident. Historically, Christian theology and the western legal system came of age together, mutually reinforcing each other. The legal system that began to emerge in the Middle Ages needed support and justification and so it turned to the church; this was, after all, an age in which the Catholic faith dominated the western world. But the church was at the same time influenced by concepts of justice that owed more to the non-Christian imperial law of the late Roman Empire than the world of the Bible.
Unfortunately, this interchange resulted in what one scholar has called an “historical short-circuit.” Concepts such as “an eye for an eye” that meant one thing in the biblical context came to mean something quite different in a punitive legal framework. Then these reinterpreted concepts shaped our reading of the biblical message, causing us to emphasize the punitive and often overlook the restorative.
In his important book, God’s Just Vengeance, Timothy Gorringe traces this story. He argues that retributive assumptions were mutually reinforced in both our faith and our justice system, resulting in a deeply punitive dimension to western culture.
Along with this reinterpretation of the quality of justice went a re-evaluation of who represented the victim. As in many traditional societies, a primary emphasis in western society had been upon repairing harm to individuals and communities. Increasingly, however, the state took the place of the victim, collecting fines and administering punishment. In the religious realm, wrongs came to be seen as primarily against God and God’s laws, with important implications for our understanding of forgiveness.
“Seek God’s forgiveness, then learn to forgive yourself,” prison chaplains often tell their listeners. True enough, but it’s interesting that this admonition does not mention any obligation to those who were harmed.
Julian Pleasants, in an article entitled “Religion that Restores Victims” in New Theology Review, notes that in the early church, as seen in Matthew 18, if you harmed someone, you needed to make it right with them. This was an important part of restoring your relationship with God. So in the early church, a wrongdoer was to make things right to and seek forgiveness from his or her sister or brother so that things could be right with God.
As in the secular realm, however, in the religious realm the “victim” eventually came to the governing authority and its laws. Wrongdoing came to be seen as primarily a sin against God and God’s moral order more than harm to people and relationships. Moreover, God came to be viewed as a stern or even angry judge dispensing harsh punishment. To avoid this terrible consequence, sinners were urged to make things right with God. The church began to focus on saving the sinner from his or her awful fate rather than assisting the victim. God’s forgiveness not only took precedence over, but often took the place of, acts of reparation and apology to the victim.
Those of us who are Christians rightfully understand that when we do something wrong, we need to seek God’s forgiveness. And we do need eventually to forgive ourselves. But there is a third, and essential, dimension: if we are truly repentant, we must also accept our obligation to the one we hurt. This obligation is rooted in the biblical concept of justice.
God does name wrongdoing, of course, as we must also. God does get angry at wrongdoing, as we should. There are consequences for wrongdoing, as there must be. But legalism, harsh judgment and punishment are not the predominant themes of the Bible.
Biblical justice is shaped by God’s intention for humanity: that we might live in what the Biblical writers call shalom – in right relationship with one another, the creation, the Creator. What matters about wrongdoing is that it harms these right relationships. What justice requires is that conditions for shalom be created or restored.
God is a God of love, a God who never gives up on us. That’s the essence of the biblical story.
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About the Author: Frank Ritchie
Frank is the Education and Advocacy Manager for TEAR Fund NZ. Frank is a licensed Minister in the Wesleyan Methodist Church of New Zealand and has a keen interest in biblical perspectives of Justice and how this connects to service to, with and for the poor, disadvantaged and marginalized people of the world.
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I tend to think this is introduce a false dichotomy which is not present in the scriptures. ‘Punishment OR Restoration’.
By showing that the West has perhaps mistakenly aligned a theology of God’s justice with it’s own systems of justice, Zehr sees the solution as changing the concept of God’s justice, rather than decoupling God’s position as the ultimate judge, with human justice systems. I think this makes much more sense of Romans 12:14-13:7 for example.
In terms of the salvation story of the Bible however, freedom and peace come through punitive justice on God’s enemies, rather than as an alternative to it. Israel is saved in the Exodus through the judgement on Egypt, and likewise, the believer in Christ is saved through the judgement of God on our ulimate enemies – sin and death – which he accomplished at the cross.
Thanks for your comment, Scott. I hear your concern, but I personally don’t see that dichotomy present in what Dr. Zehr has written here… aside from the title, but even then, is the purpose of punishment purely judgement, or is the underlying factor restoration? Did God defeat sin and death simply to judge or was the ultimate intent restoration of the relationship between humanity and himself?
God’s justice can involve punishment, but the point of that punishment always seems to have restoration as its focus at some point for as many stakeholders in an offense as possible.
I think in what he has written Dr. Zehr still leaves much room for punitive consequences to wrong-doing. What I see him addressing here is the imbalance often present in modern views of justice and how those may have been influenced to a point where too often justice is viewed as only entailing punishment and punishment being the “end-point”.
In his work “The Little Book of Restorative Justice” he talks of a continuum where society still needs the current system to a point, but that a process needs to be found where the punitive approach is not necessarily the default approach.
With this in mind, nobody who upholds restorative justice denies obligations on the part of the offender, indeed if obligations and an understanding of the need for accountability on the part of the offender are removed, then this form of justice falls over. Where the offender is not willing to recognise their obligations and be accountable for their actions, that is where I believe the purely punitive system must step in – but even then, the point is restoration for the stake-holders in the offense.
All that said, I’m still a beginner on thoughts of justice, but I would agree and assert that the aim of God’s justice is always restorative, but that sometimes in order for restoration to occur where “sin” has caused damage, sometimes a purely punitive approach must be enacted as a part of justice – but it is not the whole and in my view, it should not be the default.
PS – It’s great to hear from you again and have your participation here!
Yesterday I had the chance to interview Judge Andrew Becroft for our Podcast. I would imagine you are familiar with him through TSCF? We interviewed him in his capacity as Principal Youth Court Judge. He shared some great thoughts on justice.
Hopefully that Podcast will be up this Friday.
You should really check your state of your soul. Watch and be careful what you treed, because the real Jesus Christ the Lord is sitting on the right side of the father and knows your hypocrisy.
God the Father is a intimate loving Lord and His justice is to do away with sin, the devil, demons and those wanting to kill his saints. However not in the way you purpose.
He died for all of mankind (4 we are all sinners) if they would follow and accept Him by accepting His Son Jesus Christ the Lord and following Him by carrying your cross through the Holy spirit dayly. You’d know how to properly follow and you’d know better. God is not for demons, nor is He for immorality, sexual perversions, abortions. But those who are in these things He calls to offering His Holy Spirit through His son to save us from Sheol and the wiles of the devil. To accept His son and follow in the real Jesus who is in Heaven not a fake one made up by society or by some man or by some man calling himself God. The only man who was truly God was and is Jesus Christ the Lord He is real and living, and He sees and knows and (again) is in Heaven with the Father He is not for the anti-christ. To change your lives through Him growing in love, meekness, kindness, God’s grace. His justice is to bring those of whom “are” His sons, daughters, and mothers together in a loving relationship with Him.
Not to try to falsely use His justice and twist it to something else or world peace. That cannot be unless it is false because sinful man cannot be with God they must first be born again. Not some false nonsense about being healed either. Sinful man has to accept the true Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven which is the true one and only God and (again) following Him by His Holy spirit and living in Him. He will show His spirit in His people the truth and they know truth. Not a president, not politics, not idols, not doctrines of demons, not false prophets.
Follow the Holy Spirit or do not, check your relationship and fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ and do not falsely consider that God is for new acts of “sodom and gommorah”. God does not support a gay society, nor false justice masking itself as God’s. You are not God. God is the one who decided not man for His justice is true, not man’s for we are all sinners. You should love your enemy and pray for them that they may be saved not to go and make a false justice in the name of God or His son who is God for the Lord is one.
However, I may have read the whole subject wrong. some of that may be right, but some parts may not be.
I would say truly test it by the scripture before accepting what an article may say.
some articles aren’t right.
Ya’ll may be trying to be right with the true Lord and trying to is noted.
But the point is still stated.
Ziun, I’d be interested to know how often you have copied and pasted that comment on different blogs?
If it’s original, while I get your point, I don’t think it relates much to the article at all. You haven’t really addressed the article and shown specifically where you disagree… and I am assuming you do disagree somehow.
Note the points you disagree with and I’ll be more than happy to discuss them.