What Divine Justice Does

Comfort one another, ye fainthearted; be strong, fear not; behold, our God renders judgment, and he will render it; he will come and save us. Say to those who are fearful-hearted, “Be strong, do not fear! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God; He will come and save you.” (Isaiah 35:1-4)

The following material comes from here. The writer is not Orthodox and not everything he says is orthodox, but I thought this excerpt was very good.

Biblically to “bring justice” does not mean to bring punishment, but to bring healing and reconciliation. Justice means to make things right. All through the Prophets justice is associated with caring for others, as something that is not in conflict with mercy, but rather an expression of it. Biblically, justice is God’s saving action at work for all that are oppressed:

“Learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” (Isaiah 1:17)

“This is what the LORD says: ‘Administer justice every morning; rescue from the hand of his oppressor the one who has been robbed.’ ” (Jeremiah 21:12)

The way that we “administer justice”, the Prophets tell us, is by encouraging and helping the oppressed. In contrast to what the Satisfaction-Doctrine says, God’s justice is not in conflict with his mercy, they are inseparable. True justice can only come though mercy:

“This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘Administer true justice: show mercy and compassion to one another.’ ” (Zechariah 7:9)

“Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the LORD is a God of justice.” ( Isaiah 30:18)

If we want to understand the concept of justice as the writers of the Old Testament did, then we must see it as a “setting things right again”. Thus when Christ comes, the way that he brings about justice is through mercy and compassion. Notice how in this next verse Christ does not bring justice with a hammer, but with a tenderness that cares for the broken and the abused.

He frustrates the devices of the crafty,
So that their hands cannot carry out their plans.
He catches the wise in their own craftiness,
And the counsel of the cunning comes quickly upon them.
They meet with darkness in the daytime,
And grope at noontime as in the night.
But He saves the needy from the sword,
From the mouth of the mighty,
And from their hand.
So the poor have hope,
And injustice shuts her mouth.
(Job 5:12-16)

Divine Justice sets things right. God's Justice makes things as though sin and evil had never happened, only better. It sometimes involves chastisement. It sometimes involves forcibly stopping the hand of the oppressor.

But it never, ever requires retaliation or vindictiveness or getting even or taking revenge. This idea is alien to the Christ we know, has never been the teaching of the Christian Church, and is not biblical. It is a sad way of viewing certain texts carnally; i.e., through the lense of human passions.

And Vicarious Punishment is Not Forgiveness

To forgive, according to Merriam-Webster Online, is: to give up resentment of or claim to or requital for, to grant relief from payment of [something].

Forgiveness is synonymous with pardon.  The definition of pardon is: the excusing of an offense without exacting a penalty, a release from the legal penalties of an offense, an official warrant of remission of penalty, excuse or forgiveness for a fault, offense, or discourtesy .

Forgiveness is also synonymous with mercy.  Mercy is compassion or forbearance shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one's power; and it specifically “implies compassion that forbears punishing even when justice demands it."

“But even though God punishes Christ, it is still for the sake of being merciful toward US,” someone may say. Not so. In a penal theory of Atonement, it is specifically US God is punishing in Christ, not the Innocent One Himself. God is not lifting our penalty; He is explicitly inflicting yours and mine upon the only One Who doesn’t deserve it. He is not granting any relief from our debt; but collecting it from the only One who could pay it.

Not only that, but even the infinite debt He is said to have collected (or punishment He is said to have inflicted) upon the Cross is still not enough if you do not believe. He will continue to collect His due from you or inflict punishment upon you for all eternity if you do not believe. There is no mercy.

(No, I do not believe this is overstatement or caricature. But if it is, somebody tell me why it is and how to correct it – but sparing me all the euphemisms in the process.)

“But if you do believe, then what God did to Christ upon the Cross results in your being let off the hook!” someone may try to tell me.

No. It keeps me everlastingly on the hook. It saddles me forever with the guilt of thinking of all the punishment  my Christ endured which ought to have been mine, which I have gratefully but unfairly and unjustly escaped.

"But God wanted you to escape it."

But He didn't want Jesus Christ to escape it, even when He had prayed to be spared?  Sorry.  Forgiveness I can handle, but punishing my Lord instead of me, no.  I know what I deserve.   

Proponents of penal and satisfaction theories of atonement believe it would be immoral for God simply to forgive. For them, that feels tantamount to winking at sin, colluding in evil. Sin, they invariably tell us, must be “dealt with.”

Yes, sin must be dealt with. That's fine, provided it does not mean gratifying what Fr. Stephen Freeman has called our “lust for revenge”,  for getting even is not what justice is all about.  "Dealing with sin" must also not mean indulging that certain, neurotic form of guilt that craves punishment for ourselves.  Either of these ideas of dealing with sin would only be feeding our sickness instead of curing it.

The object of Justice is to make everything as if sin had never happened, to wipe it out and all its damage and all its consequences. Perhaps an analogy is the virus my computer picked up a few days ago. I not only had to delete the malicious files, I then had also to undo all the damage the bug had done, wiping out my security systems and blocking my access to Google (and thereby, my blog and yours). With a computer virus, that takes hours of searching, deleting, and working with a tech support person. With sin, getting rid of it and all its effects and all its consequences involves the one thing so many people consider immoral, and that’s forgiveness. Forgiveness, far from being a way of approving evil, is essential to accomplish the goal of Divine Justice: to make things as if the sin had never happened. That’s what true Justice does. In fact, by transforming deficits into positive good, God makes things even far better than they would have been, had sin never happened. That’s what true forgiveness does. That’s what true Love does.

A penal theory of Atonement, while it is meant to be all about Divine Love and Divine Justice, is at the very least a serious underestimation of them both.  It quite simply has no room for genuine forgiveness, and in fact prohibits it. 

May He, Who is far more wonderful than we can imagine, reveal to us all the heights and breadth and depths of His unfathomable Love, and give us to be able to come to terms with it.

Human Jurisprudence and Divine Justice

If justice means giving each person his due, then there is no justice in human legal systems.

Suppose, for example, that a small girl is murdered. How will you recompense her parents? You can’t. You can sentence the murderer to death by hanging or to life in prison with hard labor and no parole, but no matter what you do to him, none of it will make the parents whole, because none of it will bring back their little girl. The murderer may have gotten what he deserves, but the parents and family haven’t, and of course neither has the deceased child.

Or suppose you are a man and you are gang raped by a bunch of other men, and beaten and left to die, and you spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. Can human legal systems give you back what you’ve lost? Make the trauma and the horror never have happened? Let you walk again? No. No matter what the court does to the rapists, it will not compensate you one iota. It may uselessly gratify your hostility some, but indulging your hostility will actually further harm you as a person. (It will make your hostility grow, too, and crave further gratification.)

There is no true justice in human systems of jurisprudence. They cannot restore a life or make the damage disappear. But God can. No, what God does is even better than that: He transforms the trauma and the injury into something whereby we benefit, profit, grow, so we end up better off than we might have been, had it not happened. We get back all we had lost and much, much more.

God’s justice, then, consists of putting things back to rights. His justice means righting the wrongs, correcting them, rather than uselessly retaliating. His justice means making things as good as they originally were but even better, far better. God’s Justice means when he encounters evil, He transforms it into a good that would otherwise not have existed. Justice is perfecting His creation, damaged by sin. Justice means abolishing wrong, eliminating evil, exterminating death. It means healing the sick, making then lame walk, setting the prisoners free, liberating the people from their oppressors, giving the widow and the orphan what they need, vindicating righteousness.

And punishing the wicked? No. Converting them, rather! True justice, notice, would also restore the murderer and the rapist, and bring them back to their family and friends, new persons, healed, sanctified, made beautiful. That would be the highest justice, because that would be making things as they ought to be, as our loving God intended them to be.

Yet – because God wouldn’t define anything as sin if it weren’t harmful, especially to the perpetrator – the wicked do punish themselves, and in this way (in contrast to the Penal Substitutionary theory of Atonement) the right people are punished, the guilty instead of the Innocent. The right person is also inflicting the punishment: the sinner himself, tegether with satan. And the punishment is in exact proportion to the sin. (If I touch the hot stove, my finger is burned. If I jump from a bridge, I drown. If I tell a lie, I become calloused and false, and hollow.) This is not yet the highest form of justice, but it is the kind most people lust after. Yes, I put it this way because it is totally unchristian to hope anybody will ever suffer for any reason. Or to suppose it is God inflicting the suffering, when it is the sinner all by himself, with no help from anybody but the devil and perhaps other sinners. If you are hoping the wicked will suffer, well, they will, but you have some serious repenting to do for hoping it.

But I’m only hoping it, you say, because otherwise there’s no justice. But there is. It just isn’t the kind you had in mind, the kind driven by hostility and fear, the punitive kind. It’s True Justice, God’s justice.

So where is this True Justice, which consists of correcting rather than punishing injustice, and making everything even better than it was before things went wrong? This True Justice is eschatological, a long word meaning it only appears, in its fullness at least, at the end of the world.

So what’s to make us think it will, if it never yet has?

But it has. We do not yet see the full-grown plant, but the first green leaves do already appear, and they appear in Jesus Christ. He heals the sick, makes the lame to walk, sets the prisoners free, releases us from the bonds of sin, renews and restores His people, corrects ignorance, brings wisdom to cure our foolishness, love to counter our hatred and fear, and His own Body and Blood to doctor or corruptibility and mortality. He vanquishes death and He promises to come again when the time is right, this time in all His glory, to put the whole house in order once and for all. (Beware, all ye who have investments in the disorder!) He comes again in power to consummate all the work of His own hands.

There is no “Justice”

Fr. Stephen has pointed out that justice, as thought of in the West, does not exist. That’s to say, if justice means rendering equality, such that each person is repaid the moral equivalent of the good or the evil he has done, and recompensed for the evil he has suffered, that simply does not exist. It doesn’t exist in human systems of jurisprudence, and it doesn’t exist in the divine order, either.

Let’s begin with the latter, with theology. In classical Catholic and in Protestant thought (Protestants having inherited it), we have varying forms of what has come to be called the Penal Substitutionary Theory of Atonement. This theory states that the reason Jesus died was to bear the punishment for our sins which God the Father would otherwise have had to inflict upon us – and/or that He died to repay God the Father the debt we owed Him on account of our sins. This theory assumes that justice means rendering to each person what he deserves. Yet, ironically, the theory is devised precisely in order to avoid doing that!

In the “Pen-Sub” theory of what the atonement means, the first thing that happens is that the wrong Person is punished. The Righteous One is punished while the sinful many, provided they repent, get away scot-free. How is that any kind of justice? Its own proponents know it is not, else they would try to imitate the Lord by doing the same thing. They would go around to prisons offering to take the punishments of convicted offenders. But they know no court would even entertain the idea. No victim of rape, nor any family of a murdered person, wants to see the perpetrator set free and someone else take his place. The very idea is outrageous, both in human jurisprudence and in theology.

The next thing that happens in the Pen-Sub theory is, the wrong Person is thought to be inflicting the punishment, namely, God the Father! But how in the world could He ever derive any pleasure from seeing anybody, much less His own, perfect Son, be tortured and killed? What kind of God would take any pleasure, whether emotional, moral, legal or otherwise, in such a hideous thing? And why? And how would that repay Him in any way? What is He supposed to get out of it? Does He like bloodshed and pain, hoard up horrors and treasure them? Is anything accomplished or corrected or repaired by punishment? In reality, it is the devil in his wrath crucifying Christ, with the collaboration of wicked men. (Acts 2:23) I can’t think of any theology more tragic than that which confuses God with the devil.

We notice, too, that there is no proportional justice in the Penal Substitutionary theory, none of the business of everybody getting his due. This, on three counts:

First, as Fr. Stephen pointed out on his blog, there is no such thing as a sin so great that eternal torment would be a proportional to it. I mean, you’d think even Stalin might have paid his dues after several thousand years of unspeakable misery, and God would be satisfied and have pity.

Second, there is no way Jesus’ three days in Hades compare with even a sinner’s first taste of torment. Why not? Because Jesus’ time there was spent in perfect communion with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit while He conquered Hades. The condemned sinner, however, has no blessed communion with God and knows he has no way of conquering hell, no way out, no pass after three days or three million days.

Thirdly, if Christ endured His sufferings in the stead of all mankind, then even unrepentant sinners should not have to go to hell, since their punishment has already be borne and/or their debt to God the Father is already paid. Either way, once Christ is crucified, the Father gets all the suffering and death due to Him, yet He exacts it again from those in hell, getting it, in effect, twice. Now two people have had to suffer and die for the same sin(s) – unless you are a Calvinist and believe Christ only took the punishment or paid the debt of those predestined to be saved, and not on behalf of the rest. (I’ll give the Calvinists credit, at least, for logical consistency.)

There are many more things wrong with the Penal Substitutionary model of the Atonement, but I have limited myself here to pointing out only one of them, namely that there is no justice in it whatsoever. The whole theory is a travesty, a mockery, an undoing of justice. (And it’s meant to be, because otherwise, if this kind of justice were actually carried out, we’d all be in hell forever.)

There’s no justice in Orthodox theology, either, if "justice" means giving each person his due. I’ll try to explain that in another post. There isn’t even any such justice in human legal systems and I’ll try to explain that, too.

True justice, on the other hand, divine justice, does indeed exist. It’s the only kind that does. But it’s something else. Stay tuned.

What Does it Mean for God to Be Offended?

As readers/commentators of Fr. Stephen’s blog have illustrated, there is a very strange notion common to certain strains of Western Christian thought, that since God is infinite, any sin we commit constitutes an infinite offense against Him. Therefore, sin requires infinite punishment.

But how do we see the “Most Offended” behaving on the Cross? Here mankind has offered Him the ultimate offense, killing Him, and how does He respond? “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” What meaning does it have to be “offended” if this is the way the Offended One responds?

Or do we seriously think this attitude differs one iota from the Father’s own attitude, when Jesus Himself tells us, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father”? When St. John tells us Jesus was the exact imprint of the divine glory? (Hebrews 1:3) No, His forgiving attitude is identical to the Father’s and the Spirit’s, in every minute detail. There is no conflict in the Holy Trinity, none whatsoever. The Father no more takes offense than the Son does, for they are in complete harmony in all things, being two facets of a single God, and The Son is the Mind of God, the Wisdom of God.

And although it is extremely difficult for us who have been raised in the West to get this through our noggins (at least it is for me!), it really ought not to come as any surprise that God the Father NEVER changes His loving attitude toward us, not in the slightest. Why should this not surprise us? because after all, He is in no way harmed if we disobey His commandments. He only gave them to us for our own good. It is not as though He had determined which behaviors He likes and which He does not just arbitrarily, for no reason at all. Nor does He make this determination because it in some way serves Him. He is not self-serving. “God is love” (I John 4:8) and “love seeketh not her own.” (I Corinthians 13:5) Jesus did not say, “I have come that all men may know and serve Me and bow before Me.” Rather, He said, “I came not to be served, but to serve.” God does not need our service, does not even need for us to exist. He already has the all the fullness of glory independently of us.

Rather, God gave us commandments because the keeping of them would be for our own benefit, the same way a parent commands his child not to touch the stove or to look both ways before crossing the street. And if the child does touch the stove, does the parent get mad at the disobedience and therefore cause the stove to burn the child? If I jump from a skyscraper and hit the pavement and die, is it because God was angry with me for jumping? Or if I chain smoke for 40 years and develop lung cancer, is it because God is getting even with me because for some unknown reason He is opposed to smoking? Of course not! All these things happen just because that’s the way the universe works. It’s the same way with the commands God gives us; they are for our growth and happiness and if we transgress them, it is not He who is harmed, but we. It isn’t He who inflicts the harm, either. The harm just happens because of what we’ve done. The harm is inherent in the sin. (Otherwise, God wouldn’t have had any reason for considering it sin!) The harm is there independently of God’s attitude. God’s attitude toward us is constant and true, not fickle, not changeable.

And what is that attitude? He makes His sun to shine on the wicked and the good alike. He makes His rain to fall upon the just and the unjust, alike. He is kind to the wicked and the ungrateful. Those are Jesus’ own words (Luke 6:35), not the words of some liberal theologian. And to be like our Father in Heaven, Jesus says, we must bless those who curse us, do good to those who hate us, pray for those who abuse us. That is God’s unwavering, unalterable attitude. “God is Love.” “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.” God does not add to the enormous harm we’ve already done by harming us further! No, the very opposite: He seeks to save us from ourselves and from the harm we do.

We often do not notice the harm we do to ourselves when we disobey God’s instructions. We blind ourselves to what is happening to us inside; we imagine we’ve gotten away with it. But the harm is still being done. We grow gradually alienated from one another, we feel increasingly isolated and lonely, we find life more and more bereft of meaning, we become depressed. Our character erodes, our ability to act freely is diminished as we become enslaved to our passions, our personhood suffers trauma, even our physical health deteriorates. We build ourselves a little, but growing, hell.

No, God is not infinitely offended; He isn’t offended personally at all.

But on behalf of the people or things we’ve harmed, He can be said to be offended, yes? Well, put it this way: He does not take joy in seeing harm done to any aspect of His handiwork. He does not approve of the harm we do and He labors to undo it – but all the while still loving us every bit as much as if we had never sinned. (That’s what grace is, when He still loves us no matter what, even though we don’t deserve it.) Again, if His love for us will never change, what does it mean for Him to be offended?

Doesn’t He require at least some payment for our sins? NO! No, for the very same reason: He does not take joy in seeing harm done to any aspect of His handiwork! He does not approve. Much less does He inflict yet more harm! That’s the devil’s doing and ours, and neither we nor he do it on God’s behalf, either. We may be sure that whatever the devil does, he does in opposition to God, in rebellion and in hatred, not in collaboration. WE are the collaborators with satan; God is not. What God wants, instead of payment for sins, is correction of them, a.k.a., repentance, so that we may become whole again, and holy.

Does that mean God actually DOES NOT give to each person what He deserves? That’s exactly what it means. He gives to each person far better than any of us ever deserved. Note the parable of the laborers in the vineyard in Matthew 20. Notice that “He died for us while we were yet sinners.” (Romans 5:8)

Does this mean everybody is going to be saved? No, not necessarily. It does mean that if you are “in hell,” whether right now or in the ages to come, it is entirely your own doing. Alexandre Kalomiros describes how this happens in his lecture, “River of Fire.”

Now if anyone is perplexed and does not understand how it is possible for God's love to render anyone pitifully wretched and miserable and even burning as it were in flames, let him consider the elder brother of the prodigal son. Was he not in his father's estate? Did not everything in it belong to him? Did he not have his father's love? Did his father not come himself to entreat and beseech him to come and take part in the joyous banquet? What rendered him miserable and burned him with inner bitterness and hate? Who refused him anything? Why was he not joyous at his brother's return? Why did he not have love either toward his father or toward his brother? Was it not because of his wicked, inner disposition? Did he not remain in hell because of that? And what was this hell? Was it any separate place? Were there any instruments of torture? Did he not continue to live in his father's house? What separated him from all the joyous people in the house if not his own hate and his own bitterness? Did his father, or even his brother, stop loving him? Was it not precisely this very love which hardened his heart more and more? Was it not the joy that made him sad? Was not hatred burning in his heart, hatred for his father and his brother, hatred for the love of his father toward his brother and for the love of his brother toward his father? This is hell: the negation of love; the return of hate for love; bitterness at seeing innocent joy; to be surrounded by love and to have hate in one's heart. This is the eternal condition of all the damned.

If you find yourself in hell, it is because you actually prefer to be there, and you prefer it knowingly. It is because you hate, resent, and reject God; because you fear Truth, hate what is Good, feel jealous in the presence of Love, and find Beauty unbearable. It will be your choice, which God will not override, because to do so would be to destroy you as a person and reduce you to an automaton. And God, Who is love, Who created you to become the opposite of automatons, will not do that to you. He will always respect your freedom, which is a part of His own image in you, even if you use it perversely. He does not want to see anybody in hell; far from it; He has done everything possible to keep us from that. But He will even let you have hell, if that is what you really want. If you are in hell, it is in spite of everything God has done for you, is doing for you, and would have chosen for you.

Does the fact that God always loves us, infinitely, eternally, and unconditionally, mean there is no justice? Well, yes and no. It means there is no “justice” in the sense of equality, of giving to each person a reward or punishment equal and only equal to his good or wicked deed. That never existed, either on earth or in heaven, as I will try to explain in an upcoming post. But that never was justice anyway, not true justice. True justice there is, which I will also try to describe in another post very soon.



P.S.) Actually, the fact that God is infinite means the very opposite of the idea that He is therefore infinitely offended. It's because God is infinite that His mercy is infinite. Search any online concordance and note how many times the phrase appears, "His mercy endureth for ever." I think it's 40 times, if memory serves.

Justice (?)

Bernie Madoff was jailed today. He'll be imprisoned the rest of his life.

The reporters I heard discussing it seemed disappointed that he pleaded guilty, as though they would rather have seen the man torn to shreds in a trial. What if he had been? What if he had even been sentenced to hard labor and then execution? What would have been accomplished? His victims' anger would have been somewhat more indulged. But what kind of recompense is that for his victims - momentary emotional gratification instead of financial reimbursement? Their life savings are still gone. They cannot now retire. They are looking at a lifetime sentence of their own: poverty. There are still charities that now cannot perform their services, because their money is gone.

Is this justice? Well, it's as near to it as human systems can provide, probably. God's justice, though, is orders of magnitude greater than this, and why? Because He is able to do what our justice cannot, and that is to make the victims whole again. He really does, in the end, set everything to rights. He restores everything to the way it ought to be, was created to be. He makes everything perfect.

What if Bernie Madoff's victims had everything made perfect again for them? What if they had all their money back, with all the appropriate interest and dividends? What if, besides that, their lives were made beautiful and perfect in every other way as well, so that they walked in peace, rejoiced in love, and gave incessant thanks to God? Then what would they want done with Bernie Madoff? Then it wouldn't matter nearly so much, would it? Because they would have their justice, true justice, in any case.

God's justice doesn't require punishment (in the sense of getting even) for anybody. In fact, in God's justice, the optimum outcome is, Bernie Madoff repents and everybody forgives him (not necessarily in that order!) and we all live happily together forever after. Christ died for many reasons (which I discussed in a 19-part series of posts last summer) but not among these reasons is that God had some emotional or legal need to retaliate. He doesn't, because as Bernie Madoff clearly shows us, wrong cannot really be corrected by punishing the malefactor; wrong is corrected by being replaced with right.