As Jeremiah sees it...

Well, back to distributive justice. As my faithful reader knows, I am a retired business ethics professor. I am going to reproduce below a portion of a lecture I have given many times regarding ethical decision making based on justice as biblically defined. It's a bit long but worth wading through (in my humble opinion). It begins with a typical definition of justice in business circles.

Justice exists when benefits and burdens are distributed equitably and according to some accepted rule.... A fair distribution does not necessarily mean an equal distribution. The shares received by the [affected parties] depend on society’s approved rules for getting and keeping income and wealth. These rules will vary from society to society. Most societies try to consider people’s needs, abilities, efforts, and the contribution they make to society’s welfare. Since these factors are seldom equal, fair shares will vary from person to person.

In market economies such as ours, we have tended to see certain groups as deserving a greater share of the benefits that flow from economic life than others. These would include entrepreneurs, those with considerable means, the well educated and the highly productive. Such groups are best able to enter and succeed in the marketplace.

Other groups, who are less able to put forth effort or be productive (even if willing to) are not seen as worthy of the same rewards from the system; e.g., the handicapped, the poor, immigrants lacking language and other skills, women who insist on having babies, older people, and so on.

Is this what the Bible means by ‘justice’? Certainly, the notion of fairness mentioned in the definition above is included in the biblical definition, as we shall see, but there is another facet which is unique to the biblical teaching.

Psalms 37:30 tells us to speak justice, and Proverbs 12:5 to think it. Beyond this, we are to enjoy it (Proverbs 21:15). We are also obligated to live it (Micah 6:8). It does not seem likely that these are recommendations that we all pursue careers in law. What are they encouraging?

Jeremiah provides us with the answer. That prophet had the dubious privilege of living through the reigns of not only the great and godly King Josiah of Judah, but his rather less successful and faithful offspring. In Jeremiah 22, he gives his assessment of their collective failures. Included in his critique is a clear understanding of what Jeremiah believed was just behavior.

Woe to him [i.e., King Jehoiakim, Josiah’s son] who builds his palace
by unrighteousness,
his upper rooms by injustice,
making his countrymen work for nothing,
not paying them for their labor.
He says, “I will build myself a great palace with spacious upper rooms.”
So he makes large windows in it,
panels it with cedar and decorates it in red.
Does it make you a king to have more and more cedar?
Did not your father [i.e., Josiah] have food and drink?
He did what was right and just,
so all went well with him.
He defended the cause of the poor and needy,
and so all went well.
“Is that not what it means to know me?” declares the LORD.
But your eyes and your heart are set only on dishonest gain,
on shedding innocent blood and on oppression and extortion (Jer.
22:13-17).

Using typical Hebrew parallelism, Jeremiah first defines injustice as exploiting the vulnerable (the king’s subjects), who were themselves poor and in no position to resist his demands. By contrasting Jehoiakim with his father, Josiah, the prophet goes on to define justice as not only avoiding the exploitation of the vulnerable, but in fact becoming their champion. To underscore the king’s obligation in this matter, Jeremiah defines such behaviour as virtually the essence of being a follower of God (“Is that not what it means to know me?” declares the LORD).

Both this definition of justice, and its importance, are clearly indicated in the New Testament. Apparently someone asked James, Jesus’ brother, to define the essence of religion. The answer was not particularly theological. It stressed lifestyle, along two lines: just and morally pure behavior.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world (James 1:27).

James did not learn this concept from anybody strange. He was doubtless a student of the Old Testament, but he had his own brother’s words to underscore the importance of justice. They appear in the book of Luke. Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist, had been jailed and was perhaps losing confidence in his prophecy that Jesus was the Messiah. Messianic expectations of the day focused on a great warrior/king who would drive out the Romans and re-establish the Kingdom of David.

Therefore, John sent followers to ask Jesus if he was in fact the “one to come” or should God’s people look for someone else (Luke 7:19). Jesus response was to establish his credentials as Messiah through doing, not war and politics, but justice as Jeremiah defined it:

Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor (Luke 7:22-23).

Hopefully the above is sufficient to establish a definition of justice as the Bible defines it; i.e., not only a concern, but an obligation towards the poor, the vulnerable, the exploitable, the marginalized in the world.

Chewning, Eby and Roels (Business Through the Eyes of Faith) summarize the force of the word aptly:

Biblical justice refers to the ways relationships are structured so that there are no built-in disadvantages to any individual or group. Many of the Old Testament prophets rebuked the Israelites precisely because they had not practiced justice in the marketplace. They treated people and groups of people unfairly. The biblical command to do justice is a call to righteousness; it is a call to do the right thing in the right manner with the right motive.

How would we apply that to the topic of salvation? Well, that's next.

Let justice roll down like a river

I'll start with one of my favourite biblical doctrines, that of justice. This concept is really quite nuanced, meaning many different, almost opposite things depending upon the type of justice in view.

The concept of justice that likely springs to mind first is associated with courts, police, and prisons. The street in my town that goes past the local police station and ends at the provincial court building is called Justice Way. This notion of justice has to do with just desserts, redress, punishment, and so on. It is called retributive justice. God's sense of retributive justice was satisfied by Christ's death, taking as Jesus did the punishment for our wrongdoings as fallen creatures. Nothing more is needed to pay, as it were, for any wrong of which we are guilty.

A second kind of justice is referred to as restorative justice. This is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of victims and offenders, instead of satisfying abstract legal principles or punishing the offender. Traditional criminal justice seeks answers to three questions: what laws have been broken? who did it? and what do the offender(s) deserve? Restorative justice instead asks: who has been harmed? what are their needs? whose obligations are these? (Source: Wikipedia)

In the city next door to mine, Langley BC, a very successful restorative justice organization has run for decades. Called VORP (victim offender reconciliation program), it works with the courts to encourage another approach than the typical retributive one as follows:

* encouraging an offender to acknowledge the harm they have done to victims and the community, and to take responsibility for the consequences of their behaviour;
* taking account of the steps offenders have taken, or propose to take, to make reparations to the victim and/or community; and
* facilitating victim-offender reconciliation where victims so request, or are willing to participate in such programs.

For an interview with VORP's founder, David Gustafson, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GLsyk8cLY8.

Christ having satisfied God's sense of outraged justice at human failure, God can with full consistency swing into reconciliation mode. Because God is God, he even took the initial steps to effect this new and improved relationship.

Once a month we celebrate the Lord's Supper (or Communion). I plan these meetings and have used an overarching theme taken from St. Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 5:19: God was using Christ to restore his relationship with humanity. He didn't hold people's faults against them, and he has given us this message of restored relationships to tell others. Because the effects of Christ's death are timeless, reconciliation with God didn't start at the empty tomb. It applied to Abraham, Moses, Mary and Joseph, and to all of us since Christ's death alike.

The third relevant facet of justice is typically called distributive justice, an important concept in ethical theory. Distributive justice deals with the distribution of benefits and burdens in fair proportions. In capitalistic thinking, those who take risks, work hard, invest shrewdly, create wealth and jobs, or facilitate the sale of oceans of beer (i.e., professional athletes) are seen as more worthy of large rewards than others. Marxist thinking saw things differently, as I'm sure you know: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. There are many positions in between.

But what of biblical teaching? Let's deal with that next.