What is Justice?
Human beings are by nature social animals. Every individual human being is only alive because of a relationship between their parents, and because other human beings (usually their parents) took the time and energy to provide for and nurture them through their infancy and childhood years. Human beings have a natural instinct to join together with other human beings for mutual benefit. We are naturally wired to desire to form relationships with our fellow human beings, such as familial relationships, friendships, and romantic relationships.
For this reason, virtually all human beings exist not as isolated individuals, but as members of communities. There are rare cases of individuals living as hermits, without any human contact, but even they must have previously been members of a human community; otherwise, they would not be alive. For the vast majority of human beings, we live our lives as members of communities and broader social organizations: societies.
In order to exist, every human society must have certain codes of conduct for the behavior of its individual members. Without certain expectations for how its members should behave that are in some way enforced, a society would quickly dissolve into chaotic anarchy and cease to function, since it would be impossible for its members to live and work together for mutual benefit. Thus, every society has certain concepts of what behavior is considered fair and acceptable, and what obligations each member of the society has towards the other members. These concepts are what we term “justice.”
The virtue of justice is a character trait by which an individual acts justly as they interact with their fellow human beings. A just individual habitually understands and acts according to what is fair and what is owed to other human beings. Because so much of our lives consist of interacting with other human beings, justice is a vitally important virtue; it is often considered to be the most important of the natural virtues. Most of the actions most widely considered to be “immoral” — murder, theft, lying — are violations of justice.
Justice is inextricably interconnected with the other virtues. If we have courage, but lack the desire to act justly, then our courage will be of little use. In fact, our courage may actually become a negative thing if it enables us to risk acting in an unjust manner. If we have wisdom, but lack the desire to act justly towards others, then our wisdom will be of little use. In fact, our wisdom may actually become perverted into a cunning that enables us to more effectively harm and mistreat our fellow human beings.
Christian Justice
Justice is a central theme throughout Scripture. This is especially true in the Torah, which demands justice, especially for the poor and the socially vulnerable, and the prophets, who decry Israel’s failure to follow the Torah’s teachings about justice. All Ancient Near Eastern societies had deities whom they believed demanded justice. But these “gods” demanded justice only because they wanted a stable society that could regularly provide for their needs through temple rituals and sacrifices. In contrast, in the Old Testament, God (who has no needs) demands justice because He has called Israel as His holy covenant people, with a plan to use this people to show the world who He is and to bring blessing to all the nations of the earth.
In the New Testament, justice is still an important theme. However, the teachings of the New Testament about what it means to act justly differ from the Old Testament concept of justice and typical secular concepts of justice in some important ways.
A Christian understanding of justice is centered in the cross of Jesus Christ. There, we see the only perfectly just human being who ever lived taking upon Himself the punishment that we justly deserve, so that we could be justified and reconciled to God. In Jesus, God establishes true justice not by giving us what we justly deserve, but by showing us mercy and grace, thus demonstrating His love for us.
This cross-centered understanding of God’s justice has profound implications for the kind of justice Christians are to exhibit in their own lives. Christians should not demand that their enemies get the punishment they justly deserve; instead, they should show mercy, grace, and forgiveness to them. They should do this in the hope that their enemies will repent, believe the Gospel, and enter into a truly just relationship with God and with them. When the apostle Paul, who had previously been guilty of persecuting and murdering Christians, became a member of the Church, the Church did not demand that he receive the just punishment for his previous crimes. Instead, the Church forgave him and welcomed him as their brother in Christ. This is the kind of reconciliation that the Church is called to embody in the midst of an unjust world. Yes, justice is still important. But “mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13).
All the nations of the world seek to establish their version of justice using coercion and violence. For them, “justice” means hurting and killing the “bad guys.” For God’s covenant people, the Church, it is different. Because we are called to be agents of God’s love and of His reconciling work, we are forbidden from ever using violence, and we may only use coercion, if at all, in extreme circumstances. The Church does have a mandate to seek to establish justice, but it carries out this task using persuasion, rather than coercive violence.
The nations of the world look to the state to establish justice. Christians, on the other hand, cannot justify using the violent, coercive, unjust methods of the state to force their understanding of justice on others. Instead, Christians should seek to establish justice in and through the political community of the Church. From a Christian perspective, it is God’s Church alone which understands what true justice looks like, and which is capable of establishing true justice in the world. True justice will come about not by coercion and violence, but through Christians demonstrating the virtue of justice in their daily lives.
Recently, a particular concept of “social justice” has become increasingly popular in American society, including among American Christians. This concept of “social justice” basically boils down to saying that it is acceptable to treat individuals injustly, as long as this is done for the sake of some broader movement for justice in society in general (e.g., racial justice). Such a concept of “social justice” is incompatible with Christian ethics. Christians cannot accept the idea that “the ends justify the means.” Instead, they must always act virtuously and treat every individual justly. True social justice is established not through jumping on the bandwagon of every secular social or political movement that claims to be in favor of “justice,” but by Christians developing the virtue of justice and living it out in their daily lives, treating all human beings justly.