489 - The Politics of Justice

The Politics of Justice
By David Hollenbach

I

Justice in the Bible is pre-eminently a relational bond which links persons together in a community of mutual responsibility and mutual rights. It is the prime characteristic of the covenant relationship which binds God to the people of Israel and the people to each other. The righteousness which Paul proclaims in the New Testament is similarly relational. It is founded on God's relation of graciousness toward human beings, on the human relation of faith toward God, and on the active relation of love among neighbors.

Biblical justice, in other words, is a quality of mutual bondedness in community. It stands as a critique of all efforts to build society and create policies on the basis of individualism, both the rugged individualism of the free-enterprise capitalist and the narcissistic individualism of the "me generation." In the biblical vision, justice means seeking to protect and enhance the lives of individuals by continually building connections of mutual support in community and society. Where there is no such vision, both individual people and "the people" as a whole will perish.

II

Biblical justice is creative. In both Old and New Testaments, the justice of the covenant-community is brought into existence by the gracious initiative of God. This initiative creates a people where once there was no people. It is a justice which ever seeks new and deeper levels of mutual relatedness, not simply the preservation of those familiar bonds which already exist. Thus it goes beyond a quid pro quo fairness in social interaction and economic exchanges.

The fairness symbolized by the balanced scales in the hand of the blindfolded Roman goddess "Justitia" is part of biblical justice, but it is only a part. Biblical justice remakes the context of fairness by its drive

David Hollenbach, S.J., is Associate Professor of Theological Ethics at Weston School of Theology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of Claims in Conflict: Retrieving and Renewing the Catholic Human Rights Tradition (1979). Dr. Hollenbach is here reporting on and interpreting a conference sponsored by the Bread for the World Education Fund and the Weston School of Theology, convened this year at Cambridge under the general title, "The Churches, the Bible, and the Politics of Justice."
Although Dr. Hollenbach takes responsibility for this interpretation, he wishes to acknowledge his dependence on those who made presentations at the consultation, namely, Carole Fontaine (Andover-Newton Theological School), Jerome Neyrey (Weston School of Theology), Krister Stendahl (Harvard Divinity School), Arthur Simon (Bread for the World), Stephen Mott (Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary), Padraic O'Hare (Boston College), and Kimberley Bobo (Bread for the World).

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toward new and deeper forms of relatedness between people. This creativity is rooted in the biblical conviction that a gracious and continually active God is the source of the covenant which is at the heart of all human community.

Biblical justice is modeled on the justice of a God who labors creatively for the salvation of every person. Thus a just community is one which draws the stranger and the alien into the circle of neighbors. Following the parable of the Good Samaritan it defines the neighbor by creative, inclusive response to those in need, not by the already existing boundaries of social and political life. Such a community will approach public policy questions ever on the alert for opportunities to incorporate isolated or marginalized persons into a network of mutual support and responsibility.

III

Biblical justice is liberating. The Old Testament describes the creative construction of a community of mutual relationship as an exodus from slavery to freedom. In Paul's writings, the community which is truly reconciled with God and within itself comes into being through God's emancipating justification in Christ. In the biblical vision, freedom and corporate responsibility are not opposed to each other but rather are mutually supporting. In the Exodus, the act of liberation and the creation of a true people are identified. Similarly, Pauline justification is a liberation from the futile project of living solely on one's own resources and an incorporation into a reconciled community.

These interconnections of freedom and community suggest that biblical justice calls for policies that overcome the patterns of unfreedom and lack of community which result whenever one social group asserts itself in domination over another.

IV

This liberating quality of justice is linked with another central emphasis of the biblical vision: God's justice brings vindication to the poor, the outcasts, and the oppressed. Throughout its history, Israel was continually challenged by the prophets to recognize that the justice of God will raise up the lowly and stand in judgment on those who oppress them. In the New Testament, Jesus is portrayed as the very embodiment of this vindicating and judging justice of God. The complete fulfillment of this vindication will occur only on the eschatological day of judgment. But the resurrection of Jesus is the downpayment on its complete realization, and the Spirit of God has been given to a groaning world as the first fruits of the harvest in which vindication and judgment will be complete.

There is need for such liberation from oppression in the life of every human being. It is also sure that every person and society stands judged by the justice of God. Nonetheless, Christians who seek to remain faithful to the Spirit which has been given them are both called and

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enabled to act in the task of bringing vindication to all who are poor and oppressed. Such action is central in the biblical understanding of the Christian's participation in the justice of God.

V

These four characteristics of justice as a relational, creative, liberating, and vindicating form of life in community are all interconnected and inseparable. In the biblical vision, they are not pitted against each other as competing values or opposed norms. There can be no vindication of the oppressed apart from a creative restructuring of the conditions of exchange and interaction in economic and political life. There can be no liberation which is not simultaneously a movement into a relationship of truly mutual relatedness. The biblical vision acknowledges the reality of injustice and deep conflict in history. Thus it sees the fullness of justice as an eschatological hope.

Injustice is the conflict-ridden exclusion of persons or groups from participation in the richness of social relationship. It leads to oppression and poverty. The remedy for injustice is the struggle to overcome this exclusion and domination, a struggle that is often filled with conflict. But the conflicts of injustice as biblically portrayed are most definitely not conflicts between freedom and social solidarity or between personal faithfulness and corporate responsibility. These are inseparable both in a fully just community and in the process of moving toward such a community.

VI

This rudimentary effort to sketch an evangelically catholic portrayal of justice suggests further considerations as to the proper relation between Christian faith and civil responsibility. On the one hand, biblical justice is a public reality. It concerns the civil life of society-its laws, its public actions, and, in contemporary American terms, its "policies." Thus advocates of biblical justice need to learn to speak a language and use the analytic tools which are the keys to effectiveness in the contemporary policy process. To be effective, the full meaning of biblical justice must be brought into dialogue with the movements and issues which are at the focus of civil life today. The shape of current public debate should in part determine the form of Christian engagement in the political process.

The adoption of language and social analytic tools which are taken from current debate and from the policy sciences is not without the danger of cultural co-optation as some evangelical Christians are quick to point out. Nevertheless, reliance on non-biblical categories and forms of analysis is both practically unavoidable and theologically legitimate in the exercise of Christian civil responsibility. It is unavoidable because one cannot even discuss many major current policy concerns in the language and concepts of the Bible.

In the area of economic policy, for example, evangelicals of the Moral

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Majority persuasion would do well to notice that "the free enterprise system" is a notion which never did and never could have occurred in the biblical text. More leftist Christians should have similar hesitations before making claims about the gospel imperative to participate in the struggle for a particular brand of socialism. Right-to-Lifers and Bread for the World advocates of the right to food both need to recognize that the notion of rights which is employed in the current debates on these issues is largely a product of the eighteenth century, not the Bible. Similarly, specific policies and laws which are up for Congressional consideration today involve a host of empirical and analytic considerations on which the Bible provides virtually no information or guidance at all.

Acknowledgment of this gap between biblical categories and the categories in which policy debate is conducted, however, is not cause for being silent where the Bible is silent. Part of the biblical revelation calls Christians to recognize that as beings created in the image of God, all persons share some measure of participation in the wisdom and freedom of God. Exercising this wisdom and freedom by emphasizing the knowledge and analytic skills which are the human community's common possession is thus not only necessary but also legitimate. Further, when Christians debate public issues, the civil responsibility of having a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind" is part of the biblical call to an inclusive public community. Entering the civil process with a measure of such respect is a precondition for coming to an understanding of concepts and structures not illuminated by the Bible.

This respect for the image of God in others and the presence of "common grace" in the life of public society calls on Christians to back their policy recommendations with what John Coleman has called "secular warrants." Under the conditions of religious pluralism which prevail in the world, an inclusive, relational, and creative vision of justice cannot be realized by efforts to implement policies inspired by that vision without offering reasons for them which are at least plausible to the people affected. Making explicit the secular reasoning which warrants the policy recommendations will also help keep Christian advocates honest. It will help prevent them from confusing God's revelation in Christ with their own partial understanding of the society they live in.

VII

It must also be noted that the biblical vision of justice will sometimes call Christian citizens to question and challenge the presuppositions which underlie current movements in the political process. Pluralism prevails in both national and international communities today to a degree perhaps greater than ever before. This pluralism is frequently in danger of breaking apart into overt ideological and physical conflict. The diverse visions of individuals, groups, and nations often blind them to forms of oppression, exclusion, violence, hunger, and hopelessness

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which afflict many in the world today. The greatest temptation of a pluralist world undergoing rapid change accompanied by conflict is to lose sight of the common good shared by people bound together in true communal mutuality. In such a situation, Christians are called to press the case once again for the inclusiveness of biblical justice as they enter the political process.

A justice which is integrally relational, creative, liberating, and vindicating of the poor cuts against some of the bias and self-interests of nearly all political movements and ideologies to be found on the political scene. So though Christians need to employ reason and persuasion fully in their civil pursuit of justice, they also need to recognize its tendency to become infected with what Niebuhr called ideological taint. The defense against this danger is not retreat into an uncritical fundamentalism. The pathway of such a retreat is closed off by the fact that the Bible does not contain the concepts or analyses that can fully illuminate real policy choices.

The strongest secular warrant for the biblical vision of justice is its appositeness for a pluralist and conflicted world. Mutual relatedness, creative restructuring, liberating inclusiveness, and a forthright commitment to the vindication of the poor and oppressed are simultaneously the conditions of religious faithfulness and public civility today. Elements of this integral vision are present in diverse parts of the churches and the body politic in the 1980s. The civil task of the public church is to help nurture them and act on them in both the religious and political domains. Failure to do so would be both unbiblical and uncivil.