510 - Justification and Justice in a Theology of Grace

Justification and Justice in a Theology of Grace
By Kathryn Tanner

The issue is not to discover gratuitousness and forget the demands of justice, but to situate justice within the framework of God's gratuitous love." "God makes the ethical demand that every believer practice justice, but this demand is not in any way inconsistent with the free and unmerited initiative of God. On the contrary, it acquires its full scope and vitality only when located within this gratuitousness.¹

It is noteworthy that all the commentators [on Romans] ... lay out and juxtapose heterogeneous elements: judicial justice and grace; punishment and fidelity to promises; expiation and mercy. But can the properly juridical subsist simply alongside the moment of mercy, without undergoing a transformation ... ? ².

A BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF JUSTIFICATION?

This essay on justification is an exercise in biblical theology of a certain sort. "Biblical theology" can mean many different things. Almost any theology is biblical in the broadest sense in that it is concerned with what the Bible says and makes reference to it whenever possible in support of its own positions. In its more restricted senses, however, "biblical theology" may mean, first of all, the theology to be found in a biblical text or texts. Historical-critical investigation of the Bible uncovers this theology, say, by analyzing the theological intent behind a particular redaction of oral or textual materials in a biblical book. According to a second restricted sense, "biblical theology" means the interpreter's constructive efforts to fill out and develop conceptually the germ of theological ideas or the evocative symbols, images, and stories, present in biblical texts. Biblical theology amounts here to commentary on the Bible

Kathryn Tanner is Associate Professor of Theology at The Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Her most recent book is Theories of Culture (1997).

¹ Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1987), 88,90.
² Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 372.

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that takes the theological ends of greater conceptual articulation and coherence for its goals. While the theological construction that this enterprise involves is admittedly the work of the interpreter and is not attributed to the Bible itself, the whole raison d'etre of the enterprise continues to lie in its claim to be biblical. The point of the enterprise is simply to make greater sense of what the Bible itself is saying in a less clearly articulated and systematic way. In a third restricted sense, biblical theology involves altering or modifying Christian theological traditions in light of the Bible.

This kind of biblical theology is distinguished from the second in that the theological traditions at issue cannot claim simply to be the product of efforts to give conceptually full explications of biblical ideas, images, or narratives. While no doubt referring back to the Bible and perhaps taking their start from biblically based ideas, images, and stories, these theological traditions have their own integrity and relative autonomy from the Bible as responses to later theological challenges posed to or within the Christian churches over the course of their history. For example, although a biblical critic, say, might argue that the way ancient Mesopotamian stories of creation are modified in Genesis points in its direction, the Christian theological tradition that insists upon creation ex nihilo can hardly claim to be the result of a simple effort to explicate the cosmogony of Genesis 1-3. A Christian theology of creation ex nihilo was decisively shaped by efforts in the early church to distinguish a Christian outlook on creation from Manichaeism and from certain Neo-Platonic or Gnostic emanationist schemes. Its raison d'etre lies as much there as it does in any effort simply to be true to what Genesis suggests in a more conceptually precise and systematic fashion.

It is similar with Christian theological traditions that concern justification. While inevitably involving commentary on Romans or Galatians, they are decisively influenced by later theological problematics in ways that prohibit a claim to be simply reflective of Paul's own concerns in those texts. These later problematics surround, say, Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism (for example, they have to do with controversies surrounding issues of merit and God's free grace), or they may be prompted by worries about the terror or despair evoked in some Christians by late medieval monastic and penitential practices, and the like. Theological problematics like these are clearly different from Paul's concerns in speaking about justification by faith or by works under the law, concerns that have to do with the exclusiveness of God's covenant relations. Paul is interested in showing the way in which God's covenants extend beyond the Jews, and how God nevertheless remains faithful to the covenant promises made to them. ³

³ For the connection Paul makes between a putative justification by works and the restriction of God's covenant relations to the Jews, see Rom 2:17; 3:27-9. For Paul's worries about God's continued faithfulness to the covenant with Israel in light of justification by faith, see, for example, Romans 9-11. The contrast between Paul's concerns and later Christian ones are very clearly drawn in James Dunn and Alan Suggate, The Justice of God (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1993), 25-9.

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Doing biblical theology on the basis of Christian theological traditions with this sort of relative autonomy from the Bible would mean using the Bible to shed new light on them, using the Bible to alter the way in which the distinctive concerns of these theological traditions are addressed. Historical-critical investigation of the Bible is important for this task; historical criticism can free biblical texts from immediate assimilation to the concerns of later Christian theological traditions and thereby enable those traditions to be questioned anew by the Bible.

This essay sketches in very broad strokes a biblical theology in this third sense for Christian theological traditions that concern justification. Avoiding Catholic and Protestant polemics, one could say, most generally, that justification in later Christian theology concerns God's free and unconditional initiative of saving grace in Jesus Christ, which has as its ultimate, if not immediately obvious, consequence the transformation of human life for the better, in virtue of a changed relationship with God and/or in virtue of altered human dispositions and capacities. To do biblical theology on the basis of this Christian tradition of talk about justification is to provide a certain slant on the content of the terms of the account (which especially in my very general formulation of this tradition seem otherwise virtually

empty or almost completely formal)-a certain slant, that is, on the character and manner of divine initiative and the nature of human transformation.

More specifically-to rehearse now some of my conclusions-two general modifications will be made to the usual content of these terms in Christian theologies of justification. First, the terms of the usual account will take on a more clearly corporate reference; the relation between God and humans and the nature of human transformation will be defined in a more clearly corporate fashion. In the usual account in Christian theological traditions, the free and unconditional character of divine initiative is established with reference to every individual's prior capacities or incapacities. Moreover, the effect of that initiative on human life concerns a change in the individual's standing before God (in the classic Reformation case) or a change in individual psychology (for example, the infusion of new capacities for love). The usual account is often a story of human ennoblement by God that, though it might ultimately issue in changed relations in human society, proceeds by way of a new individual psychology-trust,

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gratitude, and love for God liberate the individual for genuinely good deeds towards others. A biblical theology of justification will, I contend, modify this kind of individual focus.

The second modification promoted by biblical theology has to do with the way mercy and justice are woven together in Christian theologies of justification. Mercy and justice will no longer be merely juxtaposed but will instead be brought to bear on one another to produce a radically altered sense of both but especially a radically altered sense of justice. The relation of mercy and justice is at issue at two points in Christian accounts of justification. First, how is God's justification of us-an act of mercy since it is free, unmerited and undeserved-to be understood in light of God's righteousness and justice? Second, how is God's justification of us, which is a show of mercy, to be related to our own putative justice and righteousness now that we are God's children in Christ? In the usual Christian accounts, mercy and justice often merely alternate. For example, God's mercy in Jesus Christ replaces the wrath of God under the law, which follows a strict canon of justice (Luther). Or, mercy and justice are commonly kept separate: God's mercy enables us in some sense to keep the law, to be just, but God's mercy does not substantially modify the nature of that law or justice; it seems a mere condition of its fulfillment (Calvinism). Here, too, on these questions of the relation between mercy and justice, I contend biblical theology makes a difference.

JUSTICE, RIGHTEOUSNESS, AND JUSTIFICATION IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

The biblical evidence I use to modify a Christian theology of justification comes from the Old Testament. Although Christian theological traditions concerning justification refer most often to the New Testament (especially Paul and James), attention to the Old Testament makes sense for the enterprise of biblical theology as I imagine it. Historical-critical scholarship finds that New Testament uses of justification/righteousness/ justice language often take their setting from the Old Testament. Those background notions from the Old Testament that are not simply repudiated in the New Testament use of comparable terms serve to pull New Testament texts away from the reading they are usually given in later Christian theology.

One could try to reconstruct a New Testament theology, say, Paul's theology in Romans and Galatians, in order to use it to throw new light on later Christian theologies of justification appealing to New Testament texts. To the same end one can, however, turn directly, as I do here, to the Old Testament background for the use of justification, righteousness, and justice language in the New Testament. Because it was so often overlooked in later theological reflection on New Testament themes, that background helps make clear the way that New Testament understandings of justification differ from later Christian ones. Besides having the advantage of going straight to one source of such differences, this tactic has the added advantage of allowing the concerns of later Christian theologies to retain their integrity even while subjecting them to modification in light of the

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Bible. That is, unlike what the use of the biblical theology of Paul to modify later Christian theologies might suggest-that those theologies become more biblical by becoming more like Paul's own theology, by sharing more of Paul's theological concerns my procedure allows later Christian theologies to retain their own concerns while modifying them from within, so to speak, by making the use of their central terms (justification, righteousness, and justice) more biblical. One looks back to the Bible for illumination from the standpoint of someone properly working within post-biblical theologies of justification that are designed to respond to later histories of controversy.

Three features of the use of justice and righteousness terminology in the Old Testament seem important for my purposes, as influences on the New Testament that have been unduly neglected in later theological treatments of justification.⁴ First, justice and righteousness are understood in the context of relationship. Second, they are not often opposed to mercy. And third, human justice and righteousness are often supposed to be modeled on, or to correspond to, God's own justice and righteousness. I will now explore these three features, on the way towards developing their import for a Christian theology of justification in the next section.

The first feature of the use of justice and righteousness language in the Old Testament that I mentioned is an appropriate place to start since it helps makes sense of the other two. It is now quite common for biblical scholars to maintain that justice and righteousness in the Old Testament should be understood in the context of relationship-specifically, the special context of covenant relations that Yahweh sets up with Israel.⁵ Thus, both Yahweh and the people of Israel are righteous to the extent that they remain faithful to the covenant that Yahweh freely institutes and faithfully maintain the rights and responsibilities that such a relationship entails. To justify someone is to restore that person to his or her proper or rightful place within the relationship, and thereby it involves the restoration or reconstitution of the relationship itself. Justice is that way of life, that body of ordinances or directives, set down by Yahweh, by which Israel is to exhibit its faithfulness to the covenant. Being true to the covenant, in other words, requires Israel to do justice by meeting the expectations and

⁴ My argument bypasses discussion of exactly how this Old Testament background changes one's understanding of the New. For my purposes all I need to presume is the simple fact that this Old Testament background is an important influence on Christian understandings of justification as one begins to find them in the New Testament. For arguments demonstrating that the Old Testament features I mention form the background of New Testament use of comparable terms and are not repudiated there, see J. A. Ziesler, The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); and John Reumann, Righteousness in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).
⁵ Following, for example, Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); and Elizabeth Achtemeier, "Righteousness in the Old Testament," in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, ed. G. A. Buttrick (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1962), 4: 80-5. For a recent statement of this opinion, see Hemchand Gossai, Justice, Righteousness and the Social Critique of the Eighth Century Prophets (New York: Peter Lang, 1993).

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demands of the relationship that Yahweh establishes with it. To pronounce judgment is to act to sustain the justice that this relationship requires, and therefore it is a way of upholding the relationship itself in its proper character.

Once justice and righteousness are seen in the context of relationship and not defined in a narrowly juridical way to mean rigid conformity to laws or norms, it becomes easier to see how acts of mercy can be compatible with righteousness and justice and not necessarily exceptions to or attenuations of them. This is the second feature of righteousness and justice language in the Old Testament-the compatibility of these terms with mercy.

To do what the law requires and punish its violators is incompatible with mercy towards them; to give a strict return in accordance with what one deserves is incompatible with gracious largesse. But if righteousness is faithfulness to covenant relations, it can be expressed appropriately in acts of mercy. Yahweh does not break off relations with those who would make the covenant void by violating justice-those who oppress the widow and orphan. Yahweh does not break relations with them as they deserve Yahweh is merciful. But in being merciful in this way, Yahweh remains righteous in the sense of faithful to the covenant, faithful to God's own intent to be the God of Israel. Such acts of faithfulness on Yahweh's part are, indeed, continuous in character with the acts by which Yahweh initially sets up covenant relations with Israel. At those times, too, God's initiatives towards Israel were undeserved; Yahweh did not set up those relations because of this people's special worthiness for them (see Deut 7:6-8; 9:5-6; 10: 14-15). God's righteousness was, then, from the very beginning an act of mercy, something that was not owed.

God's judgment, moreover, even in its harshest expression as a sentence of punishment, can exhibit this same sort of mercy, this same refusal by God to break off the covenant with its violators as they deserve:

I will establish his line for ever and his throne as the days of the heavens. If his children forsake my law and do not walk according to my ordinances, if they violate my statutes and do not keep my commandments, then I will punish their transgressions with the rod and their iniquity with scourges; but I will not remove from him my steadfast love, or be false to my faithfulness. I will not violate my covenant.... Once for all I have sworn by my holiness; I will not lie to David. His line shall endure for ever .... (Ps 89:29-36)

God's wrath in the context of God's continued faithfulness to the covenant is then understood as a way of trying to turn Israel back to its covenant responsibilities, and/or a way of eradicating those acts and persons who stand in the way of Israel's own continued faithfulness (see, for example, Prov 3:12; Jer 31:2-4; Job 5:17-18).

Therefore the Lord says, the Lord of Hosts, the Mighty One of Israel: "Ah, I will vent my wrath on my enemies, and avenge myself on my foes. I will turn my hand against you and will smelt away your dross as with lye and remove your alloy. And I will restore your judges as at the first, and your counselors as at the beginning. Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city." (Isa 1:24-26).

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Furthermore, God's judgment in favor of oppressed persons, while it may seem simply to be restoring them to what they are due according to God's ordinances or justice, is at the same time the institution of relations of mercy. God executes justice for the poor, the prisoner, and the slave, by canceling their debts; they no longer have to give back what they owe. The land and freedoms that were taken from them because of a failure to pay are to be returned to them; the obligations to hand over property or one's person that accrue because of one's poverty are canceled. This, indeed, is the highest form of justice that the covenant with Yahweh demands: the social relations to be instituted on Jubilee years, social relations of mercy in which one forfeits what one is owed and gets back what one no longer deserves, what one no longer has a title to, in virtue of debts incurred. ⁶

Now the third characteristic of the use of righteousness and justice language in the Old Testament should make sense: the correspondence between Israel's righteousness and justice and God's. The people of God are to act towards other human beings as God acts towards them-with a comparable sort of righteousness and justice. For example, God opposed their oppression by Pharaoh, and raised them up to a new life in fellowship with their God; so Israel is to oppose oppression in its midst and become a society in which special care is given to the dispossessed-the stranger, widow, and orphan. Running through these familiar prescriptions from the Old Testament, we now see a subtler kind of structural correspondence between the activity of justice and righteousness on the part of both Yahweh and Israel. The odd way that mercy and justice are to be brought together in Israel imitates the odd way that mercy and justice are brought together in Yahweh's own dealings with Israel. The peculiar justice that faithfulness to the covenant requires of God's people-the peculiar justice in which giving each person his or her due involves the merciful gift of what is undeserved and the failure to get a return on what one gives corresponds to the character of God's own free faithfulness to a covenant with Israel. Israel is required by faithfulness to its covenant with Yahweh to break social codes based on a law of do ut des; Israel is required, that is, to break social codes based on the premise "I give on the condition that you will-give me back" or the expectation that "I will receive what is due me, what is appropriate to my own effort and expenditure." In much the same way, Yahweh, without any obligation to do so, established in the beginning a special covenant with people who in themselves exhibited no special worthiness for such treatment. And in much the same way now, too, Yahweh, without any obligation to do so, continues to maintain covenant relations, works to restore their proper character, and to fulfill their promise, even in cases where Israel seems to fall away from its own responsibilities as God's covenant partner.

⁶ See Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress, 1995) for this sort of account of the social relations implied by justice.

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IMPLICATIONS FOR A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF JUSTIFICATION

What happens when one takes these uses of justice and righteousness language in the Old Testament and interjects them within later Christian traditions of talk about justification? Theological creativity is required for this. My account of what happens is therefore simply one interpretation but a cogent one, I think.

(1) Justification as the Continuation of God's Free Faithfulness to the Covenant. First, one can set one's understanding of God's righteousness and mercy in Christ in the context of covenant relations. The free grace of God in Christ can be talked about as a continuation of the unobligated faithfulness to relations with human beings that the Old Testament discusses as God's righteousness. God is shown to be righteous in this sense, in Christ. In Christ, God justifies God's putative covenant partners by restoring them to the rightful place which they seem otherwise to have forfeited through violation of God's directives; in Christ, God continues to claim God's people as God's own despite acts on their side that seem to make such a status void. As a natural consequence of their restitution as God's faithful covenant partners, they should now keep the law, that is, do justice in the sense discussed earlier. Doing justice in this sense is how covenant faithfulness is expressed in human social relations.

In Christ, however, the same sort of divine faithfulness that the Old Testament discusses is manifest in a new way. In Christ God maintains the covenant, heals and reinstates it, by stepping in to perform and undergo what human beings should by rights do as God's people and suffer themselves as violators and victims of a broken covenant. God in Christ does what human beings should do-be God's people and follow God's strange directives in which mercy and justice are reconciled. Christ in his life and death suffers the ultimate distress that comes from separation from God, the rejection and death that should come by rights to human beings as the natural consequences of their having voided their relationship with God, the creator and provider of all good gifts.⁷ In raising Christ, God takes the place of human impotence and vindicates the innocents wronged by those who violate God's Torah, knowingly or unknowingly-Jews and Gentiles alike.

Though God's acts in Christ display the same character of free faithfulness to the covenant discussed in the Old Testament, their operations, so to speak, are different. Here in Christ, God does not merely work by loving inducements and corrective judgments to bring human beings back to their proper place in covenant relations with God and so restore them--efforts that never seem finally to bring Israel back to faithfulness, human faithful-

⁷ Here I am rendering the idea of divine punishment metaphorical as Riceour does in his Conflict of Interpretations, 37 1: "if sin ... is the expression of... separation, then the wrath of God can be another symbol of the same separation, experienced as threat and active destruction . . . punishment is nothing more than the sin itself ... it is not what a punitive will makes someone undergo as the price of a rebel will ... punishment for sin is sin itself as punishment, namely, the separation itself "-which the Old Testament often discusses in terms of suffering and death.

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ness seemingly ever being followed by rejection of the covenant (see the repetition of confessional and intercessory prayers for forgiveness in Exod 32:11-14; Dent 9:25-29; 1 Kings 8:46-53; Dan 9:3-19; Ezra 9:6-15). In Christ, God takes the initiative to intercede for human beings, and so justifies them, actually setting them back in their proper place as God's faithful covenant partners, despite themselves.

The clear impression of gracious divine faithfulness, of God's free mercy, that is part of the Old Testament understanding of God's righteousness is heightened here by God's own doing of everything that human beings are obligated to do as partners in the covenant. The covenant's remaining in force therefore no longer appears conditional in any way on human performance. Human failing not only does not put God's faithfulness in doubt; it fundamentally cannot even alter human standing in the covenant. Despite the fact of human failing, in virtue of God's saving initiatives in Christ, human beings are yet God's people. There is no mistaking, then, that the covenant is a pure covenant of mercy, as much after being set up by God, as it was before, when out of simple love God chose Israel. It is a covenant of grace not simply because God keeps the covenant in force by dint of sheer persistence --- ever calling, cajoling and threatening human beings with the dreadful consequences of separation from God, awaiting human beings return to faithfulness and suffering disappointment anew. It is a covenant of grace even more because God keeps the covenant in force through God's own fulfillment of human responsibility in the man Jesus Christ.

A number of conclusions can be drawn from this heightened impression of unconditional covenant in Christ, conclusions that address the concerns of post-biblical Christian theologies of justification to combat works righteousness and yet maintain the importance of good works in human life. Because this is an unconditional covenant of grace, set up and maintained as it is in all respects by God, human faithfulness to it is essentially just belief in such an unconditional act of divine faithfulness and mercy. Human beings do their part to keep the covenant in force, not by doing anything but simply by believing in what God does for them despite themselves. Works of the law that correspond to God's own initiatives with respect to human community are still, however, the way faithfulness to the covenant, even in the form of belief in God's unconditional mercy, is exhibited in the course of human life. ⁸

⁸ In the discussion here of the importance of works, I am limiting myself to the question of moral directives. However, conforming to directives that, unlike moral ones, distinguish one social group from another (e.g., Jews from Gentiles) may also be an appropriate way to express faithfulness to the covenant. Although presumably moral directives that correspond to God's own free graciousness would be shared, covenant faithfulness would then be expressed in different ways by different social groups; different covenant directives would exist for Jews and Gentiles respectively. Conforming to non-moral directives would only, however, be an appropriate expression of faithfulness to the extent it was not used to claim exclusive rights as God's people and to boast of one's advantage over other groups before God. Such claims would suggest that God's covenant relations with human beings are conditional, dependent for their validity on human ability to perform certain actions. It should be said, however, that any directives--even moral ones to which any number of different social groups can conform-are susceptible to the same dangers. In the case of moral requirements, too, one might claim that God shows greater covenant faithfulness to the community of saints than to sinners.

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Because the covenant is unconditional, conforming to divine directives is clearly not a condition of God's maintaining it. But such directives are still what God asks human beings who are faithful to the covenant to perform. Following these directives remains an appropriate expression of faithfulness-the appropriate response to God who as covenant partner unconditionally gives all. Actions that conform to God's law are therefore not done in the expectation that they are a condition of God's faithfulness; they are done instead in grateful recognition of God's free giving, a free giving that includes the gift of these very directives for human life that are being followed. Actions in conformity with divine directives are, moreover, what God's merciful initiatives in Christ should enable: If those initiatives actually heal the covenant by setting human beings into their proper place in relation to God, human beings should be able to perform the works appropriate to it. God's enablement of human beings is, indeed, what the transition from divine persistence to divine performance in Christ is all about. The covenant is not just to be kept up on God's side, but it is to be fulfilled even on the side of its generally unreliable human subjects. Finally, because works of human faithfulness are merely the appropriate response to divine faithfulness and not its condition, the further goods that accrue to human partners in covenant with God-say, eternal life-are not rewards merited by those who, in their capacity as faithful partners in the covenant, perform the justice to which covenant with God calls them. The further goods that God supplies are not payments for the services that human beings render as God requires but genuine gifts in that they are simply the further consequences of God's unconditional faithfulness to the covenant, further consequences of that steadfast love of God that the Old Testament proclaims and that is now manifest anew in Christ.⁹

(2) The Reconciliation of Justice with Mercy in Christ. As in the Old Testament so now in God's action in Christ, God's righteousness and

⁹ Contrary to the way, say, Deuteronomy 11 is often read, I am therefore assuming here that God's fulfillment of God's promises need not be understood as a do ut des proposition. In other words, the covenant need not be understood as establishing relations between God and Israel in which Yahweh agrees to give what Yahweh promises on the condition that Israel keep the law. If the covenant remains in force, God will keep God's promises; this is simply what God's faithfulness to the covenant entails and has nothing to do with rewards for services rendered. The threatened failure to receive what God promises should Israel not keep the law (in Deut 11) has to do, therefore, with the worry that the covenant will be broken and no longer remain in force should Israel stray from the law. Or, secondarily, it concerns the human potential to block the life-enhancing consequences of covenant-the blocking of God's gifts or blessings-by a human refusal to act in ways that properly reflect a covenant that remains in force. The latter concern may remain in Christian theologies of justification that recognize, even after Christ, an interim time short of final eschatological fulfillment. For more on the complicated question of the relation between conditional and unconditional aspects of covenant in the Old Testament, see Jon Levenson, Sinai and Zion (San Francisco: Harper, 1985); and Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 1-44.

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execution of judgment and justice, on the one hand, are reconciled with God's mercy and free grace, on the other, without, however, mitigating the character of either side. Instead, both righteousness and mercy are given their proper senses; they are redefined, by exploring what God's righteousness must mean if it is expressed in a merciful way and what God's mercy must mean if it is expressed in a just way.

Thus, in the Old Testament, God's patience with Israel is an expression of God's righteousness, of God's own faithfulness to the covenant broken by Israel. God, moreover, is patient with Israel for the sake of justice, so that Israel might regain its rightful place as God's people and conform to justice in relation to God and in human affairs. Conversely, God's renewed demand that Israel be righteous and perform justice is an expression of God's gracious and merciful refusal to consider the covenant broken because of human apostasy. God's chastisement is also an expression of such a merciful God's refusal to void the covenant to the extent it is designed to bring Israel back to righteousness and justice and does not finally lead to Israel's destruction.

Although God is said to covenant also with Gentiles in Christ, God's actions in Christ can be interpreted according to these same patterns of relating God's righteousness and mercy in the Old Testament. Thus, justice is done in a merciful way when God's own Son suffers the consequences of separation from God that should properly be born by human beings. Justice is done in a merciful way when Christ takes on the human faults put to death on the cross, when Christ, rather than human beings, bears for us the death of sin, sin that must be eradicated in some way or other if justice is to be restored. Opposition to God perishes on the cross to restore justice, but mercifully, without the perishing of the human beings who oppose God. Conversely, the merciful and gracious acts of God in which Christ takes our place are done in a just way. In Christ, all that we owe and deserve by rights is indeed done-just not by us. Moreover, the merciful and gracious acts by which God in Christ performs what we owe and suffers what is our due are acts for the sake of a restored human righteousness and justice. A mercy without justice would not restore the covenant but leave the unreliable partners of God as they are.

Putting this all together in order to define righteousness, justice, and mercy anew, we can say, on the one hand, that God's righteousness and justice mean the merciful effort to maintain the rights and reinstitute the responsibilities of those parties who seem to have forfeited the one and abnegated the other. God's righteousness and justice, in short, involve gifts of what is not due. God's mercy, on the other hand, does not mean-in either the Old Testament or now after God acts in Christ-that God simply ignores or overlooks human fault. Such a form of mercy would be incompatible with justice. Justification in a Christian sense should not therefore be reduced to mere forgiveness (as it is in many Protestant theologies). God's mercy means primarily that God works to eradicate human fault and restore the relations violated by it.

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(3) Human community in Imitation of God's Action in Christ. Finally, what about the human beings who are justified, restored to their rightful place as God's people and enabled thereby to act accordingly? How might one discuss the character of their actions in terms of the account being given here of justification?

First, the typical Christian emphasis on proper dispositions is displaced. It is common for Christian theologians to say that Christ enables us to perform the works of the law gladly, spontaneously, and joyfully, out of selfless love of God and neighbor, without concern for reward or for the benefits that might accrue to one thereby, without worry about failure and consequent loss of divine favor. While this sort of focus on dispositions need not drop out, the account of justification I am giving does not encourage it.

First of all, this focus on dispositions is prompted by a particular treatment of the problem that Christ's coming is supposed to address. The focus on Christian dispositions is, that is, the flip side of a treatment of the problem of sin in terms of improper dispositions, a treatment of sin that is not highlighted in the theology of justification given in this paper. In the

common Christian account, even when the problem that Christ addresses is identified, as it is in this paper, with a failure to keep the covenant, that failure is usually defined as imperfect obedience on the part of each individual to divine directives, an imperfect obedience ultimately tied to dispositions. In order to defend the importance of Christ, the theologian needs to deny the possibility of perfect obedience under the law, a denial that leads the theologian ultimately to impugn the character of every individual's dispositions apart from faith in Christ: Someone might be able to perform the law perfectly but never with the right attitudes; no one then can ever really be righteous or innocent under the law. In my account, however, human failing need not be pushed to these extremes-pushed, in particular, in this direction of definition in terms of individual dispositions-in order to show a need for Christ. God's saving initiatives in Christ, like all God's actions for the sake of a broken covenant, serve to remedy a failure of community, the failure to maintain the sort of just social relations that faithfulness to the covenant requires. Such initiatives may therefore be necessary even if the social relations that God demands are a temporary achievement in some times and places and even if failed social

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relations include both genuinely righteous efforts on the part of some individuals and innocent wronged parties.

The second reason my account of Christian responsibility does not focus on individual dispositions has to do with the fact that those responsibilities are to be defined by a correspondence with God's saving activity in Christ. This, one recalls, is the third characteristic of righteousness and justice language in the Old Testament-now transposed into a Christian context. Such an account of Christian responsibility would naturally focus on the human relations that Christians are to institute, focus on what Christians are to do and specifically on the social consequences of those actions and not on the dispositions or attitudes with which Christians are to do them. Christian action is to correspond to God's action in Christ in virtue of its relationality: Our relations with one another are to mirror the way God relates to us in Christ.

It is not unusual for Christians to use a demand for correspondence with the character of God's actions in defining Christian responsibility. For example, in the Lord's prayer and the parable of the wicked servant in Matthew 8:23-35, forgiving those in debt to you or those who trespass against you mirrors God's forgiveness of your debts and trespasses. To take the case of a single Christian theological text, according to Luther's treatise on Christian freedom, we should come to the aid of the needy, just as we were needy before God and God came to our aid. And again, according to Luther in the same text, God gives freely to us out of the riches to be found in Christ; so full of those riches we should give freely to others (2 Cor 9:6ff).¹⁰ Commonly, however, in Christian theology the social and extra-dispositional character of these responsibilities is not very well developed. The graciousness of Christian action that corresponds to God's gracious initiatives in Christ is defined attitudinally (for example, as giving selflessly without expecting a reward or without anxiety about the precariousness of one's own circumstances), and therefore change in social relations is not explicitly prescribed along with it. But in the account I have given, the mercy of God that we are to imitate is always for the sake of reinstating justice; human graciousness and mercy can hardly therefore leave sinful social relations as they stand (as acts of Christian charity so often do).

Moreover, the justice of Christian action is as radically reconceived as mercy when it is brought into correspondence with the character of God's gracious initiatives towards us; just social relations take on a character not often affirmed in Christian accounts of justification's effects on human life. The justice to be reinstated in human life can be properly executed only in human acts of unconditioned mercy that imitate the way God in Christ gives all that we do not deserve according to the usual codes of do ut des justice.

Thus, Christians are obligated by the way God acts in Christ to execute justice in a merciful fashion, to execute justice by reinstating the rights of those who do not seems to merit such concern because of poverty,

¹⁰ Martin Luther, Christian Liberty (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957).

523 - Justification and Justice in a Theology of Grace

disreputableness, or helplessness to plead their own cause. A justice defined as faithfulness to those in need and expressed in liberality of giving in this way replaces any concern about a justice that would apportion them their just deserts according to their contributions to society or their abilities to give a return or their power to make demands. Redefining justice in this way, Christians work for a just society that corresponds to a covenant of grace, a just society in which all such people get what they do not deserve, in which they get something for nothing, in which they receive what they are not owed, at least in the eyes of a hard-hearted human justice, a human justice that is indeed-unlike the usual biblical senses of justice-incompatible with mercy.