Following is the text of remarks I presented at the Regent Law School Chapel on October 24.
Righteousness, Justice, and Us*
Matthew 5
(ESV)
1 Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain,
and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.
2 And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:
3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.
4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be
comforted.
5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the
earth.
6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness [justice?], for they shall be satisfied.
7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive
mercy.
8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
God.
9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called
sons of God.
10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake [the sake of justice?], for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.
11 “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute
you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice
and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the
prophets who were before you.
Let us pray:
Great God, in public and
private, in sanctuary, school, and home, may our lives be steeped in prayer,
filled with the spirit of grace and supplication, each prayer perfumed with the
incense of Christ’s perfect righteousness. Strengthen us to give thee no rest
until Christ shall reign supreme within us, in every thought, word, and deed,
in a faith that purifies the heart, overcomes the world, works by love, fastens
us to thee, and ever clings to the cross. Amen.
In his fine work, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, Christian philosopher
Nicholas Wolterstorff observes that Greek words with the dik stem (the noun dikaiosune
and the adjective dikaios) are
usually translated into English as “righteousness” and “righteous.” Yet, generally
when translating Classical Greek and on some occasions in English Bibles these
words are translated “justice” and “just.” What, Wolterstorff speculates, would
be the impact on English-language Bible readers if the predominant translation of
dik-stem words were reversed? While
it’s not the case that they should be, in other words, translators must choose between
meanings based on context, Wolterstorff’s rhetorical question got me thinking
about the relationship between righteousness and justice and then about the
role of the modern civil state and finally about me.
Reading books can be a unsettling activity.
Righteousness
In the radical commandments
of the Beatitudes and the balance of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus focuses on
one thing–the character of love expressed by the righteousness demanded by
divine law. Pace the Catechism of the Catholic Church[1] (and many others), Jesus’
words in the Beatitudes are not a nova
lex (new law). They instead represent a deepening of the meaning and broadening of
the application of the old law.
Jesus’ attitude toward
natural life is fundamentally a positive one, founded in the belief that the
creation and maintenance of the world is by the same God who is also the Father
of those who enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. This is why we are not merely
permitted but are commanded to take part
in the promotion and the building up of natural life as long as this present
age lasts. Any sacrifice for the sake of
this natural society made in obedience to
God’s will cannot be less great than the sacrifice of what is legally guaranteed
in this society with respect to property, rights, benefits, etc. Hence the rule
here and in Romans 13 holds that
love, the perfect willingness to serve, is the fulfillment of the law.
This is also the basis for a
correct understanding of Jesus’ pronouncements later in the Sermon on the Mount
on property, the renunciation of one’s rights, and indeed explains the absence
of positive precepts for the organization of social and political life in the
New Testament. In the Old Testament we find a very positive appreciation of
justice , of the ordinances that have been from the beginning or that have been
instituted on account of sin. Jesus does not abolish or devalue any of this. It
is thus a matter of righteousness to
continue to seek justice in the world
today.
Nevertheless, it remains true
that Jesus’ commandments, much more than the Old Testament, emphasize the relative nature of earthly life with all
of its goods as well as the danger of setting one’s heart on them. This is due
to the eschatological nature of the Kingdom of God that has come in the person
and work of Jesus himself. The prospect of treasure in heaven should obscure the glamor of that on
earth. There is no dualism in this, as if the expectation of the consummation
of all things robs of their force and value the belief in a good creation and
the gifts associated with performing the tasks of life by the faithful. Yet,
notwithstanding all the positive valuations of the present age, there is always
the warning against laying up treasure on earth and refusing to be rich toward
God (Luke 12.21).
Only the concern for the love
of God and of one’s neighbor required by the law lies at the base of all the seemingly
negative pronouncements by Jesus on wealth, property, the assertion of one’s
rights, etc. although this also shows that it was such riches that Jesus considered
as a permanent menace to this love. Love is not a law unto itself. Love is the
prerequisite and the root of the fulfillment of the law, that is, righteousness.
But such love is directed and guided by the divine law as the expression of God’s
will. And it is also guided by Jesus’ commandments as applications of this revealed
divine law. Jesus’ commandments demand from us a practical attitude in which we
are willing to be struck in the face, to lend without asking repayment, to love
our enemies, etc. if we would–and on
the appropriate occasion should–do so from the motive of love And
doing what Jesus commands from the motive of all-encompassing love is righteousness to us. It is tzedakah.
Justice
But what has righteousness,
understood as the all-encompassing motivation of love guided and directed by
God’s law, have to do with justice? In particular, what does righteousness have
to do with civil justice?
If, as Paul teaches and Jesus
presumes, civil government is more than a concatenation of coercive power, we
must avoid the temptation to assimilate political
into moral authority. Civil law does lay claim to moral authority but that
authority is not in the first instance the authority of such wisdom and justice
as it may contain but of a general obligation of everyone within a particular polity
to the law as such. But for the law to command our presumptive moral assent, it
must embody a further claim, that is, the claim of an injured party to redress.
The concept of justice as including
the moral right to recompense for a wrong can be traced at least to the covenant
of renewal with Noah following the Great Flood in Genesis 9. If we believe with Ulpian that primary “justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to
every person his or her due” and with many others including Aristotle that secondary or corrective justice is what is
appropriately done when primary justice has been violated, then we see that
justice is not the same as
righteousness. Corrective justice was indeed part of the Old Testament’s vision
of righteousness but it was not the same. Failure to act righteously did not necessarily
entail violation of the biblical norms of justice.
Civil Authority
For the modern state to
exercise political authority, it must
have at least a formal commitment to rectifying wrongs. Pace Thomas Aquinas,[2] a law may be unjust
without ceasing to be a law but if a system of law were to abandon altogether
its obligations to justice then, indeed, it would cease to be law and would instead
simply be organized coercive power.
Yet, even at is best, civil
justice bears only an indirect relation to the substantive demands of
righteousness. Justice in human communities is only relatively just. We can
think of political authority in positive law as “applying” the principles of natural law to social life because “applying”
is sufficiently broad to cover almost any kind of conscientious attempt to make
political action correspond to the principle of
legitimate redress. An individual moral agent, who has come to
understand the extraordinary demands of righteousness identified by Jesus, may
and should act as best as possible upon what he or she has learned. But a Christian
political leader, though obliged to the same standards of personal righteousness,
must hazard not only his or her righteousness but the survival of political authority
in the society. The Christian executive, legislator, or judge is constrained by
the limited possibilities for action in the public sphere, limitations arising from
that sphere’s dependence upon the efficient cause of coercive power, the formal
cause of justice, and the legitimacy of the continuing existence of the political
authority itself. The lives and work of biblical characters like Joseph, Daniel,
and Esther exemplify just such a careful–and challenging– balance among
righteousness, justice, and political legitimacy.
By way of example, even if
the law requires me to pay a tax to support a government program that I believe
is not only ill-conceived but inconsistent with righteousness, I am still
obliged to pay it. This is the paradox of political authority in a fallen
world: the civil government has a moral claim that is to a degree independent
of the moral claim of its particular demands taken on their own. Of course, this
does not prescribe unlimited deference to political authority; we are certainly
free to assert the claims of righteousness over against the demands of the
civil government. And, to be sure, there are degrees of support for the demands
of the political authority that range from the wholehearted down to bare
compliance. Nevertheless, political institutions can confront us with a morally
arbitrary demand that we are presumptively morally obliged to obey.
The exercise of political
authority is thus the search for a compromise which, while bearing the fullest
witness to righteousness possible in the circumstances will, nevertheless, lie
within the scope of possible public action in the particular community of fallen
people we are called to serve.
Conclusion
I want to conclude my
comments with two matters of great urgency: the pursuit of righteousness and
striving after justice.
It is my observation that a
decline in whole-hearted pursuit of righteousness has characterized virtually
all traditions within Western Christianity since the 1960s. Based on hundreds
of in-depth interviews by Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith reported in
his 2009 book Souls in Transition: The
Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults:[3] “Most emerging adults
[American 18-23 year olds] view morality as ultimately a personal, relative
affair … . Not many grasp a strong sense of a natural or universal moral
standard or law that in any way transcends human invention.” From whom did
emerging adults learn such relativism? Why, the cohort of Baby Boomer parents. The
centrality of the self, self-fulfillment and not righteousness has come to assume
the center of all thinking, secular and Christian. For followers of Jesus this must be reversed.
Second, the pursuit of
justice remains part of striving after righteousness even if it’s not the
whole. But as men and women associated with the law, we faculty and students
together, striving after justice is a particularly acute part of our call to righteousness. Justice is
not a magicians bag out of which we pull a rabbit of a legal solution to a
client’s problem. Justice is not politics. Justice is the high calling of
righting wrongs in a fallen world.
Prof Pryor, I am currently engaged in a detailed study on the Sermon in the Mount and I thoroughly enjoyed your homily. The connection between justice and righteousness sheds a unique light on the practical application of the Sermon. Thanks!
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