Jamin Bradley

I grew increasingly uncomfortable as I sat against the back wall of an enormous auditorium for a secular justice event. The crowd unanimously applauded statements I disagreed with. Comedians scathingly berated Caucasians, even though they were there to help. A picture of a middle finger alongside the words, “F*** FEMA and the U.S. Military,” was revealed on stage as an icon to meditate upon. For reasons like these, it was especially jarring when Christian organizations appeared on stage to discuss their justice efforts. They did not match the spirit of the event. Perhaps we were in a room with a god, but it wasn’t our God. Perhaps we were all concerned with justice, but it wasn’t Jesus justice. 

There are many theological themes and spiritual dispositions that make up the Christian way of justice. We do not have time to address them all here, but the themes we will focus on, like enemy-love, cruciformity, and redemption, will give us the foundation for a radical kind of justice that is healing and holistic for all people.

Loving the Image of God

Across the Ancient Near East, it was believed that only important people like kings were made in the image of God,¹ but the Hebrews taught that all humans carried this quality. This was quite a statement since the Hebrew word for image is the same word we translate as idol. This comparison helps us recognize that, of all the creatures on the earth, when you look at a human, you should be getting a glimpse of what God is like (though we know this often doesn’t happen).

It is because humans carry this image upon them, that God requires a reckoning for any loss of human life (Gen. 9:5-6)—for an affront to his image, is an affront to him. In the Old Testament, this principle often takes on a lex talionis fashion, but Jesus redefines this principle in a holistic way that practices enemy-love (Matt. 5:43-47). Under Jesus’ teaching, when someone kills our loved ones, we don’t respond by killing them back, but we seek a kind of justice that recognizes the image of God in everyone—even our enemies. Indeed, we might say that loving our enemies is the most important kind of love we can practice, for if we can love them, we can love just about anyone.

As Pope Francis said, “Creation is of the order of love. God’s love is the fundamental moving force in all created things.”² Therefore, when we recognize the image of God in those around us, we are put on equal ground to love them better. Despite their socio-economic standing, race, or culture, our friends and enemies are no different from us. We were all born good (Gen. 1:31) and assigned the same mission and identity. With this in mind, we can agree with Henri Nouwen that, “Compassion grows with the inner recognition that your neighbor shares your humanity with you.”³

With this compassionate disposition, we might even be able to empathize with our enemies, causing us to love them more quickly. We can recognize that some variables have likely caused the good humans around us to pursue bad things. Perhaps the unloving parent had no parent to teach them how to love. Perhaps the sexual offender was sexually offended as a child, confusing their understanding of proper sexuality. Perhaps the man stole our bike and sold it because no one would give him a job. There are a million more “perhaps” situations like this that can increase our ability to empathize with our enemy, all the while maintaining that justice is necessary for their actions and that consequences will be enforced.

Cultivating the Cruciform Life

All humans eventually face suffering, which causes the inner life we’ve cultivated to make its way out of us. Few things have displayed this more universally than the recent pandemic. All kinds of suppressed dispositions arose from humanity as global suffering pressed down on them. The world began to fall apart as people voiced their angry views on politics, science, racism, guns, conspiracies, and so on (traditional American reactions that historian Erika Lee has thoroughly documented in her book, America for Americans). And if anyone’s experience was like mine, the most horrendous statements and actions during that time seemed to erupt from the hearts of church people. Christians seemed to be the most political, least scientific, most racist, most violent, and most conspiratorial of all Americans. The people lining the pews of our churches to learn about Jesus every week seemed to be the least Jesus-like people we knew.

We must work harder to cultivate a cruciform Christianity. It is not enough to simply lead people to salvation. They must be discipled into people who expect a cross to be handed to them. At that point, they should have crucified some of their earthly passions and cultivated the fruit of the Spirit, so that they may respond to their cross with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-24). If we want to take up our crosses as Jesus did, we cannot wait for suffering to arise. The fruit of the Spirit will only be lived out in our trials if we have grown it beforehand.

No one has given us a better look at how to embrace the fruit of the Spirit and suffer well than Jesus. Rather than call down a legion of angels to destroy us, he embraced a pacifistic form of enemy-love. Rather than hold the sins of his murderers against them, he empathized with them by recognizing that they didn’t know what they were doing and then asked God to forgive them. Rather than cling to his own life by arguing in court, he understood that his death would create a better future for us and embraced his sentence self-sacrificially.

Redemptive Justice

While empathy, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice are important dispositions for us if we want to do justice the Jesus way, Christians are not to be proponents of a weak justice system. While empathy may help us love our oppressors better, we do not empathize to belittle the situation we are in. While Jesus instructs us to always forgive, forgiveness is not forgetting or leaving ourselves in abusive situations. And while self-sacrifice may seem weak since it could get us killed, martyrdom has proved to be a strength. As Tertullian once said, “The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.”⁴ Not only did Jesus and the ancient martyrs that followed him prove this point, but even recent martyrs like Martin Luther King Jr. showed us that dying for a cause has a way of waking up the world and redeeming it. This is exactly why he worked to get the suffering of his marches broadcasted on live television.⁵

Christian justice done right is not a pushover form of justice. Pacifism is “dynamically aggressive spiritually even though it is nonaggressive physically”⁶ and “in the face of violence is the proper way to express the love of God.”⁷ Such nonviolence has a way of waking up our oppressors to their sins so that we might unite them with our cause. As King once declared, “We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.”⁸ This enemy-love is not interested in loving someone just because it’s the Jesus thing to do, but because it’s strategic and redemptive—it is “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16). If our enemies can change, the world becomes a safer place. Their redemption leads to the possible redemption of those within their impact, slowly turning the world in a different direction. When our goal is redemption, our enemies are given a chance to reform their lives. Under this mindset, judges seek to make rulings that lead offenders toward healing; prisons become recovery centers; hearts are convicted; and justice “penetrates the laws of our communities and the workings of our governments.”⁹

Conclusion

God is the definition of justice, so it’s important that we look to him so that we might live justice rightly. A day is coming when God will expose all of our wrongs and hold us to account for them. If he cares about justice then, he certainly cares about it now. Therefore, Christians must be a part of this pursuit, for “This can be understood as the will of God for the world: that justice be done.”¹⁰ But to do it rightly, we must do it with Jesus via the direction of the Holy Spirit and the help of the red letters. Otherwise, we will pursue a worldly kind of justice under the direction of a false god that wishes to appease our desire for hatred and revenge. True justice only works the Jesus way, for there is no true justice outside his gavel.

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¹ John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2015), 89, Kindle Edition.

² Pope Francis, Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2015) 55, Kindle Edition. 

³ Henri Nouwen, With Open Hands (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1972) 56. 

⁴ Tertullian, “The Apology.” Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson and A. Cleveland Coxe, translated by S. Thelwall, 3:55. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885).

⁵ For more on King’s march tactics, see his speeches “Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom” and “Showdown for Nonviolence” in Martin Luther King Jr., and James Melvin Washington. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1991).

⁶ Gary M. Simpson “Overhearing Resonances: Jesus and Ethics in King and Bonhoeffer,” Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought, Willis Jenkins, ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010) Kindle Locations 4375-4377.

⁷ Susan Roakoczy, IHM, Great Mystics and Social Justice: Walking on the Two Feet of Love (Mahwah, N.J., Paulist Press, 2006), Kindle Location 2297-2336.

⁸ Martin Luther King, Jr., A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2012) 53-54.

⁹ Mae Elise Cannon, Just Spirituality (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 73, Kindle Edition. 

¹⁰ Roakoczy, Great Mystics and Social Justice, Kindle Location 1254-1293