The kingdom of God, no.6

David Bosch, a NT scholar and a missiologist, also stresses that English translations usually omit the justice meaning of dikaiosune.  He wrote that if a person translated Mt. 6:33 as righteousness that it may mean that in the kingdom of God "the spiritual is more important than the material."  But if 6:33 is translated as justice, it may mean that we are to put "the practice of justice in respect of those who are victims of circumstances and society," ahead of our own desires.

I asked a Haitian, Jean Thomas, who speaks French and is a seminary graduate, how dikaiosune is translated into French.  Jean said as justice; French really doesn't have a word that is the equivalent of the English word righteousness.  The closest the French could come to the concept of righteousness was the word holiness.

Sidney Rooy, in an unpublished manuscript entitled Righteousness and Justice, comments on the discoveries his missionary family made as they read the Bible together in Spanish. Soon we discovered that righteousness and justice are universally translated justicia, our word for justice.  Suddenly the Bible was full of texts about justice.  But why should that surprise us?  
Much later we learned that the English word justice does not occur in the New Testament of the King James Version.  Rather the word righteousness is nearly universally used. . . .  To them [Jesus and the apostles] it was transparently clear that justification, righteousness and justice were integrally part of the same reality [same root word in Greek].

We [Americans], on the other hand, tend to make idea-tight compartments for each.

In response to a letter criticizing Wolterstorff's review of Robert Webber's Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail, Nicholas Wolterstorff comments: 

The God of the Bible is a God who loves justice.  Injustice is a desecration.  That's obvious in the Old Testament; but it doesn't change when we arrive in the New Testament.  This would be starkly clear to all if our New Testament translators would follow their classical Greek colleagues and translate the frequent occurrences in the New Testament of the Greek words dikaiosune and dikaios with the English words "justice" and "just."

So Greek, Latin, French and  Spanish have only one word for justice/righteousness and the primary meaning or emphasis in these languages is on justice.  But English readers of the NT see righteousness much more often than justice.  So most of us miss the justice emphasis of the kingdom of God.  WANTED: a scholar who will rejusticize the NT and the theology that flows from it.  While she/he is at it, I recommend the same with oppression/injustice.

I conclude with two quotations from Pursuing Justice by Ken Wytsma:

          Justice is rooted in the character of God,
          established in the creation of God,
          mandated in the commands of God,
          present in the kingdom of God,
          affirmed in the teachings of Jesus,
          reflected in the example of Jesus,
          and carried on today by all who are moved and led by the Spirit.

          All people matter to God.
          All people desire dignity.
          All people need community, and community can be woven by justice or torn by injustice.

This is the end of my six-part series on the kingdom of God; "seek first God's kingdom and his justice. . . . "