JUSTICE, JUSTICE, JUSTICE!

Peter Beinart is my favorite political scientist who happens to be a Jew, an Orthodox Jew, who believes in the Hebrew concept of justice.  Most American Jews and Israeli Jews are secular, many of whom are justice ---lite.  Beinart can be very hard on his fellow Jews who, as the NT Pharisees did, neglected justice.

1.    In the December 2018 The Atlantic, Peter Beinart wrote this article, “How Far Left will the Democrats Go?”   

The very last sentence in the article reads, “The true cause of radicalism [revolution] is injustice, and the best guarantee of social peace is a more equitable country.” 

My paraphrase to this sentence would read, “Oppression leads to revolution; justice leads to peace.” 

A quotation from Beinart: “Disorder fueled a backlash in the mid-60s, too.  Five days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, riots broke out in Los Angeles.  In the following three years, riots led to 225 deaths and more than $100 billion in property damage.  From 1964 to 1966, the percentage of Americans who told pollsters that the move toward racial equality was happening “too fast” jumped from 34 to 85 percent.  In 1966, Republicans---stressing law and order won 47 seats in the House.”

2.    In the January 2019 The Atlantic, Peter Beinart wrote, “The Global Backlash Against Women”.  Near the end of the article, Beinart writes:

“The personal is political.  Foster women’s equality in the home, and you may save democracy itself.”

Noble paraphrase: “Justice [gender equality] in the home usually leads to greater gender equality in the government.” 

Beinart’s quote: “There is a striking correlation between countries where women and men behave more equally in the home and countries where women are more equally represented in government.  Take Sweden, 44 percent of whose parliamentarians are women.  There, the gap between the amount of housework done by men and that done by women is less than an hour a day.  In the U.S., where women will soon make up roughly 23 percent of Congress, the housework gender gap is an hour and a half.  In Hungary, where women account for 10 percent of parliament, it is well over two hours.”

3.    The Christian Reformed Church/Nicholas Wolterstorff on justice

The Christian Reformed Church appointed a committee to study restorative justice; they issued a 41-page report.  The following excerpts are from that report, some of which was written by Nicholas Wolterstorff.  The first quotation is from a section entitled, “The Deep Grammar of Justice”:

 “What do we mean when we use the word, ‘justice’?  For all the differences among people in judging the justice of specific situations and the differences in culture in their expressions of justice, there seems to be a strong, nearly universal, notion of what justice is . . . . The word justice names a deep human impulse, or, better, a deep human need---the need for fairness, and reciprocity.  This impulse is so deep that we find it in children who have just begun to acquire language.  One of the first things they learn to say is: “That’s not fair.”  . . . . For most people the concept needs no justification.  It is as real as the grass on which we walk and the air that we breathe.  Justice, in this sense, just is . . . .  The root of our sense of justice is from our creator.  Our sense of justice reflects the character of our God.” 

“The vocabulary of this section includes several of the key OT words for justice, including yashar [“right, straight”], ‘emunah [“faithful, true”], tsedeqah [“righteous, just”], mishpat [“just decisions, the practice of justice”], chesed [“covenant loyalty, love”].  These words for justice describe “the word of the Lord.”  The psalm then goes on to say, “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made . . . .,” and describes the creating process as, “[The LORD] spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm”.  The word of the LORD that establishes justice is the word that created the universe.  Justice is built in.”

“Let us call this primary justice.  When the Bible says that the Lord loves justice, it is to this primary sense of justice that it refers.  The outcome of justice in this sense is shalom, not simply peace but right relationships, where each person, indeed, each part of creation, receives its due and lives in right relationship with every other part of creation.  The restoration of this glorious justice is the great theme of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.”

Noble comment: “Justice is in the DNA of the universe.”

. . . . “We need a concept of justice that corrects and restores what is broken . . . . Confusion sometime occurs because the single word justice is both used for justice in the sense of being right and justice in the sense of setting right.  The Bible is concerned, for the most part, with setting right.  Justice words such as tsedeqah in Hebrew and dikaiosune in Greek refer to not only to the concept of right, but also thus setting right of what is broken.

This, of course, is God setting right, but there is also in Scripture a call for a human setting right.”

The Community of Christ is Called to a Prophetic Role:

“What of the community of Christ---the church in the large sense?  Does the church have a role to play in advocating and supporting certain criminal justice practices rather than others?  The role of the Christian community with regard to this part of justice is probably best expressed in the Sermon on the Mount.  This role involves a creative and prophetic appeal for justice.  In the sermon, Jesus uses the metaphors of salt and light for the church’s role in society.  Both of these can be thought of as metaphors of enhancement.  Salt, once it dissolves into the food, cannot be seen, but it can be tasted; light makes visible what otherwise would be in the darkness.”

“The Bible tells us that systems of justice tend to go wrong over time.  We need periodic readjustments---Year of Jubilee---in which old debts are cancelled, prisoners are freed, and the poor allowed to go back to their ancestral homes---in short, the whole program of Isaiah 61:1-3 and a program claimed by Jesus for his own ministry.”  [Luke 4:18-19 & Isaiah 58:6] [The Message]

4.    To conclude this blog on justice I would like to quote

Amos 5:24:

“I want justice---oceans of it.  I want fairness—rivers of it.”

 [The Message]