Listen to music while you read! [more info]

JUSTICE
ULRICH DUCHROW

Differing ideas of justice exist in the Bible and throughout church history, and indeed in the modern ecumenical movement.

Justice in the Bible and in church history

Biblically speaking, justice is a relational concept involving structures and behaviours based on trust, solidarity and mutuality versus those relying on betrayal, oppression and exploitation. When relations among God, human beings and creation are whole, shalom (peace) prevails (Isa. 32:17). Particularly through the power structures of highly advanced civilizations, community relations have in practice been endangered or destroyed. In this situation God’s judgment means the restoration of justice and shalom as God in his mercy hears the cries of the oppressed and liberates them (J. Miranda). In the light of the sinful structures of unevenly distributed power, justice implies struggle. If the oppressors do not repent, God’s justice becomes their punishment.

The classic example is Yahweh’s liberation of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt (Ex. 3-15). After their liberation God’s people were to act as God himself acts and create an alternative, just society for which God gave them specific ordinances (see Ex. 21:1-23:19 and 20:1-17). When Israel’s civilization itself took the form of a monarchy (1 Sam. 8), serving the idol of power (1 Kings 18) and thus dividing into poor and rich (1 Kings 21), Yahweh sent prophets calling for justice (Amos 5:24). Helping the poor* and the weak to obtain justice is identical with the knowledge of God (Jer. 22:16). After the fall of the kingdom, hope grew of God’s kingship, the kingdom of God.*

Jesus inaugurated this kingdom and God’s justice and was thus seen to be the Messiah. The poor were encouraged (Luke 4:16-22), and small communities of the new righteousness developed (Matt. 5:13-14 and Acts 4:32) that were to reject unjust structures of power (Mark 10:42-45). Jesus’ resurrection* proved God’s power to show that life is produced by suffering* and dying for the sake of justice. Paul saw the righteousness and justice of God in God’s calling even the gentiles and the entire creation through the Holy Spirit* and giving them the power to turn away from injustice and perdition and to serve justice (NRSV margin: righteousness) unto eternal life (Rom. 5:21).

Biblically there is no conflict between God’s justice and human justice. God’s just action calls for the participation of God’s creatures. Receiving answers in prayer is thus indissolubly bound up with cooperation in the struggle for justice.

In the history of the church, monastic movements and the historic peace churches* followed the early Christian pattern of resisting injustice and building up an alternative community as (preliminary) signs of the kingdom of God, born of suffering. The majority churches, especially of the West, have developed a different model. After Christianity was accepted as the official religion of the Roman empire in the 4th century, the church tried to share in power. Justice and peace were thus changed from their biblical setting into a Graeco-Roman and later a European imperial context. Plato’s concept of justice as an ordinance of authority* was taken over politically in the rule over the artisans by the philosopher-kings, assisted by the warriors, and anthropologically in the rule over the desires by reason, assisted by the will. Thus justice became a virtue. Aristotle distinguishes between commutative justice (in acts of exchange) and distributive justice (in the distribution of goods). In Roman legal thought justice is “the constant and enduring will to grant their rights to all” (Ulpian, fragment 10).

In the Roman context “to each his own” meant pre-eminently the protection of those with possessions, not the protection of the poor. In the periods of the middle ages and the Reformation, law* as an order* was understood primarily as penal and compulsive (the ordinance of the sword). The participation of Christians and churches in this order was tied to criteria: within a particular society, the order must minister to the common good, and in foreign politics any war waged had to be judged a just war.* If compulsion was exercised on Christians to make them sin,* they must refuse to do so (see also, e.g., the Augsburg confession, art. 16).

Defined as the human virtue of mastery over the desires and as the established power of the authorities to exercise compulsion, justice as a human concern ended up in tension with divine justice. Various classifications of the two types of justice were attempted: supremacy of divine justice as the rule of the church over the world (the Curialists), a harmonious graded order (Aquinas), a correlative status (nominalists) and a dialectical relationship (Luther). The theological basis for the correlation of biblical faith* with power structures is the assumption that the perspectives of love and reason are essentially the same. In the modern bourgeois age a rigid dualism developed between, on the one hand, divine justice for the individual soul and personal relations and, on the other, rigid arbitrary laws in economics* and politics that, like the laws of nature, are wholly separated from religion and ethics.* Indeed in economics justice is replaced by market value (first of all in Hobbes). For the most part the majority churches either refuse or are unable to resist this view.

Not till the 1960s did a third way of “being the church” develop – the liberation church model, which harks back to biblical traditions. The majority church of Constantine’s day did not succeed in taming power* in the interests of justice (i.e. of God’s will), while later the misuse of power in countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America by this same “Christian” European civilization became increasingly violent and destructive. Hence counter-movements have arisen “from below”, struggling for liberation including various people’s movements and new social movements and, on the basis of their praxis, liberation theology (Latin America), minjung theology (Asia), black theology (South Africa and North America) and feminist theology (see theology: Asian, black, feminist, liberation, minjung). These movements reject “imperial”, Constantinian-type civilization and create new participating communities (see church base communities) that, at the cost of suffering, have been building up the counter-power of the people, thus trying to transform the unjust structures to achieve justice and participation.

Justice in ecumenical discussion

The first major world conferences of the ecumenical movement were entirely under the influence of the majority churches. The crux of the conflict they considered was how to understand the kingdom of God and God’s justice in relation to history.

At the world missionary conference in Edinburgh (1910), realization of the kingdom of God meant primarily the Christianization of the world (i.e. educating people into the ways of Western civilization), although it undoubtedly also meant criticism of the colonialist policies of the colonial powers. In Stockholm at the first world conference of Life and Work (1925), the German and English positions clashed violently. The German bishop Ludwig Ihmels, for instance, took the view that the kingdom of God was supramundane, that it had to do with human hearts and that it penetrated the community life only of Christians, and even then never completely, because of sin. In contrast, English bishop F.T. Woods spoke in terms of setting up “the kingdom of God on earth”. Stockholm defined the aim of the movement as “united practical action in Christian Life and Work”.

The second world missionary conference (Jerusalem 1928) gave practical shape to the social relevance of the kingdom of God by rejecting in principle the worship of money as the “religion of a capitalistic society”. The object of mission* was to shape not merely the life of individual Christians and Christian communities but also social and political life as Christ intended, though no questions were asked here about the relevance of the model represented by the positive aspects of Western civilization.

Following these initial and still-tentative attempts to mobilize the biblical perspective of the kingdom of God against modern secularism and the worldwide structures of exploitation in the economic system and in colonialism,* the 1937 Oxford Life and Work conference (“Church, Community and State”) reverted to the medieval and Reformation majority church model of “taming power” by participating in it, which laid the foundation for ecumenical social ethics until 1966-68. The great world economic crisis and the rise of fascist totalitarian states (see fascism) constituted the background to this “Christian realism”, behind which stood theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, J.H. Oldham and Emil Brunner. Between the line taken by the kingdom-of-God theology (transformation of the worldly orders and resistance on the basis of an alternative Christian society) and resigned accommodation to the worldly orders in privatized piety, the majority at Oxford supported a critical but constructive approach which was intended to contribute to relative justice on the basis of natural law* or the “moral law”. Conference participants openly admitted that this approach was not taken from the Bible. Rather, the criterion for prophetic criticism of the existing orders and for their relative improvement was middle axioms* (Oldham), which could mediate between the absoluteness of Christian love and the realities conditioning socio-economic and political life.

On this basis the founding assembly of the WCC in Amsterdam (1948) developed the idea of the responsible society* as a socio-ethical criterion for assessing all individual questions. This idea seeks to balance freedom, justice and the control of power. Ideologically and politically this position rejects both laissez-faire capitalism* and communism and endorses a kind of social-
democratic liberal democracy.

The world conference on Church and Society (Geneva 1966) and the Uppsala assembly (1968) represent the beginning of a new period in the life of the ecumenical movement. Prompted by the greatly increased participation of the churches of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the WCC shifted its orientation from the top (seeking to influence power holders) to a perspective more from below (participating in the actual struggles of the oppressed in their imitation of the suffering Messiah).

In terms of method, this new approach means a switch from studies of universal concepts to models of contextual participatory action and reflection (see praxis), from “value-free” education to “conscientization” (Paulo Freire) and from aid hand-outs to committed participation. Spirituality and prayer complement struggle as a second pole in the new approach, which expresses the transcendence of the kingdom and justice of God.

Within the WCC this approach from liberation theology was adopted against racism* (Programme to Combat Racism*), against economic exploitation (Commission on the Churches’ Participation in Development; Just, Participatory and Sustainable Society;* and Urban Rural Mission) and discrimination against women; it also supported human rights, including socio-
economic and political rights. The 1983 Vancouver assembly extended this approach in two ways. First, the inter-related study of justice, peace and the integrity of creation* was placed on the agenda. Second, it became clear that this new approach has profound consequences for the understanding of the church. As Visser ’t Hooft said at Uppsala in 1968: “Church members who deny in fact their responsibility for the needy in any part of the world are just as much guilty of heresy as those who deny this or that article of the faith.” The two lines of Life and Work* and Faith and Order* came together.

Labelling as heresy* the structural racism of apartheid* and its theological justification (LWF 1977/WARC 1982) first raised the issue of justice to that of status confessionis. As regards the idol of the all-powerful transnational economic system, Vancouver 1983 also stated: “The church is... challenged not only in what it does but in its very faith and being” (see economics, transnational corporations). In extreme situations of systematic and flagrant injustice, the approach of the liberation church is therefore linked to that of the “confessing church”.* It also relates to the Orthodox-
inspired understanding of the eucharist* as the sacrament that shapes the life of its participants who have encountered God as movement from death to life (see life and death), from injustice to justice, from violence to peace, from hatred to love, from vengeance to forgiveness, from selfishness to sharing, from division to unity.

Attempts to create a worldwide socialist alternative failed dramatically in 1989. Since then finance, business and the media have been using their transnational power ower human beings and nature for the one goal of profit-making (see globalization, economic). The rich industrialized countries (G8) and their international instruments (IMF, World Bank and GATT/WTO) have tolerated and even fostered this goal by implementing policies of deregulation, liberalization, privatization and “structural adjustment”. In this neo-liberal approach justice is no longer an issue; the laws of the capitalist market are regarded as the only normative principle.

What can the church do in this situation? First, it can reject the ideological totalitarianism* of the deregulated global market and its values, which lead to social disintegration and environmental degradation. Then it can adopt the twofold strategy of getting involved in small-scale alternatives and helping to regain ideological and political control of the economy at all levels. In practical terms the church must therefore stand alongside those who are suffering in refusing to countenance injustice, and it must itself begin to practise justice in its own life. Only thus, as a peace church and liberation church, can it transcend the majority church model. In so far as the liberation church model seeks, in cooperation with people’s movements, to have a transforming effect on socio-economic and political structures, it must itself develop aims and criteria for change. Methodologically it thus has points of contact with the majority church approaches, e.g. the middle axioms* or Roman Catholic social teaching, despite all the differences in content. All approaches remain dependent on the twofold prayer “thy kingdom come, thy will be done”. “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil...” (Eph. 6:12).

ULRICH DUCHROW

n U. Duchrow, Alternatives to Global Capitalism, Drawn from Biblical History, Designed for Political Action, 2nd ed., Utrecht, International Books, 1998 n U. Duchrow, Global Economy: A Confessional Issue for the Churches?, WCC, 1987 n “Fifty Years of Ecumenical Social Thought”, ER, 40, 1988 n W. Lienemann, Gerechtigkeit, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995 n J.P. Miranda, Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, Maryknoll NY, Orbis, 1974 n
W. Stierle, D. Werner & M. Heider eds, Ethik für das Leben: 100 Jahre Ökumenische Wirtschafts- und Sozialethik, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Ernst Lange-Institut, 1996.

2006-04-12 11:41:46