Public Justice and the Church

Finally, part 5 of my series on the Truth, Justice, and Pluralism. My final proposition is simply this:

A robust public justice is not fully possible without the Church's faithful work in the world.

We, particularly as legal academics, lawyers, and judges, have a calling in the area of public justice to speak against corruption, to proclaim the truth to those in power, to come to the aid of the oppressed, and to call truth true and lies false. Our call is to live within the system without being of the system-- or hiding behind it, as many of us are prone to do.

Scripture connects justice closely to righteousness, and without a virtuous Church leavening society, public justice is hamstrung. Righteousness undergirds all justice, and to the extent that a society or culture lacks virtue, public justice suffers.

Witness, for example, the shift in the ground for public justice in the United States: as we have moved to bifurcate morality and law, as we have rejected virtue in public life, as we have moved toward consumerism, hedonism, and individualism as ultimate "goods," justice has shifted more and more toward social engineering by the politically powerful. The rule of law gives way to the rule of judicial will. If "justice" is simply enacting the "will of the people," it is not justice, it is power politics.

Because we look to God’s justice in Christ as the model for civil justice, we push our institutions in that direction. Yet it is particularly the Church that can recognize that reformation and redemption are needed across the created order, not only in law and legal institutions. Jesus is King over all of life and creation. So we also teach, proclaim, and give—in every human institution:

We instruct our children
We are faithful to husbands and wives
We care for the sick
We proclaim the truth about oppression and tyranny and justice and peace to the world and to the state
We feed the hungry, we visit the prisoner
We do justice and act mercifully
We forgive as we are forgiven

The active Church in the world encourages public justice and supports and emboldens a just state.

Suggested resources for further study:

P.C. Kemeny, ed., Church, State, and Public Justice (2007)
James Skillen, A Covenant to Keep: Meditations on the Biblical Theme of Justice (2000)
Jeffrey Tuomala, Christ's Atonement as the Model for Civil Justice, 38 Am. J. Juris. 221 (1993)

The Limits of Human Justice

Last week, I posted on a conference at Hong Kong University, In Quest of Truth and Justice: The Role of Religion in Pluralistic Societies, and laid out the five propositions of the paper I presented. Since then, I've elaborated (albeit very briefly) on my first three points:

1. We are mistaken if we believe that "pluralism" means that there is such a thing as a purely secular society, where religious neutrality reigns.

2. Human beings ought to be free to pursue what is good, unhindered by state-sponsored barriers. This assumes that "plural"-- and sometimes conflicting-- visions of the Good will and must co-exist and interact in any given society.

3. Jesus is King over the whole world, even in the realm of public law and civil justice in every society.

Today, we continue the discussion with point four:  

Human justice is partial in a fallen world.

Even in ancient Israel, God placed limits on what His chosen people could punish. Some of those limits were clear accommodations to the fallen nature of human rulers, judges, and fact-finders. For example, God required that "any sin or offense" be adjudicated only on the testimony of "two or more witnesses." Why a blanket rule that will insure that some clearly guilty will go unpunished? Surely, it is to check human error, at least in part. In addition, such a rule protects those charged with the administration of  justice: if human rulers have limited authority from God, then certainly it is overreaching to punish the innocent.  

Incidentally, this highlights the importance of procedure to justice. Moral procedure is just as much "doing justice" as "substantive" rules and regulations. "Technicalities" are, more often than not, the very core of justice. Human justice is very much about process. And process is important, in large part, because it provides protection against human sin, prejudice, and mistake. 

In addition to moral process, we benefit from a diversity of roles and jurisdictions to check human error and sin across a variety of societal institutions in our fallen world. Just as checks and balances check overreach within the branches of the state, jurisdictional separation of, among, and between civil institutions tends to check human error.  Because all authority in heaven and on earth is granted to Christ through the Father-Creator, human authority is purely derivative, and therefore must be exercised only under warrant from  Him. Families, the Church, congregations, employers, and individuals, for example, all owe duties one to another based on the authority granted them. All human beings and institutions are under authority, exercising only that which God has given. 

There is of course room for disagreement on the limits of our delegated authority, the means of discerning it, and the ways it may be carried out, but placing human law and justice within the framework of "authority" and duty before God can go some way to correct the misunderstanding that law is all about social power. Law is not merely a tool for social engineering, but about moral order, and once we realize that, the public questions can shift to “which morality?” and "what is good?" rather than the much less helpful (and much more common) questions about whether morality is relevant to public justice. 

All of this takes place in a context of competing visions-- various institutions in tension with overlapping duties and spheres of authority, competing conceptions of the Good, and political mechanisms interfering or assisting in providing answers, for example. Yet it seems to me crucial that we embrace a religious commitment to the ideal that, first, there is such a thing as perfect Justice, and that the source of that Justice is outside of humanity. Second, and equally important, we need to embrace the truth that we humans cannot accomplish perfect Justice, and that our efforts are not only imperfect in a fallen world, but impermissible if they overreach our God-given authority. Tools such as moral procedural rules, diversity of jurisdictions, wise rules of evidence, and limited power, serve these truths. 

Rejecting these truths results in a variety of evils, including despair on one hand and a faulty confidence in the state on the other. 

On the one hand, among the idealistic, despair can creep in. It's easy to see the sin and corruption of human justice and public institutions. Yet we shouldn't be surprised by the consequences of the fall that we see in our own lives every day. And it is surely a sin to despair of even limited justice in this world. In fact, it is our duty do the justice that can be done, and put our concern for ultimate Justice in the hands of the One Who will one day wipe away every tear and right every wrong. Without this belief, of course, there is no reason NOT to despair: there is no real Justice, only proximate justice. Yet we do our duty in the world to imperfectly administer a limited justice in the hope of eternal Justice.

Incidentally, I think this tendency to despair is fostered in law school. Most profs tell us that there is no transcendent source of law, that there is nothing other than the social engineers at the heart of the matter, making laws as they see fit from time to time. If all of this is true, then despair is surely warranted!

On the other hand, among the cynical-- or powerful, perhaps, lies the opposite error. In the words of political philosopher, J. Budziszewski, "One of our strongest motives to do wrong is to make everything go right." What We Can't Not Know, at 67. 

In short, if we believe that human beings can effect perfect justice, we begin to have corrupting visions of the state. When we try, through power, to do everything that is good, making everything right, we have all at once ignored the truths that we are both limited and sinful. 

The implications of the limits of human justice are vast, but I'll stop here for now. I'll post part 5 on Friday next week.

Suggested resources on this topic:

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, 20.4
Craig A. Stern, Crime, Moral Luck, and the Sermon on the Mount 48 Catholic U Law Rev 801
Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture (1948)
J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know (Rev. ed. 2011)

Some Good and Recent Books on Faith & Law

The Christian Legal Society just finished its list of "20-some" good books on faith and law on Twitter.

Here's my revision of that very good list. 

Second Tier

Joseph Allegretti, The Lawyer's Calling (1996)
Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution II (2006)
Stephen L. Bloom, The Believer's Guide to Legal Issues (2008)
Gerard V. Bradley, A Student's Guide to the Study of Law (2006)
Jeffrey Brauch, Is Higher Law Common Law? (2008)
J. Budziszewski, Natural Law for Lawyers (2006)
Jonathan Chapman, Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society (2011)
Edwin S. Corwin, The "Higher Law" Background of American Constitutional Law (2011)
John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution (1995)
Stephen Grabill, Recovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (2006)
H. Wayne House, The Christian and American Law (1998)
David Hoffman, A Course of Legal Study (1846)
P.C. Kemeny, ed., Church, State and Public Justice: Five Views (2007)
McConnell, Cochran, and Carmella, Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought (2001)
Jay Milbrandt, Go + Do: Changing the World One Story at a Time (2012)
Michael Scaperlanda and Teresa Collett, Rediscovering Self-Evident Truths: Catholic Perspectives on American Law (2007)
Michael P. Schutt, Redeeming Law: Christian Calling and the Legal Profession (2007)
Thomas L. Shaffer, On Being a Christian and a Lawyer (1981)
John Witte, Jr. and Frank Alexander, eds., The Weightier Matters of the Law: Essays on Law and Religion (1996)

First Tier

Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Law (2000)
Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983)
Harold J. Berman, The Interaction of Law and Religion (1974)
Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (1960)
Gary Haugen, The Good News About Injustice (2009)
Abraham Kuyper, Calvinism and Politics, in The Stone Lectures on Calvinism (2008)
Paul Marshall, God and the Constitution (2002)
Ken Sande, The Peacemaker (2004)
John Witte, Jr., God's Joust, God's Justice (2006)
John Witte, Jr. and Frank Alexander, eds., The Teachings of Modern Orthodox Christianity on Law, Politics, and Human Nature (2007)
Nicholoas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (2010)

Lawyers, Despair, and the Rule of Law: "Democratizing Political Murder"

I sometimes talk here and on campus about the tendency of the current generation of students to despair of justice in light of the human failings in our system. My word to them is that despair is rooted in the deadly sin of sloth-- the sin of "considering a worthwhile good"-- here, justice under the rule of law-- "not worth pursuing." In a country like ours, where the rule of law does for the most part reign (albeit imperfectly), Christians must pursue justice through faithful action and vigilant reform both from within the system and outside of it.

But what of those millions who live in places ruled not by law, but by raw power? What of lawyers who find themselves in systems where justice is never done? What happens when an entire nation lives in despair of justice?

In this amazing piece in the April New Yorker, David Grann masterfully unfolds a fascinating story of political corruption and the search for justice in Guatemala. At the heart of the story are two lawyers seeking justice. One, an upstanding citizen in a private law firm, is gunned down in the midst of his despair of finding the truth. The other, a world-renowned prosecutor, sifts throgh the "counterfeit realities" pitched by the contending political and criminal powers-- and by the murdered man himself-- to reveal the strange truth, and perhaps ultimately build a foundation for justice.

This fascinating study of justice, despair, and the law is beautfully told and filled with insights on the nature of corruption and the consequences-- for a man and for a country-- of despair.

I'd love to talk more after you read it . . . .

HT: Alan Jacobs on Twitter

If this is Summer, I Must be at Worldview Academy

One of the things that I do while law students hibernate in the summer is teach at a Christian leadership camp called Worldview Academy. This summer, Worldview will hold 21 camps on college campuses across the country, teaching high school students about servant leadership, apologetics, ethics, evangelism, and worldview. It is a wonderful ministry, and my family has been blessed to be a part of it.

This week, I've given three interactive lectures-- on epistemology, vocation, and justice. Tonight I'll talk about civil government. Tomorrow, I'll head over to Oklahoma Wesleyan University to fill in for a faculty colleague at our camp there.

If you have students between the ages of 13 and 18, consider sending them off to camp this summer. There are still openings.

Oh, and by the way, the travel on weekends sometimes allows me

to catch another ballgame at another ballpark with my son.

This is getting to be a great habit . . . .