Resurrecting Justice: How Christianity Gives Justice More Than Its Due
For some years, I have followed societies in their efforts to address past evil—those of countries such as South Africa, Chile, Uganda, and Germany, and of the Catholic Church towards its clerical abuse. I have discerned two paradigms. The dominant paradigm, held by diplomats, politicians, human rights activists, and lawyers, centers on restoring rights and the rule of law and dreams most fervently of trials and punishment for arch-offenders. But I have heard a different language in the voices of religious leaders, who spoke of reconciliation, forgiveness, reparation, and the healing of wounds.
I have come to think that the two paradigms were at bottom two ways of thinking about justice. This will surprise Westerners, who think of justice as rights and law and of the message of the religious leaders as something that might be good but is something other than justice. I have become convinced, though, that the religious leaders had a different way of thinking about justice and that they drew it from their most important source, the Bible. The Apostle Paul describes God’s reconciliation through the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ as justice, at least in some translations, and this pivotal event in salvation history was nobody’s right but rather God’s gracious gift, as Paul wrote, and deigns to restore the world. The justice of reconciliation was the axial idea of religious leaders in South Africa, Germany, and so many other places.
So, I sought to develop this concept of justice in my book of 2012, Just and Unjust Peace, arguing that this justice could enfold rights and the rule of law but also involved restorative measures such as public apology, the telling of the truth about injustices and forgiveness. Now I seek to develop this concept of justice further and expand it to all of politics, not only to confronting the past, and believe that it holds promise for divided and wounded political orders, including, as I shall explain, the United States.
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The eminent philosopher, John Rawls, wrote that justice is “the first virtue of social institutions,” an apothegm that philosophers reaching back to Plato as easily could have voiced. And what is justice? Over the course of many centuries, the concept of justice that has attained the world’s widest endorsement is the will to render each person his due. The concept originated in Greek and Roman thought, was formulated most fully and enduringly by the Roman jurist Ulpian in the third century, and is recognizable far more widely in due’s synonymous guise, rights. Rights have an elephantine presence in Western political thought and political discourse, in constitutions, which all but six states in the world possess, and in international law.
This concept of justice as rendering due, or fulfilling rights, is so pervasive and enveloping that seeing justice differently requires climbing to an overlook where one can take in a wider landscape. What we can see from there is that the justice streaming from the Greek and Roman traditions has overswept the justice that streams through and from another source, the Bible. And what is the meaning of this justice? Nowhere does the Bible teach that justice means the will to render another her due. Justice in the Bible is rather, I argue, the totality of actions that bring about comprehensive right relationship—between God and humanity, between human beings, and within the human soul. These actions are governed by principles, some of which indeed call for rendering others their due, that is, fulfilling their rights—a concept that Christian justice does not omit. But due is not enough. Other principles in the Bible prescribe actions that exceed what is due to others, including mercy, generosity, care, gift, hospitality, forgiveness, peacemaking, loving one’s enemies, and reconciliation. Christian justice entails both kinds of principles, those that render what is due and those that exceed due, which together make up the entire set of commands that God enjoins upon humans. If it grates in our ears to call all of these principles justice, is it not at all strange that modern Christians have adopted so readily a justice drawn from Athens and Rome and not that of Jerusalem?
Let us look more closely at the Bible. What is the case that its justice means comprehensive right relationship? Two terms in the scriptures are the best candidates for being translated to justice. In the Old Testament, the term is the Hebrew tsedeq, or its feminine variant, tsedeqah, which appears 276 times. The authors of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible of the third century BCE, widely used the term dikaiosune to translate tsedeq, a term that then appears 92 times in the New Testament and that carries forth the meaning of tsedeq. While all of these usages carry a bewildering variety of specific meanings, they also share on overarching meaning, comprehensive right relationship.
One of the most important variations in their meaning is agency. Sometimes tsedeq and dikaiosune refer to the actions that God carries out. Other times they refer to the actions that God prescribes for humans to perform.
God carries out tsedeq and dikaiosune in creating and sustaining the moral order of the universe, an establishment of right relationship, and in redeeming it and ultimately bringing it to completion, the restoration of right relationship. Divinely enacted tsedeq is most concentrated in Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. Tsedeq expresses God’s restoration of Israel in Isaiah, whose mysterious and messianic agent is the servant whom the Lord has “called for the victory of tsedeq.” In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus identifies himself with the servant who brings about this victory by quoting Isaiah 42. This victory is the restoration of right relationship that Jesus achieves in the Cross and Resurrection. Dikaiosune theou is the term that the Apostle Paul adopts to describe this divine restoration and that he makes the central theme of his Letter to the Romans. The culmination of this restoration is the new heavens and new earth that the Apostle Peter describes as dikaiosune.
Humans enact tsedeq and dikaiosune when they act according to God’s commands. “Our tsedeqah before the Lord, our God, is to consist in carefully observing all these commandments he has enjoined on us,” the Book of Deuteronomy reads, continuing somewhat later, “tsedeq and tsedeq alone shall be your aim.” Dikaiosune means the entirety of God’s commandments in the New Testament, where it is most concentrated in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount that those who hunger and thirst for dikaiosune are blessed, that one’s dikaiosune ought to surpass that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law; and that one ought to seek first the kingdom of God and his dikaiosune; and that one ought not to practice dikaiosune in order to be seen.
Commandments, in turn, are central to the morality of both the Old and New Testaments. Repeated in the Old Testament is God’s decree to keep his commandments, statutes, ordinances, laws—Psalm 119 indeed contains nine different words for principles. Aquinas categorizes the Old Testament commandments as moral precepts, which are the Ten Commandments, and as the many judicial and ceremonial precepts, which are derived from them. Jesus fulfills the law in a way that upholds the injunctive force of the Ten Commandments but not that of the judicial and ceremonial precepts, and adds some other commands such as to be merciful, take up one’s cross and follow him, be a peacemaker and forgive. All of the law, all of which protects or promotes right relationship, makes up tsedeq and dikaiosune.
Are tsedeq and dikaiosune, then, the Bible’s justice? This may seem strange. The reason that it seems strange is that in English bibles these words are often translated into righteousness as well as justice. The problem with both English words, righteousness and justice, though, is that neither captures the wide meaning of tsedeq and dikaiosune. Righteousness in today’s English connotes personal probity and even priggishness and fails to capture aspects of right behavior such as fairness in economic dealing or laws against extortion. For its part, justice, connoting what is due, has a public and juridical meaning and fails to capture, say, principles of mercy and compassion. Summoning either word to translate tsedeq and dikaiosune, then, demands that modern English speakers expand their notion of this word’s meaning if they are to be faithful to the Bible’s meaning. I propose justice. I opt thus because I hope that my fellow readers of the Bible, and citizens at that, would come to think of justice as having the wide meaning of tsedeq and dikaiosune.
The proposal is not merely notional. It is the choice of the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible that stood as the most important Bible in the Church for 1,000 years. The Vulgate translates the many instances of tsedeq(ah) and dikaiosune as justitia or a close cognate—the term that readily translates to justice in English. Similarly, in languages based on Latin such as French, Spanish, and Italian, the terms are translated as justice, justitia, and guistizia, and their variants. The Douay-Rheims Bible, the English language bible that is translated directly from the Vulgate, also adopts justice terms. So, seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and you will be seeking a justice that contains the wide meaning of tsedeq(ah) and dikaiosune—all of the ways that God is calling you to trod.
If the justice of the Bible means comprehensive right relationship, this same justice blends two kinds of principles, those that render and those that exceed what is due, and so contrasts with the classical justice that only renders due. This blends shapes both divine and human justice in the Bible.
Consider, for instance, God’s justice in creating and sustaining the world and its moral order. These actions are gifts, and not humanity’s due. Yet, there is also a sense in which God renders due. While it may seem irreverent to say that God owes humanity anything, God made promises to humanity in the form of covenants, and promises, by definition, are commitments to make good on what is promised. As St. Anselm wrote in Cur Deus Homo, God “put himself under an obligation to humanity,” doing so out of his free and sovereign will on the basis of his commitment to his creation.
God makes good on his promises by redeeming the world, a justice that also blends what is due and what exceeds due. Bible scholar Gary Anderson makes the case that by the time of the Babylonian exile the Bible adopted debt as its primary metaphor for the condition that sin creates. Debt expresses the natural law principle of retribution. When a person sins, he now stands indebted to God and to any victims. He owes them actions that pay this debt and negate the standing victory of the sin, and they have a right to these actions.
In several passages in the Pentateuch, God promises to reward people who keep his commandments (that is, who do justice) and to punish people who break them. “You render to each of us according to our deeds,” Psalm 62:12 puts it. Exile is Israel’s payment of the debt it has accrued for centuries of idolatry, pride, corruption, and mistreatment of the poor under its kings. The word redemption, occurring 22 times in Isaiah, more than in any other book, describes God’s eventual release of Israel from debt slavery, the condition that an entrapped debtor incurs. Recompense, expiation, service, debt—all of these words in Isaiah imply a payment that Israel has rendered, a debt that it has paid.
Yet due does not tame, limit, or exhaust God’s rectifying justice in the Old Testament. Isaiah, replete with tsedeq, or saving justice, reports superabundance: “[Israel] has received from the hand of the Lord double for all her sins.” Over the next eight or so chapters, Isaiah reports that redemption involves more yet—an actual restoration that exceeds all payment. It recounts the return of the Israelites to Judah and the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple in terms of lush nature, prosperity, peace, justice, triumph over enemies, and the uplift of the poor and the dispossessed. This is a justice of comprehensive restoration, a healing of the wounds of sin, not only a payment of its debt but also a cleansing of the stain and the burden that mar right relationship between people and God, among people, and within people. It is a justice realized in part through the Israelites’ return but also prophesied in the final page of Isaiah as a messianic restoration, where God will “make justice and praise spring up before all the nations.”
This justice of restoration reaches a climax in the New Testament, where it again melds due and beyond-due. Debt remains a metaphor for sin, most pronouncedly in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. The payment of debt for sin is prominent among the New Testament’s metaphors for the salvation won by Jesus’s cross and resurrection along with other metaphors that connote due—ransom, price, expiation, acquittal, and redemption.
Yet the restoration of right relationship, or justice, that the cross and resurrection accomplish are far wider and fuller than the justice of rendering due. First, Jesus’s payment of the debt of sin is a gift, as Paul teaches in his Letter to the Romans, a payment that he made on behalf of the ones who owed the debt, and one that he made “while we were still sinners,” not upon humanity having first repented or settled accounts. God forgave on his initiative, out of love. Second, Christ pays the debt superabundantly, as Aquinas notes, as does God in Isaiah. Third, again paralleling Isaiah, God does not only free humanity from the debt of sin but also gains the grace that provides for the total healing of the wounds of sin and restoration of right relationship. The twofold movement of freedom from sin and restoration is the Bible’s justification and reconciliation, which are one with God’s justice.
Reflecting divine justice, the human justice of right relationship combines what is due and what is more than due. It includes obligations that fulfill rights, so prominent in modern political thought and in law around the world, and differs from the skepticism of rights voiced by Christian intellectuals including Oliver O’Donovan, Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, John Milbank, Alasdair Macintyre, Michel Villey, Ernest Fortin, Nigel Biggar, Simone Weil, Richard Hays, and Stanley Hauerwas, who look upon rights as possessive, individualistic, and vehicles of self-assertion. Rights find sound defense, though, as protections of human dignity. Rights are found explicitly in the Bible, for instance, the rights of the poor in Proverbs. They are found more extensively in the natural law, which the reasoning mind can apprehend and which the Catholic and certain Protestant traditions find in the Ten Commandments and their corollaries. The actions that these obligations prescribe or prohibit not only engender the virtue of their performers but also are demanded by the dignity of their recipients. The duty not to lie corresponds to a right not to be lied to, the duty not to murder to the right to life, and so on. Dignity, or human worth, arises from the image of God in persons, declared in Genesis. Particular basic, or intrinsically valuable, human goods such as life, health and knowledge, manifest this dignity and serve to ground particular rights—to life, against torture, and to freedom of speech, for instance.
Rights, grounded in the dignity of bearers of the divine image, have a long place in the Christian tradition. Pope John XXIII espoused natural, or human, rights, in Pacem in Terris in 1963, lauding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which roots human rights in dignity in its preamble. Pope John Paul II endorsed the same ideas, making human rights, grounded in dignity, central in his confrontation with Communism in the 1980s. Natural rights extend back to Pope Leo XIII, to several Protestant reformers, to the Spanish Scholastics of the sixteenth century in their defense of native peoples in the New World, to medieval canon law, arguably to the thought of Thomas Aquinas, and to early Church fathers such as Lactantius and Tertullian. Obligations that fulfill rights, and thus are due to others, belong to the justice of right relationship.
Other obligations in the Bible, ones that God commands, do not correspond to the rights of others. They are not due but are rather open-ended, subject to discretion in how and to whom they are directed. Let us say that Theresa believes that she has an obligation to serve the poor. Possessing finite time and resources, she must choose: volunteer at the homeless shelter, give to an overseas humanitarian agency, or tutor at a local school. She cannot do all of these things and none of them strictly obligates her. A poor person across town or in Nairobi may not claim a right to her resources. Theresa has a duty to care for the poor but it is open-ended. It is what philosophers call an imperfect duty. The Bible contains many imperfect duties: to be merciful, practice generosity, live as a gift, take up one’s Cross, make peace, form friendships, care for the poor, practice hospitality, and love one’s enemies.
The combination of due and more than due also makes up the principles of human justice that addresses past wrongs—the justice of punishment, war, apologies, reparations, reconciliation and forgiveness. Due is the idea of retribution. A person who commits a wrong breaks right relationship with the person wronged and his wrong stands as a wound. The wrongdoer incurs a debt. He deserves to make good on the wrong and the wronged have a right to proportionate retaliation. If the wrong is a crime its victims include fellow citizens who live under the law, which defines right relationship in the political order, and the government represents them in pursuing just punishment, which involves deprivation. Retribution is axiomatic; it is the self-evident connection between deed, guilt, and consequences. It is affirmed widely across time and place and underpins divine action and human institutions in both Old and New Testaments. Modern theories of crime, the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria, omit this justice and court further injustices. At the other pole, Kant insisted on retribution apart from any good that it brings. Punishment’s purpose in the Bible is to restore right relationship in God’s creation, including among communities—a principle rooted in the good. Punishment belongs to justice.
Yet if justice towards past wrongs honors due, it is not confined to due. The wronged have a right to punishment but may justifiably forego it, just as a creditor may cancel a debt without committing a wrong. In the political sphere, law enforcement agencies are forced by scarcity to choose which crimes to investigate and which to pass over. Admissible sometimes are presidential pardons or amnesties for rebels and dictators in order to secure a peace agreement or transition to democracy.
Restorative justice, which has arisen in criminal justice in recent years in the West, does not negate deserved punishment but advocates forms of it that address the wide range of wounds that crimes inflict on persons and relationships and that involve wide participation. Reflecting Old Testament Israel’s codes of restitution and the holistic restoration initiated by the Cross and Resurrection, restorative justice has been advocated by Mennonite theologians and taken up by the U.S. Catholic bishops. It resonates with rituals for reintegrating wrongdoers found in indigenous traditions such as those of Maoris in New Zealand and Acholis in Uganda.
The Bible’s most dramatic departure from retribution is Jesus’s teaching of forgiveness. Forgive others their debts: this is a commandment and thus a matter of justice, but not justice as usual. Jesus tells his hearers on a hillside to forego what their wrongdoers owe them on account of their wrong. He does not repudiate the lex talionis of the Torah—an eye for an eye—which affirms the retributive principle as well as its proper proportionality, but rather develops it, commanding his hearers not merely to limit retribution but rather to forego it altogether. Forgiveness also involves a will towards the restoration of the wrongdoer. Why does Jesus teach that we ought to forgive? Because God forgives our debt of sin—and did so definitively through Jesus’s death on the Cross and his resurrection. Nowhere is this logic clearer than in Jesus’s parable of the unforgiving servant in the Gospel of Matthew—the servant who refused to forgive his debtor though he had been forgiven and who thus incurs debtor’s prison.
Does Jesus’s teaching of forgiveness annul judicial punishment? No, because the state and other organizations are bound to uphold laws and norms, the contours of right relationship. Jesus was not speaking to his hearers in their capacity as magistrates or other heads. In other respects, though, forgiveness may bear on crimes or other political matters. Pope John Paul II forgave his assassin in prison in 1983 even while he did not call into question the principle of prison. A survey I conducted in Uganda found that 68% of victims of political violence claimed to have forgiven their perpetrators.
What I have been arguing for so far, to summarize, is the justice of right relationship, which consists of actions governed by principles that render others what is their due, or their right, as well as actions that exceed what is due. This justice is found in the Bible and consists of the natural law, known by reason and mirroring God, and of supernatural principles that specify the natural law further and are known by the teachings of Jesus. Each sort of principle is important for moral and political life. The principles that fulfill rights secure dimensions of human dignity by prescribing specific and dischargeable actions: do not torture, provide everyone safe working conditions, respect everyone’s practice of religion. The beyond-due principles mostly involve the healing of wounds. The chief of these principles is mercy, which calls for alleviating distress. Mercy animates the principle of reconciliation, the comprehensive restoration of right relationship, the justice that restores. I propose that this wider justice holds promise for democratic political orders, including our own.
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The political order is a subset of the justice of right relationship. It bears on matters subject to public law and political authority, whose purpose is to coordinate and enforce aspects of this justice. If justice means right relationship and consists of both kinds of principles, due and beyond-due, then a Christian ought to work to realize this justice in the political order. Scholars have shown in recent works that political thought and discourse since the Enlightenment has sidelined beyond-due principles such as mercy, hospitality, care, and forgiveness and have called for their revival in politics. True, governments sometimes pursue beyond-due principles, say through humanitarian relief or health-care. Still, if justice is predominantly thought to be the will to render due, and if justice is the first virtue of institutions, then beyond-due principles will come to be viewed as marginal and optional in political discourse and action.
To be sure, the justice of right relationship is to be realized through constitutional liberal democracy and its limits on government: human rights, including religious freedom, equal citizenship, the rule of law, the rights of associations, the independence of church and state in their authority, economic freedom, subsidiarity, and prudence. These principles themselves are rooted in natural law and a Christian concept of the person, one that features freedom. Here lies a Christian liberalism. None of these limits prevents the practice of mercy and hospitality, care and forgiveness. These principles find all the more opportunity in the fact that politics is more than making and enforcing laws. It also takes place through the actions of people outside government—Pope John Paul II leading open-air masses in Poland in opposition to a Communist regime the 1980s; ministries to immigrants at the border of the United States and Mexico; and Ugandans who forgave soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the 2000s.
The justice of right relationship also finds application in the prototypical liberal republic, the United States. It has been practiced in response to this country’s most colossal injustices and may still be practiced in response to them and to the historical wounds that they leave.
In the matter of race, which has been called America’s “original sin,” historical injustices fall into three episodes. The first is slavery—chattel racialized slavery—which was practiced legally from 1619 through 1865 and involved an estimated 10 million slaves and 10 billion hours of labor. The second is the period of Jim Crow, spanning from around 1877 through the mid-1960s. Laws, policies, and government action in seventeen states practiced numerous forms of harsh discrimination and obstruction of economic development and failed to enforce against the 4,000 lynchings that backed up the social system between 1877 and 1950. The third is less well-known and might be called “distributive discrimination,” consisting of vast transfers of wealth through the New Deal and the Fair Deal from the 1940s through the 1960s, and housing policies from the 1930s to the 1960s, that largely and intentionally excluded African-Americans and thus sustained and widened racial disparities in wealth, education, home ownership and opportunities for economic advancement.
American prophets against these injustices have given central place to natural rights, ones that they have understood to be embedded in natural law, established by God and articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—the justice of due. The conviction that slavery flouted divinely grounded rights impelled Abraham Lincoln’s involvement in politics, as he first explained in his Peoria speech of 1854, as well as the advocacy of Frederick Douglass and the abolitionist movement. That the Lincoln Memorial was the backdrop for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963 is no accident, for King, too, made natural rights and divinely grounded natural law central to his quest for civil rights.
Lincoln, the most Christian U.S. president in thought, word, and deed, sought to end slavery in a manner that would bring about healing and restoration and preserve the nation’s democracy. In contrast to other political advocates in the North, including some clergy, he interpreted slavery as the nation’s common sin and, in his Second Inaugural Address in March 1865, interpreted the civil war as the nation’s common atonement for slavery—“the woe that was due.” It was a punishment, though, that could reunify. Lincoln’s stance towards the Confederacy met the criteria of forgiveness. He inveighed against revenge and mostly forewent retribution provided that slaves were freed and southern states remained in the Union. He concluded his Second Inaugural Address by advocating mercy and care towards restoration of a common nation: “[w]ith malice toward none with charity for all . . . to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” Similarly, King pursued his uncompromising campaign for rights through non-violent action that practiced love for enemies, forgiveness, and a call for a united “beloved community.” Principles that exceed due complemented rights, composing the wider justice that I have been describing.
Colossal historical injustices leave behind wounds, as they have in Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, and Kashmir. The most central of these is what I term the standing victory of justice, the moral fact of the injustice itself that persists in time unless redressed. Other wounds persist as well, in the case of race the many disparities between African-Americans and the larger population. The greatest of these is the gap in wealth, one’s total stock of possessions, which averages $ 240,000 per individual. Large disparities between blacks and whites are evidenced in both controlled studies of population data and experimental studies in a wide range of measures such as health profiles, the ability to attain jobs and home loans, and rates of incarceration, arrest, and wrongful conviction of serious crimes. These disparities are wounds not simply because they consist in different levels of goods, and are not less wounds on account of the income and wealth of African-Americans having grown since 1970, but rather because they result from colossal injustices. None of these wounds is healed alone by the restoration of rights through legislation and constitutional amendments.
Justice also consists in governmental measures that seek to restore right relationship in the nation. Why the government? And why should citizens today act to redress justices for which most of them are not directly responsible? Certain injustices consist of two dimensions, a collective one and an individual one. These are ones that people commit in the name of an organization, for instance, the laws and policies, action and inaction, that government officials perform in the name of a political order. While the individual’s responsibility is her own and dies with her if she does not repudiate it, the collective dimension of injustice stands victorious as long as the collective itself persists. It is one who has the standing to speak for the collective entity, then, who may redress past wrongs in its name.
Such is the rationale for apologies that the U.S. president and other heads of state have performed for past injustices, especially intensively since 1990, that Pope John Paul II performed over 100 times with respect to over 21 episodes of misdeeds that members of the Catholic Church committed in its name—and that U.S. officials might perform for the laws, policies, acts, and omissions of duty that performed and upheld slavery and racial injustice. An apology would, if carried out well, negative the standing victory of the injustice, extend acknowledgment of suffering, and strengthen civil friendship.
Reparations are apologies materially fortified and achieve similar goods as apologies as well as compensate victims and their descendants for the material damage of injustice. Like apologies, reparations have become more common in global politics in the past century including on the part of the United States government. In a recent poll conducted by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 86% of African-Americans favored reparations, while only 28% of whites favored them. Reparations for racial injustices are in principle warranted though must answer questions of implementation: who exactly would receive them? What form would they take? And in what amount?
Far more rarely in global politics do heads of collectivities practice forgiveness. Lincoln did, I have argued. French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, the lead architect of European federalism after World War II, was motivated by forgiveness and reconciliation towards Germany, for which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger remembered him in 2004. Legal scholar Roy Brooks has proposed that African Americans could practice forgiveness in response to a national apology and reparations, in a national movement of reconciliation. Represented by leaders of widely respected African American civil and religious leaders, they would release fellow Americans of moral debt and recommit themselves and their followers to common civic friendship.
Apology, reparations, and forgiveness belong to the justice of right relationship. In the case of individuals, apology and reparations are often required by the justice of rendering due. For collectivities, these are imperfect duties on account of their not being readily dischargeable because of their dependency on resources and political circumstances. Forgiveness by definition foregoes debt, or what is due. All of these principles might also bring about goods that exceed the payment of moral debt such as acknowledgment, empathy, the alleviation of psychosocial wounds, and the strengthening of national bonds.
The great African-American civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi, having been forcibly sterilized, fired from her job, beaten, and subject to the firebombing of her home in fighting for equal rights, promptly judged legalized abortion to be unjust when it became more common in the late 196os and extended nationwide in 1973. Like slavery and racial discrimination, abortion defiled the dignity of human beings and was justified by popular choice. Hamer saw abortion as eugenics and termed its wide practice genocide, as did Jesse Jackson in the 1970s. She also campaigned for maternal health care, housing, and nutritional needs and rooted it all in her Christian convictions. She demonstrated the justice of right relationship.
The justice of rendering due means protection of the right to life for unborn persons. Enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the UDHR, this right is a natural one, embedded in the natural law prohibition of killing innocent human beings. That a human being begins life at conception, then becoming a unitary and distinct organism, is affirmed by 96% of embryologists. Its right to life is denied mainly by the claim that it has not developed the attributes or the ability to perform the actions of a person, a claim that unavoidably negates the right to life of entire classes of persons who lack development in one way or another or are deemed to be less than human—the claim that augurs every atrocity. Over 64 million violations of this right have taken place in the U.S. since 1973 and some 2,800 continue to take place every day on average.
The justice that exceeds due widens and reinforces the justice that renders life its due. The principle of care, a form of mercy, is an open-ended duty to aid persons in a position of dependency. Its virtues are attention and responsiveness. Feminist theorists have taken up care in recent decades, decrying an abstract, individualistic rationality of rights and contracts that pushes relationships with vulnerable and dependent people to the margins. Certain Christian feminists have adopted the principle and have enfolded the mother’s tie to their unborn children into care, and point to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the exemplar of this care.
Care envisions life as the subject of the relationship between mother and child, both of whom are in turn dependent upon relationships to the birth father, doctors, family members, and the culture of the wider society. Fittingly titled are Women’s Care Centers, of which nearly 3,000 exist in the United States, providing material support to pregnant women and encouraging them to bring their babies to birth with high rates of success. The care principle addresses the common poverty of women who consider abortion—about three-quarters are low-income and eight in ten are unmarried—and urges policies that provide financial support for birth, health care after birth, childcare, pregnancy leave, help in collecting payments from birth fathers, and measures that facilitate adoption. The justice that restores relationship involves healing and forgiveness for post-abortive women, the message and work of initiatives such as Project Rachel. Mirroring the civil rights movement, justice for the unborn is advocated through non-violence and peaceful persuasion that invites opponents into a restored community.
The most potent quality of the justice of right relationship may be its holism. It restores rights that protect essential dimensions of dignity and also address the wide range of wounds that injustices inflict. This holism extends to the wide range of injustices, including historical ones, beyond life and race. I chose these because of their magnitude and their effects on our contemporary division. I have no optimism that this division will dissipate any time soon yet am confident that the justice of right relationship may further our unity better than a far less holistic concept of justice.
