Justice Theology II

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In Justice Theology I started (actually, continued) weaving ideas I got from Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris) into a semblance of a Christian theology based on the idea that the key to understanding the Bible is its concern with justice.

By justice I mean ... what? Intuitively, I'd say, justice is whatever is "meant to be" by God. The world, to the extent that it is not what God had in mind for it, is unjust.

That's a pretty big extent. Injustice, as I think of it, either is co-extensive with evil, or it subsumes it. We hear an awful lot about sin and evil from the pulpit, or at least we used to before religion began downplaying these harsh ideas to keep people in the pews. Nowadays, we have to read theology books to hear much about Christianity's take on evil.

Yet as soon as you start reading up on the "problem of evil" in a theology book, you immediately run into a hitch. Evil is always discussed as a concept within a particular systematic approach to theology. If you read a theology book based on a different systematic approach, you get a different take on evil.

But the people who first spoke the words of the Hebrew Bible, even before they were written down — and the auditors who first listened to them — didn't have a systematic theology. They had an experience of injustice, having been held captive in Egypt, and later in Babylon. The destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem at the hands of pagan foreigners smacked of the possibility that the Jews' just God had punished or deserted them. How to keep their unique faith intact and hold themselves together as a people was more than an intellectual question for them. Their concern for justice was their very identity.


King's book tells us, in speaking about John the Baptist, that

His message concerned justice, and like any good ethician, he spelled it out in detail: "He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none"; tax collectors were told to "collect no more than is appointed," and soldiers were to "rob no one by violence" (Lk 3:11). John was preaching social justice as the [Old Testament] prophets had before him. ... His baptism of "righteousness" called for confession of sins, a washing in the Jordan, and a moral reform. ... [One must begin] the transformation with a moral reform: one committed oneself to the careful observance of a law. Only after the moral reform did one go to the second baptism, a Baptism of Fire and Spirit. John did not administer the second baptism, but he promised another who would (p. 116).

The second baptism would be administered by Jesus, whom John did not yet know when he said, "I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire" (Mt 3:11).

Jesus submitted himself to John's baptism first, before embarking on his own mission. He did this "to fulfill all righteousness." A prophesy of Isaiah thus came true: "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles" (Mt 12:18).

As King points out, Jesus' baptismal commitment to harness his personal future to the preordination of a religious text was quickly put to the test by Satan, who tempted Jesus three times during his forty-day sojourn in the desert. Thus did Jesus prove he would hold fast, and would "give first place to the Word of God" in all its justice and righteousness. From that point on, though, he would also "understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything)" (p. 120).

Accordingly Jesus, in identifying fully with human weakness, went beyond justice without undermining justice in the slightest. How it is even possible for anyone to do that — especially one like Jesus, who was divine — is a riddle, a conundrum, and a paradox.

King likens Jesus' temptation by the devil to the dark night of the soul spoken of by later Christian mystics. After an enchantment by the word of God or any other ethical text, the believer inevitably founders on the shoals of an eventual disillusionment. Ultimately the "difficulties in identifying with a text" come to the fore. Good! As long as the believer does not renounce the Word, the Second Baptism — of fire and Spirit — ensues. Only then does one's true spiritual life really begin.

Parallels with koans used to provoke Zen enlightenment are manifest. The Zen postulant is given by his master a riddle, perhaps "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" This is the koan he must decipher. But it is undecipherable by any normal sort of logic. Good! Only once that is come to grips with is spiritual transformation possible.

But the Zen seeker doesn't just knock on the door of a monastery and get handed a koan right away. He is subjected first to the severest form of discipline, for a very long time, in a sort of religious boot camp. He has to measure up to the highest standard: a stern ethic of right behavior. Only after the Zen master senses the postulant is total in his devotion to the ethic of servitude does the master begin to treat the seeker with any sort of decency.

Likewise, King says, the baptism into righteousness offered by John the Baptist came along with the insistence on an ethical standard of behavior, a submission of the ego and the will to exacting norms. Still and all, "John and his baptism were not final; they were the first and lesser part of a double process" (p. 116). The second and greater part involved a riddle, a Jewish koan if you will. How could a God of pure righteousness and perfect justice identify himself with our own human weakness, even unto death on a cross?