Justice Theology

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

In Poetic Justice I took up the subject of justice as the root question of all Western religion, taking up themes broached by Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). In More about Justice I extended my remarks to say that injustice is endemic to our world of experience, both internal or external to the personal soul.

King contrasts the world of sense experience with the Word of God which is spoken to us — and spoken of — in the Bible. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," the gospel of John begins. The point of the gospel is that Jesus Christ is that pre-existent Word.

Words, whether scriptural or not, can enchant us. Stories take us to "another world." In such a story world, justice can win out in the end. Peace and harmony can prevail at last. Order can expunge chaos. What is "meant to be" will actually come to pass in a "new world order."

That is the Bible story in a nutshell. The Bible starts out — after the poetry of God's creation of the universe in Genesis, chapter 1 — in an Eden of peace, harmony, order, and perfect justice. When Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, it is as if a primordial symmetry has been broken. Dynamic change has become possible. The bad news is that dynamic change potentiates conflict, disharmony, chaos, and injustice. The good news (gospel means "good news") is that God, at great personal cost, restores peace, harmony, order, and perfect justice at the "end of days."

Symbolically, perfect justice comes when Christ as the "bridegroom" weds his "bride" — us! We are God's partners in bringing justice to the world!


How are we to understand such things as the "fall," the "redemption," the "end times," and the "kingdom that is to come"? If we take these phrases literally, we may look for an actual, tangible, physical "end of the world" ... and quite soon, since the Bible always talks of God's kingdom as imminently arriving. I don't take them literally. Like King, I take them far too seriously to restrict them to their literal meanings. Instead, I take the Bible's "narrative arc" as a template that can be applied again and again to everyday experience.

I am just beginning to apply it in what is for me a new way. I call it "justice theology."

Justice theology sees injustice as the overriding issue of human experience. By injustice, I mean anything other than what is meant to be by God. It can be social or economic injustice, but it can just as well be interpersonal or even sexual injustice.

It can even be intrapersonal injustice. If I don't deal justly with myself — if, for example, I try to be more of an ultra-pure Pharisee than the admittedly flawed Christian that I really am — then a grievous wrong has been done in the world.

Justice theology, accordingly, doesn't believe in whitewashing the world, any more than it believes in whitewashing the soul. It sees injustice as an unavoidable concomitant of the capacity of the world for evolution and change. The idea is to right wrongs wherever they pop up — not to expect to keep them from popping up in the first place.


You can't right wrongs unless you have an ethical standard, and you can't have an ethical standard if you, in King's phrase, "go native" and elevate "the deed" (i.e., whatever happens) over "the word" (the source of the ethical standard: God). Still, you can be enchanted by the phantasmagoria of events, too.

A phantasmagoria of events is a chaos: ever new, ever fresh, ever purposeless. The Word of God never changes. Ethical standards are, at root, absolute, as are divine purposes. These bespeak immutable order, but we, in our lives, live in territory between order and chaos: the edge of chaos.

This is indeed what science shows today. There are dynamical systems that embody order, pure and simple. There are chaotic systems, like the weather. And then there are systems which, like life on earth, are located between order and chaos. These last systems are the only ones that evolve gracefully. Pure order produces nothing new. Pure chaos cannot sustain that which is produced. Only at the edge of chaos can novelty both appear and be sustained.

Justice theology recognizes that systems at the edge of chaos are continually subject to perturbations and hiccups that push them into chaos proper. That's unjust ... but justice can be restored when the system recovers its poise at the edge of chaos. Result: positive evolutionary change.

Justice on earth is dynamic, because events on the evolving earth are dynamic. We are called by Jesus to be "salt of the earth." Salt ... as in the substance used for preserving meat in Jesus's time. By seeking justice in all of its guises and ramifications, we help bring our world out of chaos, time after time after time.