Deep in the heart of our culture is a view of justice that is harmful, unbiblical, and, plainly, not very just. Plus, it makes us afraid. As I have begun the long process of shifting my understanding of justice from our culture’s retributive justice to the more biblical restorative justice, one of the surprising outcomes has been that I have become a little braver.
Retributive justice plays itself out in our criminal justice system, in parenting, and in day-to-day conversations. It makes even the smallest mistakes (intentional or not) seem like threats to our lives and relationships, when they could be avenues to growth, deeper connection, and stronger community. Let me explain:
When retributive justice encounters wrongdoing, it asks three questions:
- What rule was broken?
- Who broke it?
- What punishment do they deserve?
In the criminal justice system, it looks like this: When crime happens, victims[1] and communities are largely left out of the conversation while the state determines what to do. Once they determine who is guilty, the only decision left is how harsh or lenient the punishment will be. This is why politicians like to talk about how tough they are on crime. This version of justice exists on a restrictive binary spectrum. You are either tough on crime or soft on crime. There are no other options.
Because there is no way of making things right or restoring relationships that are strained or broken by criminal behavior, there is also no way for the convicted to regain trust or good standing in their community. A “convict” will forever be labeled as such. Since that designation makes it difficult to find a job or a place to live, it also makes it hard for them to live above board, and many return to crime as a result. They are worse off and our communities are no safer.
This same kind of justice is often applied in parenting. With many similarities to the criminal justice system, in parenting retributive justice can look like the following:
- Punishments often have no connection to the unwanted behavior
- Kids often feel like they are the victims when they are punished, even if they have done wrong
- Parenting is described on the same tough-soft spectrum, though we tend to use the words strict and permissive
- A parent may yell at a kid who has, say, punched her little brother, while paying little attention to the child who has been hurt
- Children are rarely given ways to repair relationships and make up for harmful behavior (apart from maybe a forced apology, which does very little toward actual repair)
- Kids sometimes get labelled as good or bad kids
Retributive justice permeates our culture at every level. We are surrounded by the belief that wrongdoing deserves some degree of punishment.
Our nervous systems respond to all threats the same way, whether we’re being chased by a tiger or receive a hard piece of feedback. A nervous system is not rational. It will interpret any threat as a life-or-death situation and respond appropriately. Tiger or criticism, we enter into fight, flight or freeze mode as our body tries to defend itself. In life and death situations, we don’t have time to get curious. We aren’t able to learn. We can literally only fight, flee, or freeze. We may counterattack and shift the blame, we may get defensive and leave the room, we may descend into self-pity. The more we have experienced the harsh side of the tough-soft response equation, the more extreme our response to a threat will be.
In some ways it’s unfair to ask people to control their responses to threats when they’ve been wired for self-protection.
But mistakes don’t have to be threats. They can be opportunities for strengthened relationships, deeper community, better solutions to problems, deeper self-knowledge, strengthened discipleship. Restorative justice can begin to soften our knee-jerk response to the threat of doing or being wrong.
When restorative justice encounters wrongdoing, it asks different questions:
- What happened? Here we get history, context, multiple perspectives. People – victims, offenders, and community members – can show up as fully human with history, context, and complexity.
- What harm was caused? A full picture of the damage done is assessed, both the harm done directly to victims and to the broader community. Everyone impacted needs to be part of the conversation.
- How do we repair the harm? All members of the community, including the offender, are invited to participate in making things right. The agreements may include some kind of punishment, but can also include things that will rebuild trust, restore property, and relationships.
People do not do the right thing because they are afraid of punishment. They do right because they belong to a community which is important to them. Being accountable to that community greatly reduces recidivism.
There are profound examples of how this can work in the criminal justice system. In parenting, it can look like letting kids feel the consequences of their own behavior (rather than protecting them from the consequences and then punishing them), family meetings (which I have written about here), and giving kids the chance to make things right when they have done wrong.
When our mistakes and bad decisions are tied to punishment and rejection, it makes us tentative and afraid. Every slip up carries a threat for which we have no solution. But if we know it is possible to find a way through the pain, we can be braver.
The possibility of repair means that you can experiment and fail. It means you can try things out, even if you know you won’t be perfect. Any great entrepreneur, inventor, or artist will tell you that failure is the only road to success. That’s also true of any great marriage, family, friendship. If people are afraid to make a mistake, or call someone out because it might be too damaging, then our relationships will be shallow at best.
Many of our more pressing cultural issues, like anti-racism, require a certain amount of failure too. A white person cannot be a good anti-racist by just reading books by themselves. At some point they’re going to have to venture out of their room and have real relationships, do real advocacy, and, yes, sometimes make mistakes. The possibility of repair is the only way forward (really, the whole task is the work of trying to make things right). Otherwise, white folks like myself will endlessly fret over our potential imperfections and never actually do anything.
The shift from retributive justice to restorative justice has been a decade in the making for me, and I expect it to continue to challenge me for decades more. I long for a world where repair is possible and expected, where people are brave enough to learn a new thing, to experiment and play, to make mistakes and make it right again. Is that not the story of our faith? We have messed up and our God had done the work of repair, inviting us every day to join him in his ministry of reconciliation.
[1] Victim and offender are not great terms, and the restorative justice community is moving away from them for good reasons. I have retained them here because they are clear and I have limited space.
17 Responses
Thanks for bringing up this really important idea, Jen. I think a desire to punish others is at the heart of so much of our social pathologies – from domestic violence to road rage to politics. I wonder if the desire to punish others is, in and of itself, a sin. But you identified where it starts, too – in the way our parents teach us through their actions, what is the right way of being. It’s going to take a lot of unlearning for many of us (I think the Bible calls this repentance) to move from desiring to punish others to desiring to see all people and all of creation restored.
The whole unbiblical doctrine of Hell and the Satisfaction theory of the Atonement certainly come into play here, that God’s response to sin is to demand punishment and then unending torture.
Thank you Jen, for your emphasis.
And to Daniel, in agreement: Even if there is a “hell,” it is finally restorative and not forever retributive.
I appreciate your emphasis on not being afraid to make mistakes (and the problem of doing nothing good because we fear making a mistake). I operate with a working theory (not entirely fleshed out in my mind yet) that mistakes are not sins, but are a function of finitude. While mistakes and sins can get entangled together (as happens when we lie to cover up a mistake), they are not the same thing.
I appreciate what you are saying. For me, I don’t think we need figure out which is which. Sometimes our accidents contain sin that we are not aware of, sometimes our outright sinfulness has some portions of good motives, sometimes we’re just going through our day but still participating in sinful structures. No matter! iIt is all forgiven and God is bringing us to holiness.
Maybe this isn’t quite what you meant, but I think our concern about determining whether something was sinful or not is part of the retributive justice framework. We’re still looking for someone to blame or trying to prove that we aren’t to blame. I think we will be set free if we recognize the incredible abundance of grace and also say, “whoever is at fault, how do we make this right?” (That said, sometimes part of making it right is admitting fault… it’s never as clear as I want it to be.)
“A sin is simply something which can be forgiven.” Such is the surprising and intriguing definition by Roman Catholic theologian James Allison. He is a pioneer in the use of Girard’s Mimetic Desire, which Rodney references below.
Thanks for your response. For myself, the sin/mistake distinction helps me be more gracious to others. I first began to use it when raising my children. When my child spilled milk, there was no need to punish or forgive, or to apply restorative or retributive justice. It’s just a mistake. Something to shrug off. But if my child was willfully messing around after being warned not to and spilled milk, that was not a time to punish either, but to do restorative justice. I have to add that the sin/mistake distinction is not so much about how I view other people’s actions, but more about how I live my own life before God. If my action was a mistake, then in spite of a perfectionist streak in me, I don’t have to kick myself for it. If it was a sin, then I need to bring it to God for forgiveness. And if, as you point out, we can’t tell what it was or are not even aware of what it was, then we still seek the grace of God. I have no problem in thinking of Jesus as making mistakes (perhaps cutting off a board too short or calling one disciple by another disciple’s name). He could laugh it off as part of human finitude. But he definitely did not sin by breaking from the Father and his will.
I personally appreciate Greg Boyle’s framework in Cherished Belonging of brokenness and unhealthy behavior rather than fussing about sin. To me it goes along with salvation as being made whole rather than the narrow definition of going to heaven when you die. We participate in redemption and grace when we seek healing for ourselves and others.
Jen,
I agree with you, and this article is helpful, but I think we need to address a few things to go deeper.
1. Daniel is right. Many of our metaphors for atonement exacerbate the problem of retributive justice. Until we confess the foundational role we play as Christians, it rings hollow to blame “the culture.”
2. I’m hesitant to take the role of justice out of the hands of the state and put it into the hands of the people. I understand the impulse, but when we look at American history with lynch mobs and other horrific actions, plus my (and maybe our) doctrine of “Total Depravity,” I admit my fear. It’s not that it can’t be done. I’m just afraid.
3. I think a place to wrestle further with these issues is Rene Girard’s idea of “Mimetic Desire,” and a gospel response that addresses justice vs. violence and the role followers of Christ might play in undoing our system of retributive justice.
Again, great article. It leaves me wanting more of your thoughts on the issue.
Oh I have so many things to say! I felt really limited in having to try to make this a short post. For the moment, I’ll respond to your first two points:
1. Yes. You’re totally right. I said below (in another comment) that I think restorative justice really helps us to frame our understanding of atonement in a more helpful way. And you’re right on that our culture was largely shaped by a form of Christianity that loves retribution. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that Christians were not part of creating the problem… just that it is pervasive in our culture.
2. Take a look at some of the ways that restorative justice is used within the court system. It’s powerful stuff. In British Columbia, every youth offense goes through a restorative process as a diversion from the courts. I think it is similar in New Zealand. It’s still in the hands of the state, but the community decides what will happen next.
I haven’t read Rene Girard. I’ll have to take a look!
Jen, have a start with James Alison.
Does God really seek control and conformity? Or does God really desire a virtue and self-control that comes from within? Is our God primarily relational ( as Amanda B suggested a few days ago), or is our God selfishly vindictive like the gods of human creation?
What the world really needs is more empathy.
I recall first parting ways with James Dobson on his obsession with what he viewed as “sinful” rebellion in children necessitating the exercise of more parental authority. Granted, we all need some sense of order to feel safe, but suppressing behavior simply teaches that one needs to choose the winning side and/or to become more manipulatively clever.
This is a timely and necessary discussion for Christians. The moral logic you have laid out is compelling, Jen.
“Law and order” invariably means selective law.
I appreciate this discussion, which really connects to the passion of Christ. And for me it always raises the question what do we do with all the biblical passages that say directly or imply that the atonement is a form of retributive justice, that Christ’s sacrifice satisfied God’s wrath and justice.
I actually think restorative justice helps make sense of those. Restorative justice holds that wrongdoing creates obligations and responsibilities. Another way to say that is a “debt”, which is often the language that the Bible uses for atonement. If I harm you, then something needs to happen to make that right, whether it is apology, making amends, or whatever. That “something” is the debt that is created by sin. We are not being arbitrarily punished, we are suffering the consequences of a broken relationship and the debt it creates when we harm what God loves. What Jesus did on the cross was choose to make up for that debt in himself, or to forgive, making reconciliation possible.
I wish I had had space to include this, but if you look at the Hebrew word for justice (mishaps), especially alongside the words for righteousness and peace, you get a picture of justice that is much more restorative than retributive. Punishment happens, but within a restorative framework.
Great elaboration, Jen
I’ve always appreciated the parable of the unforgiving servant in this regard. When the king forgives the debt of the servant, where does the debt go? It doesn’t just vanish. No, it’s transferred onto the shoulders of the king. He takes it on and swallows it out of his own wealth and substance. Forgiveness, whatever else it is, is a kind of voluntary suffering. Depending on your model of the atonement, the cross is the enactment of the parable. The cross is the Holy Trinity swallowing its own wrath against sin (or at least the debt against it).
This is beautiful and timely, Jen. Thank you.