What Justice Forgot

Faith Is Not Blind · 4-2

Wars and Rumors of War · Watchman Insight

Section I

The Word That Won the Room — and Lost Its Meaning

In the spring of 2020, the word justice became the most spoken word in American public life. It appeared on protest signs, corporate mission statements, church sermons, congressional floor speeches, and university commencement addresses. It was deployed by the progressive left to demand the dismantling of structures it deemed oppressive. It was deployed by the conservative right to demand protection from what it deemed ideological coercion. Both sides invoked it with the full moral weight of self-evidence. Neither paused to define it.

That asymmetry — the word everywhere, the definition nowhere — is not incidental. It is the symptom of a civilization that has inherited the moral vocabulary of a tradition it has largely abandoned, and that now uses the words without the framework that once gave them content. Justice in contemporary American public discourse is a rhetorical grenade. Each side pulls the pin. Each side believes the explosion will not touch them.

Miroslav Volf began to write Exclusion and Embrace shortly after returning from a visit to his homeland during the Balkan wars of the 1990s — a conflict in which Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim communities had each recruited their faith to bless their violence, and in which neighbors who had lived in proximity for generations discovered, with apparent ease, that the word justice could be made to mean the elimination of the other. The same word. The same moral urgency. Opposite conclusions. Volf’s question — whether the tradition that had been used to authorize the violence might also contain the resources to end it — is the question this post is asking about the American church in the mid-2020s, at a moment when the word justice has been so thoroughly weaponized that its capacity to initiate genuine conversation has been nearly exhausted.

In the previous installment, Between Two Fires, we examined what it looks like when the church becomes politically captured — when its prophetic voice is borrowed by a party and its theological convictions are recruited to endorse conclusions reached on other grounds. The argument was that the Christian’s prior loyalty interrupts the tribal logic of the political moment. This post takes that argument one step further: if the church’s prior loyalty is real, it must produce a different account of justice than either side of the current divide is offering. Not a third political position. A prior anthropological one.

The question is not which side is right about justice. The question is whether either side is talking about the same thing the tradition means when it uses that word.

Section II

Three Revolutions and the Justice They Promised

The modern career of justice as a political concept runs through three revolutionary moments, each of which bequeathed to its successors both genuine goods and catastrophic failures. To understand why the contemporary American argument about justice feels so intractable — why the two sides seem to be speaking past each other with increasing fury — it helps to trace the inheritance.

The first moment is the liberal revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Locke, Jefferson, the architecture of rights-based democracy. Its genuine good was the legal codification of what the Christian tradition had always asserted: that persons possess inherent dignity, not derived from social position or royal grant, but intrinsic. The Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truths are not, strictly speaking, self-evident. They are borrowed. Their original warrant is theological, and the borrowing was only possible because centuries of Christian anthropology had already deposited the concept of human dignity into the intellectual groundwater. Whether Christian anthropology is the only possible grounding of human dignity remains contested — John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum have argued otherwise, and not without force. Yet, as Wolterstorff later demonstrates, these secular frameworks tend to struggle at a specific pressure point: they can stipulate that persons must be treated equally, but they cannot, without remainder, explain why a person who contributes nothing to the social contract still commands the same moral standing as one who does. Rawls’s veil of ignorance and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach are procedural and functional answers to a question that is finally metaphysical. The point here is not that secular accounts are impossible, but that the modern language of rights historically emerged within a culture profoundly shaped by Christian assumptions, and that severing the language from those assumptions has consequences the liberal tradition is still working out.

The liberal revolution’s characteristic failure was its assumption that once the rights were enumerated, the moral work was largely done — that justice was primarily a legal category, a matter of correct procedure rather than of substantive community obligation. This procedural account of justice worked tolerably well as long as the society operating it shared enough moral consensus to fill in the gaps. It works considerably less well when that consensus dissolves. The procedure remains. The shared account of what it is for has gone.

The second moment is the socialist tradition of the nineteenth century, culminating in the revolutionary experiments of the twentieth. Its genuine good was the recognition that procedural justice is insufficient — that a system can be formally fair and substantively brutal, that the wage contract can be legally valid and morally corrosive, that structural conditions shape individual outcomes in ways that individual rights alone cannot address. Its catastrophic failure is well documented. When justice is defined entirely in terms of material redistribution, and when the agency charged with that redistribution is the state, the result tends not toward liberation but toward the consolidation of power in the hands of whoever controls the state. The problem was not the diagnosis of structural injustice. The problem was the absence of any account of human nature capable of constraining the liberator.

The third moment is the postmodern turn of the late twentieth century, from which contemporary American social justice discourse draws much of its vocabulary. To be fair to this tradition, its motivating concern was not simply the denial of truth. Foucault, Derrida, and those who followed them sought to expose the ways institutions disguise contingent power arrangements as universal and natural. That concern was not entirely destructive. It was often a protest against false universality — against the presumption that the perspective of the dominant group could be presented as the perspective of everyone. This is a legitimate epistemological protest, and the Christian tradition, which has its own resources for critiquing the conflation of human power with divine sanction, need not be entirely hostile to it. James K. A. Smith has argued, with some care, that the postmodern suspicion of master narratives can even find an echo in the biblical insistence on human finitude and the danger of false universality — that the Christian tradition contains, within itself, the tools to distinguish between genuine humility about human knowing and the nihilism that sometimes travels under the same flag.

But the postmodern tradition’s catastrophic failure is its difficulty sustaining a coherent account of why justice matters in the first place. If there is no transcendent moral order — if justice is finally a function of whose story is being told rather than of what actually happened — then the demand for justice collapses into a demand for power. The oppressor becomes the oppressed as the narrative shifts; the logic of liberation has no stable terminus. What it tends to produce is not justice but an endless recursion of grievance, from which the most rhetorically agile extract themselves temporarily by finding someone else to blame.

These three traditions are not simply wrong. They are partial. Each names something real. Each fails in the same structural way: it inherits the moral vocabulary of a tradition it has severed from its roots, and then wonders why the vocabulary keeps losing its purchase.

Section III

Two Hebrew Words the English Obscures

The Hebrew vocabulary for justice is not a single concept. It is at least two, and the distinction matters more than contemporary American political discourse has been willing to admit.

The first word is mishpat. It appears over two hundred times in the Hebrew Bible. Its basic meaning is the rendering of fair judgment — the legal adjudication that gives each party what is properly owed. But mishpat in the Hebrew prophetic tradition is not a neutral procedural concept. It consistently names the specific obligation to protect those the system would otherwise grind: the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor. When Amos announced judgment on Israel, it was not because Israel had failed to follow the correct procedures. It was because Israel’s procedures were systematically structured to benefit those who already had power at the expense of those who did not.

“But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

— Amos 5:24 (ESV)

The second word is tzedakah. Usually translated “righteousness” in English Bibles, its semantic range is broader than the English suggests. Tzedakah refers to the right ordering of relationships — to being, in the full sense, what one is obligated to be toward the other person. It is not primarily a forensic concept. It is a relational one. The person who practices tzedakah is not merely following the rules. She is inhabiting the kind of relationship with her neighbor that the covenant requires — a relationship characterized by generosity, fidelity, and what the tradition calls hesed, usually translated as steadfast love or lovingkindness.

“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

— Micah 6:8 (ESV)

“Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.”

— Isaiah 1:17 (ESV)

What the Hebrew vocabulary encodes is a vision of justice that the three modern traditions have been unable, in their various ways, to sustain: justice as the right ordering of relationships within a covenant community, under a moral authority that is not reducible to any party’s political interest. The liberal tradition gets the rights but loses the community. The socialist tradition gets the structural diagnosis but loses the constraint on power. The postmodern tradition gets the recognition of the excluded but loses the ground on which the exclusion can be named as wrong rather than merely inconvenient.

A society that has organized its public moral vocabulary around the language of rights without the framework of obligation, or around the language of liberation without the framework of forgiveness, is not a society that has escaped the need for a richer account of justice. It is a society in the process of discovering, at considerable cost, why the thinner account is insufficient.

Section IV

What Happens When Justice Has No Forgiveness, and Righteousness Has No Structure

The contemporary American justice discourse has divided cleanly along a fault line that maps, with uncomfortable precision, onto the distinction between mishpat and tzedakah — but in a way that captures each concept’s pathology rather than its gift.

The progressive social justice tradition has, in its best form, recovered something genuinely prophetic: the mishpat insistence that structural arrangements are morally accountable, that systems can be unjust even when no individual act of malice can be identified, that the claim of formal equality is insufficient if the conditions under which people enter the formal system are radically unequal. This is a recovery worth taking seriously. The prophetic tradition — Amos, Micah, Isaiah — made exactly this argument against the established religious and political order of their day, and paid for it in exactly the ways prophetic voices typically pay.

But the contemporary social justice tradition has largely lost tzedakah. It has inherited the structural diagnosis without the relational framework. And without tzedakah — without the account of justice as the right ordering of relationships rather than the correct allocation of grievance — the tradition tends toward what the philosopher Charles Taylor called the “culture of authenticity” metastasized into the political: the demand for recognition without the reciprocal obligation of relationship, the right to define one’s own identity without the corresponding obligation to remain accountable to a community whose claims may conflict with that self-definition. The result is a justice vocabulary that has extraordinary power to identify wounds and almost no power to heal them.

The conservative tradition has, in its best form, preserved something equally important: the tzedakah insistence that justice is not merely a structural problem, that individuals are moral agents whose character matters, that communities are formed by habits and practices that cannot be reduced to legal arrangements, that the family and the church and the neighborhood are moral institutions with their own claims that the state cannot absorb. The conservative critique of purely procedural or purely redistributive accounts of justice is, in many of its forms, theologically well-grounded.

But the conservative tradition has, in its political deployment, frequently lost mishpat. More precisely: what it has preserved is not quite the biblical tzedakah — the covenantal obligation to the neighbor that binds one to the community’s most vulnerable — but something closer to Western individualistic moralism: a private virtue framework in which the moral agent is accountable to God and perhaps to her immediate household, but not, in any structural sense, to the stranger at the gate. It has preserved the language of moral order without the prophetic insistence that moral order includes structural accountability. When it speaks of justice, it often means the enforcement of existing arrangements against those who violate them — which is a genuine component of mishpat — while remaining largely silent about whether those arrangements themselves reflect the covenant obligation to protect the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant. The result is a righteousness vocabulary that has enormous power to name individual sin and almost no power to name structural complicity.

The sociologist Robert Bellah, in his landmark study Habits of the Heart (1985), argued that American public life had become dominated by two moral languages — utilitarian individualism and expressive individualism — both of which were inadequate to sustain the kind of robust civic community the republic required. He traced the deficit to the attenuation of what he called the biblical and republican traditions that had once provided a thicker moral vocabulary. Four decades later, his diagnosis reads less like a warning than like a description. The two languages he identified have not been corrected. They have been intensified, sorted by party, and renamed as justice.

The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, in Justice: Rights and Wrongs (2010), argued that the grounding of justice in rights — the standard move of liberal political theory — ultimately requires a theological anthropology if it is to hold. Rights are not self-grounding. They require an account of what it is about the person that generates the obligation to respect them. The secular philosophical tradition has been unable, in his assessment, to provide that account without remainder. What he pointed toward was not a theocratic political arrangement but a prior claim: that the justice the modern world inherited was only possible because the tradition that grounded it had already done the anthropological work. To operate the justice vocabulary while severing its roots is not merely a theological loss. It is, eventually, a practical one.

This is the pattern the current moment is revealing. When mishpat is severed from tzedakah, justice becomes prosecution without reconciliation — a permanent audit of who owes whom, conducted without the possibility of settlement. When tzedakah is severed from mishpat, righteousness becomes personal piety without structural accountability — a warm private virtue that functions, in practice, as an alibi. The two concepts are not alternatives. In the Hebrew tradition, they are inseparable. The person who practices one without the other has not arrived at a partial justice. She has arrived at a sophisticated form of injustice.

Section V

The Justice That Costs Something

Volf’s answer to Moltmann’s question — whether he could embrace a Četnik, a Serbian militiaman who had participated in the destruction of Croatian communities — was not a quick one. It required three hundred pages, because the honest answer was that the embrace was not possible without truth, not complete without justice, and not finally available without the kind of forgiveness that only a particular theological framework makes coherent.

The embrace he describes is not the sentimentality of cheap reconciliation — the demand that the injured party absorb the cost of the injustice and call it grace. It is the costly, structured act of holding open the possibility of genuine relationship with the person the logic of tribal justice has classified as permanently the enemy. What makes it possible, in Volf’s account, is not moral superiority or therapeutic equanimity. It is a theological conviction about the nature of the self and the nature of God: that the self is not finally constituted by its wounds, and that the God who is just is also the God who absorbs the cost of justice rather than simply transferring it.

This is not a political program. It cannot be enacted by legislation. It is a posture — formed by a specific community, sustained by specific practices, drawing on a specific account of what human beings are and what they owe each other. The word for that community is church, and the question the current moment is placing on that institution, with unusual clarity, is whether it is actually doing the forming. Whether the people who sit in its pews on Sunday are being shaped by the full account — mishpat and tzedakah together, structural accountability and relational fidelity, the prophetic voice and the covenant embrace — or whether they are simply being confirmed in whichever half of the account maps most comfortably onto their existing political identity.

Formation of this kind is slow. It happens in the practice of confession — the naming of one’s own complicity before demanding an account of another’s. It happens in the act of sitting with people whose experience of the system differs radically from one’s own, not in order to validate their politics but in order to understand what the system looks like from where they stand. It happens in the sustained refusal to let partisan identity be the primary category by which one’s neighbors are known. None of this is a program. All of it is a practice. The distinction is not minor.

The hardest sentence in this series to write is also the most necessary: the American church, on both sides of the current divide, has largely not been doing that forming. It has been doing the opposite — taking people who arrived with a political identity and giving them theological language for it. The result is a church that speaks fluently about justice and contributes almost nothing to the conditions under which justice becomes possible.

The watchman’s task is not to adjudicate between the two camps. It is to hold up the full account — the one that names structural complicity and individual responsibility, that demands both the righting of wrongs and the possibility of reconciliation, that refuses to let the injured party’s pain be the final word and refuses to let the perpetrator’s comfort be protected at the pain’s expense. The full account is harder than either side’s preferred version. It requires more. It offers more.

Mishpat without tzedakah produces a justice that knows how to wound and not how to heal. Tzedakah without mishpat produces a righteousness that is privately beautiful and publicly inert. The tradition that holds them together is not a political program. It is an inheritance — and the question of whether the church that holds that inheritance will actually use it is the question the word justice has been trying, loudly and without much success, to ask all along.