When we confess that God is just, what do we mean? Quite likely we mean that God rewards good deeds and punishes evil deeds, either in this life or the next, in the exact proportion they deserve. God is likened to a wise magistrate, knowing all motivations, particulars, contingencies, and consequences. He dispenses impartial justice, universally and comprehensively. The virtuous are rewarded with goods and blessings, and the wicked are punished by the infliction of privation and suffering. Each receives their due. No one can complain that they have been treated unfairly; no one can protest that God has not set things right. Yet if we define the divine justice as the rewarding of good and the punishing of evil, God would seem to be committed to punish every iniquitous and sinful act, without exception. To do otherwise would be an abdication of duty and a violation of justice. What then of the divine mercy? Has it been expunged from God? That cannot be correct. As the psalmist sings: “For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you” (Ps 86:5). We thus appear to be presented with a contradiction in God himself.
For the way forward, we turn to the prophet of Scotland, George MacDonald.
The Injustice of Retribution
In his famous sermon “Justice,” MacDonald rejects the popular identification of justice with retribution:
If you ask any ordinary Sunday congregation in England, what is meant by the justice of God, would not nineteen out of twenty answer, that it means his punishing of sin? Think for a moment what degree of justice it would indicate in a man—that he punished every wrong. A Roman emperor, a Turkish cadi, might do that, and be the most unjust both of men and judges. Ahab might be just on the throne of punishment, and in his garden the murderer of Naboth. In God shall we imagine a distinction of office and character? God is one; and the depth of foolishness is reached by that theology which talks of God as if he held different offices, and differed in each. It sets a contradiction in the very nature of God himself. It represents him, for instance, as having to do that as a magistrate which as a father he would not do! The love of the father makes him desire to be unjust as a magistrate![1]
Instead of imagining God as a courtroom judge, imagine him as a perfect father. How does a good father treat his children? Is he principally concerned to punish according to the letter of the law? Absolutely not. All of his acts toward his children are motivated by love, by the desire to advance their long-term well-being. When they injure someone, he insists they make apology and restitution. He may even administer corporal punishment (my father typically used a yardstick), but always the good of the child is uppermost in his mind. His goal is to set his child on the right path. This is the fair play which constitutes genuine justice and best accords with the merciful character of the God and Father of Jesus Christ. God is just because he always acts in service to the good. Justice and love are one.
Is God bound to punish sin? George MacDonald’s answer is an emphatic no. If the answer were yes, then forgiveness would be impossible. Justice and mercy would find themselves opposed to each other, generating a schism within the Godhead. But we know that God does forgive sin; hence it must be just and right for him to forgive. But wickedness deserves punishment, the retributivist replies. The lex talionis enjoys a long history, and several texts in Scripture appear to support it. Yet how do we reconcile retribution with mercy? If justice demands the punishment of our sinful acts, then they must be punished to the full extent required by justice. It will not do to think of God as first punishing sin and then subsequently forgiving it. “If sin demands punishment, and the righteous punishment is given, then the man is free,” comments MacDonald. “Why should he be forgiven?”[2] Clearly there is something odd about the idea of pardoning an offense after punishment has been dispensed. The jurist within us demands that wrongdoers endure the suffering they deserve. If one of my loved ones have been wounded, harmed, or murdered, I want the criminal to suffer. That’s why we have prisons and executions. Vengeance must be exacted—“eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Ex 21:24-25).
Yet the infliction of pain, declares MacDonald, cannot put the world to rights:
Punishment, deserved suffering, is no equipoise to sin. It is no use laying it in the other scale. It will not move it a hair’s breadth. Suffering weighs nothing at all against sin. It is not of the same kind, not under the same laws, any more than mind and matter. We say a man deserves punishment; but when we forgive and do not punish him, we do not always feel that we have done wrong; neither when we do punish him do we feel that any amends has been made for his wrongdoing. If it were an offset to wrong, then God would be bound to punish for the sake of the punishment; but he cannot be, for he forgives. Then it is not for the sake of the punishment, as a thing that in itself ought to be done, but for the sake of something else, as a means to an end, that God punishes. It is not directly for justice, else how could he show mercy, for that would involve injustice?[3]
God forgives! This liberating gospel truth alone should alone compel us to reevaluate our inherited notion of retributive justice. The infliction of suffering upon the wrongdoer does not provide redress; it does not rectify; it does not heal the disorder created by the crime. Retribution has no place in the divine heart. If God is just, he has but one duty: to destroy the sin that has entered into his good world:
Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin. If he were not the Maker, he might not be bound to destroy sin—I do not know; but seeing he has created creatures who have sinned, and therefore sin has, by the creating act of God, come into the world, God is, in his own righteousness, bound to destroy sin.[4]
The true justice of God is restorative, not punitive. The infliction of suffering, in and of itself, makes better neither the world nor the sinner.
To read more, read Fr. Kimel’s critically-acclaimed book, Destined for Joy: The Doctrine of Universal Salvation
[1] George MacDonald, “Justice,” Unspoken Sermons, Series Three (1889).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.