Justice

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

If there is no struggle, there can be no progress.

Through the high jungle tree tops, the news quickly spread: He talks to a dust speck! He's out of his head! Just look at him walk with that speck on that flower! And Horton walked, worrying, almost an hour. 'Should I put this speck down?' Horton thought with alarm. 'If I do, these small persons might come to great harm. I can't put it down. And I won't! After all, a person's a person. No matter how small.'

What are some features of this flourishing? As Christians see her, a spiritually whole person longs in certain classic ways. She longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ and Christlikeness, for the dynamite of the Holy Spirit and spiritual maturity. She longs for spiritual hygiene itself—and not just as a consolation prize when she cannot be rich and envied instead. She longs for other human beings: she wants to love them and be loved by them. She hungers for social justice. She longs for nature, for its beauties and graces, for the sheer particularity of the way of a squirrel with a nut. As we might expect, her longings dim from season to season. When they do, she longs to long again. Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Plantinga Jr., Cornelius

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end... but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature ... And to found that edifice on its unavenged tears: would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell me the truth! -

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.

There's a difference between us. You think the people of this country exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom. And I go to make sure that they have it.

A man can’t ride your back unless it’s bent.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

The prophets knew how many ways human life can go wrong because they knew how many ways human life can go right. (You need the concept of a wall on plumb to tell when one is off.) These prophets kept dreaming of a time when God would put things right again. 5

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom.

What Jim Bob’s racism shows us is that moral evil is social and structural as well as personal: it comprises a vast historical and cultural matrix that includes traditions, old patterns of relationship and behavior, atmospheres of expectation, social habits.

To despoil is to wreck integrity or wholeness, to strip away what holds a being together and what joins it to other beings in an atmosphere of hospitality, justice, and delight. As Augustine shows in The City of God, sin despoils persons, groups, and whole societies. Corruption disturbs shalom —twisting, weakening, and snapping the thousands of bonds that give particular beings integrity and that tie them to others.

Despite centuries of war, no one has ever done it, he notes: nobody has ever fired a first shot. All strikes are claimed to be counterstrikes. All shots are return fire. “For the Allies, World War II began at the Polish border in 1939; for the Germans, hostilities dated back to Versailles. Your military operation is an attack; mine is a retaliation.“ 84

We know that where grievances are concerned people have long memories and short fuses. We know that injustice enrages people and makes them vengeful. We know that people who hate their lives often abuse those who incarnate what they hate and that the abused are then likely to abuse others. We know that nobody is more dangerous than a victim. We know that sin brings distress and that people often seek to relieve their distress with the same thing that brought it on —a dynamic, as we shall see in Chapter 8, that sin shares with addiction.

Of course, the cradle of such pity often turned out to be a mental hospital, and the school for such reeducation a concentration camp —places at least as confining and dehumanizing as any conventional prison. But at least none of the inmates was to blame for being there. Koestler found all this blamelessness progressively disturbing. “Before long it began to become clear that those whom we do not blame we do not regard as responsible. Those whom we do not regard as responsible we do not see as fully human. And those whom we do not see as fully human we are willing to twist and manipulate to suit our own convenience.” 94

Before long it began to become clear that those whom we do not blame we do not regard as responsible. Those whom we do not regard as responsible we do not see as fully human. And those whom we do not see as fully human we are willing to twist and manipulate to suit our own convenience.

The same is true of certain emotions and states of mind. Anger, for example, can take the form of righteous indignation, a virtue of the just. Anger can also take the form of smoldering resentment of competitors, the vice of the envious.

Sin is deviant and perverse, an injustice or iniquity or ingratitude.

Like and equal are not the same thing at all.

The LORD is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.

Once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.

You can’t have shalom without justice. I mean, you may con people into thinking that they’re doing okay and so forth but whether they’re conned or not, if they’re suffering from injustice, if they’re being wronged, this is not true shalom.

The wrath of God is not an emotion that flares up from time to time, as though God had temper tantrums; it is a way of describing his absolute enmity against all wrong and his coming to set matters right.

To be impoverished is to fall short of shalom. That is what is wrong with poverty. God is committed to shalom. Jesus came to bring shalom.

In shalom there are no blind, all see; in shalom there are no lame, all walk; there are no deaf, all hear; there are no dead, all live.