Resurrecting Justice

Reading Romans for the Life of the World

Douglas Harink

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780830852765
• eBook ISBN: 9780830843800
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The theme of justice pervades the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. And all Christians agree that justice is important. We often disagree, however, about what justice means, both in Scripture and for us today. Many turn to Old Testament laws, the prophets, and the life of Jesus to find biblical guidance on justice, but few think of searching the letters of Paul. Readers frequently miss a key source, a writing in which justice is actually the central concern: the book of Romans.

In Resurrecting Justice, theologian Douglas Harink invites readers to rediscover Romans as a treatise on justice. He traces Paul's thinking on this theme through a sequential reading of the book, finding in each passage facets of the gospel's primary claim—that God accomplishes justice in the death and resurrection of Jesus Messiah. By rendering forms of the Greek word dikaiosyn? as "just" or "justice," Harink emphasizes the inseparability of personal, social, and political uprightness that was clear to Paul but is obscured in modern translations' use of the words "righteous" and "righteousness" instead.

Throughout this book, Harink includes personal reflection questions and contemporary implications, helping readers connect Paul's teaching to issues in their world such as church life, politics, power, criminal justice, and violence. Romans demands nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of all things in the light of the gospel. And in Romans the life, death, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus makes all the difference in how we think about justice. Resurrecting Justice makes clear that the good news of a justice that can come only from God is crucial not only for individual lives but for all peoples and nations of the world.

1

TERMS OF JUSTICE

IN THIS CHAPTER

● How the theme of justice in Romans gets lost in translation

● Other vocabulary and translation issues in Romans

● Defining two terms: apocalyptic and messianic

WHEN CHRISTIANS WANT TO think biblically about justice, they do not usually turn to the letters of Paul. They often look to other places in the Bible, such as the laws of Moses, the biblical prophets, and perhaps Jesus, who links his own mission to both the Law and the Prophets in his inaugural justice-sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth (Lk 4:16-21). Ignoring Paul is a habit even for some of the best writers on biblical justice. For example, Ronald Sider’s recent book, Just Politics: A Guide for Christian Engagement, includes a chapter that summarizes biblical teaching on justice. Sider unpacks the meanings of the two main Hebrew words for justice, mishpat and tsedaqah, as they occur in the books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets.1 But there is no mention of any text from Paul.

Further, if you search the tables of contents and subject indexes of scholarly books on Paul or commentaries on Romans, you rarely find any entry on “justice.”2 These findings seem to confirm the impression that Paul and his letter to the Romans have little or nothing to contribute to the topic. One task of this introduction is to account for the absence of justice in studies of Paul, and the absence of Paul in Christian thinking about justice. The other task is to relearn some of Paul’s basic vocabulary in order to change our perception of Paul’s message and allow the important theme of justice to surface again. In the remainder of the book I explain Paul’s letter to the Romans as a message of justice and show how our ideas of justice might be radically affected by that message.

Lost in Translation

Justice is a central and pervasive theme in Romans. So why is that so difficult for us to see? For English-speaking readers, the most important factor is English translations. When we read through Romans (and other letters of Paul) we encounter the words righteous and righteousness often. But for the modern reader these words have come to have an almost exclusively individual, moral, and religious meaning, and often not a positive one. One of the most common uses in our popular speech is the term self-righteous, describing someone who is too overtly religious, pious, moralistic or judgmental. It carries a negative meaning. Still, if we find righteous or righteousness used often in Paul’s letters, and bearing much important weight, it seems Christians at least cannot avoid them. If they are part of Paul’s basic vocabulary, they probably should be part of ours as well, even if they risk being misunderstood. After all, Paul seems to be concerned about righteousness.

What does righteousness mean to you? Do you use this word much in everyday life? If not, why not? What does the word justice mean to you? Do you feel more comfortable using it? If so, why?

When Paul’s letters were translated into Latin early on, the words we read in English as righteous and righteousness appeared as iustus and iustitia. Where we now read in Romans 1:17 of “the righteousness of God,” the Latin reads iustitia Dei, “the justice of God.” This also shows up in translations into languages rooted in Latin: for example: “la justice de Dieu” (French), “la justicia de Dios” (Spanish), “la giustizia di Dio” (Italian), and so on. Each of these is a translation of the Greek phrase dikaiosynē theou. The word dikaiosynē is one word in a set of Greek words beginning with dik–: all of them include the sense of what is just within the social and political order as well as personal uprightness—so, dikaios means “just,” dikaioō means “to justify” or “to make just,” dikaiosynē means “justice.” In ancient Greek there was no separate set of words that meant “righteous” or “righteousness” in the individual, moral, religious sense, in contrast to “just” and “justice.” The dik– words in ordinary Greek usage included both personal and legal-social-political meanings. These words may sometimes indicate what we mean by righteousness and a righteous person; but they also indicate such things as a just ruler, justice in a criminal case, just sharing of power and goods, just relations among groups and peoples, and doing justice.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans the Greek word dikaiosynē occurs thirty-three times, and other words with the dik– stem occur another thirty or more times—more than anywhere else in Paul’s writings specifically, and more by far than in any other document in the New Testament in general. When the early believers in Rome heard these words read from Paul’s letter, they would not have understood them to mean only “righteousness” or “righteous,” separated from the meanings of social and political justice. In the Greek word dikaiosynē they would have heard the Latin iustitia. Justice is the central and pervasive theme of the letter to the Romans—the justice of God, the just ruler, the just person, the way of justice in relationships, society and the world. It would therefore not be unreasonable to call Romans a treatise on justice.

But Paul’s language of justice depends not only on Greek and Roman meanings, but also on the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, known as the Septuagint (abbreviated with the Roman numerals LXX), the translation that Paul and other New Testament writers used most often. For them the Greek Septuagint was the Bible. In it we encounter the dik– stem words—the justice words—numerous times, where they translate the Hebrew words mišpāt and ṣedāqâ. Here are just three familiar examples from the Septuagint:

O God, give your judgment to the king, and your dikaiosynē [justice] to the king’s son; that he may judge your people with dikaiosynē [justice] and your poor with judgment. (Ps 72:1-2)

The Lord has made known his salvation, he has revealed his dikaiosynē [justice] in the sight of the nations. (Ps 98:2)

But let judgment roll down as water, and dikaiosynē [justice] as a mighty torrent. (Amos 5:24)

God is the source of justice, he gives justice to the ruler, he calls for justice from his people, and he reveals his justice before the nations. God’s salvation is his justice: this is a persistent theme throughout the Old Testament.3 It is also, we will see, exactly what Paul too will proclaim in Romans. For Paul, God’s salvation and justice are the very meaning of the good news—the good news of Jesus.

Jesus (as we have already noted) preached his first and famous justice sermon about the reign of God from Isaiah 61:1–2, a text that declares the liberation and restoration of the people Israel. Jesus announced this good news to a people in social, economic, and political bondage to an oppressive foreign power, Rome. No wonder, then, that when they heard Jesus’ sermon of hope, “all were speaking well of him” (Lk 4:22). But already before his first public sermon of good news for prisoners, the poor and the oppressed, Jesus’ birth had stirred up hopes among the Judean underdogs for political liberation and justice, hopes expressed boldly in the songs of Mary (Lk 1:46-55) and Zacharias (Lk 1:67-79). On the other political side, Jesus’ birth provoked great anxiety among those in charge—Herod the king, and “all Jerusalem with him” (Mt 2:3). Jesus was dogged by various authorities from the beginning to the end of his ministry, and he was finally publicly executed by the Roman occupiers with the approval of the Judean authorities in Jerusalem. The Gospels make clear that the political authorities (Roman and Judean) believed that Jesus, the Messiah and Son of David, was pursuing political aims that both threatened the bases of their own authority and fostered revolutionary hope among his followers—hope for justice.

The political authorities and Jesus’ followers were not wrong about Jesus. What they all found hard to grasp was that he consistently refused to use the usual means—coercion, violence, and militant insurgency—to accomplish his revolutionary ends. He refused those means first in his temptations in the desert (where they were proposed by the devil) and finally in his willing submission to public execution. Jesus’ revolution in this sense was fundamentally different. He did not refuse politics; rather, he proposed a political alternative to the way the Romans ruled, and to the way his Judean compatriots hoped to rule when the Messiah came. He called his fellow Judeans to refuse guerilla warfare and military solutions in their efforts to attain their hoped-for justice—the liberation and restoration of Israel in its land. Instead he called them to trust in God and to wait for God’s time and manner of deliverance. Jesus called his compatriots to love and forgive both their fellow countrymen and their enemy oppressors. He called Israel even under occupation and oppression to become the true political community of justice, a people chosen, ruled, and sustained by God and God’s Messiah, their just King. In fact, he claimed, they could be this community of justice without controlling their national territory, security, or destiny. According to Jesus, for the people Israel to trust in God, forgive enemies, and refuse violence was already to share in the reality of God’s liberation and restoration, God’s justice and salvation—the kingdom of God.4

We in the modern Western world are tempted to separate “religion” from politics and “spirituality” from justice. Both the Old Testament and the Gospels show that such separation is not part of the biblical mindset. It would therefore be startling and strange if Paul, who was so thoroughly steeped in the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets, and the gospel of Jesus Messiah, and dedicated to the God of Israel and his cause, were now to propose that Israel’s God and God’s Messiah are really only directly concerned with the spiritual condition and moral lives of individuals. We will soon see that, starting from the first few sentences of Romans and carrying on to the last, Paul declares the good news of God and God’s justice for all of life, political, social, economic, and personal alike.

More Vocabulary

Separating religion from politics, economics, and justice was not the mindset among Judeans in Paul’s time. Nor was it the mindset of Greeks and Romans. For them, all matters of imperial and political authority, good government of cities, and administration of justice in legal, social, and economic spheres, as well as the ordinary matters of success in family, business, agriculture, trade, travel, and war, were thoroughly interwoven with what we think of as religion.5 In matters great and small, Greeks and Romans honored the gods through offerings, sacrifices, rituals, and festivals. They regularly consulted prophets, shamans, astrologers, and soothsayers; they exorcised demons, read omens, cast spells, and practiced magic. No military general would go to war unless the divine signs (discerned by priests and prophets) were in their favor. Temples were built to gods who secured the safety of cities and the triumph of emperors. Indeed, even some of the great emperors, such as Augustus, were regarded as gods or sons of god and were honored in temples built for them. Life—especially political life—and “religion” were one. Thus, many New Testament words that we often think of as having specialized spiritual meanings, such as dikaiosynē, were part of the vocabulary of Greek and Roman political life. Here are some examples with their meanings:6

• “lord” (Greek kyrios): a ruler, emperor, master
• “son of God” (Greek huios theou): a ruler or emperor with divine authorization or status
• “good news,” “gospel” (Greek euangel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Terms of Justice
• Part 1: Apocalyptic Justice
• Part 2: Messianic Life
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Glossary and Translations
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Resurrecting Justice
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright