Abstract
Criminal justice is usually retributive – that is, justice is only apparent when an offender receives their just deserts. While Western ideas of criminal justice have historically been influenced by Christian tradition, doctrine and theology, in this article the Lord’s Prayer is used as a starting point to challenge conventional thinking. The article considers the prayer’s emphasis on God’s kingdom, and on forgiveness. Through the lens of retributivism there is little room for forgiveness, and kingdom justice would be an injustice. It is argued that the Lord’s Prayer turns notions of justice upside down. Implications are discussed.
Introduction
The Lord’s Prayer is familiar to virtually all Christians – and quite a few non-believers – who have learned to recite it, maybe sometimes without thinking. Yet, it is a huge prayer with wide implications, the perfect model given by Jesus when asked by one of his disciples, ‘Lord, teach us to pray’ (Luke 11.1).
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For this article, the Lord’s Prayer is a starting point to challenge conventional thinking on criminal justice. The focus is the prayer’s call for God to ‘forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors’ (Matt. 6.12). It is the only part of the prayer that Jesus clarifies in the following verses: ‘For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins’ (Matt. 6.14–15). It is a tough ask for anyone; as J. I. Packer notes, ‘the question is: can I say the Lord’s Prayer?’
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Are these words that we can say and mean them? According to R. T. Kendall: If then, we are going to be followers of Jesus, we do get a wonderful fringe benefit – we get to pray the Lord’s Prayer – but we are trapped! We have to promise to forgive. We cannot pick and choose which of these petitions suits us. We are brought face to face with the heart of Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of heaven, and we are forced to apply his words, or not pray this prayer at all.
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Can we agree that forgiveness is an outrageous human act? In our society where might makes right, a society of a myriad of victims, each licking his or her cherished wounds, forgiveness seems crazy … So right here is where the Lord’s Prayer is most difficult to pray.
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An emphasis on loving enemies and forgiving debtors is immediately problematic for a secular criminal justice system predicated, as the criminologist Nils Christie puts it, on ‘the inflicting of pain, intended as pain’. 7 Punishment is retributive, returning pain for pain with the aim that the offender receives their just deserts. 8 This article considers conventional meanings of criminal justice, including Christian influence. It is argued that criminal justice informed by the Lord’s Prayer would look very different. The article also draws on the Lord’s Prayer’s emphasis on kingdom, in praying ‘your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt. 6.10). It is contended that the Lord’s Prayer provides an alternative understanding of justice, a kingdom justice to be applied here on earth today as a foretaste of the kingdom come. Implications for criminal justice are discussed.
Criminal (in)justice
For good or ill, interpretations of Christian tradition, doctrine and theology have had historical influence on Western ideas of criminal justice. It is also possible that criminal justice theory and practice have had a reciprocal influence on Christian thinking. Literal translations of lex talionis, or an ‘eye for an eye’ (Deut. 19.21), and a view of God as a vengeful moral authority, 9 have contributed to retributive understandings of justice. For instance, according to Tim Gorringe, satisfaction theories of atonement drawing on Anselm have ‘legitimated the idea that people have to suffer for their offences’. Yet, Gorringe continues: ‘this interpretation has never been hegemonic. There have always been other ways of understanding the cross.’ 10
It is a question of whether God is vengeful or graceful, a theme to which this article returns. But first, to provide some context, during the 1970s a belief that nothing works in penal practice led to a collapse in what had been labelled a ‘rehabilitative ideal’. 11 Thus, if there were thought to be little or no utilitarian benefits of punishment – in terms of preventing future criminality and encouraging offenders to desist from crime – then that left retribution as a primary justification for punishing individuals, marking the seriousness of the offence, and ensuring that the offender received their just deserts. Since then, populist penal politics have dictated that increasingly punitive and retributive sentences have been handed down: for instance, three-strike policies in the USA and mandatory minimum terms for serious offences in the UK. 12 The result has been – in the USA in particular – the warehousing of prisoners with little on offer by way of rehabilitation. Locking offenders away in an already overcrowded prison compounds the pains of imprisonment. 13 It may incapacitate offenders, keeping them out of circulation and giving potential respite to victims of crime, but at what cost? In the USA in particular, there have been racial and class undertones to patterns of sentencing, 14 thereby criminalizing large sections of the population.
While many would be appalled by this, the notion that justice is, by definition, retributive has been broadly accepted; as Hauerwas observes, ‘Good people, morally substantive people, rightly want revenge.’ 15 Criminal justice in the West can be seen as the seeking of revenge by harming those found guilty through exile or separation. At its extreme, in some jurisdictions this is permanently through the death penalty, but more commonly through incarceration or by simply limiting freedoms in some other way. Hauerwas asserts that, ‘contrary to the liberal assumption that justice and vengeance are opposites, justice is a “purification” of the moral impetus behind vengeance’. 16 Vengeance can be limitless, yet retribution – for instance, an eye for an eye 17 – limits our level of punishment. But, retribution – causing another pain because they have caused us pain – does not elevate the punisher to a higher moral position. To return the discussion to the Lord’s Prayer and its emphasis on forgiveness, a very different view of justice is possible that suggests a higher response, offering hope rather than pain.
Jesus offers a higher moral response in Matthew 5.38–39 by stating: ‘You have heard that it was said, “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.” But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.’
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According to conventional retributivism, what Jesus proposes is the opposite of justice, it is an injustice that retribution has not been served. Contemporary individualism dictates that I may wish to lead my life how I choose so long as my life choices do not unduly harm or offend another.
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Thus, anyone who causes me harm or offence is in the wrong and should be punished for it. Retribution is therefore a natural reaction and, according to Nicholas Wolterstorff, it is also a right: To forgive the person who has wronged one is to forgo exercising some or all of one’s retributive rights. But one can genuinely forgo exercising one’s retributive rights only if one recognizes that one has them.
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Biblical understandings of justice point more in the direction of restorative than retributive justice. Biblically, ‘justice’ has to do not so much with punishment as with healing, restoring relationships, and fostering the well-being of the entire community.
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Pronouncing judgement may be socially necessary but it is certainly morally perilous, constituting as it does an invitation to forget that we are made of the same clay as the offender.
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A purer form of justice
If God is more graceful than vengeful, then what the world sees as an injustice – that retribution is not served – becomes a purer form of justice. According to N. T. Wright, justice is ‘the intention of God, expressed from Genesis to Revelation, to set the whole world right’. 31 This setting ‘the whole world right’ concerns the building of God’s kingdom – a key petition in the Lord’s Prayer – rather than the infliction of retributive pain and seeking just deserts. For instance, Isaiah 30 details a people who have turned away from God; but rather than retribution, at verse 18 it states: ‘Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice.’ Justice here is equated with grace and compassion and not retribution and just desert. God’s agape love for humanity, his desire to see his kingdom come, ‘on earth as it is in heaven’, trumps any reciprocity. As Leroy Pelton observes, ‘Clinging to the premise that justice is desert, and believing in it, yet also admiring agape, scholars of religion 32 … can do no more than wrestle with the incompatibility of the two, as if trying to make a round peg fit a square hole.’ 33
Wolterstorff looks at the place for agape love in relation to justice and considers a hypothetical situation where someone is attacked by another. 34 Wolterstorff asks, ‘So what do you, as an agapist, do in such a case? So far as I can see, you tolerate injustice. You do nothing.’ He is right that to tolerate injustice is ‘an untenable position’; but showing love for enemies, and forgiving others, does not mean standing aside when someone is suffering. It is possible to intervene, demonstrating love and recognizing the wrong being done, but also not to seek revenge. Here, justice is the same as righteousness – and, in English versions of the New Testament, the Greek dikaiosune is frequently translated as ‘justice’ or ‘righteousness’. Again, according to Wolterstorff, ‘So when the New Testament writers speak of dikaiosune, are they speaking of righteousness or of justice? Is Jesus blessing those who hunger and thirst for righteousness or those who hunger and thirst for justice?’ 35 For Wolterstorff, it is an important distinction as he sees a search for justice as interpersonal, while he sees a search for righteousness as seeking personal moral improvement. But the distinction disappears in the context of the Church as the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12.12–31). Yes, followers of Christ may each individually search for righteousness, but personal moral improvement is only possible through interconnection with others – and a search for justice for others reflects one’s own personal morality. The problem, if there is one, is in the use of language for modern readers who can view the word ‘righteous’ as old-fashioned and even as a negative, as in being self-righteous. 36 But to be righteous is to be just, and to be just is to be righteous. And justice in this context is not the same as retribution – even if the world sees the avoidance of retribution as an injustice.
Other than Christ, there is no purely righteous person; similarly, none of us are purely just (in the same way I have argued that no one is purely law-abiding, and all are sinners). But a follower of Christ more resolutely pursues both righteousness and justice, with God’s grace for when we do not quite make it. As Willimon and Hauerwas observe, ‘We have run up a debt with God so large that all we can do is ask for forgiveness.’
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To bring the discussion back to the Lord’s Prayer, Willimon and Hauerwas state: We pray as the forgiven and the unforgiving, as those who have been spectacularly forgiven and loved by Christ on the cross yet who are ridiculously unforgiving and unloving when it comes to the wrongs we suffer from others.
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There are no conditions accompanying the Lord’s Prayer that give even a loophole not to forgive until they are sorry. We do not have that luxury. It takes minimal grace to forgive when they are sorry; it takes maximum grace to forgive when they are not sorry, or do not know what they have done.
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Discussion and conclusions
Those involved with secular criminal justice would question the relevance of a discussion of Christian theology for notions of justice. Yet, in the West at least, and as noted at the start of this article, interpretations of Christian theology have long had influence over what is regarded as just, leading to prolonged emphasis on retribution and just deserts. This article has argued that a truer interpretation of God’s (kingdom) justice – as informed by the Lord’s Prayer – is more to do with forgiveness and reconciliation, and the building of his kingdom, and less about punishment and just deserts. It is a radical departure from what has been the status quo for a very long time, and would for many be seen as injustice rather than justice; as Willimon and Hauerwas put it: in commanding us to forgive, Jesus is inviting us to take charge, to turn the world around, to throw a monkey wrench in the eternal wheel of retribution and vengeance … We can take charge, turn things around, be victors rather than victims. We can forgive.
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The logical consequence of this discussion is that, if we are to take the Lord’s Prayer seriously, then we ought to embrace kingdom justice, offer forgiveness and turn away from retributive punishments – abandon capital punishment where it persists and decarcerate, using prisons far less than we do. For some it would be an argument for penal abolition. 46 Instead, alternative resolution that invites offenders back into the community should be promoted, perhaps in line with restorative justice – although this should be a substitute for punishment rather than an add-on, as is so often the case.
That said, and while morally problematic, there may still be a few offenders who require separation for public protection. Although we are instructed to turn the other cheek (Matt. 5.38), the morally right thing to do is not always straightforward, especially when dealing with some very dangerous people who may offend again – although there are far fewer fitting this category than are currently incarcerated. 47 Separation for public protection could focus on rehabilitation and would not have to be in a prison as conventionally recognized. But, of course, while we might say we are forgiving and want to show love for enemies, this approach would instead repay pain with pain. Answers are not easy, or necessarily comfortable.
The Lord’s Prayer has always been radical. It is still revolutionary when applied to issues of criminal justice, turning everything upside down. Justice is no longer the seeking of retribution, but, in the words of N. T. Wright, it is setting ‘the whole world right’. 48 It is centred on forgiveness, a kingdom justice to be applied here today as a foretaste of the kingdom come. As noted, the Greek dikaiosune can be translated as both ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’. If we seek to be right before God and before others, then this is justice. The challenge in a criminal justice context is that the world will see this as an injustice, that retribution is not served.