In the Reformation period this chapter would have been entitled: ‘Of Divine and Human Righteousness’, the frame of reference being that human righteousness should conform to the righteousness of God. But how was this correspondence viewed then, and how is it viewed now?
Secular states are an achievement of the Enlightenment. Previously, and outside the modern world still, states were formed through their political religions and were under the sway, and subject to the retribution, of their gods.[1]According to the ancient doctrine of the state, worship of the gods of city, country and state is the state’s supreme purpose (finis principalis).[2] The state’s gods provide for its prosperity and peace, so the state’s citizens must provide for their appropriate worship. The favour of these gods is won through public sacrifice, but if there are famines, pestilences, natural catastrophes and wars, these are signs that the gods are angry because of the blasphemy, insufficient cultic observance or the disobedience of the state’s citizens. The people must do penance, as once in Nineveh, and must make special sacrifices, or they must slay the wicked who are in their midst. The book of Jonah tells of both reactions: the storm at sea, because one of God’s prophets has taken flight, and the favour of this same God conferred on the repentant people in Nineveh. To ensure the favour of the gods was also the preeminent task of oriental rulers, for they were all priestly kings. The Roman caesar too was the pontifex maximus of Rome’s state gods. The Chinese emperor certainly stood over against his subjects as ‘Son of Heaven’, but if he fell into disfavour with heaven and his country was visited by famine, plague, earthquakes and floods, he could be overthrown. The Moloch in Carthage demanded children as sacrifices, the Aztecs and Mayas offered their gods still quivering hearts.
Against the background of an interpretation like this, blasphemy is the worst of crimes. It is directed not against human beings but against the gods who protect them, and indirectly puts the life of the whole people in the greatest danger.[3] This crime against the gods calls forth their vengeance. The blasphemer has to die in order that the gods may be pacified and the people survive. In ancient Israel there was a legal regulation that ‘He who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death: all the congregation shall stone him’ (Lev. 24.16).
According to the early Christian testimonies, Jesus was condemned by the high priest as blasphemer, although he was executed by the Romans as a rebel against the imperium: ‘Then the high priest tore his robes, and said, “He has uttered blasphemy. Why do we still need witnesses? You have now heard his blasphemy. What is your judgement?” They answered, “He deserves death”’ (Matt. 26.65-66).
Jesus’ ‘blasphemy’ was the revelation of his divine sonship.
In the pre-Constantinian period Christians in the Roman empire were accused of being ‘atheists’, and were persecuted on those grounds if they were not prepared to pay homage to the gods of state and nature and to the cult of the emperor, because they could not, as they said, get involved with ‘demons’.[4] Justin Martyr called himself an ‘atheist’ in reference to these gods. Discipleship of the Christ crucified in the name of these gods freed Christians from this fear of the gods and instead made them in times of need ‘enemies of the state’ who had to be sacrificed to those gods. Tertullian writes, full of ironic bitterness: ‘If the Tiber bursts its banks (setting Rome under water), if the Nile does not burst its banks (and the land of Egypt remains infertile), the cry is immediately: the Christians to the lions!’
Through the emperors Theodosius and Justinian, the Christian faith became the Roman imperial religion and thus took over the role that had been played by the ancient pagan state religion, without calling it in question. In Christian legislation, from then on the pagan cults counted as ‘blasphemous’. The death of Jesus was laid at the door of the Jews in order that, with Pontius Pilate, the Romans might wash their hands in innocence. Christianity became one more ‘tit for tat’ religion.[5] As late as 1706 the law and theological faculties in the university of Tübingen declared jointly: ‘That blasphemy was the most horrible and greatest of crimes, whereby God could easily be moved to wrath and could avenge the outrage on the whole land through famine, earthquake and pestilence.’[6]
In the German states, in times of emergency, the Protestant prince, as simultaneously the supreme bishop, would call for days of repentance so that God’s wrath might be turned away. In Germany, the ‘Day of Repentance and Prayer’ was a public holiday held in Protestant regions until a few years ago; it was thought of as a day observed by the state church in order to turn away the wrath of God.
The Catholic bishops of Portugal interpreted the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755, with its more than 20,000 dead, as an educative punishment by God for the sinful inhabitants of the city, and thereby roused the protest atheism of Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire.
The Protestant fundamentalist Jerry Falwell interpreted the attack by Islamist terrorists on the World Trade Center in New York as God’s punishment for ‘homosexual New York’, as if God were a terrorist God.
When the tsunami in the Indonesian province of Aceh left hundreds of thousands dead, fundamentalist mullahs interpreted this as the punishment of their God for the lax Islamic observance of the inhabitants. In Africa the theological pronouncement that AIDS is a divine punishment means death for women affected by the disease. They are stigmatized socially and are excluded and cast out. Today this ‘tit for tat’ religion has not disappeared either publicly or from the private life of many people. In the face of possible deadly perils, ‘pacts’ are always made with providence, and catastrophes are always followed by a search for scapegoats who have to be sacrificed.
In modern democratic constitutions blasphemy against the state’s gods have been replaced by offensive behaviour towards religious communities. It is now no longer the gods who are protected; it is the religious sensibilities of men and women. In Prussia, a law of 1794 formulated the accepted standard. According to this, to offend religious sensibilities and insult religious communities was a punishable offence. The protection of peace, religion and peoples’ sensibilities takes the place of blasphemy in the German constitution of 1919 and in the Basic Law of the German Federal Republic. For this three objective reasons can be given:
1. The theological reason
‘For the Deity to be injured is impossible; that he should revenge himself on human beings because of an infringement of the respect due to Him is inconceivable; that it must be made good through the punishment of the offender is foolishness. But the church, as moral person, has a right to respect. Anyone who belittles its purposes belittles the society, anyone who disparages the object of religious worship … disparages himself.’[7]
2. The moral reason
The good is not performed out of fear of punishment by the gods or out of expectation of a heavenly reward. That is religious slave morality. The good is done simply because it is the good.[8] That is the liberty of God’s children.
3. The Christian reason
For believers, with Christ’s giving of himself for the reconciliation of the godless world, fear of the gods and sacrificial cults have been ended once and for all. It is not the wrath of God that has to be reconciled but the godless world: God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor. 5.19). To put it in the old sacrificial language: God himself brings the sacrifice, not for his own reconciliation but for ours. Natural catastrophes and stroke of fate are not divine revelations; they are the outcome of a disrupted nature for whose reconciliation and new creation Christians hope.
The ancient Indian doctrine of Karma transfers the divine justice from the transcendent sphere to immanence.[9] Karma means the consequences of acts which ensue with logical necessity: ‘As one acts, so one will be after death’ or, to put it more simply: ‘If you steal corn you will become a rat’. Or, as a German proverb says: ‘Life punishes latecomers.’ The idea behind this is an ‘automatic retaliation causality linked to the acts committed’.[10] In India what was thought of was a ‘subtle potentiality’ which adheres to the atman (which is something like what in Greek thinking is the soul) and forms its further forms of existence. Everyone forges his own destiny through his good and evil acts. It is a cosmic law of retaliation, expressive of the divine justice, which through the karma doctrine is applied to the individual human subject. The law certainly affects everyone, but its foundation is the inequality between human beings. Everyone is determined by the karma of his ancestors and must try to alleviate or even to overcome the karmic consequences of previous actions. With the reincarnation doctrine that goes together with this, every individual life is embedded in the wider complex of generations, and inasmuch as the reincarnation doctrine extends to the animal realm, it can be seen in the wider context of all the living. ‘Karma is the fuel of the samsara, the cycle of rebirth, and all the efforts of the devout person is directed towards producing no more karma at all, so that world events in general may be brought to an end.’[11]That can only succeed if the causes of the karma, such as desire and ignorance, are overcome through renunciation and perception.
In the Old Testament this link between act and consequence is presented in a very similar way. ‘The deed returns to the doer.’[12] As the Old Testament scholar Klaus Koch showed in his foundational essay, this is not a matter of a so-called ‘Old Testament retaliation dogma’.[13] He does not, however, go into the proximity to the ancient Indian karma doctrine, although Hebrew thinking starts from an analogous ‘sphere of action which influences destiny’. ‘The act forms an invisible sphere round the author of the act through which one day the corresponding fate will be brought about; the deity watches over this internal human order and continually puts it into force where it is in danger of being diminished.’[14]
Koch also calls this sphere a true reality belonging to the person as his property. It is a link between act and destiny of pure immanent causality, with a necessity resembling a natural law. Because he stresses this aspect of the link between act and destiny so emphatically, he ascribes to God only a spiritual function: God has created this law and watches over it, but he does not intervene because to do so would refute his own decree.
The connection between act and consequence can be seen individually. ‘He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind’, ‘You have made your bed, so you must lie on it’, or—reaching over the generations—‘the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge’.
Bernd Janowski has expanded Koch’s view: no one is bound into an individual connection between act and consequence simply by himself. All human beings are incorporated into the social complexes of the corresponding retaliatory justice: ‘Don’t do to others what you don’t want others to do to you.’ He calls this the ‘reciprocal solidarity’ of a ‘connective justice’.[15] On the other hand the divine justice and this immanent act-consequence law overlap, and are not as sharply divided as Koch thought. ‘Retaliation’ in both a good and a bad sense is always an intervention in history on God’s part. If this were not the case, the God of Israel would not be a ‘living God’, living in historical relationships to his people and his creation; he would be a metaphysical principle.[16]
These ideas are questionable for two reasons. First, the problem on which the ancient Indian karma doctrine and the Old Testament teaching about the connection between act and consequence both break down is not the foreseeing promise of a good destiny or the warning of an evil one, but the retrospective search for an evil act which has to provide the reason for the present evil consequence. Who is guilty when a child is born with a disablement? Who is responsible for a severe illness? The dead in Auschwitz: For what guilt on the part of their forefathers are they supposed to have atoned? The dead of Hiroshima: what karmic retaliation are they supposed to have suffered for what evil acts? To what act does the consequence go back when in the Old Testament we find the question: why do the ungodly prosper, and the just suffer so greatly? There is of course a moral connection between act and consequence: the heavy smoker risks lung cancer, the heavy drinker destroys his liver. But there is not an act-consequence fate. Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not die an early death because he inherited an evil karma from his parents, as a Christian Buddhist from Korea once maintained at a Bonhoeffer congress; he died because he was murdered by the Nazis.
To talk about the link between act and consequence leads us to look only in the direction from act to consequence, and to overlook the reverse way of reading things. But the conclusion from the consequence to the causative act in one’s own life or in the history of earlier generations leads us astray. It shows the untenability of this age-old mythical idea of justice in the Indian karma teaching and in Old Testament Wisdom about a link between act and consequence. No justice rules between act and consequence.
Second, the God of Israel is by no means the moral ground of all reality and the positive power of this process of reality. Karma and the link between act and consequence contradict the God who ‘forgives all your iniquities and heals all your diseases and redeems your life from the Pit (Ps. 103.3–4). This God is himself the power of the new life, which overrules fate and cancels the connection between act and consequence, and instead of endless retaliation and consequences puts life’s new beginning. The divine principle of compassionate justice breaks through the curse of the evil act and repeals it: ‘His mercies are new every morning’ (Lam. 3.23). This is the freedom of the new beginning. There is no other freedom. This is the birth of life in the face of mercy. This is the opening up of a new future in the midst of the compulsions of guilt and the consequences of guilt. The Old Testament is more than the book of fateful act-consequence assessments in ancient Wisdom sayings, it is the book of the liberating promises of Israel’s God, who is the creator of life.[17]
Let us now look at righteousness and justice not as a personal virtue but as social adjustment. An adjustment of this kind is made on the basis of mutuality and equality. It can be a matter of claims, property or chances. To repay good with good and evil with evil has nothing to do with retaliation; it is an equivalence aimed at a peaceful living together. This is expressed in the brilliant definition of the Roman jurist Ulpian: Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum unicuique tribuendi[18]—justice is the constant and perpetual will to give everyone that which is due to them. To everyone his or her own. This is called ‘distributive justice’. It sounds as though all concerned should be equal, but it does not have to presuppose this. In the Roman slave-holding society it could also mean: to every master his own, to every slave what is his or hers: everyone in his own place. But in an ideal society this justice would mean the unity of equality and difference, as was later laid down in the Communist manifesto: ‘To each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ That would be difference without inequality, and an equality without uniformity.
If justice is the ‘constant will’, then what this means in modern words is the security of the law. If everyone is made content with what is his, the task of justice to achieve peace has been fulfilled. The ‘perpetual will’ indicates that the just equivalence never exists as a permanent state but always only as a continuing process. As the social ideal of an absolute harmony in a human society, this definition of justice can at most be the goal of overcoming the injustices which are always present and always emerge anew. As a description of the reality, it is inapplicable. It was therefore also considered to be a perfect heavenly world order to which the imperfect human world order was supposed to correspond.[19] God is the just judge. In just requital, he rewards the good act and punishes the evil one. God gives everyone what is his, in order to preserve his divine world order in peace. Anyone who infringes the human order of law through a crime, therefore also infringes the divine legal order. He must be punished, not merely in order to restore the just human equivalence, but also in order to restore the divine world order. This transcendent dimension is still always used as an argument in the discussion about the death penalty. The murderer must not be punished only by death but must also be sacrificed, in order to achieve an equivalence in heaven as well.
The concern behind the Old Testament rule ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ is not retaliation but an abolition of never-ending retaliation through a just equivalence. Reward and punishment must be appropriate and reasonable if they are to create just peace in a society. Justitia distributiva—distributive justice—must always at the same time be a justitia commutativa—corrective justice—if it is to minister to life and not to death.[20] Distributive justice must be just and equitable.
That brings us to the other side of the principle of just requital: Confucius’s ‘golden rule’. For him too ‘reciprocity’ was already the foundation of his moral teaching—hence his formulation:
Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you’.[21]
In positive terms this means: “Do as you would be done by.”
In Matthew’s Gospel (7.12) Jesus says:
“Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them;
for this is the law and the prophets.”
But this ‘golden rule’ only works between equals and those who are equally strong. In a world where this does not obtain, it seems like a powerless ideal. What does the victor have to fear from the defeated, the strong from the helpless, the winner from the loser, the rich from the poor, the present generation from those still unborn? The strength of the stronger prevails against the rights of the weak. The golden rule does not prevent it. It does not give directions for a just life in an unjust and violent world. Without the liberation of the oppressed, the raising up of the weary and heavy-laden, and the rights of the humiliated and insulted, the golden rule cannot be realized.[22] A ‘global ethics’ based only on this is an ideal, even if a fine one.[23] A realistic global ethics in the face of the world’s present conditions can only be an ethics of liberation on the side of the poor and the earth.
This idea of righteousness and justice has in my view two weaknesses:
First, Justitia distributiva is a justice which establishes what is; it is not a creative justice. The facts of the case are established and are appropriately adjusted in order to restore the order of the just peace. This justice does not act, it reacts. It is directed retrospectively towards what has already happened, so as to adjust it through reward and punishment. What is to each ‘his own’ must already be established in order for it to be distributed. The injustice that has been committed is punished according to the ius talionis (‘an eye for an eye’). Crime and punishment must be balanced so that the adjustment can be made. But this does not help the victim of the evil deed, and the unjust does not as result become again just.
Second, the most surprising thing is that this justice is directed only towards the acts and the perpetrators, not the victims and their sufferings. It is a justice according to works, not suffering. It is a justice that is completely perpetrator-orientated, in line with the requital. But is a man or woman not more than the sum of his or her good and evil acts? Does a person go on living solely in the consequences of his works? Where is the person who is called by name? From the karma doctrine, via the act-consequence idea, down to the Roman doctrine of justice we can see this one-sided perpetrator-orientation, and the neglect of consideration for the victims. With this alone no justice can be brought into this unjust and violent world. Certainly, when we look at the sufferings and the victims we are recalled rather to the concept of compassion. But in unjust situations is compassion not a concrete form of justice?
Let us now turn to the other concept of justice, which is less familiar but highly efficacious: that is the creative, saving justice and righteousness which puts things to rights: justitia justificans—justifying justice. In Babylon, the king, as representative of the sun god Samas, was supposed to execute the divine righteousness and justice. With the sun, this righteousness rises in the morning and awakens everything to life. It leads the land and the people along the right paths. It cares for the land’s fertility. Consequently, everything that heals and is healthful, and everything that has been put right and is upright, counts as just and righteous. Here ‘to judge’ has the positive sense of raising up, healing and giving life. As executor of this vital force, the king has to see to it that the strong does not harm the weak, that the widows and orphans are helped to their rights, that the country is protected from human exploitation and destruction. Here we have to do with a cosmological concept of justice and righteousness for which the sun is the symbol.[24]
Israel took up this creative and transforming concept of righteousness and justice from Babylon early on. YHWH is extolled as ‘the sun of righteousness’ (Mal. 4.2). According to the Sermon on the Mount too God ‘makes his sun rise on the evil and the good’ (Matt. 5.45) so that both may live. This is the reason for the love of our enemies which is to replace the repayment of enmity by enmity. True, YHWH does not like the sun merely stand in the cosmos as the power of life; as the creator of his creation he is also free towards it. But everywhere his righteousness is saving, healing and creative righteousness. It is not only manifested in the life-furthering cycles of the cosmos but in the contingent events of the people’s salvation history too, and it is also experienced in the history of personal life. And when YHWH finally comes to live with his people on his earth, he will ‘judge’ the earth with righteousness and justice, which means that he will finally put right all things, all conditions, and all peoples. To this Psalm 96.11-13 is the most impressive testimony:
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
let the sea roar and all that fills it;
let the field exult, and everything in it!
. . . For he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with his truth.[25]
In Psalm 82 this justice-creating righteousness for the poor and the earth is even elevated as the standard for the gods:
YHWH stands in the assembly of the gods,
in the midst of the gods he pronounces judgment:
‘How long will you judge unjustly
and favour the wicked?
Give justice to the weak and the orphans,
uphold the rights of the wretched and the destitute,
free the weak and the poor, deliver them from the power of the wicked!’
They have neither understanding nor insight,
they walk about in darkness.
All the foundations of the earth are shaken.
……………………
Arise, YHWH, judge the earth,
for all the peoples belong to you.[26]
Here judging with righteousness does not mean judging good and evil acts; it embraces all aspects of saving and having compassion, helping and healing, justifying and putting right. It is not confined to human beings but actually applies first to the earth, with which human beings live and suffer. Where human beings are concerned, the acts are not weighed up without respect of persons, but the persons are perceived in their wretchedness and their suffering, so that they may be given their rights, be raised up and made just. This saving righteousness and justice has no bandages over its eyes, like the Roman Justitia, but looks very sharply. God ‘judges’ inasmuch as he saves and creates justice for those who suffer injustice and violence. ‘In thy righteousness deliver me’, prays the psalmist (71.2) and trusts to the time ‘when God arose to establish judgment to save all the oppressed of the earth’ (Ps. 76.9; 103.6). Saving, having compassion, healing and raising up are here the diverse life-furthering forms of God’s creative righteousness. That is why righteousness comes to be one of God’s names: ‘And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness”’ (Jer. 23.6).
In a capitalist competitive society, things are not just, because new inequalities are continually created anew. That is why the cry for social justice never falls silent. According to the reports of the German parliament on poverty and wealth, the cleft between poor and rich is growing ever wider, even though every political effort is made to preserve the country’s unity. In Germany, the difference in the chances in life open to the unemployed and those on social security, who are at the bottom of the ladder, and the super-rich elite with their million-dollar bonuses, who are at the top, is insupportable for a democracy. As the postwar years showed, one can live in poverty if everyone is in the same plight, but not if things are going undeservedly well for other people. It is not the poverty that hurts; it is the injustice. We shall first look at extreme cases where there are obvious perpetrators on the one side, and on the others clearly detectible victims; and we shall then go on to ask about just social contracts in times of growing inequality.[27]
For the helpless and humiliated victims of injustice and violence, the cry for justice is the cry for God. Even the silence of the weary and heavy-laden is an expression of the cry for God and his justice. For it is not just the physical poverty, the hunger and thirst, which the unemployed and homeless suffer; it is even more the humiliations and disparagements. Their self-respect and self-esteem are degraded and turn into self- contempt and a feeling of being lost. The many legal and illegal migrants at the frontiers of the wealthy countries become people without civil rights, and whose human rights are ignored. Today the brutal fact of being without redress at the mercy of injustice and violence through persons and institutions is an experience for a majority of the human race.
Things are no better for the weaker, and hence misused, creatures of this earth, and the earth itself. The ‘silent spring’ and the threatening climate catastrophe are indictments enough. Anyone who still hears the echo of the cry of the Christ dying on the cross, hears today the cry out of the depths of God-forsakenness from the masses of the poor, and from the demolished forests and devastated landscapes of the earth. In the news, we take note only of the appalling figures of the starving and those facing premature death; but we know too that behind the figures human faces are looking at us.
The other cry for God and justice and righteousness is the silence of the perpetrators and their willing helpers. When they humiliated and exploited their victims, they became the assistants of evil. They let themselves be seduced by the greed for wealth and the lust for power, or they did only what was expected of them, or was commanded. They too became victims of evil, but unlike the suffering victims of evil they became its willing servants. They strayed into a vicious circle of injustice and violence from which there is no way out. Out of their silence and their self-righteousness can we hear a cry for God and justice? No. But we recognize it in their blindness to what they have done knowingly or unknowingly, and in their hardness of heart towards the laments over the social frigidity they disseminate. In their cynical egotism there is a cry against God and against righteousness and justice. ‘I hope there is no God and no higher justice’, said a German army officer to my father in Russia in 1944, ‘for if there is God and justice, a terrible fate is waiting for the German people at the end of the war, after these mass murders of Jews and Russians.’
Just as in their God-forsakenness the victims of injustice and violence cry out for God and justice, so the perpetrators of injustice and violence protest against God: there dare not be any justice to condemn what they have done and caused.
Yet we do not experience injustice and violence merely individually as victims or perpetrators, and not just socially in conflicts between perpetrators and victims. We experience it in highly organized societies as well, and generally speaking, systemically in the economic, social and political conditions. These are the systems in which we exist, and which regulate what we do and leave undone. Be it the low-wage sector or the unfairly bought up cheap products from Bangladesh, these are unjust structures and they are full of systemic acts of violence.
The economic laws of the market make many people poor and losers in the struggle for profits; the social structures stop many people from rising and keep them below the poverty level. People talk about the ‘two-thirds society’, in which two-thirds of the population exclude the other third and keep it down. We exist in political structures dividing the wealthy nations of the First World from the poor nations of the Third. We enjoy our present existence at the expense of future generations, which will have to pay off our debts. Finally, we eat and drink in a human world which plunders nature and diminishes the diversity of plant and animal species year after year.
Life at the expense of others is organized in the systems we have described. They make everyone who exists in them guilty towards the poor, the earth, and the children. In these systems it is not so much the evil we do which accuses us as the good we leave undone. It is true that the systems have become fixed in the form of objective powers which rule us through violence and fear, but they are man-made, so they can be changed by men. Like the dictatorship systems of the twentieth century, they can collapse like a pack of cards if men and women outside them and within them rise up and together demand righteousness and justice. The great financial systems built up on embezzlement and debts broke down in 2008. That shows how closely these objectified powers resemble those houses built on sand.
Christians see in the life and sufferings of Jesus Christ the revelation of God’s righteousness in an unrighteous and violent world. In his discipleship, they turn to victims and perpetrators and press towards just and non-violent conditions. Let us look first at the victims, then the perpetrators, and finally the systemic powers.
Christ among the Victims. According to the Gospels, Jesus’ gaze was directed first of all to the poor, the outcasts of his people—that is to say to the victims of injustice and violence, not to the perpetrators. His message brought the kingdom of God ‘to the poor’ (Luke 4.18), not the rich; his healing commitment was to the sick, not the healthy; his friendship embraced the outcasts, sinners and tax collectors; we see him among the lost, not ‘the good people’.[28] Just as his gospel roused the humiliated, letting them stand upright in faith, so he brought the healing power of the divine Spirit to the sick, and divine justice to those without rights, and raised up the victims of violence.
Through the way he behaved, Jesus manifested to the victims God’s compassion: God is beside them just as Jesus himself is beside them. He evidently saw the unimportant people as important, and the people who had been cast out by a self-righteous society as people called by God, as he says in the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. The lost are his first love. For the people to whom the society of the rich, healthy and righteous offered no future—the ‘no future generation’ of his time—he opened up the future of the kingdom of God on earth. In this way be pioneered a great ‘reevaluation of values’. Now ‘the devil doesn’t take the hindmost’; with God they will now be the first. That is the great reversal in the world; it can also be called God’s revolution.
So it is no wonder that the one who was beside the victims himself became the victim of the righteous and the powerful. The one group rejected him, the other crucified him. If God goes wherever Jesus goes, then Jesus brings God to the victims. And in his sufferings and dying he brings God close to the suffering and dying in this world. He himself entered into God-forsakenness on the cross in order to bring God to the forsaken, and so as to become their brother in their extremity. Talking about this great divine compassion in the passion of Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his death cell: ‘Only the suffering God can help.’
The justice and righteousness of God manifested in Jesus is victim-orientated: God creates justice for those who suffer injustice and violence.
Christ for the Perpetrators. From early on, Christianity saw in the suffering and death of Christ the vicarious atonement for the guilt of the perpetrators. Following the pattern of the ‘Suffering Servant’ in Isaiah 53, they saw in the crucified Christ the one ‘who bears the sins of the world’. Paul explains what Christ has done for us as being ‘put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification’ (Rom. 4.25). In Christ’s giving of himself for us is the forgiveness of guilt—in his resurrection our new righteousness.
Is an atonement of this kind necessary? I believe that no one who has become guilty can live with a clear view of his guilt. Once he recognizes it, he begins to hate himself. Consequently we ward off reproaches and suppress our unpleasant insights because they are unbearable. If we see ourselves through the eyes of the victims, the guilt debases us to the depths. In Germany we experienced this after Auschwitz, and rightly so.
Can guilt be ‘forgiven’ at all? What is ‘forgiveness’ supposed to mean? No one can ever undo what has once been done or ‘make good’ a wrong. All guilt fetters a human being to his past, and robs him of the freedom for his future. Even God cannot undo what has been done. Mass murder remains mass murder. But God can break the fetters of guilt for what has been done and make the past no longer a weight on the present, and in this way he can bring about a new beginning. That happens when God like Christ on the cross ‘bears’ the sins. When God takes our guilt on himself, he takes it away and we are free: ‘With his stripes we are healed’ (Isa. 53.5).[29]
For the perpetrators of injustice and violence this means nothing less than dying to the power of evil, whose servants they have been, and breaking with the systems of injustice, in order to live the new righteousness with the risen Christ. Anything else would be ‘cheap grace’ and without efficacy.
How is this possible? According to the ancient tested and tried sacrament of penance, a human being frees himself from the compulsions of guilt and arrives at a new beginning of life in righteousness in three steps:
1. Through recognition of the sufferings of the victims and confession of his own guilt towards them, that is through the step into the light of truth. Because perpetrators always have only short memories, they are dependent on the long memories of the victims if they are to arrive at self-knowledge. They find themselves when they look at themselves through the eyes of their victims.
2. The second step is a change of mind and a reversal in the direction their lives take. That is bound up with the breaking of the ruling systems producing the injustice, so as no longer to live at the expense of the poor, of the earth and of children, but to live for them. It is a new orientation towards the shared life in righteousness and justice.
3. Finally, the perpetrators only arrive at a just community with their victims if they do everything to eliminate the damage they have caused. This is also called ‘restitution’—‘making good’—although we know that nothing that is done can be ‘made good’, and that nothing in the past is ever ‘surmounted’. But satisfactio operum—or compensation through something performed—is the valuable beginning for the new community which must be sought and can also be found.[30]
For the perpetrators the churches have developed this sacrament of penance, or better: the sacrament of conversion—in German Umkehr, literally an about-turn. For sinners the Reformation proclaimed justifying faith. But both ways are orientated in a one-sided way towards the perpetrators. What about the victims? Do we not need a sacrament for the raising up of the victims, and a proclamation of the justification of the victims of the wrong?
After many discussions and experiences, I would make the following suggestion:
1. The victims of wrong, injustice and violence must first be brought out of their humiliation. They need a space of trust where they can cry out what has been done to them; they need ears that listen to what they have to say; they must rediscover their self-esteem. They must be able to utter their abuse and their shame. Priests have learnt to listen to the confessions of the perpetrators; we must all learn to listen to the cries of the victims, to loosen their tongues so as to free them from insupportable memories. Expressing what they have suffered is the first step to the truth which makes the victims free.
2. The second step is the lifting of their hearts to God and the rising up out of the humiliation, life with head held high. The victims also need conversion—a new direction. It is the resurrection to life and the experience of life loved after the sufferings over the ravages of their lives.
3. The third step may then lead on to a renunciation of retaliation for the evil experienced, in order not to be dominated by what has been suffered, but so as to repay evil with good (Rom. 12.21), first in oneself and then in the other person. Forgiveness is a medicine for one’s own soul too, if it is to be freed from bitterness and from the role of victim. The victims have ultimately the keys of heaven and hell in their hands. They can open the gates of hell for the perpetrators. The forgiveness of guilt is the divine right of the victims and an expression of their sovereignty towards the miserable perpetrators.[31] To forgive guilt frees the victims from helplessness and sadness, and frees those who have become guilty from the fetters of their guilt, and for both victims and the guilty it brings about the new beginning of a just community.
Christianity brings the divine righteousness and justice for victims and perpetrators into society. The organized form of Christianity is the church, but in order to avoid a clerical misunderstanding, I prefer to talk about Christianity. How does Christianity witness to the divine righteousness and justice in what Karl Barth calls the Bürgergemeinde—’the civil community’ or community of citizens?[32]
It witnesses through social service and prophecy, that is to say, through commitment to the victims and through criticism of the perpetrators. The connection between the two things is self-evident. The person who visits the sick and hears them complain that they have been left alone and forgotten by their families, goes to these families and appeals to their consciences. Through their congregational and organized social services the churches turn to the victims of this society and try to give them support, practically and spiritually. They surround the disabled with compassion and take in the unemployed and the homeless, and provide meals for the hungry. For this the churches are valued by many people, and in Germany are supported and furthered by the state. But they are also used by state and society in order to limit the damage caused by their systemic injustice. In order to prevent this, Christian service to the victims of this society must go hand in hand with public, prophetic criticism of the abuses resulting from the systems in force. Its service makes the church popular. This critical prophetic voice may in certain circumstances make it unpopular among many people. But what is at stake is the truth which alone can make free—societies too—and the righteousness and justice which is meant to give life to all. With its understanding of the justice and righteousness which justifies and sets things to rights, Christianity must push for the relevant legal enactments and legal reforms, for the Christian understanding of God’s righteousness is not meant just for Christians but is intended to be an anticipation of the new earth for all human beings.
Some liberation theologians believe that the poor are called by God to bring about a truly human society, and that the oppressed are called to set up a humanely just society: ‘The last shall be first.’ This seems to me to be asking too much of the poor and the oppressed, whose ‘preferential option’ is quite certainly not poverty. The person who knows what poverty and oppression are does not yet know life and freedom. The social situation does not as yet create the right conviction. But it is true that the human emancipation of men and women begins when ‘all the conditions are overturned in which the human being is a humiliated, an enslaved, a forsaken, a disdained being’, as the young Karl Marx rightly maintained.[33] For this all human beings must be won, not just the poor and oppressed, who are often no longer in the position to act.
The humiliating conditions are certainly economic. Consequently the fulfilment of material requirements is the beginning of justice. Without liberation from hunger, homelessness and unemployment, equality in a society, which is the presupposition for social peace, will be lacking. But the circumstances to be overcome are more than economic. Their humiliating character also touches human self-esteem. Consequently the fulfilment of the right to freedom is the correlation of the material fulfilment. Human dignity is no more possible without economic liberation than, conversely, economic liberation is possible without the recognition of human dignity and the claiming of human rights. ‘There is no human dignity without a stop to material distress any more than there is truly human happiness without a stop to old or new subservience’.[34] An inward raising of the consciousness of human dignity cannot be imposed from outside. It must come from within, so that people can cease to be the passive objects of distress and compulsions and can become the determining subjects of their own lives. People in the GDR offered a (literally) wonderful example in November 1989 when they rose up after forty years of political oppression and ideological paternalism and became the determining subjects of the ‘peaceful revolution’ with the cry ‘We are the people’.
In Israel’s history, the Exodus from slavery into freedom was followed on Sinai by the making of the covenant between the twelve tribes and God, and with each other. Symbolically, that means that the righteousness which puts things right for the victims and the justifying justice of God for the perpetrators aim at the covenant of the free and equal. The saving and transforming righteousness leads people to the righteousness which has also been termed faithfulness to the community or to the covenant.[35] In the covenant the equal partners pledge themselves to preserve their freedom, inwardly and outwardly. The twelve tribes of Israel swore a covenant with God and each other. Every later covenant made with a king was incorporated in this covenant between God and people. If a king broke the presupposed covenant with God, he counted as depraved.
In European political history, alliances such as the leagues between cities, or the Hanseatic League, or farmers’ associations, were always concluded ‘before God’. Israel’s covenant counted down to modern times as a model for political popular sovereignty.[36] In the covenant (later called the constitution) politics became ‘the self-government of the people, by the people, and for the people’.[37] Federal theology and federal politics became midwives for modern democracy, which overcame the absolutism of rulers ‘by the grace of God’ and for feudalism and—in principle—also surmounted class rule. Direct democracy is the foundation, representative democracy is the secondary offshoot, and is not a substitute for the former.
The fact that the popular sovereignty of modern state constitutions has a transcendent reference finds expression in the preamble to the Basic Law of the German Federal Republic as it does in the concept of American democracy as a ‘nation under God’. German members of parliament are ‘subject only to their consciences’ (Basic Law, Article 38). The reference to Israel’s covenant theology also makes the continually misused chapter 13 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans obsolete: ‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.’ In the context of the early Christian period this must surely have been addressed by the apostle to Jewish-Christian anarchists in the Roman empire. A modern democratic state is not a ‘governing authority’ in this sense (in the 1611 Bible the phrase used is ‘the powers that be’).
In modern democracies Christianity works for the rights of the victims and for the conversion of the perpetrators, and supports justice in the covenant of the equal and free. They will give full support to just laws, secure justice, and the political and economic independence of court decisions.
However, in today’s legal system as it stands the one-sided orientation towards the perpetrators must be subjected to criticism, and there should be a demand for an equivalent orientation towards the victims. The rapist gets away with a punishment of a few years’ imprisonment, while the victim suffers all her life from her spiritual and mental humiliation, and often enough from physical damage too. But in Germany except for a few institutions (the Weisser Ring and ‘Innocence in Danger’) no one bothers much about the misery of the abandoned victims. The courts can order psychiatric help for the murderer, but psychiatric treatment for the family of his victim is not envisaged in our legal system. Christians are on the side of the victims, because Christ became a victim himself; but the traditional churches are still more interested in the justification of the sinner than in justice and righteousness for the victims.
Material social justice is the foundation sustaining the justice of the formal legal system. Without this presupposition, legal edicts can be as pointless as the famous old Paris regulation forbidding both poor and rich to sleep under the bridges over the Seine. Incidentally, the instructions in most public parks are similarly formulated, their aim being to keep the homeless from sleeping on the seats. Without detectible equality between people, equality before the law (in spite of all the differences which have to be respected) becomes abstract, and in borderline cases can become inhumane.
3. Ansgar Skriver, Gotteslästerung? (Hamburg: Rütten & Loening, 1962). ↵
6. Quoted in Skriver, Gotteslästerung?, 24. ↵
7. Anselm von Feuerbach, 1832, quoted in Skriver, Gotteslästerung?, 27. ↵
8. G. E. Lessing, Education of the Human Race (1780) § 88. ↵
10. H. von Stietencron, quoted in Hummel, Weltbilder des Reininkarnationsglauben, 44. ↵
11. Hummel, Weltbilder des Reininkarnationsglauben, 11. ↵
13. K. Koch, ‘Gibt es ein Vergeltungsdogma im Alten Testament?’ ZThK (1955): 1–42. ↵
14. K. Koch, ‘Gibt es ein Vergeltungsdogma,’ quoted in Janowski, Die rettende Gerechtigkeit, 170. ↵
15. Janowski, Die rettende Gerechtigkeit, 190. ↵
18. Ulpian, Fragment 10. See ‘Gerechtigkeit’ in HistWdPh III (Stuttgart, 1974), 329–38. ↵
24. Jürgen Moltmann, Sun of Righteousness, Arise!, 127–48. ↵
26. Jürgen Moltmann, Sun of Righteousness, Arise!, 117–26. ↵