Introduction: Peace, Justice & Reconciliation
Derek Poole

Comment
Lesley Macaulay

From the Director
David Porter

Now and Not Yet
Stephen Williams

Grace: An Attribute of Reconciliation
Graham Cheesman

Reflections on ECONI
Ken Wilson & Brian Moore

Stanley Who?
Alwyn Thomson

Justice
Billy Mitchell

Peace
Ethel White

Reconciliation
Brian Cruise

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NOW & NOT YET
Justice, Peace and Reconciliation. How do these words ring in your ears? They may have the ring of hope, since they lift our hearts to settle on the promises of God. They may have the ring of despair, as we conclude that all we will experience on this earth is talk of these things, little of their reality. Or they may leave us indifferent, for we have got used to them as concepts and recognize them as ideals but they no longer deeply stir, not even in the midst of the strife and sadness that engulfs the province of Northern Ireland.

The Longing of Hope

Scripture is the mortal enemy of indifference and a resolute aggressor against despair. All three concepts - justice, peace and reconciliation - are connected to hope. They are rich ideas, in both Old and New Testaments, and together spell out the content of God's eschatological promises. Although we often think of Christ in the New Testament mainly in terms of fulfilment of the promises God gave in the Old Testament - he is our justification, our peace and our reconciler - the New Testament retains the eschatological perspective of the Old, and the New Testament believer, no less than the Old Testament believer, looks forward to what is yet to be accomplished. (1) Further, although the form of the new heavens and new earth is presently concealed from us, the vocabulary of the Bible encourages us to the cautious belief that this earth will be the scene of perfect justice, peace and reconciliation; we do not hope for a purely other-worldly heaven.

But what kind of impact does eschatological hope have on prospects of justice, peace and reconciliation in the here and now? Do we not have to settle for something far less grand and far more realistic? Yes, but before we leap to conclude that what is in eschatological store can not be attained in the ordinary course of human history, we must let those things that we hope for have their proper impact on our present strivings. 'Eschatology', Moltmann once said, 'is the passionate suffering and passionate longing kindled by the Messiah'. (2) It is impossible to long passionately for the new heavens and new earth without longing passionately for the present to approximate it as much as possible. Christian hope, as von Balthasar put it, 'vibrates with the thought that the earth should reply to heaven in the way that heaven has addressed the earth'. (3) That thought was captured in a petition in the Lord's Prayer: 'Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven' (Matt 6:10). The vision of new heavens and new earth tells us not only what God will bring, but what God loves and desires; and if we learn from eschatology what God loves and desires, we may accept the limitations of the present, but we shall strive to make the present as far as possible an anticipation of the future. This is not naive idealism, though it can become that; it is the passion stirred within us in the present by that selfsame Spirit who is the guarantee of the future (2 Cor 5:5).

But what of the here and now? It seems that justice, on the one hand, and peace and reconciliation, on the other, can be on a collision course. Surely we can sometimes be faced with the option (however undesirable): either justice or peace. Equally, it seems that we can sometimes be faced with the option: seek either justice for or reconciliation with your enemy. Those options seem all too painfully to meet us in Northern Ireland today. If space permitted, we should certainly make headway in addressing this question by exploring the exact meanings of these terms in their biblical roots. Our English terms may obscure the fact that the concepts of justice and of justification are linked in Scripture; that peace is not just the absence of strife, but the rich sovereign rule of Jehovah; that reconciliation sometimes has to do more with the restoration of order than with personal salvation. Unfortunately, we must presume upon rather than lay out the content of the biblical concepts here. As it is, we shall severely limit and focus our treatment.

Church and World

Many people assume that Christians are inhabitants of two realms: the church and the State. That is misleading. Christians are by definition people of the church; they are churchmen and women who inhabit the State. The State is the provisional and external sphere of their lives; the church is the abiding and personal reality of their lives. In the church and as a church, they learn the priority of peace and of reconciliation over the strict demand for justice. We have to specify rather carefully what we mean here. We can think of justice as a matter of people getting what they deserve. In that case, grace makes peace and reconciliation triumph over justice. Or we can think of justice in terms of the rectification of relationships. In that case, justice only comes to fulness when reconciliation has been achieved and peace restored. In either case, we are cutting against notions of justice where an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth is a legitimate end in itself. Hence, in relation to the world, Christians are willing to suffer injustice for the sake of peaceableness; yes, vengeance belongs to the Lord, but be it remembered that the Lord who will judge in justice is infinitely more disposed to mercy than are any of us. In relation to each other, they prize forgiveness and reconciliation most highly. (4) The Christian who takes up a position in relation to affairs of State, of government and of socio-political justice is moulded by the peace and reconciliation which marks the life of the body of Christ.

The problem, however, seems to be that in the wider social sphere, one is bound to urge government to act not as a church, but on the canons of justice. Everybody in his right mind wants peace, but neither in domestic nor in international affairs is government to lead people to peace at the price of justice. If personal reconciliations can happen all over the place, all well and good, but a government dare not declare its priority to be reconciliation rather than justice. It seems, then, that the ethics of the Christian community are at best only tangentially relevant to the ethics of the social and political sphere. Neither what we hope for (eschatological justice, peace and reconciliation) nor our love (which bids us give to peace and reconciliation a relative primacy over justice) enable us to extrapolate from the life of faith to the political ethics of the civil community. Is that not so?

No one with theological sensitivity or social experience can ignore the presence of certain tensions which arise when we seek to be simultaneously faithful as citizens of the heavenly kingdom and of the earthly order. Yet it is dangerous to sever the ethics of the Christian community from the ethics of public life. New Testament teaching on the responsibilities of government certainly enshrines principles, but a situation is presupposed in which the church is politically powerless and the State is religiously pagan. Where that is no longer necessarily the case, government remains bound to the pursuit of justice; but whether its justice is tempered by other principles; what scope there is for discretion; to what extent it will learn from and apply the ethics of the Christian community - these are things which are not fixed and rigid. The evolution of political society and its changing relation to the Church in the course of the single, unique history of the world which God providentially governs, means that we must be open to a variety of ways in which the kingdom of Jesus Christ impinges on the governments of this world.

What does this mean in practice? It does not dictate the specific political implications of the theological concepts of justice, peace and reconciliation. It does suggest that the passion which informs Christian conduct when, as a member of the body of Christ, the believer longs to forgive and be reconciled and is willing to suffer injustice at the hands of the world, can not be suddenly stemmed when it comes to the social and political sphere. Simply put, the believer wishes that the world were a bit more like the church as long as the church becomes a lot more like Jesus Christ. It is a wish one is bound to communicate, and a possibility one is bound to search out. The church can not simply instruct the world or the governments of the world to subordinate peace and reconciliation to justice, while at the same time ordering its own life very differently according to the peace and reconciliation brought by Jesus Christ to those who are his. It will remind government that justice is richer, deeper and purer when it is understood in its relationship to peace and reconciliation. At the same time, if government be moved to seek peace and reconciliation, in the conviction that these constitute the social good, the church will insist that that does not mean getting soft on or indifferent to justice. These comments are not meant to prescribe in matters of public policy. They are meant to warn against the neglect of love, which is expressed in the pursuit of peace and reconciliation, in the search for justice. In connection with this, at least three considerations can be advanced here.

1. The summons for justice is only safe on the lips of those personally prepared to forgive their enemies. The external content of the demand, the words used, may be identical in the cases of one disposed to forgive and the strict retributionist. But they will not sound the same. The ethos of a society governed by the one type will be entirely different from that governed by the other type. And a society truly flourishes not according to the way in which justice is clinically and strictly distributed, but according to the way in which its members are personally and practically disposed to peace and reconciliation.

2. It may be asked whether justice will 'ever be done if the ultimate goal is not reconciliation? Is this not the basic insight that led to the formation of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation after the apartheid regime had been abolished?' (5) The argument for this can probably not be stated simply, and certainly needs to be stated carefully, yet the basic contention must command the sympathy of all the disciples of Christ. For justice is at root a matter of right relationships, and relationships are never more right than when they climax in reconciliation.

3. Justice has something of the seamless robe quality. The proper clamour for justice must not be more passionate when it comes to retribution and criminal justice than when it comes to the proper treatment of the underprivileged, the weak, the powerless, those against whom there has been discrimination. A selective plea for justice is a breach of faith with the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ, who observes the fate of the widow and orphan as much as he does the deeds of the criminal and the magistrate.

Conclusion

There is nothing anaemic about peace and reconciliation. The God who brought it to us in Christ had instructed his people in the ways of justice and has promised that at the end of time the guilty will not go unpunished. But there is nothing final about justice either. It may, indeed, be the last word God will pronounce on those who have wilfully rejected him; but rejection caused the Son to weep, and not to rejoice; what is final in the divine nature is the love which is expressed in the triumph of grace and the reconciliation of sinners. Those in authority in the social and political order may know nothing of such truths. But as long as the church raises its own distinctive voice in the plea for justice, it dare not spread forth an idea of justice stripped completely of all memory or connotation of the justice of God, our peace and our reconciler. It is committed, after all, to preach the gospel to principalities and powers (Eph 3:10). The summit of its proclamation is a message of peace and reconciliation within which justice is held fast. (6) Its glory is the glory of grace; its power is the power of the Spirit. If it remembers that, it will excel all others, individuals and bodies, in its pursuit of justice. If it forgets it, it will excel all others in its blockage to peace and reconciliation.

Stephen Williams - Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological College, Belfast.

(1) Alister McGrath begins his two volume study of the history of the Christian doctrine of justification by alerting us to the need to connect and distinguish notions of justice and justification: Iustitia Dei: a history of the Christian doctrine of justification, I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch.1.

(2) J.Moltmann, Theology of Hope (London: SCM, 1967) p.16

(3) H.U.von Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic (New York: Ignatius Press, 1987) p.191

(4) As little as we can trawl through the biblical vocabulary of justice, peace and reconciliation, can we engage in exegesis here. But, quite apart from the regular instruction of Paul to his readers, 1 Peter offers a particularly important elaboration of these themes and constantly relates the thinking of his addressees to the life and death of Christ.

(5) M.Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: a Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996) p.105. Although it is dangerous to isolate one portion of Volf's argument, one might attend especially to the remarks on pp.220-231 on justice. Cf. for a wider survey S.C.Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) ch.4.

(6) Throughout this piece, we have assumed a connection, though not an identity, between the peace of forgiveness by God and the peace which is neighbourly concord. The work of Stanley Hauerwas, for example The Peacable Kingdom: a Primer in Christian Ethics (London: SCM, 1984), repays careful study in this connection.