Justice as a Spiritual Practice

By Dou­glas Mitchell
 
Asso­ciate Pas­tor for “Faith in Action,” Dou­glas Mitchell con­ceived the fol­low­ing arti­cle as a pre­sen­ta­tion for a church adult edu­ca­tion class and has adapted it here to pro­pose that the min­istry of social jus­tice can in fact be a dis­ci­plined spir­i­tual prac­tice bring­ing us into closer, more inti­mate rela­tion­ship with God. Walk­ing us through the Bible’s take on jus­tice and the bib­li­cal pur­suit of shalom (whole­ness), Rev. Mitchell con­cludes that God asks us to work for pub­lic jus­tice and to sus­tain that work with lived joy.
 
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photo of a hand resting upon a bibleWhat is spir­i­tu­al­ity?  And what is a “prac­tice” in this set­ting? What does the Bible have to say about any of this?

These sound like the­o­ret­i­cal, abstract ques­tions about spir­i­tu­al­ity, but Joyce Hol­ly­day, a long-time mem­ber of the Sojourn­ers com­mu­nity in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., reminds us that the answers have very real, con­crete out­comes for our life together. She writes,

More and more as I travel and lis­ten, I hear mate­ri­ally com­fort­able Amer­i­cans artic­u­lat­ing a deep long­ing for spir­i­tual roots and rhythms, for rit­u­als that will infuse their lives with new mean­ing and bring them closer to God. At the same time, I hear the des­per­ate pleas of those who cry to us from the streets and the soup kitchens, from the shacks and the shel­ters, for com­pas­sion and jus­tice. These are not unre­lated plead­ings.  They are in fact two sides of the same problem—and of the same hope. At heart, the cri­sis that divides our nation is a spir­i­tual one. And only spir­i­tual trans­for­ma­tion will make us whole again.(1)

There is a lot of talk cur­rently about spir­i­tual prac­tice. William Willimon and Stan­ley Hauer­was have writ­ten two recent books, Res­i­dent Aliens and Where Res­i­dent Aliens Live: Exer­cises for Chris­t­ian Prac­tice, in which they talk about Chris­tian­ity as a set of prac­tices that help us act out Chris­t­ian dis­ci­ple­ship. They are try­ing to dis­tin­guish between Chris­tian­ity as some­thing we do rather than as some­thing we believe or expe­ri­ence. Willimon, how­ever, is hav­ing sec­ond thoughts. The lan­guage of prac­tice can be too gen­eral and applic­a­ble to all reli­gious experience.

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“More and more, I hear Amer­i­cans artic­u­lat­ing a deep long­ing for spir­i­tual roots and rhythms, for rit­u­als that will infuse their lives with new mean­ing and bring them closer to God.“
– Joyce Hol­ly­day
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As an alter­na­tive, Willimon points to Søren Kierkegaard (Prac­tice of Chris­tian­ity, 1850) who also empha­sizes that Chris­tian­ity is more than the intel­lec­tual accep­tance of a par­tic­u­lar set of beliefs.(2) Kierkegaard calls on Chris­tians to obey Jesus more than to under­stand a philo­soph­i­cal sys­tem of beliefs based on Jesus’ teach­ing.(3) Willimon sums up Kierkegaard’s def­i­n­i­tion of dis­ci­ple­ship as “prac­tices… one must live [out] if one is con­vinced that Jesus Christ is the full rev­e­la­tion of God.”(4) 

His con­clu­sion: “The ques­tion to ask… is, ‘who is the God being served through this prac­tice?’.”(5) 

Our mis­sion to be faith­ful Chris­tians, there­fore, is shaped by our under­stand­ing of the God we serve. The writ­ers of Deuteron­omy end their his­tor­i­cal review of the Hebrew peo­ple with a won­der­ful pic­ture of who God is and what God wants from us.

So now, O Israel, what does God require of you? Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in God’s ways, to love God, to serve your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the com­mand­ments. For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awe­some, who is not par­tial and takes no bribe, who exe­cutes jus­tice for the orphans and the widow, and who loves the strangers, pro­vid­ing them food and cloth­ing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.  (Deut. 10:12‑22)

What God does, God also requires of us:

  • Show truth­ful­ness and honesty.
  • Exe­cute jus­tice for the poor and those at the mar­gins of society.
  • Prac­tice hos­pi­tal­ity for strangers.
  • Pro­vide basic needs such as food and clothing.

There is a lot to say that fol­lows from this pic­ture of God we get in scrip­ture, but I wish to focus on the cat­e­gory of justice.

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Sim­ply put, doing jus­tice is know­ing God.
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First, let me dis­tin­guish between two closely related bib­li­cal terms, jus­tice and right­eous­ness. They are very sim­i­lar in mean­ing, and are at times inter­change­able. Right­eous­ness is the ful­fill­ment of the require­ments of a rela­tion­ship, whether with other peo­ple or with God.  Right­eous­ness, as right rela­tion­ships, pre­serves or restores com­mu­nity and makes com­mu­nal life pos­si­ble. I use the term jus­tice in a more insti­tu­tional set­ting, to define the insti­tu­tional struc­tures and pat­terns of power that shape our lives exter­nally. Bib­li­cally, there is no hard and fast dis­tinc­tion between the two con­cepts, but I want to make clear how I use them. The descrip­tion of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of God above (Deut. 10) encom­passes both con­cepts as a part of the nature of God.

Con­tinue read­ing on next page…

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