Social Justice is Love in Public (Short Read)

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One of my favourite quotations comes from the American philosopher, political commentator, and theologian Cornell West. He wrote that: “Love in public is justice, and love in private is tenderness.” Today I am concentrating on what it might mean to say that justice is the public act of loving the neighbour.

Justice is Always Something to Work Towards

The thing about justice is that it is something that is always coming but never quite here, a task always to be undertaken but never completed. Justice must always be strived for, but the person who says ‘here is justice’ is too confident in their own opinion.

That is why justice cannot be spoken of on its own. Justice and righteousness. Justice and mercy. Justice and love. Justice on its own is a short step away from tyranny.

Ancient Examples of Law-Based Justice

Sets of laws have been fundamental to all societies. Whether the socio-sacred taboos of prehistoric culture or the highly complex law codes of Egypt and Persia. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our first example comes from the Roman Republic.

The Romans had a goddess called Justitia, and she had a set of codified laws inscribed on huge bronze tablets in the forum, where everyone could see them. The laws mostly concerned the economy, land ownership, and the personal rights of freeborn people.

Roman justice meant maintaining order in accordance with the ancient customs and rights of each social class. Everyone belonged in their place, in their part of society. The laws were weighted in favour of the powerful and wealthy, who were considered the most important people in society. Justice meant that the privileged’s power was preserved.

This approach to justice was largely maintained for the next thousand years. The Salic codes of the Carolingian empire and the King’s law and common law of Alfred the Great all weighted justice in favour of those with power, position, and privilege.

What if the Law Were About More Than Order and Hierarchy?

But in 1088, these assumptions would be challenged. The University of Bologna was established as the first of its kind to train lawyers for the newly reformed universal Roman Catholic church.

Pope Gregory VII had separated the church from the control of kings and secular rulers, solidifying his power over what was now being called Christendom. Now, Pope Gregory VII needed to establish a principle of divine law to be universally applied throughout the church. He needed lawyers

There were lots of canons, decrees, papal rulings, penances, and precedents scattered in archives and bishops’ palaces across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. They did not all agree with each other, they did not all apply equally, and they provided a contradictory sense of divine law. A universal church needed a universal sense of justice if it was to hold kings to account.

Gratian and the Principle of Divine Justice through Natural Law

A monk called Gratian went searching them out and compiled all the elements of church dogma, legal rulings, and penance documents together, finishing in 1150 in a text called the Decretum: the Concordance of Discordant Cannons. This was the foundation of what became Canon Law.

Gratian understood the command to love your neighbour as yourself to be the foundation stone of any system of laws, if it were to be just and considered loving the neighbour as natural law. This is the principle with which he started his great work and introduced the book.

All souls were equal in the eyes of God – a radical position to take at that time and a break from established precedent, especially in the legal system. He wrote: “Enactments, whether ecclesiastical or secular, if they are proved to be contrary to natural law, must be totally excluded.”

Everything, whether written by bishops or kings, that did not adhere to the principle of loving the neighbour was to be rejected. No one was above divine law.

Previously, the law favoured the powerful

Previously, the systems of law held custom to be the ultimate authority, the purpose of the law was to uphold the social status and the position of each person in the structure of society.

The assumption was that justice would naturally favour those who had invested the most in society. This was only natural for both Romans and Franks.

For Gratian, the Law must be Just for everyone

In contrast, Gratian insisted that the purpose of law was to provide equal justice for every individual, regardless of rank, wealth, or lineage, for each is an equal child of God.

The law could create justice when grounded in the love of neighbour and applied equally to everyone, regardless of who they were.

By 1200 it has been ruled that a starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so in accordance with natural law and as such was not guilty of a crime. Instead the rich man owed a duty of alms to the poor starving person.

The starving poor person was only taking what was properly owed to him. It was the wealthy miser not the starving thief who earned God’s disapproval.

Charity was a legal obligation. The rich had a duty to the poor. The poor had an entitlement to the necessity of life. This was formulated by cannon lawyers as a human right.

Equality under the law as a way of ensuring all people are subject to justice, not according to their station but according to their person. A society is not just if the rich and powerful are treated differently and afforded different treatment by the law.

God’s justice is justice for everyone

The justice of God is equality for all people but with an inherent bias towards the poorest, weakest, and oppressed, people’s. There is a duty in justice from those with power to those without it, from those with resources to those without.

Power and privilege exist for the service of those who are weaker and poorer and when that is abused then those who have failed to be just fall foul of God’s displeasure. This is what it means to say that justice is love in public.

To love the neighbour means to serve the person in need. The story of the good Samaritan, told to explain who our neighbour is, makes it very clear that the neighbour is the person who needs us. The neighbour was not priest or Levite. The neighbours were the person in need and the person who served those needs. The neighbour is not just whoever happens to live near us, or who looks like us, who a person that we like. The neighbour is always the person in need. We become a neighbour through acts of loving service.

God’s justice does not mean everyone is treated the same. There is an arc to justice which is shaped by the command to love the neighbour. Justice does not exist on its own, justice is always done as the application of love. It is most necessary to be directed in service and protection of those who are most vulnerable and at risk.

The laws of a state or government are only a shadow of the kind of Justice that God wants us to bring about. But they are a start. We have to go the rest of the way. That is the task of the Church.

When we are called by scripture to do justice then this is what it looks like. To ensure that there is an arc towards the poor, the outcast, the stranger, the vulnerable, the oppressed, and to remind those with power that they do not have absolute power but are subject to the divine law of love for the neighbour.

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