(Source image by Christian Yanes on Unsplash)
Forty years ago, Stanley Hauerwas published The Peaceable Kingdom. The instant classic also became a lightning rod for controversy, the book seeming to stand in for Hauerwas’s thorny views on justice—that it is a bad idea, that it cannot be the church’s focus, that rather than “make the world more just” the church should simply “be the church.” This sounded exactly like the kind of luxury afforded those who don’t need justice. Of course the Hauerwases of the world consider justice a bad idea—for them, it is! But for everyone suffering injustice, justice is the opposite of a bad idea. It’s the whole idea.
By the point in the book where Hauerwas pushes pacifism as an answer to injustice, many people had stopped reading. Had they kept reading they might have come to agree with him that the only thing more important than getting justice is getting justice right.
Countries invade, governments imprison and execute—all in the name of justice. To deny their cause because we don’t like the consequences is to forget that a similar cause drives us progressive Christians: we too want justice. To assume tidy distinctions between just causes and their unintended consequences is to wash our hands of the untidy fact that intensely justified causes often come with intensely unintended consequences. And nothing justifies as intensely as justice. “We’re different. They say they’re after justice, but we really are.” No doubt we think that, as do they.
