Quotes from Christopher D. Marshall

True insight comes from standing in solidarity with victims.

The best vantage point for clarifying one's moral responsibility when harm has occurred is in the dirt and blood alongside the wounded party, not at the safe distance of a detached jurist debating the details of the relevant legislation.

Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord GOD, and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live?

But the distinctive concern of biblical justice is not to punish sinners, but to restore shalom by clarifying and dealing with the damage caused by wrongdoing. Punishment was a tool for helping to achieve this.

Justice flows from God's own being and designates the way God intends the world to be. But things have fallen into disorder; the shalom of creation has been ruptured. God responds by seeking to restore the world to the way it ought to be.

It seems clear from the wider gospel tradition that Jesus considered love to have hermeneutical precedence in the interpretation of the Torah and to be the lodestar for his own activity,12 and, as T. W. Manson observes, in the oral culture of the day, "the only way of publishing great thoughts was to go on repeating them in talk and sermons."13

When Jesus concludes the parable by asking the lawyer, "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the one who fell among robbers?" (v. 36), he is indicating that the question, "Who is my neighbor?" is really a victim's question, which can only be answered from a victim's point of view.

Nothing is said about the need to catch and punish the offenders (most muggers never get caught anyway); all emphasis is placed on the need to restore and heal the victim.

We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway.

Biblical hope - that confident expectation of a better future - is rooted in the knowledge of God's justice and faithfulness. Because God is the source and champion of justice, and because God is utterly reliable, there is always hope for positive change.

No political system or economic order can ever be regarded as the full, or even as an adequate, realization of justice. All human social structures and centers of power are denied ultimate significance. Every human attempt to create justice, when measured against the perfect justice of God's coming kingdom, is inescapably partial and limited.

Justice is not a static ideal; it is not the maintenance of some steady state in society. The accent in biblical justice falls on positive action, the exercising of power to resist the oppressor and set the oppressed free. This is why Amos pictures justice as a thundering river that than as in the Western tradition, a neatly balanced set of scales [Amos 5:21-24].

Contrary to what many people think today, punishment as such is not what satisfies the demands of justice. Justice is satisfied by repentance, restoration, and renewal. Punishment serves as a mechanism for helping to promote such restoration.

Significantly, "compassion" in Luke's Gospel is used only of God (1:78, cf. 1:50, 54) and of Jesus (7:13), and of the two most extraordinary parabolic characters of all: the father of the Prodigal Son (15:20) and the Good Samaritan (10:33).21

What social justice requires, King assumes, cannot be discerned in the abstract from the safe distance of a policy analyst or an academic theorist. It can only be found by looking at the actual, embodied suffering of the victims of oppression and injustice, and questioning the structural arrangements that perpetuate their suffering.