Quotes About Justice

Grace is unfair, which is one of the hardest things about it.

Grace, however, is not about fairness.

Legalism lowers, rather than raises, God's standards. Loving your neighbor as yourself, caring for the poor, bringing about justice, forgiving enemies—none of these reduces to a set of rules. Indeed, any list of rules narrows the breadth of what God wants done in the world. It moves the emphasis away from dispensing God's grace to sinners toward a pointless competition with pseudo-saints. It makes faith petty and irrelevant, not something that urgently matters.

Forgiveness is not the same as pardon, he advises: you may forgive one who wronged you and still insist on a just punishment for that wrong.

Forgiveness has its own extraordinary power which reaches beyond law and beyond justice.

Justice has a good and righteous and rational kind of power. The power of grace is different: unworldly, transforming, supernatural.

The church works best as a force of resistance, a counterbalance to the consuming power of the state.

En nuestro interior existe una especie de juicio instintivo, según el cual la vida debería ser justa, y de alguna manera, Dios debería estar «haciendo mejor su trabajo" de gobernar este mundo.

The free offer of grace extends not just to the undeserving but to those who in fact deserve the opposite: to Ku Klux Klanners as well as civil rights marchers, to P.

He aprendido a ver la realidad espiritual por encima de la realidad física de este mundo. Tenemos tendencia a pensar que la vida debería ser justa, puesto que Dios es justo. No obstante, Dios no es la vida.

Like grace, forgiveness has about it the maddening quality of being undeserved, unmerited, unfair.

None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God's requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell.

Caught up in righteous—and wholly appropriate—revulsion over Serbian atrocities, the world overlooks one fact: the Serbs are simply following the terrible logic of unforgiveness.

There is one major flaw in the law of revenge, however: it never settles the score.

God is present in the hungry, the homeless, the sick, and the imprisoned, as Jesus claimed in Matthew 25, and we serve God when we serve them.

the descendants of today's raped and mutilated victims will arise to seek vengeance on the avengers.

it seems so unfair, to forgive injustice. I am caught between forgiveness and justice.

Vengeance is a passion to get even. It is a hot desire to give back as much pain as someone gave you. . . . The problem with revenge is that it never gets what it wants; it never evens the score. Fairness never comes.

Law merely indicated the sickness; grace brought about the cure.

Forgiveness may be unfair—it is, by definition—but at least it provides a way to halt the juggernaut of retribution.

Calvary broke up the logjam between justice and forgiveness. By accepting onto his innocent self all the severe demands of justice, Jesus broke forever the chain of ungrace.

King clung to nonviolence because he profoundly believed that only a movement based on love could keep the oppressed from becoming a mirror image of their oppressors. He wanted to change the hearts of the white people, yes, but in a way that did not in the process harden the hearts of the blacks he was leading toward freedom. Nonviolence, he believed, 'will save the Negro from seeking to substitute one tyranny for another.

By forgiving, I release my own right to get even and leave all issues of fairness for God to work out.

Democracy requires us to recognize others' rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them.