CONFERENCE THEME

Redeeming Justice: Theological Insights for Criminal Law and Beyond

“So natural is the union of Religion with Justice, that we may boldly deem there is neither, where both are not. For how should they be unfeignedly just, whom religion doth not cause to be such; or they religious, which are not found such by the proof of their just actions?”

So writes Richard Hooker in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie. Religion has long been seen as the basis for justice, and the principles that are found in the text of the Old and New Testaments were for centuries in the West taken as principal sources for understanding and right applications of law. But in the increasingly post-Christian societies of the West, acceptance of biblical and theological underpinnings in the field of criminal justice have been increasingly seen as suspect.
 

The recent decades have seen a heightened awareness of the need to reform criminal justice, both in theory and practice. Many reform movements have vied for prominence, and public discourse on justice has been fraught. Many assume that criminal justice has only to do with the political and ideological, and that we can only assess justice based on the end result (e.g., statistics about crime or incarceration rates). 

Some scholarly contributions have contested this simplistic way of thinking, and made movements to recover the inseparability of religion and justice. Notably, in his recent significant book, Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, Matthew T. Martens has suggested that recent attempts to criticize our criminal justice system have fallen flat because critics lack any real understanding of how the system works, and because their arguments are unmoored from both biblical wisdom and the natural law tradition. Evangelical cries for change have more closely resembled common political talking points than considered application of biblically and theologically informed ethics. 

Christian love sees an image-bearer in need of correction, but also recognizes the reality of human nature affected by sin. Likewise, a Christian critique of the system of criminal justice must hold in tension the need to discipline and correct the sinful heart and also the need to confront the danger of sinful misuse of authority by the state.

At the Fall 2024 Raleigh Regional Convivium, our fourth on the broad theme of “theology and law,” we invite you to join us to consider the necessity of grounding criminal justice reform in Scripture, tradition, and natural law.