The Christian’s Obligation to Seek Justice

The Bible does not counsel passive acceptance of injustice. It counsels patient endurance under injustice—which is a very different thing.

Patience does not mean silence. It does not mean inaction. It does not mean acquiescing to evil because “God is in control.” God is in control, but He uses human agents to accomplish His purposes, including pursuing justice. “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8).

The Christian is called to seek justice through every lawful means available: through legal advocacy, through political engagement, through public testimony, through the exercise of the freedoms that democratic societies still provide. Christians should serve on juries. They should advocate for sentencing reform. They should support organizations that provide legal aid to the wrongfully convicted. They should publicly speak out against unjust legislation or decrees, and against their unjust applications. Academic Christians should provide, as I have in volume 3 of Bearing the Cross, new policy alternatives that replace prisons altogether. They should vote for candidates who understand the principles of biblical justice and apply them to criminal justice policy.

This is not a distraction from the Gospel. It is an application of the Gospel. The God who cares about the salvation of souls also cares about the bodies and lives of those souls. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27). The prisoners and their families are among the afflicted. Visiting them—and advocating for them—is not peripheral to the Christian life. It is central.

International Perspectives

My experience in the Chilean prison system, combined with my knowledge of prison systems in the United States, Europe, the Philippines, New Guinea, Brazil, Paraguay, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and elsewhere, has given me a comparative perspective that few authors on this subject possess.

Consider what I observed firsthand. I will recount in chapter 32 below the day when scrawny gendarme Castro pressed me into chair-carrying duty in a way that reminded me I was no different than a slave in the eyes of the state. Consider the guard named Cookie, who denied me food and called me a “sapo” (wide-eyed toad)—an informant—simply because I had asked for what was rightfully mine. Consider Warden Parra, who lowered my conducta score, stripped my conjugal visits, and seemed to enjoy the spectacle of a professor brought low. When he asked, “How are you?” I stared, frowned, and looked away. “That man’s a son of Satan,” I said to nearby inmates. There was no disagreement. These are not aberrations. Major Riveros in Rancagua forced me to stay an extra week in a frigid, filthy quarantine torture chamber because I did not want to be nose-swabbed for Covid-19. These are the daily operations of a system in which the state holds absolute power over human beings and wields it with the casual cruelty that absolute power invariably produces.

The Chilean system is characterized by overcrowding, corruption, inadequate medical care, and a judicial process that is slow, arbitrary, and politically influenced. But these problems are not unique to Chile. The United States has long incarcerated a higher percentage of its population than nearly any other country in the world—recently surpassed only by El Salvador’s mass-detention regime under President Bukele—a staggering indictment of a system that purports to value liberty. European systems are generally more humane in their physical conditions but increasingly hostile to Christian expression and conscience rights. Systems in the developing world often combine the worst features of all—corruption, violence, overcrowding, and complete absence of due process. Such happenings and cruelty highlight that God's calling the state His servant or deacon (diakonos) in Romans 13:4 must have a far more general, certainly non-church-oriented role than it has when applied to Phoebe in Romans 16:1 or the church deacons of 1 Timothy 3:8-13.

The common thread across all of these systems is the state’s monopoly on criminal justice and its inevitable tendency toward abuse, inefficiency, and injustice. The state is man’s chief enemy in all ages, as I have stated elsewhere, and the criminal justice system is the sharpest instrument in the state’s arsenal.

The church must engage with this reality globally. Prison ministry is not merely a domestic concern. Millions of Christians around the world are incarcerated under conditions that make the horrid Chilean system look humane by comparison. The church that ignores these brothers and sisters—because they are far away, because they speak different languages, because their suffering is invisible—has failed the Great Commission as surely as if it had closed its doors and sent its missionaries home.

Action Steps

Study the biblical principles of justice. Read Exodus 21–22, Deuteronomy 19, and Micah 6:8 with specific attention to the restitution model, proportionality, and the distinction between victimful and victimless offenses. Compare these principles with the criminal justice system in your jurisdiction.

Educate your congregation about criminal justice reform from a biblical perspective. Most Christians have never considered the subject theologically. A sermon series, a Sunday school class, or a small group study on the biblical foundations of justice would be transformative.

Engage politically. Support candidates and policies that align with biblical principles of justice. Advocate for sentencing reform, for alternatives to incarceration, and for the protection of the wrongfully convicted.

Support international prison ministry. Identify organizations that serve incarcerated Christians in other countries, accept financial contributions, and provide specific prayer requests.

Remember that the state is not God. The tendency to conflate patriotism with faith, and to assume that the government’s definition of justice, good, and evil is God’s, is a perennial temptation for Christians in democratic societies. Resist it. “Put not your trust in princes” (Psalm 146:3).

Discussion Questions

In what sense does the government punish evildoers and reward those who do good? By what standard? Explain what the apostles intended by divine ordination, judgment, and standards of the state, which is called God’s servant or deacon (diakonos) in Romans 13:4. What is the extent of our submission to the state, its rulers, and its policies for prisons or anything else, for that matter?

Compare the biblical model of restitution-based justice with the modern model of incarceration-based justice. What would it look like to move toward a more biblical system?

Why do Christians in democratic societies tend to assume that their government is fundamentally just? How does this assumption affect their response to the criminal justice system?

What is the relationship between criminal justice reform and the Gospel? Is advocating for reform a distraction from evangelism, or is it an application of it?