Read it again …
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The words do not change.
You are trying to achieve justice before allowing forgiveness.
Richard
I don’t think justice and forgiveness can be treated as opposites in the biblical or Jewish sense. Forgiveness without justice collapses into indifference; justice without mercy collapses into relentless retribution. Jewish theology consistently rejects both extremes.
In Judaism, justice (דין / mishpat) and mercy (רחמים / chesed) are not rival principles but co-essential attributes of God that must be held together. That’s why Scripture can affirm both without contradiction:
“Justice, justice shall you pursue.” (Deut 16:20)
“The LORD loves justice.” (Ps 37:28)
“The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.” (Exod 34:6–7)
Exodus 34:6–7 is especially important, because it places forgiveness and justice side by side rather than in opposition: God is “forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty.” Forgiveness here is an expression of mercy, not a denial of justice.
Divine forgiveness cannot be reduced to human penal systems, but the biblical picture isn’t that justice is set aside; it’s that justice is fulfilled through mercy, not abolished by it.
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I think you are claiming a spin on what is justice as well as allowing for a caveat to forgiveness.
One might ask whether the quotes about Justice come directly from God or as a human response to Him.
Judaism is notorious for its love of law, rules and regs, on which justice thrives and forgiveness quakes.
God’s forgiveness is seen more as relenting, or ceasing of punishment. which is where your statements sit.
Richard
If that’s true then God is either unjust, or is unforgiving.
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Not a “spin” so much as a difference in how justice itself is defined. If justice is reduced to punishment alone, then of course it will look like the enemy of forgiveness. But that reduction isn’t biblical and it isn’t Jewish.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, justice (mishpat / din) is not merely retribution; it’s the maintenance and restoration of right order. That’s precisely why the calls to justice matter—they’re not just human projections upward, but reflections of what God loves and requires. The prophets in particular don’t treat justice as optional human bureaucracy but as something grounded in God’s own character.
I’d also push back gently on the idea that Judaism’s emphasis on law makes forgiveness “quake.” The law exists precisely because mercy and forgiveness matter—repentance, atonement, and restoration are woven into the system. God’s forgiveness isn’t portrayed as simply “ceasing punishment” in the sense of overlooking wrong, but as addressing wrongdoing truthfully while restoring relationship.
So my point isn’t that forgiveness comes with a caveat, but that forgiveness without justice becomes indifference, while justice without mercy becomes retribution. The biblical tension isn’t resolved by choosing one over the other, but by holding them together.
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Good read. And I also looked at your substack, with good stuff to ponder there. Thanks for sharing
It puts Micah 6:8 in a bit different perspective for me. I had seen it as putting mercy and justice in tension, but good to look at them as being inseparable.
This perspective also has value in reading the Lord’s Prayer. That part about forgiving our debtors always bothered me a bit as being transactional rather that genuine and loving, so seeing it as flowing out of healing is good. Still appears to our selfish desire to be healed, but that is a good thing. Sometimes I find I do not want to be healed from a wrong as the pain validates my anger and …hate. And we are encouraged by Jesus to let that go.
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We were just discussing this in Sunday School. According to one author, the Lord’s prayer bundles together our own forgiveness with “…as we forgive others” because it’s all really the same thing. As in, somehow, my capacity to even just receive forgiveness cannot be separated from my forgiveness of others. One won’t be happening without the other. I’m pretty sure justice and Mercy (also forgiveness) are also inseparable pairs as you were speculating, Phil. Calvinists may object, but here we are!
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As someone who suffers from PTSD, I can attest to that!
Amen!
P.S. If justice is truly the antithesis of forgiveness, what do you do with the biblical texts that explicitly place God’s justice and mercy together (e.g., Exod 34:6–7; Ps 89:14; Rom 3:25–26)? Do you read those as human projections, or do you redefine “justice” so it no longer means what the texts appear to mean? And what would that even look like?
- A vague benevolence: God as generally “nice,” disposed to relent, but not necessarily committed to moral rectitude in any robust sense.
- Therapeutic consolation: encouragement, comfort, and pastoral uplift, detached from moral judgment.
- A reduced gospel: “God forgives” as an unstructured declaration—more like cancellation of consequences than reconciliation grounded in truth.
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? The Hebrew does not match the Latin letters.
Yes.
Well said.
Justice is surgery, mercy is healing?
Fair point on the Hebrew—those are two different mercy terms. I should have written either rachamim (compassion) or chesed (steadfast covenant love), not both as equivalents. The underlying point still stands, though: in the Hebrew Bible, both are repeatedly paired with mishpat rather than set against it.
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False dichotomy.
Justice is not all about punishment. Justice is about treating all people equally. Jesus Parable of the workers illustrates this.
IOW your dichotomy only deals with one aspect of justice. By forgiving all, God shows justice for all. it is humanity that insists on hierarchy
Richard
Justice is not reducible to punishment alone. That’s why I push back on the idea that justice and forgiveness are opposites. Where your argument still goes off the rails is in redefining justice so narrowly that forgiveness becomes justice by itself. Treating all people equally is one aspect of justice, but it isn’t the whole of it—especially in Scripture, where justice also includes truth-telling, accountability, and right ordering of relationships.
The parable of the workers doesn’t abolish justice; it challenges human assumptions about merit and entitlement. The landowner isn’t unjust—he gives everyone exactly what was agreed. The shock of the parable comes from generosity layered on top of justice, not from justice being discarded. So the problem isn’t hierarchy versus equality, but the false move of collapsing justice into a single dimension. Biblically, justice is broader than punishment and broader than equal outcomes, which is precisely why forgiveness doesn’t negate it. Once justice is understood that way, the supposed antithesis disappears.
OK so we have established that both Justice and forgiveness are more complex than antithesis might suggest, but there is still an emphasis on consequences before forgiveness can be made.
If we are going to get pedantic, then I will have to be specific. On the Cross, Christ’s cry for forgiveness had no caveat. There was no cry for retribution of any kind. It was a mistake to be forgotten, not punished. There is no punitive justice in that forgiveness. If that is a demonstration of God’s forgiveness then there is no punitive justice in that either.
All this purgatory and cleansing is rooted in human justice, not God’s forgiveness.
Richard
??? Forgiveness that costs nothing, repairs nothing, and transforms nothing is precisely what Bonhoeffer meant by cheap grace—whether you accepts that label or not.
IMO, your reading doesn’t escape justice; it dissolves it. Christ’s prayer from the Cross is not spoken instead of consequences but from within them. The absence of a verbal demand for retribution does not imply the absence of moral gravity, accountability, or repair. The Cross itself is the context in which forgiveness is uttered.
If forgiveness were merely the forgetting of a mistake, then the Cross is theatrics and the language of sin, reconciliation, justification, and renewal becomes unintelligible. Scripture does not treat forgiveness as amnesia; it treats it as restoration—and restoration presupposes that something real has gone wrong.
When you say that cleansing, purification, or transformation are “human justice,” you are importing a modern moral intuition and projecting it backward onto the text. Biblical forgiveness does not negate justice; it fulfills it by bearing, healing, and transforming what justice alone would condemn. Remove consequences entirely, and forgiveness ceases to be meaningful. It becomes sentiment rather than redemption.