Quotes about Justice

This, then, do you consider, and devise how both you yourselves may be saved and this land, and I be not brought into ill odor with the citizens; for I have not absolute sovereignty, as over barbarians; but if I do just things, I shall receive just things.

Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense, someone must cry: Thou shalt not!

By becoming one of the poor who was deprived of his rights, by dying as one of those robbed of justice, God's Son submitted to the utmost extremity of humiliation, entering into total solidarity with those who are without help.

The well-known passage in Micah 6:8 ('does the Lord require of you?') declares that justice and mercy are two foundational aspects of God's character... forgiveness is by no means as simple or expeditious as is often suggested; it is a complex and demanding matter. The question of forgiveness and compensation really should not be discussed apart from the question of justice.

The word translated "justice" and "righteousness" is the same word in Hebrew and in Greek. The root of the word becomes, in both Testaments, both a noun and a verb, so that "justice" or "judgment" is the same thing as "righteousness" or "rectification" (making right).

All the references to judgment in the Bible should be understood in the context of God's righteousness—not just his being righteous (noun) but his "making right" (verb) all that has been wrong.

In other words, God's righteousness involves not only a great reversal ("the first will be last") but also an actual transformation and re-creation.

Begin to see that when we say God will "justify" rather than merely "acquit," the action has a reconstituting force — hence the insufficiency of the courtroom metaphor "to acquit." God's righteousness is the same thing as his justice, and his justice is powerfully at work justifying, which does not mean excusing, passing over, or even "forgiving and forgetting," but actively making right that which is wrong.

What we do know is that followers of Jesus Christ will always want to remember that the true and righteous judgments of the Lord are applicable to every side of every conflict.

Jesus' public ministry... was not a drama played out on an empty stage... Especially in a creation infested with sin, the proclamation and enactment of the kingdom of truth and justice is never an act of pure positing, but always already a transgression into spaces occupied by others.

I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.

We were taught in school, and I was taught at home and in church, that blacks and whites were equal and we should not discriminate based on skin color, even if my school was almost entirely white.