Revien and I have just returned from a green Kansas City where we attended the Just Love conversations with my friend and co-author Wayne Jacobsen—a 4-day get-together of fellow travellers who had read the book and wanted to connect to others to discuss its ideas.

You can click here to listen to a podcast where Wayne and I discuss the meeting.

Just Love was released in early March, and it has been exciting to see how it is touching people’s lives. The past few months have provided an opportunity to assess the book’s impact and the varied responses to it, and to begin bringing that conversation into this space.

The main thesis of the book is simple: The word righteousness, as it is generally used and understood in the English-speaking world, does not appear in the original languages of the Bible. In the Greek world of the centuries before and after Christ, the word we translate as righteousness—dikaiosynē—meant justice.

The easiest way to see this is to look at English translations of classical Greek literature, such as Plato’s The Republic or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The same dik-stem words that run like a network of arteries throughout the Greek New Testament and Septuagint dominate much of the conversation in these works, yet many of them are translated into English without a single occurrence of the word righteousness. Overwhelmingly, it’s justice.

In the modern English mind, righteousness and justice do not mean the same thing, which is what Just Love is all about. This is not a casual observation, but a disturbing revelation that offers insight into why the lifestyle described in Matthew 5-7 (the Sermon on the Mount) and Luke 6:20-49 is oftentimes seen as an unattainable ideal reserved for the super-spiritual, or an interim ethic for the period between the Old Covenant and the Day of Pentecost.

I mean, seriously, who lives like that?

Righteousness or Justice?

Let’s pause for a moment and think about righteousness. What do you think when you hear this word?

Over the past decade, I have asked a lot of people this question. Their answers presented righteousness as a two-pronged fork: some hear it as moral rectitude or even religious piety; others as acquittal, forgiveness, or right standing before God. The relationship between these two ideas is understood in different ways. Some see the latter as God’s gracious answer to humanity’s inability to achieve the former. Others see it as the empowerment that enables believers to begin living the kind of life demanded by the former. Still others place obedience first, viewing it as the path that leads to God’s acceptance.

The word justice shifts the focus away from the above. Rather than a moral ideal or salvific status, justice suggests a relational reality. This is how the ancients understood it. As Aristotle argues in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics, justice is the “complete virtue” because it is virtue exercised toward others. 

The implication is clear: For justice to be, you need an other. You can practice righteousness on a desert island, but not justice. Righteousness is associated with inward states and divine status; justice is concerned with the way you treat your neighbour.

This explains why justice is employed as a tool to order human relations. The relationship between justice and political order has been a central concern of human societies across time. In The Republic, Plato frames the question of the ideal state in terms of justice, treating it as the organising principle of both the individual and the polis. Justice, in this framework, is not an abstract ideal detached from lived reality but the condition that makes ordered communal life possible. 

This focus predates Plato by many centuries. One of the oldest legal codes known to humanity is a seven-and-a-half feet tall, charcoal-coloured, finger-shaped stone pillar (called a stele) unearthed in 1901 in Susa, Iran. Known to us as The Code of Hammurabi, it was penned by its name bearer in 1754 BC and is ancient Babylon’s version of The Republic. Hammurabi, the sixth Amorite king of the Old Babylonian Empire, claimed to have received his code and its 282 laws directly from Shamash, the Babylonian god of… you guessed it, justice. 

Hammurabi’s code was perceive to be grounded in divine authority. It reflects a worldview in which justice is not merely a human construct but a transcendent standard to be mediated through legal structures. Its provisions, which regulate matters ranging from property disputes to bodily harm, illustrate a consistent concern with proportionality, restitution, and social order—features that remain central to modern legal systems.

One of the reasons why Hammurabi’s code has attracted so much attention is that its content is remarkably similar to the laws of the Old Testament. (Law #196 reads, “If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.”) This has led some to suggest that the Israelites must have copied their laws from the Babylonians during the time of their exile, but that is to miss the point entirely. The similarity springs from a causality underlying both the Babylonian and Hebraic legal codes: the theme of justice—the very theme that dominates Plato’s Republic.

As Paul reminded the Romans, God has written his laws of justice on the hearts of the gentiles. The way they codify this universal inner consciousness is of lesser concern than the fact that their codes testify to a profound principle: Anyone who wishes to live peacefully with a neighbour must first bow to the call of justice in their hearts.

Across these traditions, a consistent pattern emerges: the establishment of a just society depends on the articulation and enforcement of just laws. Law, in this sense, functions as a formalised expression of justice, translating normative principles into enforceable rules.

Think about this. Societies do not create laws for the sake of righteousness; they do it for the sake of justice. A Department of Righteousness sounds like something one would encounter in an Orwellian novel. The connection between justice and law is obvious. To speak of governance is to speak of the institutionalisation of justice.

This structure is just as obvious in contemporary constitutional frameworks. Modern states typically distinguish between legislative, executive, and judicial functions, each of which plays a role in the realisation of justice. Legislative bodies formulate laws, executive authorities implement them, and judicial institutions interpret and apply them to concrete cases. While the terminology and institutional forms vary across jurisdictions, the underlying logic is consistent: law exists to secure justice, and the legitimacy of political authority is measured by its capacity to do so. It is no coincidence that 27 of the 45 US presidents were lawyers.

The relational character of justice is critical to the conversation I would like to have in these pages. Justice is not merely a personal attribute or moral disposition; it is a principle that structures interactions between people. It presupposes a community within which claims can be made, obligations recognised, and disputes resolved. For this reason, justice cannot be reduced to private virtue. It is intrinsically public, concerned with the ordering of relationships in a way that secures fairness, reciprocity, and social cohesion.

The historical record reinforces this understanding. From ancient Mesopotamia to classical Greece, from Roman law to modern constitutional democracies, the development of legal systems has been driven by the need to regulate human interactions in accordance with perceived standards of justice. These systems differ in their sources of authority—divine command, philosophical reasoning, popular sovereignty—but they converge on a shared premise: that a stable and flourishing society requires a framework within which justice can be articulated, administered, and enforced.

With this in mind, the towering presence of justice (tsedeq), judgment (mishpat), and Law (Torah) throughout the Old Testament makes perfect sense. Together they provide the framework for the establishment and ordering of God’s kingdom in ancient Israel.

Yet the Law and the Prophets, whose purpose was to establish justice and judgment in Israel, testify to a reality that is strikingly absent from the historic legal codes of the nations: the limitations of legal expressions of justice to bring about the relational reality God intended for his people.

Think about it. What ruler, if he were in his right mind, would issue a royal decree to order relationships throughout his kingdom, only to conclude by lamenting that the decree itself was incapable of producing the very thing it was designed to establish? That would be to undermine the entire project.

Yet this is precisely how the Old Testament is structured. Its message is unmistakable: legal systems can regulate what people do, but not what they desire. A person may conform to the requirements of the law while remaining inwardly disposed toward injustice. Legislation cannot reach the heart or redirect its loves.

Every civilisation recognised that justice requires law. Israel alone insisted that law is not enough. The Law and the Prophets therefore carry justice further than the nations ever imagined. They present their own legal code not as an end in itself, but as a shadow bearing witness to its own fulfilment.

We’ll explore that fulfilment in the posts to come.