Too bad for justice?

I believe that one of the things upon which societies and individuals will be judged is their ability to treat their enemies with scrupulous justice, however heinous their offence. In the light of this I find some of the practices adopted by the US and UK to deal with Islamic terrorists increasingly disturbing.  There seems to be an underlying line of thought that the crimes committed by these individuals are so appalling that we can do anything we like to them – justice is too good for them.

I’ve been reading about some of the prominent figures of the English Civil War. It seems that they fell into the same trap. Some fine, principled Christians gained positions of influence under Cromwell, but tragically some of them sanctioned appalling acts in the sphere of justice. These men who had endured so much themselves in the cause of religious liberty threw off restraint when they came to power and subjected their former opponents to punishments that seem gratuitously violent and vindictive. Nothing, it seems, was too extreme for certain offences.

The fact that these punishments were often  for  ‘thought crimes’ only makes it worse. But even when an offence is truly horrific, a good society proves itself to be such by treating those who offend against it with greater justice and restraint than the perpetrator afforded to others. The seriousness of the offence never justifies setting aside the principles of justice or descending into barbarism. When that happens, society becomes as bad as the offender. Participation in barbaric forms of punishment debases us to the level of animals – we are behaving like beasts, which act aggressively when provoked because they only know to follow their instinct.  But it is our sense of justice and our awareness of the need to govern our passions that lifts us above the animals. This is part of what it means to have been made ‘in the image of God’. God supremely exemplifies those qualities. He knew that such justice is costly:

‘For God demonstrates his love for us in this: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us … When we were his enemies we were reconciled to him through the death of his son.’ Romans 5:8,10