“He Probably Deserved It” (August 7, 2005)

Being a Christian involves abandoning what I call the "justice instinct."

The justice instinct is the assumption that life is ultimately, cosmically fair. It is reflected in the speeches of Job's friends, who knew that somehow Job had to be responsible for the horrors visited upon him. It is seen in the question of the disciples concerning a blind man: "Who sinned, this man or his parents?" (John 9:2). It is seen in the attitude of the crowd in Luke 13:2-4 that believed that victims of disaster and slaughter must have been "worse sinners than others." It is seen in the reasoning of Maltese islanders, who briefly thought that the Apostle Paul was a murderer because a snake bit him. (They changed their minds when he lived - Acts 28:3-6.) It is seen in the rapture of Captain and Maria Von Trapp, who in The Sound of Music sing to each other, "Somewhere in my youth, or childhood, I must have done something good." It is touted in the Buddhist doctrine of karma, which extends Newton's third law of motion to the moral realm: "Every (good, bad) action has an equal and opposite (compensatory, punitive) reaction." In Buddhism you get what you deserve. Even the Dalai Lama has credited his personal happiness to the karma he has accumulated through good deeds.

The justice instinct is a terrible mistake and must be renounced, but I think I can see why it has universal appeal. First, because it is just too painful to acknowledge that life is unfair. We feel no grief when a villain dies, but we feel terrible when a good man does. So our minds work hard to reduce the sorrow, and one method of anesthetizing the mental pain is simply to assume that the sufferer got what he deserved.

A second reason the justice instinct appeals to us arises from the moral intuition God has placed in our hearts that we ourselves ought to be fair. We should judge justly, rewarding good and punishing evil. But many make a logical jump and assume that the way we should behave correlates directly to way Nature itself in fact behaves. Such thinking either projects our morality onto Nature, which is silly, or projects Nature's cruelty onto our morals, which is evil. In the former, we dupe ourselves into thinking that Nature is as pleasant and as kind as we ought to be. (It isn't; as Tennyson noted long ago, Nature is "red in tooth and claw.") In the latter, we find Nazis concluding that since Nature rewards the fit and weeds out the feeble, it is our moral duty to give allegiance to powerful tyrants while killing off the retarded and disabled.

However "natural" it might be to expect Nature to mirror our moral sense of fairness, a few moments' careful reflection should be enough to show that it does not. Therefore, for truth's sake alone, we must discard the justice instinct and actively resist it. But let me suggest a few more motives, beyond mere Reason, for getting rid of it.

1) The justice instinct kills compassion. It mutes mercy by permitting the strong to think, "That sufferer must be getting what he deserves (though perhaps I don't know exactly what he did to deserve it). Who am I to oppose the faultless judgment of the cosmos?"

2) The justice instinct creates false guilt. The sufferer compounds his own misery by succumbing to Satan-inspired self-accusation, and perhaps is tempted to lie against the truth by confessing sins he is not guilty of.

3) The justice instinct encourages pride. When a man who has prospered attributes his good fortune not to God's grace but to some cosmic reward for goodness, then he is closer to the gates of hell than he is to the kingdom of heaven.

4) The justice instinct slams the door on the gospel of Jesus Christ. Something that has always made Christianity a "hard sell" is the fact that its hero was executed. If you assume universal fairness, then he must have done something terribly wrong to deserve death. But the Bible insists that he "knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21); that he "committed no sin" (1 Peter 2:22); and that "in him is no sin" (1 John 3:5). Jews and Gentiles alike found the doctrine of crucified Perfection a contradiction in terms. It was a piece of foolishness, a stumbling block - who would ever dream of worshipping a God who gets crucified?

Only one who has disabled his justice instinct could manage to worship a crucified Lord. Those who persist in regarding present reality as "fair" will continue to stumble over the cross, and they will sin by judging people who are merely unlucky even as they praise people who are merely fortunate.