Discussing
Why Orange is the New Black is TV’s most beautiful show

Orange is the New Black honestly embraces the complexity of our own brokenness and weakness, which is where beauty always begins.

"And righteousness is always, only, wrapped up in the brutally honest experience of mercy, recovery and restoration. God’s justice is not The Rule, The Law, The Order that puts the ugly in its place. No, God’s justice is gracious and restorative in its right-making."


I so want to embrace this sentiment. And there's a sense in which this is deeply true, I believe. But this is also a point that often trips me up in my conversations with restorative justice peers in theological conversations--because as I read the Scriptures, I still see a fundamentally retributive facet of God's justice that can easily be sidestepped by well-meaning theologians who want to honor Jesus' call to "turn the other cheek" or to restore offenders to community through mercy and forgiveness by redefining God's justice as fundamentally restorative and thus no longer retributive at all.

This is a beautiful discussion of the complexity of human nature surrounding crime and punishment, particularly concerning that conflicted part of us that simultaneously wants to render payback and extend mercy. I think this inner conflict has deep theological roots.

I'm not sure that I can agree that "God’s justice is not The Rule, The Law, The Order that puts the ugly in its place." I mean, otherwise, the cross begins to look pretty superfluous. It's hard for me to imagine anything uglier than a crucified Innocent bleeding and dying a slave's death in obedience to his Father's eternal decree. In a very real sense, the ugliness of the cross points to HOW God's perfect justice deals once for all with putting away the ugly in all of us. The complicating factor is that God does something for us that He never does for Satan and the fallen angels: in absorbing the ugliness into Himself and putting it away at Calvary, He simultaneously makes it possible for us to become beautiful. So, in that sense, I very much embrace the other half of your statement: "God’s justice is gracious and restorative in its right-making."

It is indeed gracious and restorative, but the right-making comes at a very high cost--the cost of putting away our ugliness once and for all in the cross of Jesus Christ.

Hey Jonathan, so here's where I would probably land in that conversation you are having with folks. I can't cancel out a retributive aspect to God's justice for both biblical and theological reasons. Yet this seems to me, in the light of Jesus's teaching and example on the character of God, to be a kind of "last resort" and "giving over" when someone has persistently rejected the offer of restoration. In that case, God's justice can only bring on the appropriate consequence of those actions. But God is not, in my view, hellbent on damning everyone for the slightest infraction in order to protect the prettiness of the The Law, as some theologies seem to emphasize.

To put it another way, there is such a thing as ugly, but it is often not what we think it is.

I'd also probably take a different view of the atonement as instructive here - but that is a whole 'nother deal if you know what I mean :).

Thanks for your reply, Zach. I hope you'll permit me just a few more lines of commentary on this. I love that your post draws out this particular conversation, because it's one that I think so many of us in evangelical circles just don't give as much critical thought as perhaps we might.

Like you, I agree that a strictly retributive paradigm is inadequate to wholly describe God's justice, and I believe that the substitionary aspect of Christ's atonement (understood in retributive terms) is only one facet of the picture. I read somewhere once that the atonement is like a multifaceted jewel: you only get the full beauty by stepping back and looking at how it reflects the light from multiple angles at once. I think there's a lot to that...penal substition, ransom paid, Christus Victor, etc.

I think the big difference between me and, say, Mennonite scholars on this count is that I'm not prepared to wholly jettison retribution as though it were a sinful instinct altogether. My deep conviction is that our desire to pay back those who hurt us (as well as to reward those who do good) is part of the tarnished imago Dei. But, like all sin-tainted aspects of that divine image, we too often turn it into something perverse.

Where I think you and I probably agree very much is the point about retribution being a sort of "last resort." I like to explain my view of restorative justice in terms like this: because God forever satisfied His retributive claims against us in the person and obedience of Jesus Christ, those of us who claim that same Christ as Savior and Lord have, in so doing, surrendered our retributive claims against others. Put another way, because Jesus satisfied God's justice, we have a burden laid upon us to do in our human affairs something that the world can't understand: to extend mercy where justice demands payback, and in so doing, to witness to the once-for-all glory of Christ.

I think cultural explorations like Orange is the New Black are really poignant, forward-thinking expositions of how the Spirit-led mind begins to see beautiful shades of gray where worldly justice (a sinful perversion of divine justice) sees only black and white. Which is why I appreciate commentators like you who see it so clearly.

Thanks, Jonathan!

Thanks for the article and the discussion that followed.