[Note: There is still room in our first Just Love Zoom Discussion if you still want to join us. We will meet six times over the next eight weeks to take a practical look at how love fills us with his goodness and writes his justice on our hearts. That will change every human interaction we have in the world. This is not a book study of the content of Just Love, but a conversation about applying love and fullness to the interactions in our lives. We have room for eight more. If you’re interested, email me.]
I know many of you have questions about how AI will affect our future, concerned that it may well destroy human society in the long run. I share that. But as a research tool in the short term, it can be incredibly helpful.
Recently, I asked ChatGPT to scan through the writings of the early church fathers (up to AD 200) and synthesize how the concept of justice played into their message and their view of salvation. I did not prompt it with anything from our new book, but just wanted to know how the theme of justice played into the early church.
Here’s how it responded:
Up to about 200 AD, the early fathers did not treat justice mainly as an abstract legal principle or a later courtroom theory of salvation. They usually spoke of it as the way God makes things right: truthfulness, mercy, judgment, generosity, and restored human life that flow from God’s own character and are embodied in Christ.
Then it called out six specific ways that justice impacted their perceptions. Here is my summary below.
- To the earliest Christians, justice was not a side issue. It was one of the visible signs that someone had entered Jesus’s way of life. They saw justification as the process by which God makes people just from the inside, not a works-oriented approach to personal righteousness. That is why the Didache begins the Christian life with “two ways”: the way of life and the way of death. The way of life is love of God, love of neighbor, nonviolence, truthful speech, sexual faithfulness, economic integrity, and care for the vulnerable. Its justice is practical and relational: do not murder, steal, covet, exploit, bear false witness, or speak deceitfully. Almsgiving is also treated as morally serious, both for the giver and the receiver.
- Thus, salvation meant being rescued into a just and loving way of life. The fathers did not usually separate salvation from transformation. To be saved was not merely to be acquitted; it was to be healed, reordered, and made capable of living in God’s life. That is a very early view of Christian salvation: Christ saves by drawing people into the love of God, and that love expresses itself as a community free of rivalry, factionalism, arrogance, and self-seeking. Justice is what love looks like when it flows into relationships.
- Justice was not opposed to mercy; it was mercy’s public shape. The early fathers do not set up a hard contrast between God’s justice and God’s mercy, as if mercy softens justice or justice restrains mercy. God’s justice is often restorative because God’s purpose is to save, heal, and renew. Justice is not merely punishment for wrongdoers. It includes the restoration of truthful speech, generous economics, reconciliation, and purity of heart. The just life is the healed life.
- The early fathers believed God judges the world and that human choices matter. Salvation is a gift, but not a trivial one. To receive Christ is to be drawn by love into a new way of living. The fathers warned against presuming one being “called” while continuing to treat others unjustly.
- Christ’s work was understood as right-making, not merely penalty-bearing. The early writers often describe salvation through Christ as sanctification, forgiveness, liberation, healing, recapitulation, and participation in divine life. God’s justice is not simply that sin receives a penalty. It is that creation is not abandoned, the body is not discarded, the victims’ blood is not forgotten, and humanity is recovered in Christ.
- Living justly is the fruit of a life that love is transforming. It is how we participate in God’s own character. That is perhaps the richest early formulation: God’s justice is not merely retributive. It is medicinal, pedagogical, and restorative. It makes things right by bringing persons and creation toward their intended end.
It’s conclusion:
For the early fathers before 200 AD, justice was not a separate doctrine alongside salvation. So, if we translate their instinct into a single sentence:
Justice is what God’s love does when it confronts evil, heals the damaged,
restores right relationship, and forms a people who embody the life of the coming kingdom.They would likely have found it strange to separate “being saved” from “being made just.” Salvation was not merely a change in legal status before God; it was the beginning of God’s justice being written into human beings, communities, and ultimately creation itself.
I then asked ChatGPT what Christianity lost when it substituted a preoccupation with righteousness for learning to live in the rich bounty of his love. The answer was as breathtaking as it was shocking. I’ll share that in my next blog.
Of course, none of this would be good news if we think of justice as something we have to achieve by self-effort.
In the context of the new covenant, justice is the gift love writes on our hearts. In Just Love, Tobie and I describe how justice flows out of our lives naturally when love fills us with God’s presence, untwists injustice inside our own hearts, and makes us as aware of others as we are of ourselves.
In that reality, embracing God’s heart for justice becomes the joyful passion of a lifetime and the ultimate hope of the universe as Jesus returns and God’s justice is spread over all of creation.
