The Kingdom and the Law: Truth, Justice, Ambiguity, and Redemption

In the previous post in this series, I talked about how our judicial system is centered on a justice narrative, which is the notion that people are good or evil, and that good people need to be vindicated while evil people need to be punished. There is nothing wrong with this narrative per se. It certainly finds its way into scripture. But the redemption narrative, which is an even stronger idea in scripture, is completely absent from our system.

As a result, litigation becomes a no-holds-barred, every-man-for-himself environment where spiritual and emotional healing are virtually unknown.

At this point, its important to understand that, even within this framework - which is completely inadequate to address real human situations - the civil litigation system doesn't function at a high level of efficiency in dispensing "justice" (arguably, the criminal system does somewhat better because of the way it is set up - but that is outside my area of expertise). Here is why:

Most lawsuits end up boiling down to conflicting testmony between witnesses. Here are a few examples:
1. Driver A says Driver B ran a stop sign. Driver B denies running a stop sign.
2. Consumer C says contractor D said they would properly fix his house. Contractor D denies that he agreed to fix that particular problem.
3. Injured person E says he hasn't worked in his yard in six months. Witness F says he saw E working two months ago.

I could go on, but you get the idea: two people say two different things. In a civil lawsuit, the job of a jury is to decide whether either story is credible, and - if both are found to be credible - to decide which one carries the most weight.

I'm convinced that it isn't always the case that someone is lying. When the pressure's on, and particularly when there is a lot of money or a reputation on the line, people have a tendency to begin to rationalize things - and as they do that, their "memories" of events tend to change. Its just human nature, particularly for those who have been forced to play a role in a justice narrative.

The problem here is that we don't have a time machine. As such, there is often no definitive way to know what was really said, who did really run the stop sign, or what someone really was doing in their yard two months ago. We end up leaving these issues to juries.

Juries are usually comprised of conscientious, intelligent folks. But they aren't God. They don't really know what was said or what happened, and they are ultimately called on to do the same thing anyone must do in their situation - guess.

Sometimes, the jury gets it right. Sometimes, people that are particularly good at either (1) lying or (2) believing and selling their own rationalizations can manipulate the system (there is another word that I won't use for "rationalizations" in the interest of keeping this space family friendly). Its that simple.

Don't get me wrong, here. I'm not advocating the wholesale trashing of our system. To the contrary, all societies must maintain on a justice system and proscribe procedures procedure for ferreting out truth in order to avoid social and economic chaos. And I'll talk about why that is the case in the next post.

My concern here is to convince you that human civil justice systems are incapable of reliably producing consistent, appropriate results, because they are - well - human. Our faith that the world can be made right, therefore, needs to be placed somewhere else.

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