Should Retribution or Reformation be at the Center of Our Criminal Justice System?

On April 17, 2023 Newsweek ran a helpful summary of events that transpired in Chicago. The previous weekend mobs of teenagers had vandalized entire sections of downtown Chicago, the city where I live and pastor. According to the article, “Hundreds of young people descended on the Millennium Park area for a “Teen Takeover” event on Saturday night. Videos posted on social media showed teenagers fighting in the streets, jumping on the roof of a bus, breaking into vehicles and setting them on fire.” Two teenage boys were shot that evening in the chaos and fifteen were arrested. Many who live in Chicago remember that weekend well, as it was not long ago.

What made the weekend particularly interesting was the response made by, our then recently elected, Mayor Brandon Johnson. Mayor Johnson responded with these words, “In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend. It is unacceptable and has no place in our city. However, it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” This kind of language is consistent not only with Brandon Johnson’s approach to crime and punishment, but with a much larger progressive movement within Western society as a whole towards combatting crime, namely to pinpoint primary fault not with the criminal but with the environment that created the criminal.

In a separate article, The BBC succinctly captured the essence of the two different approaches to tackling crime in cities by comparing the approaches of Mayor Brandon Johnson to Paul Vallas, the runner up in the Chicago mayoral race, “While Mr Vallas promised to hire hundreds of additional officers to fight crime – and was endorsed by the police union – Mr Johnson vowed to invest city funds in intervention methods focused on de-escalating conflict, as well as addressing root causes of crime such as schools, jobs and mental health.”

How ought Christians think about crime and punishment? Which approach, Mr. Vallas’ or Mayor Johnson’s, is more consistent with the Scriptures and with historical biblical Christianity? Is the new progressive model of handling crime by showing leniency and sympathy to the criminal, while pouring taxpayer money into root causes, God’s best design? These questions, and many more like it, are at the center of many of today’s most common political questions. Many Christians would do well to read extensively on the Biblical understanding of crime and punishment. I offer some helpful counsel, particularly from Herman Bavinck, below.

The Basis of Justice
Herman Bavinck, was a prominent Dutch Reformed theologian in the late 19th and early 20th century. I have been reading deeply from his Reformed Dogmatics (essentially his works on Systematic Theology). In Book Three of Reformed Dogmatics, Bavinck works meticulously through the Doctrine of Sin, showing both how God punishes sin, and how God has instructed earthly government to punish sin. In a section titled Crime and Punishment, he deals directly with the questions posed in this blog post. I actually found reading this section almost prophetic, considering he wrote over a century ago. He writes,

“The fact that God punishes evil is the basis of all human punitive justice. Those who carry it out judicially act in the name of God as his servants, perform a sacred office on his orders. Punishment, therefore, is never a matter of expediency but rests in the inviolable ideas of good and evil that are rooted in the holy will of God” (p. 163).

This is a vital starting point for our inquiry. Our earthly sense of justice must be legitimized by eternal principles of justice that flow directly from God’s Word, otherwise there is no legitimate basis for justice at all. If there is no fixed standard of right and wrong, of good and evil, then every time popular opinion sways on some moral principle—which can happen in a matter of days—the entire justice system must be reconfigured. Abraham Kuyper wonderfully summarizes this point, “Where principles are involved, right is right, or it is not. And if it is right and just, then so it remains, anywhere on earth. If a majority of votes decides, then what is called just in one region may be branded unjust elsewhere. All certainty about justice would be lost.” Therefore, as a matter of first principles, Christians believe that justice must flow out of God’s revealed law.

The Sociological Approach to Crime
After establishing this principle, Bavinck goes on to debunk two common approaches to crime and punishment in his day that were threatening the Biblical worldview. The first approach arose from the Anthropological School of Thought which “viewed criminals as victims of heredity, people who stayed behind in the evolutionary process” (Bavinck, 164). This approach, while seemingly aligned with the Darwinian science of the day, encountered tremendous criticism and found no basis for reality in any justice system.

The second approach however did find an ongoing place in judicial ethics. Arising from the Sociological School, this second approach “tried to explain crime, not in terms of the innate nature of individuals, but in terms of their environment and upbringing, the whole surrounding society. It viewed crime as a symptom of social disease, a necessary product of circumstances, a consequence of ignorance, poverty, poor upbringing, and heredity.” (Bavinck, 164). This Sociological School of Thought is precisely the foundation upon which modern progressive approaches to crime and punishment are built.

Bavinck, with a master theologian’s precision, spells out why this sociological approach fails before it begins. To begin, the sociological approach makes it virtually impossible to uphold any real justice in a society for obvious reasons. “For if a crime can, in fact, be totally traced to… the environment in which they grew up, and their own evil nature need not or may not be taken into account, criminals are completely free of blame, and society loses all right to punish them” (Bavinck, 164). In fact, it is society who is at fault and bears the burden of guilt. Under the sociological school, it is society who must be punished for their crimes against the criminal. But since imprisoning society is an impossibility, the next best approach is to “accuse society of every possible injustice… No words are sharp enough to condemn it, no columns of print long or wide enough to properly castigate it” (Bavinck, 164). It is not the purpose of this post to highlight the countless ways in which modern society has attempted “accuse society” in this way, suffice it to say, we are currently living in this reality.
Problems with the Sociological Approach

But consider the inconsistencies of this sociological approach to crime and punishment. First, if we say that the criminal is not the guilty party, but that they are simply a natural product of the society they were raised in, how can we not apply that same approach to the society itself, thereby kicking the can even further back in time to the previous society that raised that society. In other words, the society that created the criminal, is itself a product of the society that came before it, and can no more be held accountable then the current criminal on trial. How many generations back must we go before we can discover true guilt and responsibility?

The second inconsistency is that in modern criminology there is actually no longer any room for punitive justice. Instead of punishing the criminal (a judicial methodology consistent with God’s law), modern criminology increasingly believes that “retribution and punishment no longer belong in a Christian or an ethical society.” Rather than punishing crime, we must study crime and its roots, and labor to fix the roots so as to not produce the criminal. Rather than being punished, the criminal “should much rather be treated as a patient, nursed in an institution” (Bavinck, 165). Here is where Bavinck’s genius is on prophetic full display. He writes,

“Those who wipe out the boundaries between crime and disease let a state grounded in principles of justice decline into a state based on cultural mores, violate freedom in the life of the people, and hand all its citizens over to the arbitrariness and omnipotence of the state” (p 166).

The third inconsistency is the the challenge before the judge. If the judge loses sight of punitive consequences for crimes, and instead undertakes an effort to study the criminal, how will he know if his goal of reforming the criminal is ever achieved? As a human, the judge is not God, able to discern the condition of the heart. Further, “what are we to understand by improvement? Does this mean that the criminal will later desist from his misdeeds out of fear of punishment or on the basis of moral principle? But how can this ever be determined?… A great danger exists that the smartest criminals will fare the best.” In other words, the smartest criminals will quickly learn to do and say the things that must be done to convince the judge that he is truly a changed man. Bavinck summarizes this best when he writes,

“Modern criminology, by calling the notions of retribution and punishment antiquated and adopting as its goal the moral improvement of the criminal, takes from the government’s arm the power of justice and assigns to it a task for which it is utterly unqualified and unfit” (p 167).

While there are certainly positive elements to the modern heart of criminology, namely a desire to see the person and story behind the crime—a Christian desire indeed—the state cannot exist without the maintenance of retribution and punishment. It is in fact the poor, the weak, and the needy, who would suffer the most under such a legal situation.
Concluding Thoughts

Christians, operating out a Christian worldview must reject the notion that the state is qualified to heal the diseases of society. According to Romans 13, the state has been granted the sword, a tool to be used for punishing evildoers in proportion to their evil deeds. This moral order was not developed by humans, but delivered to us by God through His Word. “It is the revelation and operation of the justice of God in this world; it is rooted in the perfect, holy will of him who upholds and governs all things. Those who violate it are violating God himself… The purpose of punishment is the restoration of justice, the maintenance of divine justice. Failing to serve that end, it becomes coercion and mere exercise of superior power” (Bavinck, 168).

This does not mean that Christians are not interested in social problems. Far from it! Of course we are. Historically speaking, it is Christians who run into the greatest needs of society with the love of Christ and the practical gifts of charity. We are passionate about issues like fatherlessness, health, and education. The history of our great cities is one of Christians building orphanages, missions, hospitals, and schools. Indeed, we are very interested in root causes, and in fact we know the true root cause, sin! The cause of degeneracy in a society is nothing less than sin, and a falling away from God. It is the Church that is uniquely established by God to demonstrate compassion towards sinners of every kind, not the State. It is the Church that is far more equipped to step in and heal root causes, not the State.

Summarizing this well, Abraham Kuyper writes in Our Program, A Christian Political Manifesto,

“A [sovereign] is not a pedagogue, but a judge. Although he should not deny freedom to churches or private societies to work for the rehabilitation of the criminal, the sovereign himself must first of all be mindful of punishment, discipline, retribution, and make the prisoner understand that he has brought this miserable existence upon himself through his own guilt and sin” (p 226).