What a homeless encampment, a counseling chair, and my son taught me about the kind of justice that actually heals.
I want to start by agreeing with the people I’m about to disagree with.
For a generation now, we’ve been trained to be suspicious of power — to listen for the voices that get drowned out, to notice when “the way things are” quietly serves the people who already hold the cards. Call it postmodern, call it critical theory, call it whatever you like. At its best, it’s a discipline of honesty about ourselves.
And as a Confessional Lutheran, I’ll be the first to say: that instinct is not the enemy of my faith. It’s an echo of it. The prophets warned that the powerful tend to write the rules in their own favor roughly three thousand years before any of us got around to it. “The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9, NIV) isn’t a postmodern slogan — but it could be.
So when I raise a concern about how we tend to do justice today, I’m not throwing stones from the outside. I share the longing. I just don’t think the longing, left to itself, takes us all the way home.
What a courthouse taught me
I didn’t learn the limits of our current approach from a book. I learned them from a homeless encampment.
During my years serving on a county board, an encampment grew at our courthouse. Under the banner of social justice, the conversation increasingly favored preserving it as an act of advocacy for a marginalized group. The intention was humane. But the services those folks actually needed went largely unprovided, while ongoing drug use blocked the very substance-abuse counseling that might have helped — and made the courthouse unsafe for other vulnerable people, including victims of violent crime arriving to seek protection.
In the name of one marginalized group, others — people in recovery, trauma survivors — quietly became invisible. Justice had turned into a zero-sum game: some voices amplified, others erased.
That’s the danger I keep running into. When a category becomes the unit of moral concern, the actual person inside the category can be sacrificed to the symbol. We start measuring our justice by the elegance of our language instead of by whether real people are any better off.
A word bigger than “peace”
The Hebrew Scriptures have a word for what I went looking for instead: shalom.
We usually translate it “peace,” but it’s so much larger than the absence of conflict. Shalom means wholeness, right relationship, flourishing — all things restored to the way they were meant to be. And here’s the part that reframes everything: justice isn’t shalom’s rival. Justice is part of shalom. There’s no real peace without right relationships, and no right relationships without justice.
So shalom isn’t a softer alternative to justice. It’s justice grown up.
It also refuses a false choice we keep getting handed — between a justice that’s fierce but loveless and a peace that’s gentle but unjust. Shalom holds both. It’s a third option: not a mushy compromise, but a more original vision that includes what each side was actually reaching for.
What makes that possible is a particular view of the human person. Every one of us bears the image of God — so dignity is intrinsic and equal, not handed out by status or group. And every one of us is a sinner. Both at once. The old Lutheran phrase is simul justus et peccator — at the same time saint and sinner. That’s exactly what the oppressor-versus-oppressed binary can’t hold, because it knows the line between good and evil doesn’t run between groups. It runs through every heart, including the heart of whoever’s doing the accusing.
A justice built on that can be tender and truthful at the same time. It can defend the vulnerable fiercely while refusing to demonize anyone — because it knows the same fault line runs through the defender.
Justice begins where you’d least expect: inside
Here’s where my counseling work and my theology meet.
When we treat justice as something that can only be extracted from other people or systems, we accidentally tell the suffering person that nothing will be okay until the whole world is fixed. That’s not compassion. It can be a quiet cruelty.
Viktor Frankl, writing from inside the concentration camps, insisted that the last of the human freedoms is the ability to choose your own response — a freedom no system can hand you and no system can take away. Forgiveness therapy says something similar with thirty years of evidence behind it: a wounded person can release resentment and recover peace whether or not the offender ever repents, or even knows.
I want to be careful here. This is not telling the oppressed to forgive and be quiet. Forgiveness doesn’t deny that harm happened — it names the harm honestly and then refuses to let it have the final word in your soul. It begins with the one thing injustice can never fully reach: your interior life. And that’s empowering, not dismissive. It gives back an agency that a purely structural story quietly steals.
When someone sits across from me, my first job isn’t to recruit them into a movement. It’s to help them find the peace, meaning, and moral footing that are theirs to keep.
The shape of all of it is a cross
The longer I do this work, the more I’m convinced that forgiveness is cross-shaped. To forgive is not to pretend the debt doesn’t exist — it’s to decline to collect it. The forgiver absorbs the cost rather than passing it back. You lay down your right to retribution, and you hand the debt to the only One who judges perfectly.
That self-emptying isn’t just a therapy technique. It’s the shape of the Gospel itself. Paul says Christ, though he was in very nature God, “made himself nothing” and “humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6–8, NIV). The One who held every privilege gave all of them up — for the good of the people who had wronged him.
If that’s what God is like, then justice made whole can’t finally look like grabbing what we’re owed. It looks like self-giving.
And we’re invited into the same pattern. Jesus told his followers to deny themselves and “take up their cross daily” (Luke 9:23, NIV). But everything depends on how you hear that. Luther distinguished the theologian of glory — who looks for God in strength, success, and self-justification — from the theologian of the cross, who finds God hidden in weakness, suffering, and the honest admission of need.
Taking up your cross isn’t a heroic performance. It’s humble and penitent — the daily putting-to-death of the self that always wants to justify itself. (And to keep the Lutheran order straight: we don’t do this to climb toward God or to add anything to what Christ already finished. We can pour ourselves out only because we’ve first been filled by the One who emptied himself for us.)
This is the part that convicts me most. There’s a way of pursuing justice that is, in Luther’s terms, a theology of glory — it earns moral credit by naming everyone else’s sins, secures the advocate’s standing, and asks no repentance of the one doing the pointing. The performative advocacy I’ve watched fail real people is exactly that: justice as self-display.
The cruciform way is harder and quieter. It asks me to take the plank out of my own eye first, to come at even genuine injustice from a posture of penitence instead of superiority, and to be willing to bear a cost rather than impose one. Oddly, that’s where the cross finishes what postmodern suspicion only starts. The cross is the most thorough critique of every self-justifying claim — including mine — and yet it doesn’t leave me in despair, because the same cross that exposes me also forgives me.
What it could actually look like
In a counseling room: starting with a person’s interior freedom rather than their demographic file. Helping them forgive, clarify what they actually value, and find meaning even in pain — while still taking real structural barriers seriously.
In civic life: measuring our justice by whether actual people are better off, and having the courage to say that defending one neighbor must never mean abandoning another.
In all of it: restraint born of trust. Repair over punishment. Reconciliation where it’s possible and safe. And underneath everything, the freedom that comes from knowing ultimate justice belongs to God, not to me. That’s not passivity — it’s release from the impossible job of engineering a perfect world, a job that, when we take it on ourselves, has a long history of producing new tyrannies. We’re freed instead to do the next faithful thing: order our own hearts, serve the person in front of us, and work for real change without the violence of the absolutist.
Why I care at all
I’ll be honest about my real motive. More than any argument, it’s my son.
My deepest hope is that he’ll be known for what he does in word and deed — seen, in Dr. King’s enduring phrase, for “the content of their character.” King dreamed of a table where the children of former enemies sit down together. That dream was never only structural and never only interior. It was shalom: the whole world set right — person and people and system alike — under the peace of God.
I can do no less than work toward it. Beginning, as I have to, with my own heart.
This post distills a longer paper, “Shalom as Justice: Honoring the Postmodern Longing for Justice While Reimagining Its Fulfillment.” If you’d like the full argument — with the research, the counseling literature, and the theological sources behind it — the complete document is attached below.
Life Vocations 
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