Religion and justice: atonement as an element of justice in both western law and Christian thought

Abstract

In 2008 Ian McEwan’s best-selling novel Atonement (2001) was adapted for film starring Kiera Knightly and James McAvoy. The cinematic treatment confrontingly brought to life the story of Briony Tallis and her destructive role in the lives of her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner (Cecilia’s lover). As both the storyteller and a major character in the narrative, Briony expresses deep remorse about her ruinous acts as a 13-year-old girl and says that her novel, to which she gave an ending very different from the reality, is her ‘atonement’. In this story, Briony seeks atonement through fiction – by reuniting the two lovers whose lives had been wrenched apart – in an imagined happy ending. Atonement is central to a Christian understanding of the world with the claim that God achieves it, not through fiction, but through the reality of Jesus Christ’s death. This is a concept that reaches back thousands of years to Old Testament times and the film highlights the fact that the idea of atonement may yet be hard-wired into the human psyche regardless of religious belief. This article therefore seeks to capitalize on the return of the word ‘atonement’ to the more popular vernacular, by exploring how the Biblical concept of atonement may be detected and/or useful within formal western understandings of justice, and theories of punishment. In exploring the relationship between atonement theology and ideas about punishment, this article acknowledges that this is not a new area, and indeed that many legal and theological scholars have sought to show that a Christian theology of the atonement should have a bearing on penal theory (see, eg, Tuomala 1993; Garvey 1999; Garvey 2003; Braithwaite 2003).1 Such scholars have spent considerable time arguing that ‘the role retributive ideas have played in atonement theology is largely a function of the close relationship between law and religion, which are equally concerned with the question of what it is that sustains a human community’ (Forrester and Kee 1996). This article in particular seeks to explore the extent to which the biblical concept of atonement is present and visible within our western understanding of justice, and more specifically theoriesof punishment. As such the present exploration has three parts: the first outlines the Biblical concepts of ‘justice’ and ‘atonement’ – what they are and how they work particularly from the perspective of restoration and retribution; the second part picks up on these two perspectives as the more prominent contemporary justifications for our criminal penal system. The last part to this paper invites an exploration into the ways in which the retributive and restorative elements of atonement are at play in a secular ‘justice’ system, and places this within the dichotomy of continuity and discontinuity. The notion of atonement is central in the Christian faith and as a result its meaning is often ‘as varied as theological systems are diverse’ (Tuomala 1993: 222). However, views from all perspectives generally agree that the goal of Biblical atonement is the reconciliation of God and Man. More specifically, the concept of atonement in Christian doctrine encompasses the process by which sin can be forgiven by God, and emphasizes a duality of retribution and restoration, in order to achieve justice. The scope of this article is thus limited to a discussion of atonement as a different way of viewing traditional criminal justice, and is meant to be descriptive and conceptual in nature, rather than addressing or proposing any institutional reform. From a descriptive point of view, Biblical concepts are presented here as a stimulus pointing to the ways in which the Bible may have influenced our common law system of justice. Likewise from a normative perspective, the Biblical ideas are explored to help us ‘critique existing legal rules and institutions and to guide us as to the kinds of rules and institutions we should have. In short, biblical concepts of justice can help us understand both what the law is and what the law ought to be’ (Brauch and Woods 2001: 46). It is important to acknowledge at this juncture that, while the article is written from a Christian viewpoint, the arguments are not intended to be in any way sectarian.