🧭Justice at the Intersection: Love, Power, and Mercy

Living justice in an unjust time

In our fractured American moment, where power often masquerades as justice and retribution as righteousness, we urgently need to reconsider what justice truly means from a theological perspective. Drawing on Paul Tillich's profound insights about love, power, and justice as interrelated divine attributes, I want to propose that genuine justice emerges precisely at the intersection where love, power, and mercy converge.

This isn't abstract theology. As Dominative Christianism and Providential Identitarianism increasingly deploy the language of justice to justify vengeance, exclusion, and domination, those of us formed by different theological traditions must articulate an alternative vision—one that speaks to Christians, Jews, and those who have served our nation with the expectation that its ideals meant something.

Beyond Retribution

The justice we encounter in our political discourse today is often merely retribution dressed in judicial robes. It asks only: "What punishment does the wrongdoer deserve?" This narrow view reduces justice to a transaction of pain, where suffering is meant to balance suffering.

But this is not the justice revealed in our sacred texts. The Hebrew prophets thunder not primarily about punishment but about restoration of right relationship. When Amos declares, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream," he envisions not prisons filling but communities healing.

True justice isn't found in imperial courtrooms but in the feeding trough spaces where God chooses to be present—those overlooked places where the "lowliest of the low" gather and divine revelation breaks through. Just as God conducted a "stealth operation" beneath Herod's palace to reveal divine presence in a manger, authentic justice often emerges not from centers of power but from marginalized communities where God's presence is most tangible.

Justice as Encounter with the Divine

Tillich recognized that justice is not merely a human system but a face of God—one way we encounter the divine in our midst. This understanding transforms justice from a cold calculation of desert into a sacred space of encounter where broken relationships can be mended.

When we truly meet justice, we are not simply applying rules; we are participating in God's ongoing work of restoration. This justice seeks not the destruction of the wrongdoer but the healing of the entire community.

This eucharistic understanding of justice is embodied most fully at shared tables where power differences are set aside. When we break bread together across boundaries of difference, we practice justice that reflects divine table fellowship. Just as we "receive the gift by becoming the gift," justice is realized when we embody the very restoration we seek in the world through concrete acts of presence and solidarity.

Love Without Power is Sentimentality

Justice requires love, yes, but love without power is mere sentimentality. How many times have we witnessed communities express "thoughts and prayers" while refusing to address systemic injustices? This is sentimentality, not love.

True love, as Tillich understood, always contains within it the power to transform. It is not passive wishing but active engagement with suffering. The love that informs true justice must have teeth—the capacity to reorganize power structures that perpetuate harm.

Veterans understand this instinctively. Love of country is not just feeling patriotic during the national anthem; it is willingness to place oneself between harm and the beloved. It is power deployed in service of protecting what we cherish.

Power Without Love is Tyranny

Conversely, power divorced from love inevitably becomes tyrannical. We see this in policies that separate families at borders, in rhetoric that dehumanizes opponents, in governance that privileges domination over service.

The current administration's deployment of power follows this tyrannical pattern—using authority not to protect the vulnerable but to reward allies and punish enemies. This is power corrupted by absence of love.

What we need instead is not dominant power that controls and subjugates, but servant-power that lifts up and liberates. Servant-power doesn't lust for control; it embodies the Christ-path of self-giving for the benefit of others. While dominant power demands loyalty and obedience, servant-power creates space for others to flourish and grow into the fullness of their humanity.

For those who have served our nation in uniform, this corruption feels particularly acute. The oath was to the Constitution, not to a person; to principles, not to power. When power serves only itself, it betrays that sacred trust.

The Essential Role of Mercy

But even love-informed power is insufficient for justice. Here I want to extend Tillich's framework by insisting on mercy as the third essential element of justice.

Mercy is not weakness; it is the recognition that all human systems of justice are incomplete, all human knowledge partial. Mercy creates space for repentance, for growth, for the unexpected breakthrough of grace.

My Jewish friends recognize this in the tradition of leaving the corners of fields unharvested for the stranger and the poor—building mercy directly into economic systems. My Christian siblings see it in Jesus's consistent refusal to condemn those society had already judged.

Sam Wells' "Being With": Incarnational Justice

Here, Sam Wells' incarnational theology of "being with" provides crucial insight. Wells reminds us that God's justice operates not through distant judgment but through presence—God choosing to be with us rather than merely doing things for us, to us, or despite us.

Justice that follows this incarnational pattern does not simply impose solutions from above but enters into solidarity with those who suffer injustice. It sits alongside both victim and perpetrator, seeking healing for both.

This stands in stark contrast to the current political theology that positions certain leaders as saviors who will impose justice from above. True justice cannot be delivered by a strongman; it must be embodied in communities committed to being with one another through the messy process of reconciliation.

Justice at West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy

The service academies instill "Duty, Honor, Country" precisely because justice requires all three elements I've described. Duty reflects the power to act, honor embodies love's commitment to something greater than self-interest, and service to country at its best includes mercy toward those we protect.

When these values become distorted—when duty means blind obedience, honor means never admitting wrong, and country means only those who look or think like us—we lose the very justice we claim to uphold.

Living Justice in an Unjust Time

So how do we live justice at the intersection of love, power, and mercy during this autocratic moment?

First, we must reject false dichotomies. Justice is neither weak forgiveness that requires no change nor harsh punishment that offers no redemption. It is the demanding, transformative space where love's fierce demands meet power's capacity to effect change, all tempered by mercy's recognition of our shared humanity. The binary apocalypticism that divides the world into rigid categories of good and evil, us and them, must be replaced with a more complex understanding that allows for redemption and restoration.

Second, we must build communities that embody this intersection. Congregations, veterans' groups, neighborhood associations—these can become laboratories of true justice when they commit to loving accountability, shared power, and practices of mercy.

Third, we must make regular navigational corrections in our pursuit of justice. Like a submarine that constantly experiences "set and drift" away from its intended course, our justice practices require continuous adjustment to prevent power from becoming dominance or love from becoming sentimentality. We need spiritual "periscope depth" moments where we pause, listen, and correct our course toward true justice.

Finally, we must speak this vision into the public square. When "justice" becomes a weapon for partisan advantage, we must reclaim it as God's own attribute, revealed most fully where love, power, and mercy meet.

In doing so, we offer not just resistance to authoritarianism but an alternative vision of common life—one where justice flows like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Key Terms

Dominative Christianism: A theological mutation of Christianity that fuses Christian identity with nationalist power structures and authoritarian leadership. Full entry →

Providential Identitarianism: A progressive theological mutation that identifies divine providence with specific identity markers and progressive political structures. Full entry →

Binary Apocalypticism: A theological mutation that creates rigid friend/enemy distinctions and divides the world into absolute categories of good and evil. Full entry →