Iustitia

For years on this blog I’ve discussed the problem with the way our English versions of the Bible have literally translated justice out of the text. In the original Greek and translations going back to the Septuagint and the Vulgate, the words meaning “justice” were translated as “justice.” But most English translations weirdly substitute the word “righteousness” instead.

That’s not altogether wrong because those words, centuries ago, were mostly synonyms. But today they’re not. Not at all. As Nicholas Wolterstorff put it:

It goes almost without saying that the meaning and connotations of “righteousness” are very different in present-day idiomatic English from those of “justice.” “Righteousness” names primarily if not exclusively a certain trait of personal character. … The word in present-day idiomatic English carries a negative connotation. In everyday speech one seldom any more describes someone as righteous; if one does, the suggestion is that he is self-righteous. “Justice,” by contrast, refers to an interpersonal situation; justice is present when persons are related to each other in a certain way.

I think this is very important, getting to the heart of the Very Wrong turn that English-speaking Christianity has taken away from justice. So much so that this quintessentially biblical word “justice” is now viewed with hostility and suspicion by many white English-speaking Christians.

But here’s something that doesn’t quite fit with all of that. Here in English-speaking America, we still have a “traditionalist” branch of Catholicism that prides itself on preferring Latin to English. These folks are still reading the Vulgate, in which justice is always iustitia.

And yet, if anything, the Latin Mass “traditionalist” wing of American Catholicism is far more hostile to justice than their fellow Catholics who worship and read scripture in translation. Your Opus Dei types, Scalias, Alitos, Mel Gibsons, Viganos, and conspiracist loonies like Taylor Marshall all seem driven by a model of faith that favors a very particular culturally determined white American notion of individual rectitude over anything resembling justice and right relationship.

That’s odd. It doesn’t fit. And so I will need to think about that some more to see if I can figure out why.

Here, again, is Wolterstorff on the subject: