Book Review of Compassionate
Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime,
and Restorative Justice, Christopher D. Marshall, Eugene Oregon: Cascade
Books, 2012.
At the first
national teleconference in the United States on Restorative Justice (in 1991 I
believe), a woman asked the panel about the Christian roots of Restorative
Justice. She was assured by a panelist
that there were none, and no one on the panel said differently. Christopher Marshall’s first book in this field,
Beyond Retribution: A New Testament
Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001,
and The Spiritual Roots of Restorative Justice,
New York: SUNY Press, 2001, published
ten years later, demonstrated otherwise. So does this second book by Marshall.
Christianity not
only played the essential role in the development of the Western legal tradition
(for good or for ill) as shown for instance in Harold Berman’s magisterial Law and Revolution: The Formation of the
Western Legal Tradition, Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983,
Christianity centrally gave rise to the recent worldwide development of
Restorative Justice programs and theory.
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