A Christian Approach to Conflict Resolution

Professor Wade*s excellent paper addresses directly the question for this seminar, "What does the Lord require of Christians in conflict?". It provides a scholarly and most helpful coverage of the issues. I wish to focus more closely on the subject of mediation touched on by Professor Wade, and specifically to consider restorative justice as a New Testament or Christian approach to conflict resolution.

Restorative justice might be said to be the close cousin of alternative dispute resolution, bringing to bear in the criminal justice context similar principles to those of mediation and other ADR procedures in the civil context. I explored those parallels in a paper given in Perth in 19971 and will not repeat them here. In New Zealand and in some Australian States a form of restorative justice is seen in the Youth Justice procedure of the family group conference with its emphasis on the meeting between victim and offender (and their supporters), the importance of reconciliation, of restitution to the victim as a primary objective, and of negotiated rather that imposed outcomes. In New Zealand what are called diversionary conferences can, with the agreement of all parties, produce outcomes that are consensual and do not require approval by the Youth Court. Court directed conferences usually result in acceptance of the conference plan without the need for formal court orders. I should clarify that denied cases have to be proved using the adversary system in the same way as for adults.

There are now some government-funded pilot schemes for restorative justice for adults, building on the concept of community group conferences which I advocated in 19942. In addition there are models of restorative justice that are not related at all to court procedures, such as victim-offender mediation that occurs in prisons, and school based restorative justice as trialled first in Queensland and then in New Zealand. There is available a very substantial body of international writing on the subject of restorative justice and the 10th UN Congress on Crime in 1999 gave it considerable support.

Restorative justice is based outside courts, even where courts have a supervisory role. It is free from the rituals of the courtroom and the formalism of the Pharisees. If a lawyers is present it is not as advocate but as advisor and supporter. Professionals do not run or own the process. Given that we lawyers have for centuries tended to act as though we had a monopoly on justice, it comes as a bit of a shock to find that the parties can often, if not usually, work it out better themselves! Is there a parallel with St Paul*s question?

God from being at work in our justice systems. A plea of Not Guilty may not mean "I did not do it" but rather "You prove it!". Elsewhere I have argued3 that this approach to pleading does the reverse of encouraging personal accountability: it encourages people to deny the charge and see if they can "get off*. As it was put by a senior Canadian law officer Brent Cotter QC4, then Deputy Minister of Justice of Saskatchewan, "In a family, such behaviour would be considered dysfunctional. In a community it is still dysfunctional."

Of course, it would be a mistake to pretend that the Old Testament does not contain the seeds of restorative justice, just as it contains the seeds of the New Testament. One of the most influential books on restorative justice has been "Changing Lenses" written in 1990 by Howard Zehr, a gentle Mennonite Christian from Virginia, USA who has visited New Zealand several times now. Zehr — in my view, a modern prophet of justice - finds some support for restorative justice in the Old Testament concept of shalom, which refers to peace between people and God as well as between people themselves on a variety of levels5. He builds a picture of restorative justice as healing justice and as peace making in the spirit of shalom. But there is also the darker side of Old Testament justice — where the loss of one eye allowed6 the plucking out of another, where terrible retribution could be wrought upon people guilty only by association, where adultery was a capital offence, where redemption often seemed impossible. Christ pointed us in the completely opposite direction — turn the other cheek, meet violence with love, "love one another as I have loved you".

It is very easy in a world of high achievers like the legal profession to be caught up in the belief that we succeed in life by our own efforts. That of course is not the Christian message. After reading Phillip Yancey*s wonderful book What*s So Amazing About Grace? it occurred to me that it was often God*s grace that was at work in restorative justice. In such a context an expression of forgiveness cannot be something expected of victims - it is theirs to give if they feel it appropriate at the time, and they sometimes do. More often, though, there is a place for grace, that unearned generosity of spirit, and its transforming power.

I will give but one example. It relates to a young man in Wellington who at the age of 16 committed two burglaries. He had been in trouble before and been to family group conferences but this time he didn*t wait around; he took off for the South Island and the police lost contact with him. Two years later something had changed in his life. His partner was pregnant and he was going to become a father. He wanted to clean up his past and put behind him the mistakes that he had made so that they did not come back to haunt his new family. He handed himself into the police and asked that a family group conference be arranged where he could meet the people who owned the two houses he had burgled. He had a job and he had worked out that he could repay the damage suffered by these two families (which was quite a lot of money — about $1500) at $50 per week. He put forward that proposal and on a whiteboard set out his entire budget including expected expenses for when the baby arrived. He also offered to do community service in addition to paying this reparation.

The gracious response of those victims was, for Christians, an expression of the love of God — and for non-Christians perhaps an expression of that love which desires the good of the other. The victim who does not demand their "pound of flesh" or an eye for the eye they have lost is freeing both sides from the cycle of action and reaction, of "take" and "payback". The victim who wants to see a better outcome for both themselves and the offender exhibits a generosity of spirit in an act of grace. Like all human beings offenders do not expect such generosity and their defences can be overcome by grace. As Yancey puts it:7

Quite apart from the possibility of forgiveness and grace, a restorative justice conference encourages the expression of remorse and a willingness to change — ie repentance. This often follows from the expression of the victim*s distress and anger at what he/she has suffered, through which the offender can come to see the crime in human terms that bypass rationalisations like "it*s just property", or "they can afford it" or "he deserved it". As we would expect, repentance in turn allows the gracious response, or an expression of forgiveness, and from there the parties tend naturally to look to the future and how things can be changed for the better, both for the victim and for the offender. Healing can begin to occur in a meaningful way, for all parties, especially when offenders are enabled to deal with their sense of guilt and victims are able to be freed from the worries and anxiety of the past and start rebuilding their lives.

Even punishment, the intended means of control, can be shrugged off as unjustified (ie the offender becomes a victim), or meaningless ("I don*t care what you do to me"). As I have often stressed, punishment is not ruled out in restorative justice, and most conference plans have a punitive element, but punishment is not the overriding objective which it is in the traditional system rather the emphasis is on making things right.

Perhaps it is a mistake to call the adversary model "the traditional system". In the scale of things it is a relatively recent arrival. For tribal societies, without the central State, justice necessarily resided in the community and focused on preventing feuds and generally keeping the peace. In such systems the victim had a central role and restoring the victim (and also the offender) to a place of respect was the key to restoring justice. Restorative justice can therefore be seen as a more natural form of justice, both within families and within communities; it is second nature to most indigenous peoples today, including Maori8.

I take these terms from Riane Eisler*s "The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future".9 This powerful American writer tells of the Minoan people who lived in peace on the island of Crete for two or three thousand years. At about 2000 BC their population was some 100,000. She describes theirs as a "partnership" culture, where men and women could be gods, leaders, guides and protectors. It was a culture amazingly rich in the arts and with an advanced standard of living. Crete was, in Homer*s words, "a rich and lovely land"10. It was a place where "the economy prospered and the arts flourished".11

‘The old view was that the earliest human kinship (and later economic relations) developed from men hunting and killing. The new view is that the foundations for social organisation came from mothers and children sharing. The old view was of prehistory as the story of "man the hunter-warrior". The new view is of both women and men using our unique human faculties to support and enhance life.

In sum, under the new view of cultural evolution, male dominance, male violence, and authoritarianism are not inevitable, eternal givens. And rather than being just a "utopian dream", a more peaceful and equalitarian world is a real possibility for our future.* (page 73)

Ten years ago Auckland University Chaplain, Revd. Ray Galvin gave a sermon on prison reform and the gospel.12 I cannot improve on what he had to say about revenge:

In this vein I found one of the most powerful passages in "What*s So Amazing About Grace?" to be the analysis of the confrontation between Jesus and the Pharisees concerning the stoning of the woman caught in adultery, ending with this reminder of where we all stand:

"Thus in a brilliant stroke Jesus replaces the two assumed categories, righteous and guilty, with two different categories: sinners who admit, and sinners who deny.13

At the same time Revd Galvin also reminded us that we should learn to see Christ in the prisoners, for "Jesus said ... that whenever we visit and comfort a prisoner, we visit and comfort Christ himself. The prisoners, the poor, the sick and the lonely are all given this special status in the gospel. When we meet them, we meet Christ." I believe that this encourages us to remember that Jesus is in the people we process as criminals, just as he is in us, and for that reason if for no other they are to be treated with dignity and respect.

The passage from Matthew 25 to which Revd Galvin refers comes near the end of Jesus* ministry, a few days before his death. It is significant that near the beginning of his public ministry, in his home town of Nazareth, Jesus was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Unrolling it he found the place where it was written:

"The spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord*s favour."14

"Today" said Jesus, "this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."15

15. Luke 4:21

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