Douglas HARINK, Resurrecting Justice: Reading Romans for the Life of the World. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020. xvi + 229 pages, pb, $26.00. ISBN 978-0-8308-5276-5. Reviewed by Thomas SIMMONS, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota 57069.

Dr. Douglas Harink, professor of theology at The King’s University in Edmonton, Alberta, has previously authored a Pauline monograph as well as a Petrine epistles exegesis. His style is cogent and his prose is well-engineered, though this is a demanding book. Harink’s central thesis is that we ought to read Romans as an explication of justice.

So, what is justice? A dictionary might define justice as fair and equitable treatment by a governmental judicial system. Rendering correct decisions and reasoned outcomes based on established rules. Finding the blameless innocent and the culpable guilty.
We think of justice as legal correctness; the prudent resolution of conflicting claims by an impartial jurist. Alternatively, we might consider justice from an individual standpoint, such as one who to adheres to conformity with the law; a person who regularly exhibits righteousness, restraint, truthfulness, honesty, and fair dealing.

Saint Paul, Harink explains, has a startlingly different definition of justice. Justice, Paul claims, “is God’s power of eternal life (the Spirit of holiness, Rom 1:4) unleashed on the body of the Messiah, raising him from the dead.” (96) Justice for Paul invokes a radically different premise than either the Torah or the civil law of a sovereign such as the Roman Empire (or our own). Justice is not some “free-floating idea” and certainly not to be found within the judicial machinery of a sovereign state. Rather, “it is Jesus Messiah himself.” (Ibid)

The reader might have taken note of the linked words “Jesus Messiah” in the foregoing paragraph. One of the particularly effective methods employed by Harink is his reorientation of certain terms. He justifies his employment of “Jesus Messiah” through the book because, he says, the word Messiah (or Christ (christos in the Greek)) is not a name:

Messiah is a title. And it is not a religious title; it designated an anointed one, whether political or priestly. More accurately, it is a theo-political title, since for Jews in biblical times God (Greek theos) and politics were not held in separate compartments; they belonged together.

(8) Later in the same introductory chapter, Harink unpacks other terminological subtleties. “Apocalyptic,” for example, calls to mind Hollywood movies of meteors and earthquakes – end-times destruction. There is terror implied in the Greek apokalypsis, although the word is often translated blandly as “revelation” (e.g., the Book of Revelation). But Paul employs the term in a different sense, such as, “God was ‘pleased to apokalypsai his Son to me.’” (14, quoting Galatians 1:12) The word apocalyptic is used as a verb to signify a divinely wrought, fundamentally altered reality; God’s action bringing about a new creation. Harink continues to use apocalypse as a verb with a uniquely active sense throughout his book to great effect.

Some might quibble with some of Harink’s emphases or perceive a Calvinistic or Anabaptist streak here and there. He rejects the possibility of a just war. He posits a black and white, all or nothing, holiness.

Still, Harink succeeds in offering a challenging but rewarding book for “ordinary thinking Christians who want a deeper, gospel-informed understanding of biblical justice.” (xi) This is an engrossing, potent book.