Based in Jesus’ teachings and example of love, compassion, and righteousness, the Christian call to “seek justice” beckons believers to be agents of change – a message that resonates with profound significance in a deeply unjust world. In the pursuit of justice, where do the paths of law and religion converge, and where do they differ? John Inazu, a professor at Washington University, suggests that the law should be seen as a means by which to understand, empathize, and resolve differences in the present day while we await the coming time of complete justice and restoration.

In this podcast episode, Curtis and John discuss what it means to engage in this mission, and offer practical insights and stories that explore the potential for both legal frameworks and Christian principles to foster more empathetic dialogue in a world teeming with diverse and often opposing perspectives.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.

John Inazu: I think what the law teaches us is how, in the world in which we live, not everything’s going to be wrapped up in a tidy bow. That we enter this messy world of differences over laws and policies and lots of other things. And intuitively as human beings, we want wrongs to be righted. We want injustices to be made just. And the reality of a fallen world is that’s never going to happen in a perfect sense. The best we have is proximate justice and proximate fairness.

So as Christians we can say, there is a time coming that is justice and is truth. But in the long stretch between now and then, the imperfect attempts at justice that we make are going to be met with frustration and mess and confusion.

I think what part of the law points to though, and this is especially true for Christians, how then might you engage? What are the possibilities and the ways to imagine a different future? And here notions of forgiveness and reconciliation really become quite powerful. You can’t command forgiveness in the positive law, but what you can do is model it and to say, when faced with the reality of an unjust world where harms will not be made fully right, that people who have faced massive injustices can still choose with God’s grace and God’s help to move forward in forgiveness. Not in a way that forgets the past, not in a way that always goes without recompense, but in a way that acknowledges the only possibility of moving forward in this world of injustice and great harms is to imagine a quite different future that transcends them.