Various ways of speaking of our disordered existence have been used within the Christian tradition. Many of you have heard of the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. This has always been met with great resisitance because people assume when they hear it that it is saying that we are as bad as we can possibly be. But that would be utterly depraved. Total depravity means that our total being, every aspect of what we are, has been disordered and disoriented – our reasoning, our emotions, our wills, our physical state, our relationships, our affections, even our consciences. This is sometimes referred to as the noetic effects of the fall. The effects of our fall from grace and our broken fellowship with God are all pervasive, all encompassing. There is no area of our life left unbroken.
Other traditions have preferred to use biblical terms like righteousness and justice (or, when speaking of our brokenness, 'unrighteousness' and 'injustice'). The Eastern Father Dionysios the Areopagite stated that the Church and the Scriptures use the term “justice,” not as a legal term, but as a term regarding the proper order of things. God's justice is His ordering creation, distributing things suitable to all, both right in measure, in beauty, in good order and arrangement, setting the limits and boundaries of each thing and being the Cause for whatever free actions are apportioned to each. This ordering of the cosmos displays God's creative power and wisdom, but it can also properly be called justice. The ordering of creation by God is right, meet, fitting or appropriate, and therefore “just.”
But Dionysios also indicated that Divine justice refers not only to the perfect intended ordering of the cosmos by God in creation before the Fall, but also to God's intended pattern for mankind to follow as the pastors, shepherds, stewards and rulers of creation. God's justice is to be the pattern for mankind's activity in the world.
Of course we messed that up in royal fashion. Decided we could do better, wanted life on our terms, etc. Our fundamental, primary relationship – our relationship with God – was broken. We lost our center. Everything fell apart within us as a result. Again, a good way of summing all this up is to say that we are became disordered. Unjust.
And with the good creation of God in a disordered state, we could say that the justice of God demanded that things be set right, reordered, restored to God's original ordering. Only upon a full restoration would God's justice be satisfied. Of course, we find the justice of God being meted out in the work of Christ, who came as Man - man rightly ordered to God and to all things - in order to redeem, restore and renew mankind and all creation. Christ has effected as it were a new creation (or we might call it a re-creation). He is the justice of God upon which the restoration of all things will be patterned.
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