Earlier this year, I delivered a paper entitled Kingdom Justice? at the Anglican Network of Intercultural Churches conference. In it I argued that justice is never acontextual, i.e. justice is always shaped by the culture and context in which it is pursued, but this is rarely acknowledged when discussing various topics of social justice. I was invited to revisit this thinking at a recent Deanery Synod. On the day of the Synod, however, the resignation of Justin Welby, the first Archbishop of Canterbury to step down from office, shifted the conversation. His decision came amidst mounting pressure over the Church of England’s failure to adequately address historic abuse cases and embed a robust safeguarding culture.
My original paper attempted to challenge the cultural assumptions underpinning how we interpret and pursue justice. It must involve asking whether our understanding of justice is embedded in a shared set of values and narrative and is able to deliver meaningful and transformative change for all people involved rather than privileging simplistic solutions that risk compounding harm rather than addressing its roots.
Yet, I became increasingly aware of the abstraction of this argument when juxtaposed with the visceral pain of safeguarding failures. Calls for justice are never merely theoretical; they always emerge from deep wounds, institutional betrayals, and a pervasive sense of disillusionment. Augustine’s engagement with the Donatists in his time offers surprising and provocative insights into this particular, contemporary crisis. His theology compels us, both critics and defenders of the Church, to think more deeply about the naure of justice, evil, and the redemptive possibilities of grace.
In the recent debates around safeguarding in the Church of England, justice continues to solely be shorthand for accountability, transparency, and the punishment of wrongdoers. These are, of course, essential elements to consider as any just response, yet, as I argued in Kingdom Justice? and based on Augustine’s well argued definition, justice is deeply relational, concerned with restoring right relationships with God, others, and creation. It is also profoundly contextual, shaped by the realities and shared values of the community in which it is enacted.
This contextual nature of justice is often overlooked in Western culture, where justice is increasingly framed in legal or transactional terms. The predominant response to the Church of England’s safeguarding crisis from all sides of the debate reflects this assumed framing, emphasizing retribution and systemic reform. While necessary, these responses risk being insufficient as they fail to address the deeper causes of harm or offer a vision for healing and reconciliation. They can also fall prey to a simplistic view of evil that locates the problem in a few bad actors and/or outdated policies, rather than recognizing evil’s insidious presence in disordered systems, relationships, and values.
In Augustine’s day, the Donatists were deeply concerned with the holiness of the Church, insisting that it must remain pure and untainted by association with sin or compromise. They rejected the authority of bishops who had lapsed under persecution, arguing that their actions invalidated the sacraments they administered. Augustine countered that the Church is a corpus permixtum (a mixed body), inherently flawed yet sustained by God’s grace. He warned against the Donatists’ purity ethic, arguing that perpetuated the fractures in the Church’s unity and denied God’s transformative power of grace. Prioritising and pursuing purity through exclusionary action often results in embedding division and relational breakdown rather than discovering the healing that Jesus embodied and revealed.
Modern parallels to the Donatist instinct are not hard to find. The increasingly urgent demand for a ‘pure Church’, free from scandal and compromise, in its various and competing guises, seems obvious. Survivors of abuse, advocates, and disillusioned laity have seen firsthand the devastating consequences of institutional failure. Their anger at the Church’s hypocrisy is righteous, and their calls for justice are urgent. Yet there is also a risk in framing the Church’s failings in purely moralistic terms, as if the removal of corrupt leaders or the implementation of perfect policies will restore its holiness. Our approaches, unintentionally, replicate the Donatist impulse, seeking purity through exclusion rather than transformation.
Complicating this dynamic further is Western culture’s dominant concept of justice, which often equates it with punishment. In safeguarding, this can translate in different ways to a focus on identifying perpetrators, removing them from positions of power, and preventing future harm. While these steps, again, are crucial, they do not address the underlying systems and cultures that have allowed abuse to occur in the first place. They have also repeatedly left survivors still feeling unheard and unsupported, as justice becomes procedural rather than relational.
Augustine’s understanding of evil offers a counter-narrative. For him, evil is not a force in itself but the distortion or absence of the good. This means that evil cannot be discussed as some thing that can be dealt with directly. Addressing it can only involve restoring what has been lost or broken. In the context of safeguarding, this suggests that justice must go beyond punishment to include processes of healing, reconciliation, and the reordering of, what Augustine called, ‘disordered loves’. For Augustine, Church unity was not an excuse to overlook sin but the context in which sin is confronted and transformed. The Church must resist the cultural tendency to scapegoat individuals, recognizing that abuse distorts and disintegrates relationships throughout the society/community in which it occurs. True reform, therefore, only comes through a shared commitment to repentance, healing, and renewal; a process that will be slow, painful, and profoundly relational.
This is a different way of addressing the safeguarding crisis in the Church of England. Rather than seeking justice through punishment and purity through exclusion, Augustine prescribed an intentional mending of the specific trust and relationships that have been broken. He engaged the Donatists with intellectual rigor and pastoral sensitivity, hearing their pain and acknowledging the validity of their concerns while prophetically reminding all of the vision of the Church as a community of forgiveness and reconciliation. Similarly, the Church today must create spaces where survivors, clergy, and laity can engage in honest dialogue without fear of defensiveness or retribution, working together towards our shared hope. Independent safeguarding oversight bodies are essential, but they must be integrated with theological reflection to ensure that accountability is paired with grace.
The safeguarding crisis reveals a distortion of priorities, where the Church has too often valued reputation over truth, and institutional preservation over the care of the vulnerable. A commitment to reordering these loves must begin with a cultural shift—embedding safeguarding as a theological and missional imperative rather than a bureaucratic necessity.
The safeguarding crisis confronts the Church of England with its deepest failures, but it also grants us a great opportunity: to embody a justice that is neither transactional nor retributive, but profoundly relational and redemptive. This is not an easy path. It requires the Church to walk the way of the cross, acknowledging its sin, bearing the weight of its failures, and trusting in the redemptive power of Christ. But it is the only path that leads to true justice—a justice that heals wounds, restores relationships, and reflects the love of God in a world desperately in need of hope.