Communities of Restoration ought to be read or referred to by anybody working with or responsible for restorative justice schemes and community chaplaincy (the voluntary accompaniment of short-sentence prisoners back into the community). The book has its frustrations, especially for UK readers as it addresses a specifically North American reversion to penal ‘punishment’ regimes. Nevertheless, in speaking of restorative justice schemes in the US as well as Canada and New Zealand, its frustrations are also merits because populist politics in the UK are not so far from the current penal culture in the USA. Thomas Noakes-Duncan begins with a comparison between concepts of justice in Graeco-Roman culture and successive Christian theologies. Cicero epitomises Roman justice as equity, followed by Justinian. Anselm's (feudal) theory of atonement also contributed to a legalistic and retributive understanding of justice. Luther's theology of the two kingdoms led to an autonomous understanding of justice, which Kant emancipated from theology altogether, basing retributive justice on reason alone. Pure and strict justice now required that every crime be annulled by retaliation on the criminal.
Noakes-Duncan then expounds ‘ecclesial ethics’, following Stanley Hauerwas. This teaches not so much an alternative theory of justice as that the ecclesial community, the Church itself, must become a community of reconciliation where justice and mercy meet. This involves confession, prayer and liturgy. It presupposes, according to Sam Wells and Ben Quash, a priority to the actual new life lived by Christians rather than the culture of the wider community. It is anti-Constantinian and has been much influenced by the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank and even Karl Barth's famous ‘Nein’ to interpreting revelation in terms of culture. While not everyone will be convinced by the strong argument for the separation of Church from culture (the union of which is epitomised by the teaching of William Temple and much earlier by Schleiermacher) the argument for ecclesial ethics needs to be attended to rather than ignored by the institutional Church, not least in the Churches’ involvement in the penal system. Ecclesial ethics draws upon virtue ethics and here Noakes-Duncan notes that Hauerwas himself draws on both Aristotle and Aquinas. The Church is a narrative school for virtue, forming Christians in character and practice. While Noakes-Duncan is unashamedly an exponent of such, he does articulate criticism of this school of ethics, notably by Oliver O'Donovan. But he asks – quoting William Cavanaugh – whether the courtroom or the Eucharist, with its notes of penitence, reconciliation and community, best embodies the divine justice. Lawyers and theologians could find value in Noakes-Duncan's careful introduction to the exponents of virtue ethics. He then moves on to restorative justice in actual practice. In effect he argues that, whether or not one agrees with the exponents of ecclesial ethics, the phenomenon of the emergence of restorative justice schemes in fact embodies it.
The following sections of the book are more historical and practical. Noakes-Duncan outlines in detail the fascinating emergence of restorative justice schemes in the Mennonite-Anabaptist (sic) tradition from 1970 onwards, in the face of increasingly punitive rather than correctional penal policy in North America. The first was in Ontario and emphasised the encounter between victim and offender which fitted well with the Mennonite tradition of peace-making and reconciliation. He documents the relevant literature extensively but also notes that, as restorative justice schemes multiplied, their explicitly Christian roots were successively marginalised or secularised in terms of victim satisfaction and mediation. He argues for recovering their ‘ecclesial footprint’. Noakes-Duncan goes on to document international restorative justice programmes from the 1990s and new legislation, especially in New Zealand with its comprehensive reform of juvenile justice in the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act (1989). He also draws attention to Desmond Tutu's South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He proposes new ways of how the Church might continue to contribute to restorative justice, including the insistence of Sam Wells that Scripture is not so much a script, to rehearse or memorise, as a training manual to be improvised upon – ecclesial ethics again. After explorations on the meaning of biblical justice and justification (justification is not just declarative but also performative) we are given two extended biblical studies, first the Prodigal Son and second the First Letter to the Corinthians. Both are rich meditations, of value in their own right but also illustrating communities of justice and mercy.
In conclusion Noakes-Duncan rebuts the criticism of ecclesial ethics as sectarian, as argued by James Gustafson. He then gives an account of the work of Thomas Porter and Peacemaking Circles, as developed from the South African experience. After this he describes approvingly the Sycamore Tree Project, widely used, until financial cutbacks, in prison chaplaincy in the UK, and which this reviewer has had good personal experience of in Staffordshire and Surrey. He concludes this description with a lament that a high percentage of prisoners are currently released back into the community without adequate support, arguing that the Church should act here. So I was surprised that nothing is said about community chaplaincy, which has been developed around several prisons in the UK and in which I was involved in relation to Shrewsbury Prison and North Staffordshire, especially Stoke-on-Trent, when I was Bishop of Stafford. This also had its origins in Canada.
Overall I wish more material from the UK had been available to Noakes-Duncan but his research, sponsored by the Universities of Otago and Wellington as well as the Diocese of Wellington and Christchurch, is an important contribution to the distinctive understanding of justice which is to be found in the Christian Church and its practical application in restorative justice.
