How the Early Church Understood Salvation as God Making Things Right

The author opens with a note about using AI as a research tool. He shares some concern about how artificial intelligence may affect society over time, but he finds it useful for short-term research. To explore how justice related to salvation in the early church, he asked ChatGPT to review the writings of the early church fathers up to about AD 200, without prompting it with ideas from his new book, *Just Love*.

According to the summary he received, the early fathers generally did not treat justice as a separate legal principle or a later courtroom theory of salvation. They saw it as God making things right, rooted in God’s character and embodied in Christ, and including truthfulness, mercy, judgment, generosity, and restored human life. The author offers a one-sentence version of this view: justice is what God’s love does when it confronts evil, heals what is damaged, restores right relationship, and shapes a people who live the life of the coming kingdom. He suggests these early believers would have found it strange to separate being saved from being made just, since salvation began the work of God’s justice in people, communities, and creation.

The author also mentions a follow-up question he asked the AI about what Christianity may have lost when it focused on righteousness rather than on living within God’s abundant love. He says he will share that answer in a future post.

Finally, he stresses that justice cannot be earned through self-effort. In the new covenant, he writes, justice is a gift that love writes on the heart. It flows naturally when love fills a person with God’s presence, untwists injustice within the heart, and makes us as aware of others as we are of ourselves. He closes by describing a lifelong joy in embracing God’s heart for justice, which he sees as the ultimate hope of the universe when Jesus returns and God’s justice spreads over all creation.

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