Few subjects produce more confident, and more mistaken, theology among Christians than the question of lawsuits. Somewhere along the way, a great many believers have constructed an entire doctrine out of a single passage — the conviction that a Christian may never, under any circumstances, take another believer to court. It is spoken as though it were the whole counsel of Scripture. It is not.
I want to treat this carefully, because the instinct behind it is good. Christians are called to be peacemakers. We are called to forgive, to bear with one another, to absorb wrongs rather than retaliate. Anyone who reaches for a lawsuit as a first response — out of greed, ego, or vengeance — has already lost the more important battle. So I hold no brief for the litigious spirit. Scripture condemns it plainly.
But a partial truth, held rigidly, becomes an untruth. And the belief that justice through lawful authority is always forbidden to a believer is not merely incomplete. In certain circumstances, it is used — knowingly or not — to shield people who are doing real harm.
Let me walk through what the text actually says.
The passage everyone cites is 1 Corinthians 6. Paul rebukes the Corinthian church: “If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people?” He asks, “Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?” It is a strong passage, and it should not be softened.
But read it in context. Paul is addressing believers dragging one another before pagan courts over “things pertaining to this life” — trivial disputes, matters of property and money, aired before unbelievers for the sake of winning. His concern is twofold: that they were consumed by greed over small things, and that they were doing so before a watching, hostile world in a way that shamed the name of Christ. This is a rebuke of pettiness and of public spectacle among brothers who were both still under the authority of the church. It is not a universal prohibition on ever seeking justice.
We know this because Scripture elsewhere commends exactly that.
Consider Matthew 18, the passage on how believers are to handle sin between them. The process is specific and ordered. First, go to your brother privately. If he will not hear you, bring one or two others. If he still refuses, tell it to the church. And then Jesus says something that most people quote past without stopping: “And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
Stop there. That final step matters enormously. When a man has been confronted privately, then with witnesses, then by the whole church — and still, in willful defiance, refuses to repent — Scripture itself declares that he is no longer to be treated as a brother under the covering of the church. He has, by his own hardness, removed himself from that protection. The category of “brother” in 1 Corinthians 6 assumes a man submitted to the discipline of the body of Christ. The man who spurns Matthew 18 has stepped outside it.
This is not a loophole. It is the plain structure of the text. Matthew 18 is a ladder, and the church so often pretends it stops at the second rung. It does not. There is a final rung, and it exists precisely for the person who will not be corrected.
Now, what of the person who has removed himself — who continues in conduct that is not merely offensive but harmful, or even criminal, and who ignores repeated rebukes and warnings? Here Scripture is not silent. It is emphatic.
Romans 13 tells us that governing authority is established by God. “For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” Read that slowly. The civil magistrate is called God’s servant. The pursuit of justice through lawful authority is not a failure of faith. It is, in Paul’s own words, one of the instruments God has ordained to restrain evil.
So we have two God-given institutions: the church, which handles sin through discipline and restoration, and the civil authority, which restrains and punishes wrongdoing. They are not in competition. They serve different purposes. And when a man defies the first and persists in doing harm, God has provided the second. To refuse to use it — in the name of a misapplied verse — is not righteousness. It can be a dereliction of duty.
Paul himself understood this. When he was mistreated, he did not always turn the other cheek in the way sentimental theology imagines. In Acts 16, unlawfully beaten and jailed, he stood on his rights as a Roman citizen and required the magistrates to answer for it. In Acts 25, facing false accusation, he declared, “I appeal to Caesar” — invoking the full machinery of Roman law to secure a just hearing. The apostle who wrote 1 Corinthians 6 also used the courts of his day when justice and his God-given rights required it. He saw no contradiction, because there is none.
Consider, too, the persistent widow of Luke 18, who came again and again to the judge crying, “Grant me justice against my adversary.” Jesus does not rebuke her. He commends her persistence as a picture of faith. Or Proverbs 31: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves… defend the rights of the poor and needy.” The defense of the vulnerable is not opposed to the gospel. It is commanded by it.
And here is the point that the “we are only to love” crowd so often misses: love and justice are not opposites. Real love protects. A father who would not lift a finger to defend his children from someone determined to harm them has not achieved a higher spirituality. He has abandoned his post. 1 Timothy 5:8 does not mince words: “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith.” Provision is not only financial. It is protection. It is standing between those you love and the one who means them harm.
Romans 12 says, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” Notice the two conditions Paul builds into that command. “If it is possible” — acknowledging that sometimes it is not. And “as far as it depends on you” — placing the responsibility for peace on your conduct, not on your capitulation. You are to pursue peace to the very edge of what you can control. But you cannot make peace with a person committed to conflict, and you are not required to purchase a false peace with the safety of the innocent.
So let me say plainly what I believe Scripture teaches. Forgiveness is required of every believer, always. Forgiveness releases my heart from bitterness. But forgiveness is not the same as the removal of consequences, and it does not obligate me to leave a defiant wrongdoer free to keep doing harm. I can forgive a man and still, through lawful means, stop him. Those are not in tension. Mercy and justice meet at the cross; they can meet in our conduct as well.
When a person has been warned, rebuked, and given every opportunity to make things right — when they have rejected the church’s authority and persisted in willful, harmful acts — the believer who then turns to the civil magistrate is not violating Scripture. He is honoring it. He is using the very instrument God ordained for exactly this purpose.
I did not arrive at this conviction in the abstract. I arrived at it the way most hard convictions are formed — through circumstances I would not have chosen. And I hold it now not as a justification but as a settled understanding of what the whole of Scripture teaches, not merely one verse pulled from its context.
Be slow to go to court. Be quick to forgive. Exhaust every avenue of private reconciliation first. But do not let anyone tell you that faithfulness requires you to stand by while the people you are responsible for are harmed. That is not the gospel. The God who is love is also the God of justice — and He has given us both the church and the magistrate for reasons He understood better than we do.