Where do you go for justice?

Acts 24:4-5

Tertullus [the spokesman] began to accuse him, saying . . . “We have found this man a plague, one who stirs up riots among all the Jews throughout the world and is a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes. He even tried to profane the temple, but we seized him. By examining him yourself you will be able to find out from him about everything of which we accuse him.”

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part Two)

Only when we allow the weight of these charges, and their prima facie plausibility, do we face the real theological problem that has been looming up behind the rather stylized account of a typical first-century barrister [lawyer] making a sly speech to a typical first-century provincial governor. If this is how the authorities get at “truth,” so that they can do “justice,” is the world threatening to collapse into chaos after all? Would not Paul be better doing what many revolutionaries have done in many places and at many times—and what many people today assume will result from any attempt to “combine religions and politics”—namely, to deny the validity of the court and declare that he wouldn’t have anything to do with it, since obviously it wasn’t capable of bringing about God’s justice? . . . Or are more important principles [than mere pragmatism] at stake, principles such as we find in the thirteenth chapter of his own letter to Rome? And do those principles not flow directly from the deeply Jewish belief that the God with whom we have to do is the God of both creation and providence? (184)