Abstract
Nicholas Wolterstorff has penned a companion volume to his Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, 2010) which argues that both in biblical terms and those of philosophical theology, justice and love are compatible and do not clash. It is clear, from reading this as the intended sequel to the 2010 volume, that the intention is to give a philosophical, theological and biblical warrant for Christian support for human rights.
The central problem which Woltestorff detects in the modern western literature on justice and love as imperatives is that they are considered necessarily to conflict with each other. He begins by critically analysing ‘classical modern-day agapism’, the view that ‘love should be the totality of one’s orientation toward one’s fellow human beings’. (Already this introduces a tension never really properly explored in the book, namely between love as an individual’s orientation versus love as the theologically desirable orientation of an entire community, such as the Christian community or the wider political community. While Wolterstorff makes excellent arguments in relation to literature in analytic philosophy, he hardly gives any citations for theology, apart from his own work, and in Biblical Studies limits himself to supporting the New Perspectives on Paul.) The ‘classical agapists’ are deemed to be Kierkegaard and Nygren, with Reinhold Niebuhr cast as non-classical agapist. Due to this being more a philosophical than a dogmatic work, Wolterstorff neglects to probe the significance of the Lutheran confession of the classical agapists versus Niebuhr’s somewhat thin reformed commitment. Yet this is highly relevant for grasping the antinomian tendencies in the former. Evidently Wolterstorff wishes to go beyond the incessant merry-go-round of Niebuhr versus Yoder in American Protestant ethics, which in terms of this book means evading the endless arguments preferring a ‘New Testament pacifism’ born of ‘love’ as opposed to an ‘Old Testament’ preference for moral and political realism, born of a concern for justice and protection of the vulnerable (perhaps those considered naïvely enthusiastic in their faith) from victimisation.
The use of the Bible invites further discussion. Wolterstorff’s use of the New Testament, mostly centring on the double love commandment, could be understood as a philosophical recasting of ‘Golden Rule Christianity’. The fact that he argues that Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is ‘for everyone’ and ‘not just the disciples’ is peculiar in that it introduces a dichotomy that ultimately proves false. The reason for this is never discussed, namely the Great Commission at the end of the same Gospel—Matthew—in which the Sermon is written. The Greek statement denoting the Great Commission is ‘mathete ta ethne’, which appears to have the simple meaning ‘teach the nations’. In English Bibles, however, it is often translated in terms of ‘making disciples of the nations’, which is often subtly understood to mean ‘make individuals from all the nations your disciples’. The question of what Wolterstorff thinks is the meaning of the statement is important. For the statement could be read to indicate that the resurrected Jesus wanted the disciples to call all people everywhere to be disciples, so that there would be no ‘in-group’ of disciples. Thus the argument as to whom the Sermon on the Mount applies would be abolished. This matters because the perennial problem with attempting to build an ethic from the Golden Rule alone is that it easily slides into making the claim that Jesus’ teaching was intended for people of all faiths and none and that following it did not require faith in Him as the Messiah and the Lord of history. Wolterstorff’s treatment of the New Perspectives on Paul’s view of justification in Romans in the last two chapters in the book does not really address this problem.
In order to demonstrate that love and justice are reconcilable in biblical terms, it would be helpful to have more wide-ranging discussion of the Bible, especially the reading of Old Testament texts in the New Testament. For example, Wolterstorff makes much of the Parable of the Good Samaritan in his redefinition of love as care, a central component of his overall argument. (He rejects the classical agapist emphasis on love as benevolence, and also rejects modern theories that place empathy at the centre of definitions of love.) Love as ‘care’, defined over the course of Part II of the book, is meant to develop a view that eschewed benevolence or paternalism. Thus the Good Samaritan is said to be moved by compassion, not pity, in that the former has connotations of a real sense of the worth of the victim. Yet Wolterstorff reiterates familiar platitudinous readings of the parable as drawing its moral import from the fact that Jesus calls us to pay attention to people’s needs regardless of whether they belong to one’s ‘in-group’. This can only be inferred properly, however, if we first read the parable as belonging to the tradition of figurative reading of Samaria as the Northern Kingdom of Israel to Judah as the Southern Kingdom. Samaritans are not just ‘the other’. They are literally the neighbours of the Jews because they are the descendants of the people who settled the area of the Northern Kingdom after its fall in the eighth century
All this is to say that while I see much to agree with in the preceding volume Justice: Rights and Wrongs, in setting out a philosophical-theological argument for justice as inherent natural rights, the argument as it is continued in the present volume is much better defended by its philosophical sourcing than its biblical and theological sourcing. In Part III, Wolterstorff sets out to argue first that forgiveness (which he understands as conditional upon repentance) does not violate justice (understood as reprobative but not retributive), second that unequal distribution of generosity is not necessarily unjust (as in the parable of the labourers in the vineyard), and third that a distinction is discernible between just and unjust paternalism, even in a liberal democracy founded on popular sovereignty. There is much that is morally attractive and reasonable in the first and third arguments. The second argument is less clearly articulated. It is not entirely clear how this set of arguments fits in the overall structure of the book, especially given that Part IV suddenly introduces the New Perspectives on Paul. The first argument is based on singling out the view that Paul regards state punishment as reprobative, expressing condemnation of an unjust act, but not retributive. How this squares with Wolterstorff’s insistence that the law is compatible with love, given that Mosaic law clearly allows both types of punishment (with capital punishment as the maximal permissible punishment for sexual offences and divination, and lesser, more ‘reprobative’ punishments for other kinds of offence) is not accounted for. Required here is discussion of Jesus writing in the sand and telling the adulterous woman to ‘go and sin no more’. Not only is Jesus demonstrating himself to be God incarnate by imitating Yhwh writing the two tablets of the Decalogue with his own finger, he is speaking to a woman whom the text takes to represent the unfaithful southern Kingdom of Judah, typologically fulfilling the divine promise in Ezekiel 16 not to punish the two wayward women. It is on this basis that Christians can argue that Jesus revoked death as the maximal punishment for all the offences in the Mosaic law for which it had been permitted. It is perhaps relevant that Wolterstorff repeatedly throughout the book speaks casually of Christian, Jewish and Muslim ethics and reading as if they were all somehow equally reflective of subjective natural rights. Yet the Old Testament, considered by most Jews as the full Scripture, does not allow such a clear divine permission for such revocation—still less does the Qur’an (Surah 4 on women)! We need a fuller biblical basis and more confessional honesty here. Wolterstorff may be trying to have things both ways, to make a case for American Christians to support human rights, while also reaching out to Muslims to discover grounds for justice as inherent rights in the Qur’an. I say this because he said clearly in Justice: Rights and Wrongs that concern for the plight of Palestinians as victims was a core motivator in his becoming interested in human rights (p. viii). Palestinian territories are under Islamic law.
This returns us to debates about ‘justice as right order’, the view of Oliver and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, versus Wolterstorff’s definition of ‘justice as inherent rights’, in the earlier volume. Given that in the present volume, he acknowledges a just form of paternalism, there is a question as to how wide the division between himself and the O’Donovans really is. For, as he says, they consider subjective rights more in relation to rulers’ obligations than to the inherent worth of the governed, and more in terms of the right of the political community. While I personally am more inclined to agree with Wolterstorff in that volume, there are pressing practical theological and philosophical debates about rights (and right) that bring this discussion into sharp relief. Wolterstorff mentions briefly in chapter 17 the possibility that forgiveness would lead to a criminal’s sentence being reduced in response to repentance. He adduces this as evidence that ‘foregoing reprobative punishment’ is not a violation of justice. Yet one example does not make a principle. There is a need to investigate criminological debates as to whether regular practice of this kind has a positive effect on the common good and the rights of all. Puzzling also is the claim that ‘God’s justice system [sic]…should not be thought of along deterrence lines but along reprobative lines’. As with retribution, does the Bible exclude deterrence completely? Jesus teaches repeatedly about Hell; the call to serve the vulnerable, in Wolterstorff’s terms to respect their justice as inherent rights and worth, is nowhere more strongly proclaimed in Matthew 25, but this is precisely in the context of an image of Heaven and Hell which has partly deterrent intention and force. Likewise, in the final chapter Wolterstorff makes it clear he wants to reject the penal substitutionary theory of atonement (PSA), on the grounds that ‘acquitting and pardoning, declaring innocent and forgiving, are not only distinct but incompatible’ (p. 258). Can it not be the case that divine acquitting of the accused is understood as the gift that is forgiveness itself, precisely by being unmerited? This may not be the same as saying that forgiveness becomes effective through its acceptance. Here we go to the heart of the problem of neglecting confessional dogmatic debates. He may worry that belief in PSA entails, either necessarily or typically, support for the death penalty. This may be the case, but it need not be, if a rigorous enough Christology is developed which can show that the Jesus who abrogates the death penalty for Mosaic offences is the same One who takes the penalty on the cross. None of this is to exclude the validity of other theories of atonement. Excluding PSA is linked to excluding retribution and deterrence; it ends up narrowing the biblical and moral frame of reference. In conclusion, this book is philosophically rich and rigorous in presenting a timely and morally attractive argument, but it requires much greater theological and biblical argument if it is to reach those Christians who are suspicious of human rights.