Last week I reported on a symposium at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, directed by James Hunter, centering on Nicholas Wolterstorff's forthcoming book Justice: Rights and Wrongs. (Princeton University Press tells me that the title is on their Spring 2008 list. A sequel is also promised, touching on justice and love.) In that connection we briefly considered the state of "justice talk" today. Certainly it's not enough, for a properly philosophical understanding of justice, to collect instances in which people are talking about justice and analyze them under our analytic microscopes. (Remember the spectacular pretensions of "ordinary language" philosophy?) But it is useful nevertheless to consider some examples.

Heraclitus said that "justice is conflict," a resonant aphorism that Stuart Hampshire appropriated for the title of a little book he did for Princeton University Press several years ago. Clearly "conflicts between conceptions of the good" are pervasive, but Hampshire is particularly concerned to deny that there is principle a transcendent source to which we might appeal in order to adjudicate such conflicts, hence his chapter "Against Monotheism."

Hampshire's book is helpful as a window on the current scene, where many of the people who think explicitly about justice—and never in history have so many professors, so many civil servants, so many denizens of think tanks been employed to do so—combine a passionate devotion to justice, variously construed, with a horror of transcendent claims.

For Christians, of course, things are different (though the variety of responses to Wolterstorff's manuscript showed that Christian thinkers disagree sharply, for instance, about the genealogy of the modern discourse of "rights"). For Christians, talk about justice is inseparable from God's promises. As David Kelsey writes in Imagining Redemption, "the eschatological 'kingdom of God,' God's ultimate triumph over powers of evil, will be marked by humankind's liberation from bondage to powers of evil and will be the rule of justice and peace." Moreover, this is not a promise that awaits fulfillment until the end of this world. Rather, the Gospel narratives "present a figure the burden of whose message is the promise that the world as we know it is about to end and God's justice is about to begin." Indeed, "the inbreaking is already beginning even as Jesus speaks."

Kelsey is especially helpful in his emphasis on "Jesus' power to redeem in ways governed by the act of promise making. We need to explore how the sheer act of promise making can be a model in which we may imagine God's wild and unpredictable power to create new life-worlds in the midst of living death," as Kelsey goes on to do in the context of the concrete circumstances of a troubled family. If Kelsey's language is a bit stiff, his insight is precious. Don't we have here a fresh perspective on justice as well as on redemption?

How interesting to find this same theme in one of the essays from Inhabiting the Church: Biblical Wisdom for a New Monasticism, by Jon Stock, Tim Otto, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. In his chapter on "Vows," Jon Stock writes that "Israel's self-understanding is that it must be a community of promise keeping and fidelity," and he cites Micah 6:8, "He has required you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love loyalty, and to walk humbly with God." If John 3:16 was the verse most cited by evangelicals in my youth, Micah 6:8 occupies that place today.

Even so, among Christians there will be different and sometimes painfully contradictory understandings of how to apply Micah 6:8. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, for example, dissents from "Christian realism" and its underwriting of "just war." If we need reminding that it has always been so, Kevin Uhalde's Expectations of Justice in the Age of Augustine will set us straight. (Look for a review in Books & Culture.) If Uhalde is too easily disenchanted, he nevertheless has assembled a richly suggestive dossier of everyday challenges in the ecclesiastical administration of justice. This might make strangely encouraging reading for many a modern-day pastor. "The history of justice," Uhalde concludes, "much like the history of the episcopal office during our period, must include all its failings, imperfections, and ambiguities, as much as its single point of clarity, always prominent in the minds of Christians: God's ultimate reckoning." May it be prominent in our minds as well.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

Copyright © 2007 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

Read more from 'Books & Culture Corner'

				Try an Issue of Books & Culture Free! Name Street Address City/State/Zip E-mail Address No credit card required. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. Offer valid in U.S. only. Click here for International orders. If you decide you want to keep Books & Culture coming, honor your invoice for just $19.95 and receive five more issues, a full year in all. If not, simply write "cancel" across the invoice and return it. The trial issue is yours to keep, regardless. Give Books & Culture as a gift Buy 1 gift subscription, get 1 FREE!

Free Newsletter Sign up today for the ChristianityToday.com Books & Culture Newsletter    RSS Feed   RSS Help