United in Love

Essays on Justice, Art, and Liturgy

Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Joshua Cockayne, Jonathan C. Rutledge

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781666715613
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This volume brings together decades of research in philosophical theology on the concepts of justice, art, and liturgy. One might be inclined to think that reflections on these topics should take place in isolation from one another, but as Wolterstorff masterfully demonstrates, they are indeed united in love. Inherent in each of these topics is a logic that affirms its object. Whether the dignity of the other, the desire for creative and enhancing understanding of the other, or the infinite goodness of the creator, all these things and practices find their completion in a unitive core of love. Which is to say, ultimately, they find their fulfillment in the worship of God and in the affirmation of the image of God in each of us.

Justice

2

Love and Justice

Two concepts long prominent in the moral culture of the West are love and justice. One can imagine a society in which one or the other of these (or both) was absent; in such a society, nobody would think in terms of love or nobody would think in terms of justice. In our society many of us, probably most, think in terms of both.

The reason for this is that we are the inheritors of two comprehensive imperatives issued by the writers of antiquity that employ these concepts. The imperative to do justice comes to us from both the Athens-Rome strand of our heritage and the Jerusalem strand. “Do justice,” said the Hebrew prophet Micah in a well-known passage (6:8). The ancient Roman jurist Ulpian said that we are to render to each what is his or her right or due (ius in Latin). The imperative to love comes to us only from the Jerusalem strand: love your neighbor as yourself, even if that neighbor is an enemy.

These two imperatives—do justice and love your neighbor as yourself—do not reveal on their face how they are related to each other. Thus it is that over and over the question has been raised in the writings of the West, in philosophy, in theology, in literature: how are these two imperatives related to each other?

The fact that it is only in our Jerusalem heritage that both of these imperatives are to be found, and not in our Athens-Rome heritage, has the implication that the topic of love and justice was not discussed by the ancient Greek and Roman writers. The ancient Stoic, Seneca, wrote a small book titled de Clementia. “Clemency,” as used in present-day English, refers to foregoing the appropriate punishment for some crime out of mercy for the offender or his family, out of concern for the common good, or whatever. So one would expect Seneca’s topic to be that sort of relation between love and justice. But that is not his topic. By “clementia” Seneca did not mean foregoing the appropriate punishment of some wrongdoer out of mercy; he meant choosing the lesser of the punishments specified in law for some crime.

Perhaps the most prominent theme in the literature on love and justice is the theme of tension or conflict. Sometimes this theme takes the form of writers arguing that it is impossible to follow the two imperatives simultaneously; it is argued that they are inherently conflictual. To act out of love is perforce not to act as one does because justice requires it; to treat someone as one does because justice requires it is perforce not to act out of love. At other times the theme of tension or conflict takes the weaker form of writers arguing that following the love-imperative will sometimes wreak injustice, or that following the justice-imperative will sometimes be unloving.

The examples offered of love wreaking injustice fall, for the most part, into three types. First, the way generosity is sometimes dispensed is unjust. This is the issue posed by Jesus’ parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matt 20:1–16). Second, the way in which benevolent paternalism is sometimes exercised is unjust. And third, a persistent charge against forgiveness, pardon, amnesty, commutation of sentence, and the like, is that in foregoing or diminishing punishment of the wrongdoer, justice is violated. This charge is at the center of the controversies swirling around truth and reconciliation commissions of the past thirty years or so. It is also the issue Anselm raised when he discussed the relation between God’s love and God’s justice in chapter IX of his Proslogion. Addressing God, Anselm asks, “How do you spare the wicked if you are all-just and supremely just?”13

There are both different kinds of justice and different kinds of love. So a question that comes to mind, once one has noted this theme of tension between love and justice, is what kind of justice and what kind of love do those writers have in mind who see tension between these two?

The major distinction within the field of justice is that between retributive or corrective justice and primary justice—meaning by primary justice, the sort of justice whose breakdown makes retributive or corrective justice relevant. So what kind of justice is thought to be in tension or conflict with love?

All kinds. Sometimes the justice that a writer has in mind is retributive or corrective justice; sometimes it is primary justice. And within primary justice, sometimes it is distributive justice, sometimes it is so-called commutative justice.

The situation with respect to the idea of love in these discussions is different. One thing that the English word “love” refers to is love as attraction: the love that consists of being drawn or attracted to something on account of its worth or excellence—as when one says, “I love Beethoven’s late string quartets.” A classic discussion of such love is Plato’s Symposium. Another thing that the English word “love” refers to is love as gratuitous benevolence or generosity—the love that consists of seeking to advance the well-being of another as an end in itself, paying no attention to whether or not justice requires this.

To the best of my knowledge, whenever a writer talks about the tension or conflict between love and justice, it is always love as gratuitous benevolence that he has in mind. Writers don’t usually say that this is the sort of love they have in mind; they just talk about love. But when one looks closely at what they say, it becomes clear that it is love as gratuitous benevolence that they have in mind. Perhaps justice sometimes comes into real or apparent conflict with love as attraction; but I know of no case in which it is love as attraction that the writer has in mind when he talks about real or apparent conflict between love and justice. Always it is love as benevolence, love as gratuitous generosity.

Cases of real or apparent conflict between justice and benevolence are often ethically important and intellectually intriguing, as are many of the proposals for resolution that writers have offered. But on this occasion I want to set such cases aside so as to raise a prior question: if love as gratuitous benevolence so often yields real or apparent conflict with justice, forcing the person either to choose between love and justice or to analyze the case in such a way that the conflict is only apparent and not real, may it be that we are misinterpreting our Jewish and Christian inheritance? May it be that when the Torah and Jesus issued the imperative to love our neighbor as ourselves, it was not gratuitous benevolence that they had in mind but some other form of love? And may it be that between justice and this other kind of love there is not tension but unity? May it be that we must re-think our understanding of love—and that some of us must also re-think our understanding of justice?

The Greek word that the New Testament writers used to report Jesus’ injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves is agapē. The view that what Jesus meant by agapē was gratuitous self-sacrificing benevolence or generosity was never more thoroughly developed than it was by the members of the so-called agapist movement in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestant ethics. Taking a brief look at what the modern-day agapists had to say will be a good way of identifying the fundamental issues.

Among the prominent members of the modern-day agapist movement were Søren Kierkegaard, Anders Nygren, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, and John Howard Yoder. I recently read Free of Charge by my former Yale colleague, Miroslav Volf. Volf takes it for granted in his book that the sort of love that Jesus and the New Testament writers had in mind is gratuitous generosity.

The two great documents of the modern-day movement are Kierke­gaard’s Works of Love and Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros. Let me on this occasion take Nygren rather than Kierkegaard as my main example of the movement—mostly because, though Kierkegaard was the more profound, Nygren was not only more influential but also more relentless in drawing out the implications of the agapist understanding of New Testament agapē.

Nygren saw three great motifs as locked in a struggle for dominance in Western thought. One motif is that of eros, eros being love as attraction. The motif of eros is dominant in the Platonic tradition; it’s the topic of Plato’s discussion in his Symposium. Nygren argues, implausibly in my...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Analyzing Theology
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• United in Love
• Justice
• Art
• Liturgy
• Afterword
• Bibliography