Does Love Supplant Justice?

For my birthday I took the liberty of ordering two books that have been bouncing around theology blogs for the past month or so. I started Justice: Rights and Wrongs by Nicholas Wolterstorff, which seeks to ground, to the exclusion of any other narratives, the idea of inherent human rights within theism. I'm struggling through it for several reasons, the main being that I'm not adept enough in his fields of interest to know whether he is pulling a narrative over my head or not. This is not a case of the unreliable narrator but a case of the unreliable reader. I have little knowledge with which to judge his claims so I have to read suspiciously lest I be convinced of ideas that I don't want to, or that I'm not supposed to be convinced of. Ahh the life of a lay-anything feels so unrewarding at times.

(For critics who can offer a more authoritative analysis of the book, check out The Immanent Frame blog)

Regardless, I carry on.

The title question arises from this Wolterstorff analysis:

There has long been a powerful strand of thought in the Christian tradition that de-justicizes the New Testament. The New Testament, so it is said, is about love, not about justice. Justice is the theme of the Old Testament; love, the theme of the New. The Christian puts considerations of justice behind her. Love is her motive and guide. Many non-Christians have gone along and accepted that love supplants justice in the New Testament (96).

Obviously he is going to argue that this should not be the case, and I'm not there in his text yet, but I wanted to proffer the question before I get his answer to explore if we have experienced or assumed this to be true. In thinking on this, I keep coming back to a line President Obama said in his Call to Renewal speech in 2006 that seems to reinforce a similar interpretation of the New Testament. Describing a hypothetical Christian nation, Obama asks which scriptures should guide public policy and ends with this thought: "Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application?" Now Obama is not advocating such a move, but his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount as so radical that any rights or obligations to defend oneself cannot be justified seems to judge the words of Jesus as having little to do with justice and a whole lot to do with the idea of love. Of course the matter is not settled merely by Obama's interpretation of a single passage in the New Testament, but it serves as one example of how I and others view the relationship between love and justice in the New Testament.

My thoughts on this matter have been shaped by the prevalent idea of the Kenotic Christ as example for the Christian and the Church. The well weathered chapter, Philippians 2 serves as the starting point to find the Kenotic Christ:

"5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 8 he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross."

I have always related Kenosis, or self-emptying, to a relinquishment of power. With lit crit as my first introduction to theory, I've often viewed the sum of human relations as a vast network of Foucautian power dynamics. If we are to view Christ as the figure who willingly empties oneself of power, and if that is to be our example, than it does appear that a kenotic love supplants justice. (caveat: I play fast and loose with the scriptures)

This is clearly an idea that we cannot build a legal system on. The early Christians recognized that, and faced with the choice of either going down in a kenotic flame or developing a strategy to somehow instill order and justice, chose the latter and thus the saculem, or secular for all of us who don't read Latin was created. (I'm not quite making this up as I go along. Most of this analysis comes from theology books I didn't make adequate notes on.) Or, as Augustine puts it, there is the City of God and the City of Man. They have different ideas of time and different ideas of justice. If we view the Secular as the time before the eschatological event of Christ's return, than we can develop an idea of worldly justice immune to the radical kenosis of Christ. Which is what we kind of have. Although it makes the example of the kenotic Christ a little tough to apply.

Does that subsume the call of Christ into a form of private pietism while Secular Justice becomes the watchword of all humanity? Or does the New Testament have a lot to say about Justice? I get the feeling that a lot of theologians these days feel like secular logic and justification is in the process of collapsing on itself. There are some, like Rowan Williams who argues that Justice and Human Rights can be adequately grounded without the support of Christianity (listen to his fabulous LSE podcast lecture), but for others like the Radical Orthodox troop and Stanley Hauerwas, Secular understandings of Justice cannot substantiate the worth or rights of a human without eschatology. If I'm not totally off base here, I think they suggest that Christians should start infusing the public square with the kenotic ethic of Christ. What that does to Justice I have no idea, but I take it to mean that Christians should use that ethic as an example and follow it to its logical conclusion by adopting non-violent persuasions and learning how to, not fight for them, but die for them.

I realize I've been a bit too free-wheeling in my attempt to describe how I feel how the idea that love supplants justice might be true, or at least still finds some expressions in current theology. In order to adequately flesh this idea out it is clear that I need to do some work and fill in some holes with references and clearer thought, but after all, this is a blog, and I'm not quite there yet. But I do hope I have described a cogent, if not reputable narrative concerning the demands of justice and love. I do ask those of you who wade in the theological waters more deeply than myself to offer advice and admonishment as needed, especially if I have incorrectly characterized some thinkers/texts.

Church Hunting pt. 1

“Church and world are often more prescriptive rather than descriptive terms; in practice, the church is full of the world. This is as it should be; the dialectical drama of sin and salvation implies a dialogical relationship between the church and its others, which include the world and God. Indeed, the Holy Spirit blows where it will, and the activity of the Spirit is not limited to the church. The church is therefore a relational body, and not a closed system. The church is not a polis; ekklesia names something closer to a universal “culture” that is assembled from out of the particular cultures of the world (Healy 2000: 159–75). The church is not only crossed by nonchurch elements; it also contains anti-Christ elements. The church is a corpus permixtum, full of both saints and sinners. As Nicholas Healy reminds us, ecclesiology must maintain both poles of Paul’s dictum in Gal. 6: 14, “far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” On the one hand, we must not boast of the church, as if the church were already the answer to all the world’s social ills; on the other hand, we must glory in Christ, and regard the church as a key actor in the unfolding of the drama of salvation which Christ’s cross has won (Healy 2000: 1–24). The eschatological “not yet” means that the history of the drama so far needs to be told hopefully but penitentially, with room for marginal voices and conflicts. The story is not told in an epic manner, as if the church were made to rule. As the embodiment of God’s politics, the church nevertheless muddles through. God is in charge of all of history. The church’s job is to try to discern in each concrete circumstance how best to embody the politics of the cross in a suffering world” (Cavanaugh “Church” in Blackwell’s Anthology of Political Theology 405).

In Katie and I’s search for a church home, I have kept this passage in mind to help us discern exactly where we should commit our time and resources to. Our search has not been easy, indeed we have to struggle against the temptation of sleeping in and going to the farmer’s market down the street instead of attending churches. I have found that my enthusiasm waxes and wanes in this attempt. When we do decide to go and then we discover how a place doesn’t feel right, or a theology is a little too out of whack for our liking, it seems to set the search back for a week or so. In this post I want to unpack this Cavanaugh passage and help shed some light on just what we are looking for.

I am fascinated and convicted by the thought that the church does not have a monopoly on the workings of the Holy Spirit. I don’t take this idea to necessarily mean The Holy Spirit, but a more general idea of God’s exertion of grace upon our world. I have been guilty of thinking that the Church is the super-structure end all of all ends for the World’s ills before, but I think that ultimately leads to an impoverished community of believers. I still believe that, I think, but the idea needs to be prefaced with the very important “not yet”. As Christians we must struggle with the knowledge that we are paradoxically already transformed into the new creation, while at the same time we are the broken and hapless community in need of much grace and patience. If we are indeed not so hapless, I would think that this whole eschatologic moment would have come a lot sooner. So if the church must negotiate with other voices, and perhaps even contain voices that can carry the whispers of God’s grace in our world, what does that look like? Surely there must be a very bare-bones sub-set of beliefs that one must in some way subscribe to in order to bear the witness of Christian. I don’t like muddled pluralism, but I don’t like rigid sects either. Can the church contain anti-Christ elements? Does the church incorporate the Truth’s of God’s grace outside of it in the same manner as the plundering of Egypt’s riches? Or perhaps the idea that the church is made of the world is very important here. Perhaps subscribing to Christianity is a continual act that can never stick for good. Perhaps there is so much of the world in those who profess the witness of the Church that our subscriptions and memberships are never enough to fully separate ourselves from even the world inside of us. If I interpret that passage as something to be applied personally and inter-church, it can certainly work, although it does sound as if the hope the Church has to offer the world is very muddled indeed.


This reminds me of the idea of Carnival. The saints are always sinners of a sort, and the sinners are always saints of a sort, and in the Carnival revelry, we are exposed as the “already-but-not-yet” hope of for the World. Although we are exposed as the corpus permixtum that we are, our hope is also reified by the act of switching places. When the Kings are made into fools, and the fools into Kings, when the Sinners are made into saints and the saints into sinners, we are reminded, by the sinners who play saints, that we are actually saints of a sort, and we must bear witness as best we can.