What is Justice? 2

Last updated on: September 6, 2011 at 12:05 am by Scot McKnight

What is Justice? 2 2011-09-03T11:51:42-05:00 Scot McKnight

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What is Justice 2

David Opderbeck is Professor of Law at Seton Hall University Law School. In this series, David reflects on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s most recent book, Justice in Love (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion).

In my first post, I highlighted some of the major themes in Wolterstorff’s recent books: Justice: Rights and Wrongs, and Justice in Love. Wolterstorff seeks to ground human rights in the claim that each and every human being has worth because God loves each and every human being with the “love of attachment.” In this post, I want to jump ahead to the final two chapters of Justice in Love to confront a fundamental issue that lurks underneath Wolterstorff’s entire project. Those chapters are entitled “The Justice of God’s Generosity in Romans” and “What is Justification and What is Just?”

For now, what do you think of Wolterstorff’s treatment of the nature of God’s justice in Romans? Is Luther’s treatment of Romans in On the Bondage of the Will correct, or does Luther overstate or mis-state the case? I’m particularly interested to hear from readers who are knowledgeable about the New Perspective on Paul: does Wolterstorff properly frame these two chapters in terms that are consistent with the NPP?

When I was a child, we used to sing the tune “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Today we might blush a bit at the racial and colonialist undertones of this song, but we might want to affirm its basic message: Jesus loves all the children of the world. God loves everyone. As children, we also memorized John 3:16 (in the King James, of course*!): “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life.”* God loves the whole world. Jesus died for everyone and God’s gift of life is available to everyone. Wolterstorff’s basic notion that God loves everyone seems manifestly attested to in popular evangelical piety and in scripture.

There were no Sunday School ditties, however, referring to Paul’s dense and tangled argument in Romans 1-11. The famous passage in Romans 9:13-22 must give us pause as we think about “justice”:

Just as it is written, “JACOB I LOVED, BUT ESAU I HATED.”

What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! For He says to Moses, “I WILL HAVE MERCY ON WHOM I HAVE MERCY, AND I WILL HAVE COMPASSION ON WHOM I HAVE COMPASSION.” So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “FOR THIS VERY PURPOSE I RAISED YOU UP, TO DEMONSTRATE MY POWER IN YOU, AND THAT MY NAME MIGHT BE PROCLAIMED THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE EARTH.” So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.

You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?

Obviously, this is a massively difficult passage for any Christian perspective on human rights and justice. God hates some people? God creates some people for destruction? In what sense can a person God creates for “common use,” a person whom God “hates,” have “human rights” – particularly rights grounded in God’s love? For many theologians and ethicists in the Reformed traditions, Romans 1-11 demonstrates that there is, in fact, no such thing as “human rights” and no such thing as any “natural” sense of ethics or justice.

In his treatise “On the Bondage of the Will,” Martin Luther responded to Catholic theologian Desiderius Erasmus’ claim that Luther’s theology destroyed the concept of human free will. Exactly, Luther responded: we do not have free will because God foreknows everything, including the fact of each person’s salvation or reprobation. This is not a problem for “justice,” Luther said, because

If [God’s] justice were such as could be adjudged just by human reckoning, it clearly would not be Divine; it would in no way differ from human justice. But inasmuch as He is the one true God, wholly incomprehensible and inaccessible to man’s understanding, it is reasonable, indeed inevitable, that His justice also should be incomprehensible; as Paul cries, saying: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!”

It is not a stretch to suggest that Luther’s rejection of the Catholic view of human freedom and natural justice lay at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. It also is not a stretch to suggest that this remains a fundamental dividing point not only between the Reformed and Catholic and Orthodox traditions, but also among evangelicals today.

Wolterstorff dives boldly into this historical debate. He suggests that his “interpretation of Paul will be along the lines of ‘the new Paul’ initiated by Stendahl and Sanders.” (JIL, p. 247). Romans, he says, “can be seen as a meditation on the theological significance of Jesus’ actions [in showing “no partiality” to non-Jews] and Peter’s vision [in Acts 10, in which table fellowship is opened to gentiles].” Paul’s central argument in Romans 1-11 is that God is substantively just in extending covenant blessings to the Gentiles because those blessings are extended on the same basis upon which they were made available to the Jews: faith.

This line of thought obviously diverges significantly from Luther’s. Wolterstorff suggests that the substantive principle of God’s justice is, indeed, discernible and is made known in the course of Paul’s argument. For Wolterstorff, Romans 1-11 is not about the unknowability of God’s justice. Rather, it is a theodicy in which Paul argues that God impartially offers justification to Jew and Gentile alike.

But what about Paul’s theme of election? Wolterstorff argues that Paul is

not talking about who shares in the final redemption; he’s talking about the pattern of God’s action in history to bring about redemption. He’s not talking about who God ultimately justifies; he’s talking about the fact that God chooses certain persons for a special role in the story line of redemption. He’s not talking about divine strategy; he’s talking about divine tactics. He’s not talking about who God declares justified on the great day of final judgment; he’s talking about who belongs here and now to “the children of God,” to “the children of the promise.” (JIL, pp. 267-68).

Wolterstorff subsequently unpacks what he takes as the purpose and meaning of “faith” in relation to justification and justice. He also tackles the nature of the atonement and its relation to justice. These are enormous topics in themselves, so I’ll leave them for later posts.

For my part, I’m not a Biblical scholar or a Paul scholar. I can’t (and don’t want to try to) speak with authority on how to interpret this incredibly difficult text. Yet, I’ve read Romans 9-11 dozens of times in recent months, trying to reflect on this very issue of God’s justice. To me, the interpretive key for Romans 9 must be Romans 11. But I’ll refrain for the moment from offering more of my thoughts. Who is right – Luther, or Erasmus and Wolterstorff?

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