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December 1, 2021 - January 9, 2022
Flexible order? Changing identities? The world of fixed rules and stable identities is the world of the older brother.
father keeps reconfiguring the order without destroying it so as to maintain it as an order of embrace rather than exclusion.
To use images from the prophet Micah, only if there is consensus on justice can people hope “to sit under their own vines” and “under their own fig trees,” and enjoy the fruit of their labor in peace (4:4);
To have “peace” without justice you will have to keep “breaking the bow,” “shattering the spear,” and “burning chariots” (Ps 46:9 CEB).
for the people to “beat their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks” (Mic 4:3) on their own accord—agreement on justice is needed.
Both a postmodern thinker and a communitarian will, of course, have a great deal to say about how to escape the morass of clashing justices. But their advice would clash. Like the world of generals, the world of philosophers is a world of competing justices.
We seem to be trapped in the iron logic of a syllogism of despair. Premise one: conceptions of justice depend on particular cultures and traditions. Premise two: peace depends on justice between cultures and traditions. Conclusion: violence between cultures will never stop.
I will first examine three dominant ways of dealing with the issue of clashing justices
the universalistic affirmation that justice is one, the postmodern claim that justice bears many names, and the communitarian placing of justice within a tradition.
God’s divinity is contested and therefore God’s justice is disputed.
The question is whether Christians who want to uphold God’s universal justice can judge among cultures with divine infallibility. The answer is that they cannot.
For one, Christians stand inside a culture, inside a tradition, inside an interest group.
Second, well-meaning Christians disagree profoundly about the nature of justice. Western Christian fundamentalists disagree with liberation theologians about the very notion of justice,
Even within the Christian tradition justice struggles against justice, and there is no final court of appeal in advance of that day when all will “appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor 5:10).
Kant’s justice cuts through cultural differences because it rests on something independent of any culture. Justice is blind to differences among human beings; it determines how any and every freely choosing, autonomous person should act.
As Michael Walzer puts it in Thick and Thin, Men and women who acknowledge each other’s equality, claim the rights of free speech, and practice the virtues of tolerance and mutual respect, don’t leap from the philosopher’s mind like Athena from the head of Zeus. They are creatures of history; they have been worked on, so to speak, for many generations; and they inhabit a society that “fits” their qualities and so supports, reinforces, and reproduces people very much like themselves.21
Rawls’s distinction between “reasonable” and “unreasonable” serves simply arbitrarily to draw the line between those who accept liberalism and those who do not; only “liberals” are “reasonable.”
The argument of postmodern thinkers is not so much that every account of justice is particular, but that every account of justice that purports to be universal is inherently oppressive.
“the worst injustice, the most bloody and unjustifiable transgressions of justice, are . . . committed daily in the name of justice, under the protection of the name ‘justice.’”
It can be persuasively argued that the postmodern critique of justice, like the postmodern critique of rationality, draws its pathos from the self-stultifying tendency to generate false expectations and then harbor disappointments when they fail to be fulfilled.
Moreover, no adequate notion of justice may disregard two Nietzschean moves that the postmodern critique makes: the insight that “all judgments” are “incomplete,” “premature,” “impure,” and therefore “unfair,”33 and the protest against the “vindictive characters” who, “disguised as judges,” carry “the word justice in their mouths like a poisonous spittle.”
Notice, however, that we have come almost full circle, close to the liberal principle of justice: all should respect all; none should respect those who do not respect all.
All radical difference notwithstanding, there sits within most postmodern thinkers an undeconstructed liberal with universal commitments quietly subverting the work of his or her master.
Alasdair MacIntyre, the main proponent of the view that theories of justice are aspects of given traditions, puts the problem this way: since contending social groups are unable to “arrive at agreed rationally justifiable conclusions on the nature of justice,” they appeal simply to their rival convictions without even attempting to justify them rationally.
As a result, in modern democracies the assertions of those with more political power win.
Let me start my alternative proposal with two simple propositions. One: “Nobody stands ‘nowhere.’” Two: “Most of us stand in more than one place.”
To leave all tradition behind is not a requirement of rationality but a recipe for insanity.
the place where the Christian theologian will learn about justice is the community called the church.
Christian thought on justice is rooted in the fiery protests of prophets and in the engaged reflection of apostles.
Christians do stand somewhere. Much needs to be said about how they should stand where they stand and how they should insert their particular vision into the larger public debate.
Christian “tradition” is never pure; it always represents a merging of streams coming from the scriptures and from given cultures that a particular church inhabits.
Cultures and traditions are not integrated wholes and cannot be made to be such in contemporary societies.
I think it is better to give up on “coherent traditions” and, armed with basic Christian commitments, enter boldly the ever-changing world of modern cultures.
Sustained by our intersecting lives and our underlying agreements, disagreements persist, however. And they are profound. We need to look for ways of resolving them without recourse to either the power of guns or the brute strength of the democratic masses.
a Christian theologian will not necessarily want to get rid of the “hybridity”—he or she will be much more interested in affirming basic Christian commitments in culturally situated ways than in forging coherent traditions and he or she will suspect that hybrid traditions will be more open than coherent traditions, not only to be shaped by these commitments but also to be enriched by each other.
Moral judgment, she insists, “cannot function in strict isolation or solitude; it needs the presence of others ‘in whose place’ it must think, whose perspective it must take into consideration.
“By appealing to our (multifaceted) respective traditions and the resources they provide.” For Christians, this would mean that we learn what justice is by observing justice as it is revealed in the biblical traditions
We may find that we must reject the perspective of the other. Yet we should seek to see things from the other’s perspective in the hope that competing justices may become converging justices and eventually issue in agreement.
he could recognize unfailingly the godlessness of the godless, but we cannot. Indeed, one of the most basic tenets of the Christian faith is that we are the perpetrators who crucified Christ, we are the godless whose godlessness God exposed.
The faith in Jesus Christ, who made our cause his cause, frees us from pursuing our interests only, and creates in us the space for the interests of others.
Three major objections militate against the practice of “double vision” as a way of countering injustice generated by the struggle of justice against justice.
First, one can object that the proposal is an exercise in wishful thinking. It will not work when we need it most.
the will to embrace the unjust precedes agreement on justice.
the will to embrace needs neither the assurance that it will in fact overcome enmity nor the inner rewards that the pleasure of loving someone unlovable may provide. This is simply what those who are the children of the “Father in heaven” and follow Christ do because this is what being God’s children and following Christ means (Matt 5:45).
The second objection to the notion of “double vision” concerns the struggle against injustice.
Here the critical question is not whether we can practice “double vision” in the thick of battle but whether we should practice it when faced with manifest injustice.
Must we not stop the killers rather than seek to see things from their perspective?
the human ability to agree on justice will never catch up with the human propensity to do injustice.
The scriptures uniformly call us not so much to reflect on justice as to do justice.
Once the primacy of the struggle against injustice over the agreement on justice is established, the problem is no longer how we can afford to go on reversing perspectives, but how we can afford not to do so.
