Dignity and choice
I've picked up Nicholas Wolterstorff's new book, Justice in Love, and am reading it slowly, trying to savor each paragraph as he discusses the relationship—which sometime feels like a conflict—between justice and love.
Wolterstorff comments on and critiques Anders Nygren's classic Agape and Eros and Reinhold Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, with its notion that Jesus' ethic is an "impossible possibility." According to Wolterstorff, the basic Christian ethical concept is that individuals have a right to justice because they are loved by God. He builds his case for a new "care-agapism" in which justice and love, instead of being in conflict, are in harmony with each other and part of one ethical/moral position.
Wolterstorff points to Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan, and the striking moral mandate that appears in all three synoptic Gospels: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." That, Jesus said, is the heart of the Torah. "That sums it up," says Wolterstorff.
