Journey toward Justice, by Nicholas P. Wolterstorff

Nicholas Wolterstorff is one of the great thinkers of our time. As the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, he has been a leading Christian philosophical voice both in the academy and the church. So he is a catch for the new Turning South book series from Baker Academic, which promises to address the implications of the shift of Christianity to the Global South. The idea of the series is to invite authors to reflect on how the experience of non-European forms of Christianity is changing the nature of Christianity as a whole. Autobiography is supposed to encounter theology. So how does this book do?

At the outset Wolterstorff admits that autobiography is not his genre. The mixture of his Dutch Reformed heritage and his philosophical training makes the telling of a narrative very tricky for him. Instead, his fame rests on his finely honed philosophical skills that allow him to organize and present precise distinctions. Therefore, perhaps it isn’t surprising that his autobiographical accounts of encounters with the Global South are limited.

Early on he describes a set of experiences that were formative for him back in the 1970s. The first was in South Africa in 1975, where he heard the cry for justice from black South Africans; the second was in Chicago in 1978, where he first listened carefully to the cry for justice from Palestinians. These were his “awakening experiences.” He relates these narratives briefly; he doesn’t paint a descriptive picture or provide a portrait of his feelings and reactions. Instead he simply documents the facts—time, location, nature of the meeting.