Journey toward Justice (Turning South: Christian Scholars in an Age of World Christianity)

P. Wolterstorff Nicholas

Description

Christianity's demographics, vitality, and influence have tipped markedly toward the global South and East. Addressing this seismic shift, one of today's leading Christian scholars reflects on what he has learned about justice through his encounters with world Christianity.Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff's experiences in South Africa, the Middle East, and Honduras have shaped his views on justice through the years. In this book he offers readers an autobiographical tour, distilling the essence of his thoughts on the topic. After describing how he came to think about justice as he does and reviewing the theory of justice he developed in earlier writings, Wolterstorff shows how deeply embedded justice is in Christian Scripture. He reflects on the difficult struggle to right injustice and examines the necessity of just punishment. Finally, he explores the relationship between justice and beauty and between justice and hope.This book is the first in the Turning South series, which offers reflections by eminent Christian scholars who have turned their attention and commitments toward the global South and East.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology
• Ethics in religion
• Philosophy of religion
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 05 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441242983
• Langue: English

Extrait

Joel Carpenter, series editor
T he Turning South: Christian Scholars in an Age of World Christianity series offers reflections by eminent Christian scholars who have turned their attention and commitments toward the global South and East. In order to inspire and move the rising generation of Christian scholars in the Northern Hemisphere to engage the thought world and issues of the global South more vigorously, the series books highlight such reorientations and ask what the implications of “turning South” are for Christian thought and creativity in a variety of cultural fields.

© 2013 by Nicholas Wolterstorff
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www . bakeracademic . com
Ebook edition created 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-4298-3
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations labeled Jerusalem Bible are from THE JERUSALEM BIBLE, copyright © 1966 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd. and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Material in chapter 25 is taken from “Just Demands” by Nicholas Wolterstorff, reprinted with permission in a modified version from the July 27, 2010, issue of the Christian Century . Copyright © 2010 by the Christian Century .
“Nick Wolterstorff is one of my ‘heroes of the faith’ not just because he is a brilliant philosopher (although he is that), and not just because he is a careful and attentive reader of Scripture (although he is that too), but because he is an advocate for justice. His concern with justice is a lived concern, not just a theoretical one. His encounters with people who had been treated unjustly decisively shaped his life and re-formed both his analysis of the concept of justice and his reading of Scripture. I hope this book is widely read. It just may prompt others to listen both to the oppressed and to God and to hunger for justice.”
Allen Verhey , Duke Divinity School
“Nicholas Wolterstorff has earned our respect and stirred our minds in his long career as a Christian philosopher. He has demanded our attention and struck our conscience in his more recent turn to the theory and practice of justice. Here he captures our imaginations and moves our souls as he tells the story of his journey toward justice a journey that leads him from wisdom to witness.”
Samuel Wells , vicar, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square; King’s College, London, England
“Ideas have consequences, the philosophers tell us. And they are right. But every idea also has a story. This is the tale of how one of American Christianity’s most careful thinkers got justice deep down in his soul. Journey toward Justice is nothing if it is not clear. But it is more: by telling the story of how people suffering injustice touched him, Wolterstorff has also made his case deeply compelling. I put this book alongside Lament for a Son as his best writing for the church.”
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove , author of Strangers at My Door
“Nicholas Wolterstorff here explores various ways we humans have come to think about issues of justice. But rather than offer us an anatomy of viewpoints, he asks himself and us what might move us from worldview to engagement. And what moved this philosopher accustomed to canvassing and assessing ‘theories’ was encountering those suffering the throes of injustice yet enduring them with hope, including black South Africans, Palestinians, and Hondurans as well as those from the societies dominating them who had come to stand with them. Here is a philosophical inquiry that is imbued with life.”
David Burrell, CSC , University of Notre Dame
Contents
Cover i
Series Page ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Endorsements v
Series Preface vii
Series Editor’s Foreword ix
Preface xii
Part 1: Awakening 1
1. Two Awakening Experiences 3
2. An Evening in Amman 11
3. Questions about Starting from the Wronged 15
4. One Difference That Starting from the Wronged Made 22
5. Another Difference That Starting from the Wronged Made 29
Part 2: Justice and Rights 35
6. Opposition to Rights-Talk 37
7. What Are Rights? 42
8. Rights Grounded in Worth 45
9. Why Rights-Talk Is Important 50
10. Is Rights-Talk for Expressing Possessive Individualism? 57
Part 3: Justice in Scripture 63
11. Natural Rights in Three Church Fathers 65
12. Justice in the Old Testament 69
13. On the Claim That Justice Is Supplanted in the New Testament 79
14. Justice in the New Testament 85
15. On English Translations of the New Testament 91
16. More about Justice in the New Testament 98
17. Justice and Love 105
18. Justice, Love, and Shalom 113
19. Does Scripture Imply a Right Order Conception of Justice? 119
Part 4: Righting Injustice 127
20. Human Rights 129
21. Six Days in South Africa 140
22. Art in the Struggle to Right Injustice 151
23. On the Blocking of Empathy and the Hardening of Hearts 156
24. The Structure of Social Justice Movements 166
Part : Just Punishment 181
25. A Visit to Honduras 183
26. St. Paul’s Rejection of Retributive Punishment 193
27. What Paul Said about the Task and Authority of the State 200
28. Justice, Forgiveness, and Punishment 208
Part 6: Beauty, Hope, and Justice 219
29. Justice and Beauty 221
30. Hope 227
31. Recap 244
Index 251
Back Cover 254
Series Preface
N early forty years ago, the Scottish church historian Andrew F. Walls predicted that Africa would become the new Christian heartland and that other regions to the global South and East would become the new main places in the world for Christian practice and thought. Few of Walls’s colleagues paid him any attention then, but today we see how prophetic he was. The “coming of global Christianity,” as historian Philip Jenkins put it, is gaining broad interest and attention, and its signs are quite evident. Africans have recently led the World Council of Churches and several of the Protestant world communions. The South African Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu is arguably the world’s most prominent public theologian. China and Brazil are now closing in on the United States as having the world’s largest national populations of Protestant Christians. And not only has the balance of Christianity’s place in the world tipped markedly toward the global South and East, so has public and scholarly consciousness of it.
This global shift in Christianity’s demography, vitality, and influence has caught most Christian scholars in the North Atlantic region by surprise. Their orientation and sense of mandate has been toward the problems of the increasingly post-Christian West, and their preparation for dealing with these issues has been framed within the European “Christian humanist” tradition. C. S. Lewis, Abraham Kuyper, and Dorothy Sayers are their patron saints, and one of their prime mandates has been to try to take back intellectual territory from the “cultured despisers of religion.” Christian scholarly guilds, colleges, and universities are deeply oriented in this direction. Their strategies and preoccupations were forged on the anvils of European Christendom. As a result, says Walls, there is a major mismatch between Christian vigor and engagement in frontline mission and Christian resources for producing scholarly work. Christian scholarship needs a major reorientation.
Walls took that idea to heart, and he set to work rewriting the church history syllabus. It needed to reflect the implications of the gospel’s traveling south and east from Jerusalem as well as to the north and west. There are others too who have been reorienting their personal and scholarly callings, and the purpose of this series is to give several Christian thought leaders the opportunity to share what they have been learning. May these reflections be powerfully instructive, so that many of you who read and ponder them will turn your hearts, minds, and vocations in this new direction.
Series Editor’s Foreword
J OEL C ARPENTER
W hen Bob Hosack of Baker Academic started thinking with me about a “Turning South” series, we decided that we would look for Christian thinkers from North America (and perhaps from Europe too) who had experienced a change of heart, mind, and professional direction because of their encounters with people from Africa, Asia, or Latin America and their ideas and concerns. If Christian intellectuals are supposed to be helping the church do its most demanding thinking about its mission to the world, then they should be ready and willing to engage the problems and issues that arise at the front lines of the church’s work. Given the seismic shift of Christian vigor and activity toward the global South and East, shouldn’t Christian thinkers be devoting the greater share of their time and talent to those regions too? Needless to say, the trends of Christian thought lag far behind the dramatic shift of the church’s main arenas. So we have been looking for some exemplary Christian scholars who have experienced a reorientation of their calling and who are willing to tell the story of their