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Until Justice and Peace Embrace

By Nicholas Wolterstorff

Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1983. 197 Pp. $13.95.

This book comprises the 1981 Kuyper Lectures, delivered at the Free University of Amsterdam. It reflects the Neo-Calvinism of both the author and his primary audience, yet the perspective achieved is anything but parochial. Wolterstorff is deeply concerned about the repressive economic and political character of the whole "modern world-system." Moreover, he is well informed as to the depth of Western capitalist complicity in the poverty and backwardness of the world's poor.

The author's purpose in the "disclosure of society" is clearly theological. He is ultimately aiming toward the development of social consciousness which will fuel "obedient action" on the part of the Christian community. In a chapter vaguely reminiscent of H. R. Niebuhr's Christ and Culture, Wolterstorff briefly surveys the history of Christian social

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ethics. He argues that sixteenth-century Calvinism represented a radical break from the medieval pattern of "avertive" religion, that is, a characteristic turning away from the evils of society in order to contemplate a "higher reality." It is true that Calvinism was a departure from late medieval Christianity, but I found his characterization of medieval religion and social ethics simplistic and stereotyped. His term "avertive" does not explain the real power that the medieval church garnered and used in its attempt to "Christianize" society.

The theocratic character of medieval society demonstrated that the church had a "world-formative" goal. Where Calvinism differed, as Wolterstorff is well aware, was in its vision of what that goal should be. Luther's doctrine that all legitimate human occupations, lay or ecclesiastical, were Christian vocations, was cast in a conservative mold by his "two kingdoms" theory which entailed the denial that we could achieve in our vocations much more in society than brute order. Calvin radicalized the Lutheran doctrine of vocation and taught that our vocations carried out in "obedient gratitude" to God served the common good only if they were done in a social context consistent with the revealed will of God. For Calvinism, Christians must see to it that the social order is in fact consistent with God's law. Unlike the biblical radicalism of the Anabaptists, which led to an anti-Constantinian strategy of withdrawal into the "believers" church, Calvinistic biblical radicalism led to a dynamic social activism designed to bring society in line with revealed writ.

Wolterstorff, Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, surely knows that Calvinism was not without its own faults, oppressiveness being chief among them. Calvinists did not "think through how they could live together in a just society with those with whom they disagreed." Nevertheless, Wolterstorff affirms that their fundamental vision assumes that Christianity should be "world formative" and aggressively seek social change. It is hard to disagree. After the era of Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, there has been a well-nigh universal theological collapsing around this central "Calvinist" perspective. Modern Lutherans, Anabaptists, Catholics all expound the necessity of activistic Christian social ethics.

The central question is just where ought this Christian visioning of society lead? Herein lies the great strength, but also the limitations, of this book.

In a moving chapter, "For Justice in Shalom," Wolterstorff defines the ideal. "Shalom is the human being, dwelling at peace in all his or her relationships: with God, with self, with fellows, with nature." Shalom is this "right, harmonious" being in a context of delight.

We are commanded by God to work for Shalom. Progress toward Shalom requires the struggle for justice which Catholic liberation theology stresses and which Wolterstorff largely endorses. However, it also requires the development of technology and our increased mastery of creation, which Neo-Calvinists have stressed.

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All this I find illuminating and even inspiring, but alas, abstract. In spite of making a number of interesting distinctions between theory and praxis, this book is, finally, heavy on theory and light on praxis. Well into the book, at a critical juncture, we read: "In that circumstance, what should the victims (and those who side with the victims) do? Should they confine themselves to talk in the hope that somewhere they will find a listening ear? Or should they engage in active resistance and opposition? And under what circumstances, if any, is civil disobedience morally permissible as a component in such active resistance? Further, under what circumstances, if any, is resorting to violence legitimate as such a component? These questions plunge us into an immensely important cluster of topics which to my regret, I cannot here treat." (Italics added, pp. 142-143.)

I am not criticizing Wolterstorff for not solving the problems he analyzes, nor would I suggest that analysis without an accompanying solution is invalid. Further, though I believe Reinhold Niebuhr was the greatest political thinker America has produced in our century-and he rarely refrained from offering solutions-he was often, I am tempted to say, usually wrong in the specific advice he gave (said with the benefit of hindsight, to be sure). In many situations there is a grace in remaining silent.

Theologians and philosophers are not prophets. A theologian can perhaps point to the place that prophecy is needed, but a prophetic word, a "relevant" word as God counts relevance, is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is miracle. Christian social ethics are, by the nature of things, human speculations, second guessing, and the analysis of "experts" unless God sets on fire a man or woman to give these ethics power. To be sure, we need books like these, and there will not be many as good as this one, but we need also a prophet. We need a Martin Luther King, Jr. to give such insight divine marching orders and holy focus.

Wolterstorff speaks a great deal about God acting in history. He also rehearses the seemingly hopeless immediate future of the Third World, and yet his analysis never deals with the problem of evil as a theological problem. Can the problem of evil be reduced to the problem of human sin, especially when one is prepared to grant, as I'm sure Wolterstorff would grant, that the God of Joshua is the creator of this kind of world.

RONALD GOETZ

Elmhurst College
Elmhurst, Illinois