Category: Justice

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Biblical Studies Justice Political Theology Public Theology

James Cone: A Black Theology of Liberation

This is a book review I wrote on James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation for a class on modern theology.  I’m primarily posting it here because I need to reference my thoughts in another paper, but I hope readers might appreciate the review.

James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation was first written, as Cone notes in the Postscript to the Fortieth Anniversary Edition, at the height of the civil rights and black power movements in 1969.[1]  Cone says that “[n]o one can understand this book apart from the social and political context in which it was written.”[2]  In particular, at the time he wrote this book, Cone had become frustrated with theology written by “white privileged intellectuals.”[3]  He wanted to write a specifically black theology within, to, and for the black experience.

The book begins with a description of Cone’s theological method.  For Cone, “Christian theology is a theology of liberation.”[4]  In particular, Christian theology “is a rational study of the being of God in the world in light of the existential situation of an oppressed community, relating the forces of liberation to the essence of the gospel, which is Jesus Christ.”[5]  This definition of theology seems consistent with other kinds of liberation theologies, and indeed seems somewhat conventional.  Cone draws his existentialist approach from noted white theologians such as Barth and Tillich.  However, Cone not only argues for “liberation” as a central motif in an existentialist theology, but further states that “black theology affirms the black condition as the primary datum of reality . . . .”[6]

The centrality of blackness to existential reality and therefore to theology, for Cone, means that “whites are in no position whatever to question the legitimacy of black theology.”[7]  White theology, Cone argues throughout the book, is a theology of oppression, beginning with the extermination of Amerindians and running through the enslavement of blacks.  Indeed, for Cone, “whites have only one purpose: the destruction of everything which is not white.”[8]  The rationality of black theology therefore need not, and should not, remain subject to the criterion for legitimacy drawn from white theology.

Notwithstanding this strong affirmation of the independence of Black theology, Cone proceeds to describe the sources and methods of Black theology in apparently conventional terms:  they include scripture, experience, and above all Jesus Christ.[9]  The “experience” Cone thinks is relevant, however, is the black experience of oppression.  The black experience is in fact the lens Cone uses to interpret scripture and Christ:  “[t]he meaning of scripture is not found in the words of scripture as such but only in its power to point beyond itself to the reality of God’s revelation – and in America, that means black liberation.”[10]  The meaning of “black liberation” is crucial to Cone’s theology in this book.  As noted above, Cone wrote the book in the midst of the black power movement.  Cone’s view of “black liberation,” therefore, included potentially violent resistance to white America.  For Cone, “[t]he black experience is the feeling one has when attacking the enemy of black humanity by throwing a Molotov cocktail into a white-owned building and watching it go up in flames.”[11]

Cone then proceeds to a discussion of what “God” means in black theology.  Consistent with his existentialist bent, he understands the term “God” to point to a transcendental reality that interprets history.  For Cone, this means in particular the history of God’s liberation of Israel as narrated in scripture and the history of God’s liberation of black people.[12]  At this point in the text, an apparent contradiction arises in Cone’s argument.  While “[t]he black theology view of God must be sharply distinguished from white distortions,” Cone suggests that “[t]his does not mean that black theology rejects white theology entirely.”[13]  Nevertheless, on the very next page after this statement, Cone says “[t]he goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods.”[14]

This contrast should be read as intentionally dialectical, as begins to become clearer in the next two chapters on theological anthropology and Jesus Christ.[15]  While Cone does identify blackness with black bodies, he also notes that “[i]n the literal sense a black person is anyone who has ‘even one drop of black blood in his or her veins.’”[16]  In Cone’s chapters on anthropology and Christology, blackness begins to seem more like an existential condition summed up in the black American experience rather than merely a skin color.

The final chapter discusses ecclesiology, culture, and eschatology.  Cone’s eschatology is strongly immanent.  He criticizes futurist eschatologies as means by which whites have encouraged blacks to remain docile in their servitude in hope of a future reward.[17]  His view of culture is similarly immediate to the lived experience of oppressed black people:  “[t]he world is not a metaphysical entity or an ontological problem. . . . It is very concrete.  It is punching clocks, taking orders, fighting rats, and being kicked around by police officers.”[18]  Similarly, eschatology, for Cone, must be realized in the present struggle for black liberation.  Nevertheless, he also recognizes the importance of “the future reality of life after death” as “grounded in Christ’s resurrection” because this hope supplies the courage to face death in the struggle for liberation.[19]

It is somewhat jarring for me – a white middle-aged lawyer, studying theology in a historically mostly white evangelical context – to read this text.  Cone’s frequent use of terms like “whitey,” his apparent calls to violence by blacks against whites, and his insistence that whites cannot critique black theology, initially seem to suggest that this text bears little value for a broader theological conversation, if it is not in fact completely unhinged.  But a more careful reading of the text within its own historical context argues for a subtler interpretation.  Cone brilliantly deploys modern white existentialist theology to challenge the very notion of “whiteness.”  He shows that what American culture has assumed as “normal” – the white middle class – is in fact not consistent with the fundamental norms of scripture and Jesus Christ.  Cone challenges us to see that what white American culture has despised – blackness – is, in fact, the true Christian norm precisely because it has been despised.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to know how to interpret some of the passages in this text that seem to call for black violence against whites.  At times Cone seems seriously to endorse immediate violence, and at other time he seems to suggest that violence is more of a possibility than a necessity.  In his chapter on eschatology, for example, Cone concludes that “[l]ooting, burning, or the destruction of white property are not primary concerns.  Such matters can only be decided by the oppressed themselves who are seeking to develop their images of the black Christ.”[20]  Although even the suggestion that violence might be appropriate seems shocking, Cone repeatedly invokes Nat Turner, the heroic leader of a slave rebellion prior to the Civil War, in a way that brilliantly disarms modern white liberals who eschew violence.[21]

Ultimately, I suppose I must accept Cone’s judgment that, as a white man, I cannot judge black theology.  As a white man, I learn from Cone what the experience of “blackness” in America can mean in relation to the existential core of the Gospel.  I cannot endorse the calls to violence in this text, but I can at least recognize how my requirement of nonviolent social change implicates a long history of racism that is anything but peaceful.

[1] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll:  Orbis Books 40th Anniv. Ed. 2010), 152.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., Preface to the 1986 Edition.

[4] Ibid., 1.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 5.

[7] Ibid., 8.

[8] Ibid., 12.

[9] Ibid., Ch. 2.

[10] Ibid., 34.

[11] Ibid., 25.

[12] Ibid., Chapter 4.

[13] Ibid., 64.

[14] Ibid., 65.

[15] Ibid., Chapters 5 and 6.

[16] Ibid., 69.

[17] Ibid., 145.

[18] Ibid., 140.

[19] Ibid., 150.

[20] Ibid., 130.

[21] See, e.g., ibid.

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Justice Law and Policy

Richard Stearns / World Vision on Foreign Aid

In today’s Wall Street Journal, World Vision President Richard Stearns writes:

One objection that I often hear from evangelicals is that while aid is good, it is not the government’s job. Yes, individuals and churches play a vital role in aid and development. But governments play a unique and vital role that private organizations cannot. The poverty-focused programs in the foreign-aid budget are facing cuts of between $1.2 billion and $3.2 billion from 2010 levels. In comparison, the largest American Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, has a budget of $308 million for its missionary and aid organization.

We cannot let others suffer simply because times are tough in the U.S. All Americans must understand the urgency of the human need and the effectiveness of our government’s aid programs.

Excellent.

Categories
Justice Religious Legal Theory Theology

What is Justice, Part 1

I’m doing a series on Jesus Creed  on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s most recent book, Justice in Love (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion).  Go over there and join the conversation!  Here’s my first post:

Introduction

Nicholas Wolterstorff is a leading Christian philosophical theologian who combines his intellectual erudition with a warm evangelical faith.  Recently he published an important two-part series of books on the theme of “Justice” — Justice: Rights and Wrongs and Justice in Love.  Although both books touch on some difficult philosophical and theological themes, they are readily accessible to anyone.  If you’re involved in justice ministries, legal or law enforcement work, government or military service, or are otherwise interested in the theme of justice, these are books you should read.

Here are some opening questions:  Why two fat books on “justice?”  Don’t we already know what “justice” means?  What do you think comprises “justice?”  Do human beings have inherent “rights”?  Is a concept of “rights” required for a concept of “justice?”

“Justice” and “rights,” in fact, are slippery concepts.  Western liberal theories of justice and rights, after the rise of modernity, generally attempt to avoid reference to God or any other transcendent source of rights and justice.  John Rawls’ highly influential approach, for example, is rooted in social contractarian ideas.  For Rawls, “justice” requires that each individual give to others what she would desire for herself, if all individuals were ignorant of any other person’s desires.  Other theories, such as the “capacities” approach of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, conceive of “justice” as what is necessary to maximize the innate capabilities of each person in a way that supports human flourishing.  Each of these theories, and others like them, focus only on human or “natural” factors.

Christian theology, of course, must think beyond the human to the divine.  But how do notions of “justice” and “rights” fit into a Christian theistic framework?

In Roman Catholic theology, “justice” is woven into the “natural law,” which is to some degree accessible to all human beings through the exercise of natural reason.  For Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, natural law served as a précis to the fuller understanding of truth and the virtues that could be acquired only through faith.  Following Aristotle, Thomas’ ethical theory is a eudemonistic one – it posits an ideal “good life,” a life in which the vision of God is the ultimate good, and develops virtues and practices required to attain the good life.   Although Thomas considered faith necessary for a fully virtuous live, he believed ordinary human reason could grasp the basic principles of justice.

Wolterstorff argues that eudemonistic theories of ethics fail to supply a stable basis for “rights” and “justice” because they fail to offer an account of inherent human worth.  (JR&W at p. 179).  The “life-goods” of eudemonism, he says, are activities “each of us must choose … with the goal in mind of enhancing one’s own happiness.”  Wolterstorff suggests that, “[t]here is no room in this scheme for the worth of persons and human beings, and hence none for one’s right against others to their treating one a certain way on account of one’s worth.”  (JR&W at p. 179).  This argument against eudemonism is interesting because it turns the usual Protestant / Reformed argument against eudemonism on its head by suggesting that eudemonism is not “humanistic” enough.

Thomistic natural law theory – or at least a version of it – was subject to severe attack during the Protestant Reformation.  Martin Luther, in particular, famously battled with Thomist scholars of his day over the relationship between nature and grace.  This basic question of theological anthropology – to what extent, if at all, can human beings know and do good through natural reason, and what is the necessary role of God’s grace – remains a fundamental question for any Christian theory of justice.

For some strands of Protestant Christian theology, following Luther and to some extent John Calvin, the notion of “human rights” is eyed suspiciously or flatly rejected.  If God’s sovereignty is such that he “can do whatever he wants,” then human beings have no inherent “rights.”  For Reformed thinkers in this vein, the only real basis for “justice” and “rights” is God’s divine command.  The Decalogue provides us with the blueprint for God’s law, which we are bound to obey, and that law gives people obligations to each other, with corresponding rights.  For example, the command not to steal (Exodus 20:15) supports a right against other people to personal property.  But these are not “natural” rights that inhere in persons apart from God’s commands.

One problem with this kind of divine command ethic is that it raises the specter of arbitrariness.  Is theft wrong merely because God says so?  Could God then change the command and at some point declare theft to be lawful and “good?”  On the other hand, is there a standard of “good” to which even God must adhere, suggesting that there is something greater than God?  Most divine command theorists avoid this problem by noting that God Himself is the perfection of good in His being, so that His commands, which are always consistent with His own being, are neither arbitrary nor indebted to a standard above His own being.

Wolterstorff, however, argues that divine command theories fail because they rest on an analogy to human commands.  We know what a “moral command” looks like because we as human beings issue such commands to each other.  But if human beings can issue moral commands to each other, Wolterstorff says, then the standard for morality can be at least in part a human one, which does not rest on God’s commands as divine command theory requires.

Further, Wolterstorff argues that divine command theories fail because all such theories rest on an inherent moral obligation to obey God’s commands, even prior to any specific command from God (JR&W, at p. 275-76).  The reason we are morally obliged to obey God’s commands cannot itself arise from one of God’s commands, or else we become stuck in an infinite regress.  We must be morally obliged to obey God’s commands because of something inherent in the God-human relation that precedes the divine commands.

In other important strands of Reformed thought, the imago Dei, combined with a theology of “common grace” supports a concept of natural human rights.  This seems to be the approach taken by many contemporary protestants who cite Abraham Kuyper as an influence.  But it remains difficult to understand exactly what about the imago Dei grounds a universal concept of rights.  Is it a set of human capacities that arise from the imago?  If so, what about people who have not yet developed all their capacities (infants) or who have lost them (mentally incapacitated adults)?

Wolterstorff argues that “rights” and “justice” cannot derive from eudemonism, divine commands or the imago Dei alone.  Rather, he says, “human rights” flow primarily from the fact that every human being is loved by God and is thereby a “friend” of God (Wolterstorff calls this the “love of attachment”).  The imago is itself the fruit of that love:  God wishes to relate to us and he desires us to share in His creative life, which is what the imago makes possible.  The fact that God loves us and wishes to relate in friendship to us endows each one of us with inherent dignity.  We each have rights in relation to each other because each one of us is loved by God.  As Wolterstorff summarizes his position in Justice:  Rights and Wrongs:

I conclude that if God loves a human being with the love of attachment, then that love bestows great worth on that human being; other creatures, if they knew about that love, would be envious.  And I conclude that if God loves, in the mode of attachment, each and every human being equally and permanently, then natural human rights inhere in the worth bestowed on human beings by that love.  Natural human rights are what respect for that worth requires.  (JR&W, at p. 360).

This notion that “each and every human being” is loved “equally and permanently” by God obviously appears to conflict with some important passages in scripture, notably in Romans 9, particularly when read through an Augustinian / Reformed theology of Divine election.  If God “loved” Jacob and “hated” Esau (Rom. 9:13), and if God shapes vessels for different purposes, as the potter shapes the clay (Rom. 9:19-21), is it possible to say that God loves “each and every human being equally and permanently?”  Wolterstorff devotes an entire chapter to this problem in Justice in Love, which I will leave for another post.  In short, Wolterstorff interprets Romans through the lens of both Karl Barth’s theology of election and the New Perspective on Paul, and argues that Paul is not addressing the question of individual salvation and individual election that occupied the Reformers in their reading of Romans.

In sum, Wolterstorff’s central argument is that “justice” and “human rights” are substantive concepts rooted in the love of God for each and every human being.  Because we are each created to share in God’s own life and are loved by Him, we owe to each other the dignity due to creatures loved in this unique way by God, and have corresponding rights with respect to each other.

What do you think of Wolterstorff’s arguments against eudemonism, the imago Dei as a basis for rights, and divine command ethics?  Is he correct to locate inherent human dignity in God’s “love of attachment” to us?

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Justice Spirituality

Brueggemann on Justice

An Invitation to Justice from The Justice Conference on Vimeo.

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Justice Law and Policy Moltmann Spirituality Theology

Justice, Judgment and Reconciliation

The Sunday service on July 4 at my church was excellent. One of our younger pastors preached on the theme of “hope.” He managed to tie together some thoughts about hope rooted in our national history in the U.S. (there was a stirring reading from the Gettysburg Address) with his recent experiences on a missions trip in Cambodia. He observed how the Church in Cambodia is starting to produce little pockets of culture out of the ashes of totalitarianism, including economic and artistic renewal, in places where the gospel of freedom in Christ is being heard.

The ashes of Cambodian totalitarianism, of course, include Pol Pot’s killing fields, which our pastor visited. He described how the rains every year expose more and more of the bones of the estimated 1.3 million people who died during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. We are grateful that, for all our ills, nothing like the Killing Fields presently exists in the U.S., in no small part due to some of the moral and legal principles we inherited, however imperfectly and haltingly, from Christian, Jewish, and other religious sources. And we are grateful that there are communities in places like Cambodia where the Church is shining the light of the Gospel in its fullness.

At the same time, we may wonder: where is the answer to the bones that cry out for justice? We are painfully aware of the limits of justice in this life. Very few of the perpetrators of this sort of violence are ever identified, judged and convicted. Often they remain in power, or simply dissolve into anonymity. We cry out to God with the Psalmist: “How long will the wicked, O LORD, how long with the wicked be jubilant?” (Ps. 94:3). We look for the final judgment, the terrible “Day of the Lord,” when the “white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True” is unleashed — “With justice he judges and makes war.” (Rev. 19:11).

But how does this final judgment restore the victims of Pol Pot? My Evangelical Christian tradition in particular has emphasized that the final judgment is ultimately a sorting out of all those who have, during life, exercised faith in Christ from those who have not. The vast majority of Pol Pot’s victims were not professing Christians. Most had probably never heard of Christ. Are they condemned to Hell with their tormentors? Where, then, is “justice” for them? If final justice is mostly about one’s access to Christian teaching during life (or in Reformed theology, about one’s election by God), how does this provide any foundation for attempts to do “justice” during this life? Was Qohelet right after all: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity”? (Eccl. 1:2).

One contemporary Christian theologian who has wrestled with these issues is Jurgen Moltmann. His most recent book, Sun of Righteousness, Arise!: God’s Future for Humanity and the Earth, summarizes his many decades of brilliant, if sometimes controversial and perhaps even heterodox, theological writing. I commend the reading of Moltmann to everyone, particularly to Evangelicals and others who are perhaps a bit too wedded to neat theological formulas, and this latest book of his is a great place to start.

Moltmann lived through World War II — he was a reluctant German soldier, became a POW, and returned to post-war Germany as a pastor and theologian — and as a result he has a keen eye for the problem of justice. For Moltmann, God’s “final judgment” must be conceived of as “not the great reckoning, with reward and punishment” but rather “the victory of the creative divine righteousness and justice over everything godless in heaven, on earth, and beneath the earth.”

Moltmann’s theology often wrestles with the meaning of history, hope, and freedom, and even “final” judgment, he believes must be “open” to the future: “Because the judgment serves this new creation of all things, its righteousness is not a righteousness related to the past, which merely establishes what is done and requires it. It is a creative righteousness related to this future, a righteousness which creates justice, heals and rectifies.” This is a judgment of restoration and reconciliation, akin to a truth commission in which the perpetrators of violence “must listen to [their vicitms’] accounts and learn to see themselves with the eyes of their victims, even if this is terrible and destructive.” The intention of this judgment is “to put right the disrupted relationships between people and nations; its intention is not to reward or punish individuals. . . .” The last judgment, then, should be imagined as “a peaceful arbitration whose purpose is the furtherance of life, not as a criminal court which decides over life and death.”

Here is a compelling vision of hope for the dry bones in Cambodia’s killing fields. They will meet their murderers in the eschaton — and they will be reconciled to each other, and all in the end will be saved.

It will be difficult for most Christians in Augustinian traditions — including most Evangelicals — to accept much of Moltmann’s vision, not least his universalism. Personally, from my theological perspective, I desire to do my best to account for the fullness of the Biblical witness in a way that coheres with the Tradition, reason and experience. Rev. 20 does not seem to me a picture of universal reconciliation, and the Tradition, reason, and experience suggest that some people will refuse to be reconciled. And yet, Colossians 1:2 seems tantalizingly inclusive: the Christian hope is that Christ will “reconcile all things to himself.” Perhaps those of us in Evangelical Augustinian traditions cannot rely on Moltmann, but I believe we can at least learn from him that the cosmic scope of salvation must be bigger than our limited horizons if there truly is to be final justice. And maybe this can lead us to learn from our Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters, from the early Greek Patristic writers and from contemporary Catholics such as Balthasaar and Ratzinger, a bit more about the meaning and hope of salvation.

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Justice Law and Policy Spirituality Theology

Caritas in Veritate: Markets and Justice

Pope Benedict on markets and justice (Caritas in Veritate, para. 35):

In a climate of mutual trust, the market is the economic institution that permits encounter between persons, inasmuch as they are economic subjects who make use of contracts to regulate their relations as they exchange goods and services of equivalent value between them, in order to satisfy their needs and desires. The market is subject to the principles of so-called commutative justice, which regulates the relations of giving and receiving between parties to a transaction. But the social doctrine of the Church has unceasingly highlighted the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy, not only because it belongs within a broader social and political context, but also because of the wider network of relations within which it operates. In fact, if the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires in order to function well. Without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function. And today it is this trust which has ceased to exist, and the loss of trust is a grave loss. It was timely when Paul VI in Populorum Progressio insisted that the economic system itself would benefit from the wide-ranging practice of justice, inasmuch as the first to gain from the development of poor countries would be rich ones[90]. According to the Pope, it was not just a matter of correcting dysfunctions through assistance. The poor are not to be considered a “burden”[91], but a resource, even from the purely economic point of view. It is nevertheless erroneous to hold that the market economy has an inbuilt need for a quota of poverty and underdevelopment in order to function at its best. It is in the interests of the market to promote emancipation, but in order to do so effectively, it cannot rely only on itself, because it is not able to produce by itself something that lies outside its competence. It must draw its moral energies from other subjects that are capable of generating them.

This passage sets up an important contrast between “markets within a moral framework” and “markets as a moral framework.”  Most “conservative” pundits today suggest that “markets” are the most moral form of economic structure because markets preserve individual liberty.  It is true that individual liberty is an important value, and that free markets emody that value.  However, that is not the end of the story, pace the conservative / libertarian wags.  A truly Christian vision of the good society recognizes that individual liberty is only one virtue within a broader constellation of virtues.  “The greatest of these is love,” St. Paul said (1 Cor. 13:13).  Markets are only “moral” when liberty is governed by love.

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Justice Law and Policy Religious Legal Theory Science & Technology Spirituality Theology

Caritas in Veritate

An extensive new Papal Encyclial was just issued concerning social teaching in light of the current economic crisis.  This is an important document, which all Christians should carefully consider.  I hope to do a number of posts on it.  A taste:

We recognize . . . that the Church had good reason to be concerned about the capacity of a purely technological society to set realistic goals and to make good use of the instruments at its disposal.  Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense of both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it.  Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.

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Biblical Seminary Culture Justice Law and Policy

Gleanings Laws for Today

In Missional Theology I, we were required to write  contemporary paraphrase of the gleanings laws in Lev. 19:9-10 and Deut. 24: 19-22. Here is mine:

Now when you develop ever more sophisticated global communication networks that facilitate creativity and trade, when you discover new medicines, when your lands produces the abundance resulting from advanced farming and husbandry technologies and genetically modified stock and seeds, when your study of the human genome yields new insights about human health, when you create new cultural and technological goods from the traditional and biological resources of the South, you shall not seek all the rents available to an efficient monopolist under a strong intellectual property regime; you shall leave a portion of the rents to the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. You shall permit the poor, the orphan, the widow and the stranger to access your technologies and information on equitable terms that promote their welfare and development. You shall remember that you were once a developing country and the LORD brought you freedom and abundance; therefore I am commanding you to do this thing.

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Justice Law and Policy

The Torture Lawyers

When I first heard that the Obama administration was considering whether to prosecute lawyers who crafted the “torture memos,” I was very concerned.  It sounded like a witch hunt, and worse, like an impingement on the sacrosanct freedom of legal counsel to render advice.  This piece by Brian Tamanaha, however, powerfully explains why my concern was to a large extent misplaced.  Tamanaha, by the way, is no wishy-washy liberal.  His book Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law is an important argument for the recognition of normative-moral principles for legal theory, which every Christian interested in legal theory should read.

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Culture Justice Law and Policy

Terminology (and Ideas) for Engagement with Muslims

Chris Seiple of the Institute for Global Engagement, a Christian think tank on foreign policy issues, offers these excellent guidelines for how we should speak of engagement with Muslims throughout the world.  Over and over again, IGE shows itself to be one of the most thoughtful Christian voices on U.S. foreign relations to be found anywhere.