THE THEOLOGY OF GRACE: PRESENT TRENDS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS (original) (raw)
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Justice, Grace, and Love: A Theological Commendation
Trinity Journal, 2021
Justice, and its pursuit, has become a regular point of contention within Christian communities and their ambitions to take the moral life seriously. To pursue justice, it is often assumed, requires either a capitulation to a purely secular enterprise in which the distinctives of the Christian faith are abandoned, or can only be applied within parochial and quite limited circumstances appropriately judged to be “Christian.” Though justice is not difficult to find in the pages of Scripture, such construals find it difficult to see what justice has to do with central themes of the Christian faith, like grace and love. At best, justice is a sometimes-permissible distraction from love and the display of grace, and it only displays elements of divine wrath. It certainly does not have anything to do with the noble aspects of Christian discipleship. It is the ambition of this article to show, insofar as the short summary above tells a true story, that this state of affairs is deeply mistaken. Far from being inconsistent with grace and love, Christian justice is grounded in and defined by grace and love. Not only is there no incompatibility between justice and the gospel, but justice is the necessary moral outflow of a life correctly shaped by the reception of grace and the pursuit of love. In short, my argument will be this: justice is defined by the worth bestowed by the gift of Christ and is the appropriate pursuit of those in whose hearts the love of the Holy Spirit has been poured forth (Rom 5:5). To make the case, section one will exposit Nicholas Wolterstorff’s view of the nature of justice, maintaining that though it properly understands the central dynamics of justice, it does not adequately ground them. Section two will provide this grounding with reference to John Barclay’s theology of grace. Both authors care deeply about worth and make this concept central to their proposals; an inherent and intuitive bridge exists, I shall maintain, between them, one that fortifies each view. Finally, I shall conclude with an Augustinian proposal about the motivations available for the pursuit of justice, motivations never separated from the convictions central to the Christian faith. At each step, then, one discovers that justice is not an enemy to the gospel; if the argument below succeeds, justice is an indispensable outflow from the reception of the gift of Christ. Far from a distraction to the principal characteristics of the Christian faith, it is an essential component of that faith.