Justice Wit hi n of the Created

the Limits World

Charles West

Some people would say we are back to square one. After three centuries of an expanding economy and increasing domestication of the forces of nature, we are again facing the intractable problem of living within limits and trying to learn how to share those limits equitably and to discern the transcending promise of God in something else than an extension of our own powers. The two tasks go together: working out the form of distributive justice and dis- covering a new form of hope. The politics of bending human power to humane ends is a function of them. The newest statement of the human problem is classical in its outlines. Gone are the ideologies, revolutionary or develop- mental, which find the solution in the dynamics of change itself. We are thrown back into the realm of ethics, and therefore of theology, even when we talk the language of science and economics.

It it really square one? In the period of greater elbow room for human enterprise, have we learned nothing which will stand us in good stead now? Is Heilbroner, for instance, right that democratic institutions will not stand the pressure of redistributing limited resources and curbing the ambitions of some? Were all the theories of tolerance and individual rights moral super- structure on an expanding material base? This little essay assumes the con- trary: that the ubiquity of human sin is not the only lesson to be learned from history and that something about the mercy of God and the sanctification of human relations has come into focus which will help us in the future. Let me suggest four levels of the situation.

1. J d c e within limits

We are back with the problems of distributive justice, unmitigated by the illusion that human avarice can be reconciled with social equality by the indefinite expansion of human productivity. For a while we thought we had transcended it. It was assumed by capitalists and socialists alike that there is no end to the expansion of man’s capacity to harness nature to meet human needs and therefore to raise standards of living by expanding the economic product of the society. Justice was therefore understood only as sharing control of the process, of empowering the poor so that they might feed their

Prof. WEST is Professor of Christian Ethics at the Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, USA.

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needs and desires into the decision-making process and have a part in the promise. Today we have lost this promise. We face each other once again with the stark realization that in a finite world one man’s wealth is another’s poverty. The economic question that faces us is also a spiritual question: how should the limited material gifts of God - the raw materials, the sources of energy, water, air and fertile earth - be distributed among his creatures both now and in future generations?

This is an old question. It has been with us since the dawn of human conscience. It was the assumption behind Christian and Jewish economic ethics from the time of Moses until economics set itself up as an autonomous science based on commercial and industrial expansion, led by the French physiocrats and Adam Smith. It was shared by John Calvin and those early Puritans who transformed the economic life of Britain and founded New England, though the fact is often obscured by a misunderstanding of the Max Weber thesis about the Calvinist roots of capitalism. Out of this heritage certain basic guidelines have emerged. It might be well for us to remind ourselves of them.

First, material wellbeing, even prosperity, is a blessing from God. Economic asceticism has at best been a subordinate theme in Hebrew- Christian history. Where poverty has been accepted as a discipline or a virtue - St Francis of Assisi is the shining example - the goodness of God’s material creation has not been thereby despised or denied, but only placed in its proper relation. Abraham becomes wealthy as a part of the promise to him. The people of Israel move into a land flowing with milk and honey. Jesus turned water to wine for a feast, distributed loaves and fishes, and promised to those who seek first the kingdom of heaven, that “all these things will be added unto you”. There “was not a needy person” in the early Church, as the book of Acts relates it. The suffering of want, hunger, or exploitation is not a Biblical virtue. The promise of God, also in Jesus Christ, has a material dimension.

Second, in the distribution of economic blessings those in need have first call: “For as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and distribution was made to each as any had need.” (Acts 4 : 34-35) “If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be to him as a creditor.” (Ex. 22 : 25) Over and over again throughout Scripture the poor are described as the special objects of God’s compassion, and the cheating or oppression of the poor or defenceless as the major sin coupled with idolatry. The material dimensions of the promise of God have the poor especially in mind: “Ho, every one who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” (Isa. 55 : I) “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.” (Luke 6 : 20-21) To “spiritualize” the exegesis of passages like this is to miss the earthiness of the Gospel and the meaning of the incarnation. The material needs of the poor are God’s special concern-at the cost, if need be, of the rich.

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Third, material prosperity is a blessing from God. It is not a right by which his creatures can hold and measure his faithfulness or justice. It is absolutely dependent on the primary covenantal relation, on faithful obedience to the divine calling, and on the realization of love and justice in the covenant of human society. Whenever the order is reversed, whenever the search for material security is the primary goal, the result is idolatry and material goods become a curse. “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” This is the lesson of the manna in the wilderness for the Hebrew people, and of Jesus’ admonition to “be not anxious for the morrow, what you shall eat, and what you shall drink”. Material prosperity is a by-product, not a goal of human purposive activity in this time which prepares the way for the coming of Christ. Human relations and human needs have absolute priority over economic calculations. Jesus had vivid ways of demonstrating this fact throughout his ministry: 2,000 pigs plunged into the sea to save the sanity of one man, Zacchaeus’ fourfold restitution as a sign of salvation, praise of the steward who wrote down his master’s credits, the pearl of great price, or the command to the rich young man to “sell all you have and give to the poor, and come, follow me”.

It follows from this that both the biblical history and the ethics of the Church down into the 18th century show a profound suspicion of the tempta- tions of the rich and of the spirit of economic calculation. The Gospel parables of the man who built many barns, and of the rich man and Lazarus, not to mention the fate of Ananias and Sapphira, haunt Christian history with a dire warning. The vocation of merchant was suspect in the early Church because of its temptations to avarice. Clement of Alexandria tried to soften the stern warning concerning the rich man and the kingdom of heaven by suggesting that one could hold riches if one were spiritually free from them, but the whole monastic movement of his time thought otherwise. Medieval moral theology spent much effort carefully defining justice in the economic realm, including every step in the transactions of manufacture and trade: just price, just wage, just return for non-productive services performed and the like. Calvin and the Puritans followed this tradition and elaborated it in a Herculean effort to bring the energies of emerging capitalism under moral and spiritual control. They believed that productive work was a divine calling to organize the substance of this world for the glory of God, but at every point they too set limits on prices, profits, market-cornering, interest rates on loans and so on, with an eye both to the needs of the whole society and the control of avarice among the rich and powerful. It is the faithfulness, not the economic success of the steward of God’s blessings, which is a sign of his sanctification.

Fourth, human beings are called to be stewards, not owners, of the material gifts of creation. The image of the steward in the New Testament negates every absolute right to private property, while it empowers and encourages us to economic activity. The New Testament steward (oikonornos in the Greek) was responsible for the management of the estate, both its material production and the people on it, but the estate was not his. The owner might be present

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or absent, but the steward was at any moment accountable, not for the profits he turned for his master, but for the faithfulness of his dealings with the servants as well as with the goods (Luke 12 : 41 ff). This steward image was broadened by Paul to apply to the whole calling of the Christian - “servants of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God” (I Cor. 4 : l), but the material dimension was not lost from it. The mysteries of God, the plan (oikonomiu) of God “for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1 : lo), includes the whole of creation in such a way that economic activity - production and distribution of earthly wares - of human beings becomes part of the harmony of the whole, a channel of grace by which all things are fulfilled. The Christian, says Paul, is a steward of this whole process: “to preach to the nations the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the economy of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, that through the Church the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers in heavenly places.” (Eph. 3 : 8-10) This supra-social cosmic economy determines the distribution of goods in this age, bearing witness to the age to come; of it Christians are stewards.

A footnote: in the light of the distortions of the Christian doctrine of stewardship, one must add that stewards are accountable for their divine vocation also to human colleagues - to the persons affected by them, to the Church as the body of Christ. The line to God is not private. Only in modern times has the Church tended to forget this fact, and to leave economic accounting out of its discipline for its members. Those who have influence and power over the distribution of material wealth, are accountable to society and the Church.

2. Justice and justification

So far we have dealt only with the lowest level of justice in Christian under- standing. We have accepted the limits of material creation and asked about the theology of sharing them. We could not do even this, however, without sounding the dominant chord in the biblical history - the open-ended promise of God who “in Christ, was reconciling the world to himself’’. There is more to justice than equal distribution of things; there is an affirmation of persons which responds to and reflects the love of God.

“Enter not into judgment with they servant, for no man living is righteous before thee.” (Psalms 143 : 2) The burden of this paradox is that justice in the biblical history is revealed to be neither individual integrity nor social power and respect, but a demand of human relations with its roots in God‘s relation to humankind. It is not “a quality of a person or action but a personal contribution made within a concrete relationship. It is directed towards maintaining the security and right of the parties involved, and towards recti- fying the relationship where it has been damaged or broken.” It is that

a H.-H. SCHREY, H. H. WALZ and W. A. WHITEHOUSE: The Biblical Doctrine of Justice and Law. London : SCM Press, 1955.

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which, in human relations, reflects the balance and intention of God‘s covenant and purpose.

To know what is just, then, one must reflect on God’s dealings with Israel and the work of Christ in the world. Righteousness is first of all a description of God, and gets its redefinition from him. It is therefore a concept the mean- ing of which is never exhausted but about which, with fear and trembling, we can say certain things.

First, God’s righteousness showed itself first of all in choosing a people and delivering them from bondage, for covenant with him. There was nothing in Israel that deserved this election; they were oppressed, poor and needy. God in his justice sought them out there, called them, rescued and established them. He gave them a new humanity. This event was the parable of his dealings with all mankind. Continually the Psalms and the prophets define his justice in these terms: “With righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.” (Isa. 11 : 4) So also with human justice. It has meant, in the Hebrew-Christian tradition, not the balance of civil claims or the enforcement of contracts but outrageous parti- sanship for the poor and helpless, a concern to lift them up, to empower them as equal members of the community, to give them their humanity in the covenant. One of its most moving expressions is in the book of Job:

When the ear heard, it called me blessed, and when the eye saw, it approved; because I delivered the poor who cried, and the fatherless who had none to help him. The blessing of him who was about to perish came upon me, and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy. I put on justice and it clothed me; my judg- ment was like a robe and a turban. I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the poor, and I searched out the cause of him whom I did not know. I broke the fangs of the unrighteous, and made him drop his prey from his teeth. (29 : 11-17)

The poor and helpless have a just claim on the rich and powerful. Justice is the business of vindicating them. It is an open-ended process which aims at the quality of covenant community God intends in his kingdom.

Second, the crime of injustice is disobedience to God’s justice, the misuse of power, the denial of covenant, the spoiling of community and hardening of heart toward the poor. It is to shift the focus from what the promise of the community calls for to my rights, my security and my power in the society. This shift can be given very specific names - murder, adultery, theft, deceipt, covetousness, to name only the ten commandments - but the underlying orientation is the basic injustice. The rich and powerful are more guilty because they have more opportunity, but the lesson of Israel’s history and the experience of the church is that all people are tempted. The imprecatory Psalms are evidence of this temptation. The need even of the poor, oppressed Israel is for both inner and outer justification.

Third, God’s supreme justice is expressed in his justification of the unrighteous. He creates a new covenant when the old one has been broken. He renews the heart and transforms the society that has broken down. “In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the

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name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness’.” (Jer. 23 : 6) By “his knowledge” the Suffering Servant, “the righteous one”, will “make many to be accounted righteous” (Isa. 53 : 11). This is of course what hap- pened in Jesus Christ. Justice is not a human possession. It is God’s forgiving action which creates a new relation with us all. To claim to be just in the sense of needing no repentance or reconciliation is the greatest sin of all. To share his transforming and reconciling mission is to “become the righteousness of God”.

For the human struggle for justice this has a double implication: first that justice is liberation, or better, humanization. It is the open-ended movement toward the vindication and establishment of the poor and the meek in the community of the covenant which has its end only in the kingdom of God. This means it is a struggle against the powers of self-sufficient domination which lasts just as long. Second, justice is transformation of the conflict itself. It is forgiveness of us all; it is reconciliation which creates new com- munity beyond our self-assertions. Never in this world does this process stop; in every new age it must be recast. Here is the dimension which tran- scends material creation and the limits of distributive justice. There is no limit on the sensitive imagination discovering new forms of liberation, ways of repentance and new community, and no limit on the possibilities of em- bodying these in social and personal policy.

3. Justice and hope

This leads us to the dimension of hope in human affairs. The Christian message is in no small degree responsible for the linear view of history and the confidence of a better future which was built into modern economic theory, even though the latter was a distortion of it. Scientific discovery and techno- logical invention have bred a false confidence in human power. But they have also borne witness to a dimension of God’s promise present in Scripture and in the Gospel itself: the world will be transformed, the new will come, the whole creation “waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (Rom. 8 : 19), and will be reconciled in Christ who is the head of the Church (Col. 1 : 18-20). Creation is not static. It participates in the history of God with his people, both in sin and judgment, and in the promise of the new life which begins now in Christ and will come to its completion in the new heaven and the new earth. God, not material nature, sets the limits and opens the horizons in which we are to live. To this the amazing expansion of science, technology and economic life have borne indirect witness during the past two centuries. The search for justice in a time of new awareness of limits cannot forget this; it must be a search for the present form of the promise of God, the present style of Christian stewardship of all the mysteries of Christ and the economy of God, to fulfil all things.

This means concretely that we have the task of recasting human hope in terms that will guide, not undercut, technological invention and scientific research, and which will give the proper economic value to humanizing work

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in a world of limited resources. It means that when we embody this hope, we must be responders, not masters, in both the divine-human and the human- human encounter, stewards, not lords. If we take this seriously, it casts two other relations in a new light. We will understand non-human creation neither as some divine mystery with its own rights even if human beings perish, nor as material to be used and used up to satisfy human desire. It is rather the provision of God for human life, whose beauty is to be enhanced by being cultivated and drawn into the movement of human history, which is to be respected and cared for as a reflection of our faithfulness to its maker.

Second, we will understand future generations as a projection of God’s grace into the times to come, witnesses either to our faithfulness or our disobedience to the heavenly vision, before the throne of grace. They will not be more important than our fellow humans who are living now, not an excuse for inhuman acts today, not population statistics, but part of the cloud of witnesses in whose community we will be judged and with whom we hope for the consummation of all things.

4. The politics of justice and hope

In conclusion, then, let me suggest just a few lines of policy which, it seems to me, all this implies:

1. In technological and economic policy, the Christian church should seek that the public good be given priority over private goods, the general welfare over private property or contract rights, and planning for the whole society over the pull and haul of group and personal interests. This does not necessarily mean “socialism”; the form of ownership and management of production and distribution remains an open question. But our society has lived too long with the illusion that justice is only individual rights and that liberation is only individual freedom. In this context private powers have been allowed to grow to the point where they dominate our economy and can only be called to account by a responsible public planning and enforcing agency. When public responsibility for decision and execution of policy for our society is properly focused, the issue of covenantal responsibility can at least be raised and the victims of social change and breakdown can make their voice heard.

2. The Church can help the nation and the world in a fundamental reassessment of the values by which we live and the goals we set. We can and must redefine “the pursuit of happiness” in such a way that it aims at new and more promising human relationships rather than an ever-expanding control over material things for private enjoyment. This is the direction of the promise of God. It is the basis for the creative asceticism which has always been part of the Christian tradition, and which is now being forced on us all by limiting circumstances.

3. In our planning for the future, the relation of public policy to the poor is the touchstone of its faithfulness to the divine promise. This is true in a double way. The reduction in material “standard of living” in order to create

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community with the poor is to open new possibilities for human development. It is the way of promise. To neglect or exploit the poor and not to put them first in planning is to court the destruction not only of our souls but finally of society.

4. It may be that our policies will not avoid an ecological catastrophe. Heilbroner clearly believes, in the fashion of a good Calvinist, that the political power of human sin - greed, selfishness, short-sightedness and so on - will make an intelligent environmental policy impossible in time to avoid at least a relative apocalypse. Christians do not find their hope, however, in the success of human policies, any more than they hold up the world like a weary Atlas, as Heilbroner would have us do. Rather we find signs of hope, signs of the inbreaking of the kingdom, in the midst of this world, signs which may take the form of redemptive suffering or of repentance forced by events themselves. It is this faith in the new reality created by God in Jesus Christ that gives us courage and confidence to work for very relative political and economic goals, for small improvements, reforms and revolutions, without setting our total hope upon them, while we discern the judgment-and therefore the promise - of God, in such catastrophes as befall us. Christians are called to be the guardians both of hope and realism in the face of where human sin is taking us today. We are called to take absolute risks at times, for very relative policies.

5. Finally, Christians can be creators of new life styles, and discerners of these styles when they appear elsewhere, which liberate human beings from the social imprisonment of a consumer-product-centreed society, and there- fore from the grip of greed. The problem of justice in the face of environ- mental limits will not be solved by public policy alone, any more than by individual changes of heart. But communities of a renewed covenant, signs of the promise of God for us all, may be a dynamic and redeeming force. The Church should discern, form, and be such communities.

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