90 books in 90 days -- love and justice

Love and Justice is a collection of various articles by Reinhold Niebuhr during the lead up to World War II.  Niebuhr draws on the resources of the Christian faith to address his contemporary national and international issues.   Central to any application of Christianity to any moral, political or social issue was the "problem of love and justice" (p. 9).

Niebuhr defines love as the perfect sacrificial commitment to the "other".  This kind of love is demonstrated in the work of Jesus Christ on the cross.   In Christ, this perfect agape is demonstrated by his willingness to give himself up to the cross for the redemption of the world.  The cross is the perfect symbol for love.  Niebuhr contends that this kind of love is to be held is the ideal Christian virtue, but not possible in the real world.   Because of sin -- the self-interest of individuals and groups -- another virtue besides love is necessary to govern human relationships.   This virtue is justice -- "The ordinary affairs of the community, the structures of politics and economics, must be governed by the spirit of justice and by specific and detailed definitions of rights and duties" (p 25).

This distinction between love and justice and the relationship between the two provides the architecture for Niebuhr's arguments.  Because love is the ideal, it rises above justice and "exceeds its demands" (p. 25).  Love has a dual role in society. F irst, it provides the vision for what a perfect society might look like.  Second, it judges all our attempts to achieve approximate justice.  Niebuhr argues that the ethic of love was the ethic of Jesus and that Jesus' primary interest was in the life of the individual.  Therefore the ethic of Jesus -- an ethic of love -- is more suited to an individual ethic rather than a social ethic.  Niebuhr maintains that Jesus really had not social ethic, "precisely because the ethical ideal is too rigorous and perfect to lend itself to application in the economic and political problems of the day" (p. 30).  Jesus' love would negate the need for coercion (which is the fundamental principle that governs competing claims in society) and therefore is not relevant to a growing society.

Thus, love (and an ethic of Jesus) is inadequate as a guide to moral living in a sinful world.  Justice, on the other hand, is something less than love because it admits the interest of the self and adjudicates between conflicting claims.   Niebuhr states that, "the struggle for social justice in the present economic order involves the assertion of rights, the rights of the disinherited, and the use of coercion. Both are incompatible with the pure love ethic founding the Gospels" (p. 34).  For Niebuhr, any standard of justice that we move toward is approximate because our reason is not capable of determining a universal law of justice.

With this distinction (dare I say duality) between the ideal of love and the approximation of justice, Niebuhr contends for a Christian Realism that holds the ideal of love over the attempts at approximate justice in society.

Niebuhr has cast a long shadow over American political life in the 20th and into the 21st centuries.  Both President Obama and former FBI head James Comey cited Niebuhr as one of their major theological influences.  You can't think about the question of the relationship between American politics and Christian faith without you contend with Niebuhr.  But I do have two questions for those who take Niebuhr seriously (I don't):

(1) Has Niebuhr defined "love (agape)" correctly -- see Glen Stassen's definition of love in Kingdom Ethics -- a definition that brings love and justice together?

(2) Has Niebuhr rightly identified Jesus' ethic as an ethic for the individual -- see John H. Yoder's argument that Jesus was concerned with the structures of society in The Politics of Jesus?

Both of these questions, if answered differently than Niebuhr would alter his conclusions significantly and bring Jesus into the social conversation.