Despite any quibbles along the way, reading Justice in Love (Eerdmans, 2011) reminded me of why I first came to love distinctively Protestant ethics. Wolterstorff’s project possesses a remarkable creative freedom, something that I suspect he shares in common with those early modern humanists who attempted to balance reverence for the classical tradition with a critical ad fontes methodology. For a humanist project, centuries-old primary sources are made contemporary in a unique way. And like the early humanists, Wolterstorff retains the belief that rigorous biblical exegesis is indispensible to our modern theories of justice and love if we want to clear away the erroneous accretions of our philosophical traditions. His venture into biblical scholarship and application is as refreshing as it is ambitious.

From the very start, Wolterstorff identifies his project with agapism, which he locates in the “Jerusalem strand” of ethical inquiry. This tradition descends from the New Testament command to love your neighbor as yourself, which is distinct from the venerable “Athenian-Roman” imperative to “do justice.” Even so, the agapism of Justice in Love resists almost all the stereotypes typically ascribed to a Christian ethic of love. In fact, the heart of Wolterstorff’s argument is the contention that an agapism which remains neutral toward injustice is no true agapism. The trick, then, is to show that agapism can do justice, and do it better than its rivals.

According to Wolterstorff, every ethical system employs some idea of acting to bring about certain “wellbeing-goods” for someone else as an end in itself. Love, even if goes by some other name, seeks to promote these ends. Therefore, failing to love rightly is the central criterion Wolterstorff uses to critique the ethics of egoism, eudaimonism, utilitarianism, and what he calls “Classical Modern Day Agapism” (CMDA). Egoism stumbles at the very outset by failing to explain how something like the love of parents for their children can exist without a radical re-orientation of themselves and their self-interest. Eudaimonism fails to provide sufficient explanation for motives like compassion, which often lack the potential to promote wellbeing of the individuals involved (according to Wolterstorff’s eudaimonist, the Good Samaritan was a misguided bleeding-heart). Wolterstorff’s relationship with utilitarianism is somewhat more complex than the others since key turning points in his argument will hinge on how we account for all those who will be affected by our actions. Yet in the final estimation, Wolterstorff holds that the system’s “maximizing principle” fails to identify the proper means by which we ought to value the wellbeing of others (10). Lastly, while Wolterstorff identifies with certain strands of CMDA, he faults its primary proponents for not preserving the integral relationship of justice and love. With the interesting exception of Reinhold Niebuhr, the older agapists believed that it is love alone, and not the demands of justice, that seeks the good of someone as an end-itself (24). But in the end, CMDA simply proves unlivable. By rejecting any “utilitarian trade-offs” in its totalizing view of neighbor-love, CMDA prevents the very sort of agapic adjudication that the exigencies of life require us to make.

What Wolterstorff wants, then, is a “defensible” version of agapism that can account for what is just and how justice ought to be applied. On this count, acting justly is acting in love. If you want to love your neighbor, treat her as your moral counterpart. Act in such a way that befits your neighbor’s worth. Act with responsible care for her and her rights since she bears the image of God’s love. The implications of this just love are profound, even if they are bound to provoke dissent among Wolterstorff’s dependable posse of critics. For instance, love without justice cannot forgive (53); loving action may act coercively in pursuit of justice (58); the paradigmatic heart of agapism, the Sermon on the Mount, is meant for everyone since it describes the standards of non-retributive justice (127).

The implications are in fact so extensive and creative that it is impractical to respond to all the points in Justice in Love. So, in future posts, I want to raise questions about two critical parts of Wolterstorff’s argument. First, I have concerns about whether Wolterstorff’s language of natural rights – so prominent in the preceding volume – limits the creative application of just love. Second, considering his distinctively biblical influences, I question why the biblical notion of covenant is relatively absent from Wolterstorff’s project.