Wolterstorff on the Competing Conceptions of Justice 1.2

The records of the Hebrew writers contained in the Old Testament have much to say about just and unjust actions, and also quite a bit about the role of justice in God’s relationship to his people (and humans in general). However, these writers do not “step up to the meta-level and talk about how to think about justice [as a concept].” (67) Oliver O’Donovan (in Desire of the Nations) is the leading contemporary writer who has reconstructed the ancient Hebraic concept of justice But Wolterstorff believes that O’Donovan’s conclusions are markedly off-course. In place of O’Donovan’s conclusion that the primary referent of “justice” in the Old Testament is true judgment exercised by the judge (what Wolterstorff calls rectifying justice), Wolterstorff notes that without a concept of primary justice, a judge would have had no standard on which to base rectifying judgments.

Wolterstorff conducts a lengthy analysis (over 20 pages) of the Old Testament Scriptures to buttress this argument from implication. He makes up for his lack of knowledge of Hebrew by using several English translations and some secondary sources. Wolterstorff focuses on the Old Testament’s use of mishpat and concludes, correctly I think, that there are passages in which it “is unambiguously used to refer to primary justice.” (73)  

Then, whether one considers them lengthy asides or simply planks in his platform, Wolterstorff makes several additional arguments that bear noting. First, he observes that OT writers frequently connect justice with the “quartet of the vulnerable:” widows, orphans, resident aliens, and the poor. (76) The prophets, he asserts, simply assume that justice (the term used more often than mercy) requires alleviating the plight of the poor. To head off a headlong rush to the Left, Wolterstorff immediately goes on to note that the primary justice owed to the poor is neither evidence of radical egalitarianism nor a valorization of social and cultural “rights” (social justice) over political rights. Yet, he argues that we should not ignore the significance of the quartet; it is not mere rhetoric: “Israel’s writers must have believed that when we look at the actual condition of widows, orphans, resident aliens, and the poor and compare it with the condition of other social classes, we discover that the former are . . . disproportionately actual victims of injustice.” (78-79)

Wolterstorff leaves the content of justice for Israel’s poor aside for the moment as he turns to the question of the proper role of justice in the “nations.” Even though the nations did not have God’s Torah, the book of Amos makes it clear that the nations knew (or should have known) better than to do that for which they were condemned. “The Hebrew prophets [principally Amos] and songwriters [see Psalms 82 and 72] assume that Yahweh holds even those who have not heard Torah accountable for doing justice.” (86) Whence this knowledge? Hard to know for sure but Wolterstorff cites with approval Michael Novak’s Natural Law in Judaism at this point.

But enough for now. I’ll pick up with Wolterstorff’s argument for the OT’s understanding of rights as inhering in human beings next time and will also address what is missing (to this point anyway) in his otherwise cogent and persuasive argument.