Journey toward Justice (Turning South: Christian Scholars in an Age of World Christianity)

Personal Encounters in the Global South

Wolterstorff, Nicholas P., Carpenter, Joel

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441242983
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Christianity's demographics, vitality, and influence have tipped markedly toward the global South and East. Addressing this seismic shift, one of today's leading Christian scholars reflects on what he has learned about justice through his encounters with world Christianity. Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff's experiences in South Africa, the Middle East, and Honduras have shaped his views on justice through the years. In this book he offers readers an autobiographical tour, distilling the essence of his thoughts on the topic. After describing how he came to think about justice as he does and reviewing the theory of justice he developed in earlier writings, Wolterstorff shows how deeply embedded justice is in Christian Scripture. He reflects on the difficult struggle to right injustice and examines the necessity of just punishment. Finally, he explores the relationship between justice and beauty and between justice and hope. This book is the first in the Turning South series, which offers reflections by eminent Christian scholars who have turned their attention and commitments toward the global South and East.

1

Two Awakening Experiences

In September 1975, I was sent by the college at which I was teaching, Calvin College, to an international conference on Christian higher education organized by the University of Potchefstroom in Potchefstroom, South Africa, a small city located about an hour’s drive from Johannesburg. At that time the university deliberately and explicitly located itself within the Afrikaner tradition. Whites who were not Afrikaners were admitted as students; but so-called blacks and coloreds were not.3 This was the first time I had set foot in the global South.

Most of the South African scholars present at the conference were Afrikaners; but there were some so-called blacks and coloreds as well. In addition, there were scholars from other parts of Africa, a sizable contingent from the Netherlands, a number of us from North America, and some from Asian countries.

Though the conference was not about the South African system of apartheid—1975 was well before the revolution in South Africa—apartheid was the dominant topic of conversation during coffee breaks and meals, and constantly threatened to intrude into the conference itself. Eventually it did, first into a scheduled session of the conference, and then into a hastily called unscheduled session. The discussion in that unscheduled session was more intense than anything I had ever experienced. The Dutch were very well informed about South Africa and very angry about apartheid; they vented their anger at the Afrikaners. The Afrikaner defenders of apartheid in turn vented their anger at the Dutch. Later I would learn that Afrikaners fended off most critics of apartheid by telling them that they were misinformed. They could not charge the Dutch with being misinformed. So instead they charged them with being self-righteously judgmental. Eventually the so-called black and colored scholars from South Africa began to speak up, more in tones of hurt than of anger—or so it seemed to me at the time. They described the daily indignities heaped upon them and the many ways in which they were demeaned; they spoke of being expelled from their homes and herded off into Bantustans. With great passion they cried out for justice.

Not only was I profoundly moved by this cry for justice, I felt convinced that I had been issued a call from God. I did not hear words in the air; it was by way of the speech of the so-called blacks and coloreds that God spoke to me. Fidelity to God required that I speak up for these victims of injustice in whatever way might prove appropriate.

While in South Africa, I learned of the existence of its antiterrorism laws. These allowed the police to detain a person for ninety days without filing a public charge, without notifying anyone where the person was held, without giving the person access to an attorney, and with the right to renew the ninety-day period repeatedly if they so wished.

Before going to South Africa I had known of the heroic resistance to apartheid by C. F. Beyers Naudé, a member of one of the prominent old Afrikaner families. For me it was a matter of conscience to have an interview with Naudé while in South Africa; so it was arranged that, after the conference was over, I, along with Gerald Vande Zande from Canada, would have an interview with Naudé in our hotel in Pretoria. The interview was never held. Two days before, one of Naudé’s principal assistants had been arrested under the antiterrorism detention laws; Naudé was so preoccupied with reorganizing his staff and trying to find out where his assistant was being held that he had to break the appointment.

Deeply disturbed over the existence of a society in which such an arrest could take place, I walked the streets of Pretoria that night with a professor from Malawi who had attended the conference, venting my anger. After some thirty minutes, I noticed that my companion was absorbing all this with little noticeable reaction. I asked him how it could be that if I was so angry, he could be so calm. I shall never forget his answer: “I live with this sort of thing every day of my life. If ever I would criticize my government outside a tiny circle of trusted friends, I would be arrested, my family would lose its means of livelihood, and my seminary would be closed down.” I saw more vividly than ever before what a privilege it is to live in a country where I can vigorously criticize my government in public without fearing reprisal.

Upon returning home I bought yards of books about the situation in South Africa and its historical origins, and read avidly. I began to think, speak, and write about justice in general and about injustice in South Africa in particular. I returned to South Africa a number of times and became friends with many opponents of the old regime—black, colored, and white. Of these, it was Allan Boesak who became one of my dearest friends and who, over the years, has remained that through thick and thin.

In May 1978, I attended a conference on Palestinian rights on the west side of Chicago. I do not know why I was invited, nor have I ever understood what it was in myself that impelled me to attend. The conference was sponsored by an organization called the Palestine Human Rights Campaign. There were about 150 Palestinians present, mostly Christian; they poured out their guts in flaming rhetoric, rhetoric too hot, I later learned, for most Americans to handle. They described the indignities daily heaped upon them. They told of how their ancestral lands and orchards were being confiscated and of how they were evicted from their homes and their homes bulldozed to make room for Jewish settlers. They told of collective punishment and of the multiple ways in which they were daily demeaned. They cried out with great passion for justice. I was deeply moved by the cry. And again I felt convinced that I had been issued a call from God to speak up for these wronged people in whatever way might prove appropriate.

The US State Department had allowed Ambassador Terzi, who at the time was the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) representative to the United Nations, to attend the conference on the condition that he see to it that whenever he spoke, there be no more than five people within earshot. This infuriated me. If my country’s policy in the Middle East was so fragile that it would be endangered by more than five people simultaneously hearing what Terzi was saying, then there must be something profoundly wrong with the policy.

Upon returning home I bought yards of books about the situation in the Middle East and its historical origins, and read avidly. I spoke and wrote about injustice in the Middle East. I became chair of the board of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, and organized and spoke at conferences that the Campaign sponsored. I traveled to the Middle East several times, and became friends with a number of those who were protesting the situation, both Israeli and Palestinian. When the Oslo Accord was signed on September 13, 1993, I concluded that the situation was now in the hands of the Israelis and the Palestinians and that there was little that foreigners like myself could now contribute. How naive!

Why were these two experiences so moving for me? I had been a vocal supporter of the American civil rights movement, though I had not traveled to the US South to participate in protest marches. I had been a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War; I had spoken out publicly in opposition. Rereading some of the things I wrote at the time, I notice that the basic moral categories that I employed for thinking and speaking about these situations were those of justice and injustice. But I had not felt called, not in the way I did when confronted by the situations in South Africa and Palestine. I had not been motivated to think, speak, and write about justice.

John Rawls’s now-classic text A Theory of Justice was published in 1971.4 The acclaim and attention it immediately received led me to read it soon after it appeared, more out of intellectual curiosity than anything else, since political philosophy and ethics were not among my specialties in philosophy (I never taught a course or seminar in either until after I retired). I found Rawls’s book intellectually intriguing and some of the discussions surrounding it fascinating. But I was not moved to think for myself about justice, nor was I motivated to read further in the literature on justice.

So why was my response so different when I heard the so-called blacks and coloreds in Potchefstroom cry out for justice, and why was it so different when I heard the Palestinians gathered on the west side of Chicago cry out for justice?

I think it was because in Potchefstroom, and on the west side of Chicago, I was face-to-face with the wronged. I was not reading what someone had written about some abstract thing called justice, but neither was I reading newspaper reports about the victims of injustice somewhere. I was listening to live human beings telling their own stories of how they and their families and friends were systematically demeaned and humiliated. As they told their stories, I fastened on their faces, looked into their eyes, absorbed their words. Nothing of this sort had happened to me before. The injustices with which I had been personally acquainted were mainly episodes. These people were not speaking about episodes in their lives; they were describing the daily condition of their existence.

They, the wronged, came to me; I had not gone out looking for them. When I went to Potchefstroom, I expected a leisurely discussion on Christian higher education. I do not know what I was expecting when I went to the conference on Palestinian rights, but certainly not that I would be confronted by 150 Palestinians crying out for justice. In both cases, I was overtaken.

Not only was my thinking, writing, and speaking about justice motivated by seeing the faces and hearing the voices of people who were systemically wronged; their contours have been shaped by that starting point.

In A Theory of Justice John Rawls did not start from the wronged; he started from various problems in political and ethical theory. The same is true for that enormous body of writing that was spurred by Rawls’s publication; it is by professors and for professors, about issues that professors find intellectually intriguing. I too am a professor, a professor of philosophy. But my experience in Potchefstroom in 1975 and on the west side of Chicago in 1978 made it impossible for me not to start from the wronged in my reflections on justice.

The response to the “blacks” and “coloreds” by the Afrikaners at the conference who spoke up in defense of apartheid took me completely aback. They did not contest the charge of injustice; but neither did they concede the charge and resolve to join the oppressed in the struggle to right injustice. They insisted that justice was not a relevant category. Order and disorder were the relevant categories; South Africa was threatened with disorder. And as to the whole project of apartheid, they insisted that this was an act of goodwill on the part of the ruling Afrikaners. In South Africa, they explained, there were some ten or eleven different nationalities. The system of apartheid was inspired by the ideal of each of these nationalities finding its own cultural identity. If that was to happen, they could not live mingled among one another; they would have to live separately, apart—hence, apartheid.

To this, some added stories about their own individual acts of charity: clothes they gave to the “black” family living in the backyard that their own children had outgrown, trinkets that they gave to the family at Christmas, and so forth. Some of my fellow North Americans were skeptical of these stories; I was not.

In short, they, the Afrikaners, presented themselves as a benevolent people. They complained that so often their benevolence went unacknowledged; no gratitude was forthcoming. Why can’t we just love each other, one of them asked plaintively of the “blacks” and the “coloreds”; why do you only criticize us? And they complained that critics of apartheid ignored the visionary beneficent ideal that motivated the project; the critics only took note of the difficulties encountered in achieving the ideal.

What I saw before my eyes, as I had never seen before, was benevolence being used as an instrument of oppression—self-perceived benevolence, of course.

Why was it so important to the Afrikaners who spoke up in defense of apartheid at the conference that they resist thinking of the situation in terms of justice and injustice, and think of it only in terms of order and goodwill? Because for them to concede that the “blacks” and “coloreds” were being treated unjustly would require putting brakes on their own passion for order and on their self-perceived paternalistic benevolence; it would require advocating the rejection of the whole project of apartheid. And that was something they could not bring themselves to do. Not only were they inspired by the great good that apartheid would supposedly yield, they were satisfied with their own position in the situation; they were calling the shots and living comfortably. Of course, they did not themselves make this last point, that they were calling the shots and living comfortably.

What is it about justice that puts brakes on paternalistic benevolence? And why, more generally, does justice matter? Why are goodwi...