Journey toward Justice: Personal Encounters in the Global South by Nicholas P. Wolterstorff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a book that sparkles with clear thinking and a personal narrative that helped inform and shape that thinking. Wolterstorff continues in this book to elaborate thinking outlined in Justice: Rights and Wrongs. In short chapters he shares both his own ideas about justice and the personal encounters with victims of injustice in South Africa, Palestine, and the Honduras. And he contends that it was the personal encounters with those whose dignity was impaired and whose inherent rights were denied that informed his theory of justice centering around human dignity and inherent rights.

Nicholas Wolterstorff

He distinguishes his approach from one of the leaders in the field, John Rawls. I’ve not read Rawls and so I don’t feel I can adequately assess the distinctions between the two. Wolterstorff focuses on the idea of inherent rights as opposed to right order as central in his concept of justice. This arose, as I’ve noted from his experiences, particularly in South Africa, of seeing justice defined as right order and yet denying basic liberties to blacks that he would consider inherent rights. His theory also develops an understanding of justice in terms of ‘primary’ and ‘reactive’ justice (the latter being justice that responds to criminal acts against a person while the former dealing with structural injustices that impair personal liberties). He argues against those who claim that an “inherent rights” approach can be abused by those claiming extravagant rights beyond what he envisions. He contends that abuse does not support doing away with an inherent rights concept but rather calls for its proper use.

Along the way, he engages some of the biblical theology surrounding justice, particularly what he sees as a mistranslation of the New Testament dik stem words in many contexts as righteous or righteousness instead of just or justice. He also argues against the blind submission to authority that many read into Romans 13, arguing that this is to be understood not as rulers who are divinely appointed who must be submitted to no matter what (except where submission involves direct disobedience to God) but rather that rulers are appointed to exercise justice and the power of the sword against perpetrators of injustice, which warrants advocacy when the state fails to live up to its God-appointed role.

Wolterstorff’s philosophical work has included work in the area of aesthetics and here he considers the role of artistic expression in justice movements. In a chapter on “Justice and Beauty” he argues for the intrinsic worth of art and that shalom, the kind of peace in which humans flourish, knits together the disparate elements of pursuing justice, scholarship, and beauty in the world.

My sense is that this book represents both a distillation, and, in some ways, an elaboration of his academic works on justice. It left me wanting more and served as a good introduction to his thinking about this important subject.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through Goodreads “First Reads” program.

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