If You Want Peace and Justice ...

The familiar bumper sticker says, "If you want peace, work for justice," a quote from Pope Paul VI. Well, yes, but I think it goes deeper than that. "If you want peace and justice, work for harmony," I'd put it.

By "harmony" I mean the word as used by the Prince of Wales in his recent book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. It's basically a book to warm the cockles of any environmentalist's heart. Prince Charles says we are so out of harmony with the natural world, and so out of balance within our own collective human psyche, that we don't begin to comprehend how out of whack we really are.

I don't want to put words in Charles's mouth, and I don't claim to be wise enough to know how far beyond his meaning my thoughts lie. Yet I increasingly believe he'd agree: We have injustice and war because we are fundamentally off-center within our own human nature, when taken in its very complex totality.

Many ills are byproducts of our deep disharmony, I think. Take sex in its most negative aspects. Look at how many abortions there are each year. Look at how many single-parent households and broken homes we have. How many rapes. How many unmarried childbirths intentionally sought by misguided teens. How much time we spend debating supposedly "settled" issues like women's "right" to contraception.

And look at how het up we all get over hot-button, non-sexual issues, like whether the children of illegal immigrants deserve a legal path to a college education and U.S. citizenship — or, again, whether addictive drugs or gay nuptials or carrying a concealed weapon should be legal.

The plain fact is that we fundamentally disagree about so many things. Some of us "go to war" over them, putting on display our entrenched disagreements about what is, or is not, right or just.

Sociologist Charles Murray's most recent book says, via its title, that we are "coming apart" class-wise. The mores and lifestyles of the "new lower class" are today dangerously different from those of the (safely ensconced within their socioeconomic bubble) "new upper class."

Seemingly, the upper-crusters' ethos isn't so different from America's long-celebrated "founding virtues," to use Murray's term, while the bottom-dwellers' lives ways have "come apart" from our once-universal American mores. Crime, welfare dependency, opting out of the workforce, single parenthood, dropping out early from the educational trajectory — all these are symptoms of how our socioeconomic bottom-dwellers no longer find our "founding virtues" — industriousness, basic honesty, marriage, and religious faith — of great value.

But I think we non-bottom-dwellers live lives of incongruity, too. I call ours a "bikini-wax world." At the beach, women wear bikinis that are (warning: frank talk ahead) too tiny to conceal all of their pubic hair. So they pay someone to wax away the offending hair.

In a world of less incongruity, there might be a thorough covering up of the pubic region at the beach, or there might be brazen nudism in which everything is bared and no body fur need be removed. What with now-obsolete women's bathing dresses and the occasional nudist beach, we've seen both in our cultural history. And there are comprehensible philosophical underpinnings for both.

For teeny-weeny bikinis and paying good money for Brazilian wax treatments, though, not so much. Go ahead and try: give a comprehensive philosophical justification for bikini bottoms that conceal some, but not all, of nature's hairy endowments.

In a bikini-wax world, seemingly incompatible ideas simply coexist. It's no longer OK to go braless today — that's ostensibly "skanky" — but it's OK to let your bra straps show — that's ostensibly not "skanky."

Or, in a graver realm, it's OK to privately oppose abortion on moral grounds, but it's not OK to impose your beliefs on anyone else.

I contend our bikini-wax society has lately become obsessed with fighting — and yet, at one and the same time, with avoiding fights.

Notice how oriented toward clashes our popular culture has become. Look at just about anything on TV and, when sex isn't front and center, it's usually fighting, in one guise or another, that's on tap.

And yet ... as individuals we often decline to stand and deliver for what we believe in, i.e., a particular moral code. On issues concerning sexuality, social justice, war, the environment, and much else, many of us opt out of the debate entirely. Different strokes for different folks, we say. Your truth is not my truth, and there's no absolute truth anyway.

Except when we get het up over something. There's the actual truth, we think then, and there's also what the other side of the discussion falsely believes.

But both sides feel the same way, of course. Bothe sides think they alone have a handle on the truth.

A world of such incongruity is a fractionated world. In such a fractionated world, I believe, there's no real road to either justice or peace, unless and until we get back into some semblance of natural-societal-intrapersonal harmony.

In Search of Justice

Michael J. Sandel's Justice: What's the Right Thing To Do? is a must-read for those who seek, in the systematic application of moral-philosophical argument, a rational basis for answering some of the thorniest questions surrounding us today. Among the issues Sandel brings up are "The Abortion and Stem Cell Debates," "Same-Sex Marriage," "Citizenship, Sacrifice, and Service," and "The Moral Limits of Markets." His approach will, I think, strike many readers as fresh and helpful.

Justice, the concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, religion, fairness, and equity, is of ultimate importance to a democratic society and its politics. Sandel is a "higher-norms" liberal in a sense that went out with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in the 1960s. He opposes the underpinnings of much "liberal" thought today, especially that of ultra civil libertarians who think First Amendment rights are paramount, while quarreling as well with today's right-wing libertarians and individualist, market-loving conservatives.

Sandel presents a pared down history of moral philosophy in a way that makes for anything but heavy lifting for lay readers like thee and me, so clear and crisp is his exposition. We get various strains of Western ethical thought laid before us in the context of moral dilemmas we can relate to. Due to the aptness of Sandel's examples, as we read his opening chapters we feel immediately comfortable with our comprehension of:

• The traditional utilitarian thought of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
• Today's resurgent libertarianism as embodied by economist Milton Friedman and philosopher Robert Nozick.

Utilitarianism presumes that justice is a matter of calculating which moral choices make for the greatest utility — happiness, pleasure, satisfaction, the opposite of suffering or pain — for the greatest number of people. Libertarianism, on the other hand, holds that morality is ultimately a matter of individual freedom and uncoerced consent. Sandel gives us reason to believe each of these two principles might work as a solid foundation for general social morality ... and then gives us counterexamples to convince us that both are flawed.

Even so, utilitarianism and libertarianism lie at the heart of many of our moral attitudes today. They are not wrong per se; Sandel wants us not so much to abandon them as to go beyond them.

Libertarianism and Utilitarianism

Libertarianism in particular appeals to the political right and the political left: the right adores marketplaces that leave us free to choose what to do with our own resources; the left adores, say, a woman's unfettered "right to choose."

Utilitarian thought undergirds many of the arguments today's liberals make about the welfare state, in the context of wanting to increase society's overall quotient of happiness be taking wealth from the rich to give to the poor. Conservatives, for their part, are themselves utilitarian when they point to the ability of the "invisible hand" of markets to allocate goods and services in ways that will provide the greatest economic benefit to the most people.

Sandel frames his arguments against both utilitarianism and libertarianism in terms of hot-button topics of the present. The rights and wrongs of surrogate motherhood are a case in point. A utilitarian would say that an infertile couple paying another woman to bear their child maximizes the happiness of all concerned, as the couple winds up with a child and the surrogate mother winds up with a tidy monetary reward. A libertarian, meanwhile, would say that all parties have exercised free choice in the absence of governmental or societal coercion, so what's not to like?

Well, Sandel points out, what about the notion that "surrogacy contracts degrade children and women’s labor by treating them as if they were commodities"? Or that "valuing everything according to utility (or money) degrades those goods and social practices — including children, pregnancy, and parenting — that are properly valued according to higher norms"? (These are arguments Sandel borrows from contemporary moral philosopher Elizabeth S. Anderson.) We need a theory of moral justice, Sandel says, that take account of these "higher norms" and "modes of valuation" that utilitarianism and libertarianism are blind to.

Are There Universal Human Rights?

What, then, lies beyond utilitarianism and libertarianism? Specifically, are there universal human rights that are not possible to justify in terms of either of those approaches?

"Consensual cannibalism or selling oneself into slavery" can be done freely under libertarianism, Sandel notes, yet few libertarians would find either one moral. A consistent libertarian, I might add, would not object to an "assisted suicide" pact with the likes of a Dr. Kevorkian, if entered into freely. Even among libertarians, few would agree that these things are moral or just, so there must be limits to libertarianism.

As for utilitarianism, Sandel writes:

You might defend human rights on the grounds that respecting them will maximize utility in the long run. In that case, however, your reason for respecting rights is not to respect the person who holds them but to make things better for everyone. It is one thing to condemn the scenario of the suffering child because it reduces overall utility, and something else to condemn it as an intrinsic moral wrong, an injustice to the child.

If we want to reject the notion that we "own" ourselves (the libertarian mantra) even to the extent of permitting intentional self-destruction, and to hold moreover that our continued existence as individuals ought not to be subsumed to computations involving the general welfare of society (as utilitarians would hold), then how can we anchor in rational belief our intuitions of intrinsic rights that go beyond the libertarian mantra and the utilitarian bottom line? Doesn't morality, in fact, insist first and foremost that we cherish all human beings qua human beings?

Sandel, in chapter five, says a groundbreaking answer to this question was offered by 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant upped the ante on the very definition of freedom that had been assumed by proto-libertarians of his day. According to Kant, Sandel writes,

Our capacity for reason is bound up with our capacity for freedom. Taken together, these capacities make us distinctive, and set us apart from mere animal existence. They make us more than mere creatures of appetite.

These two uniquely human capacities, for reason and for freedom, are for Kant the solid foundation for a belief in universal human rights. We apply reason to the question of morality, according to Kant, and we find

 ... the moral worth of an action consists not in the consequences that flow from it, but in the intention from which the act is done. What matters [to Kant] is the motive, and the motive must be of a certain kind. What matters is doing the right thing because it’s right, not for some ulterior motive. (Sandel's words, my italics)

If we are to do the right things for the right reasons, then we must determine our moral duties independently of our personal desires. Our ability to do so (whether a person actually manages to do so in living is life is another matter) is, for Kant, that which lends human lives their dignity and respect.

We humans are accordingly subject to universal moral imperatives in Kant's view; Kant collected these moral mandates all into a single overarching principle, the "categorical imperative." Kant's categorical imperative is distinct from "hypothetical" imperatives that depend on intended outcomes. If we are just and moral, we need to yield to this categorical imperative, to set aside our individual desires. Accordingly, we must never treat persons as means to our own ends.

Kant's categorical imperative is paradoxically one that we, in our freedom, must choose. If we fail to choose it, even though pure reason bespeaks its validity, we are accordingly slaves to our own desires and not truly free!

Kant on Casual Sex

Hence, Kant objects to (among other things) today's "casual" sex:

[Kant] opposes every conceivable sexual practice except sexual intercourse between husband and wife. Whether all of Kant’s views on sex actually follow from his moral philosophy is less important than the underlying idea they reflect — that we do not own ourselves and are not at our own disposal. He objects to casual sex (by which he means sex outside of marriage), however consensual, on the grounds that it is degrading  and objectifying to both partners. Casual sex is objectionable, he thinks, because it is all about the satisfaction of sexual desire, not about respect for the humanity of one’s partner.

In short, casual, unmarried sex is out of bounds, for Kant, for the reason that we do not "own" ourselves — including our own sexuality!

From Kant's Categorical Imperative to John Rawls' Ideals of Political Justice

Kant did not specify how to turn his categorical imperative into a system of political justice. Twentieth-century philosopher John Rawls extended Kant's ideas into a theory of how a just state ought to operate.

What principles, Rawls asked, would we all agree to if we were placed in a situation of initial equality? That is, if we had no advance knowledge of what tenets of social morality would feather our own nests — of who was highborn and who was low, who was well-off and who needy, who was hale and who sickly — and if we all came together under the aegis of pure reason to produce an ideal "social contract," what ought its terms to be? Sandel:

Rawls believes that two principles of justice would emerge from the hypothetical contract. The first provides equal basic liberties for all citizens, such as freedom of speech and religion. This principle takes priority over [utilitarian] considerations of social utility and the general welfare. [Rawls'] second principle concerns social and economic equality. Although it does not require an equal distribution of income and wealth, it permits only those social and economic inequalities that work to the advantage of the least well off members of society.

If we are each just as likely to be poor as to be rich, sick as to be well, obtuse as to be smart, then by Rawls' second principle we would insist on social policies that work to the advantage of the former, weaker categories, rather than the latter, stronger ones. Any other allocation of society's "goods," tangible and intangible, would allow the better endowed to trample the worse off in their reach for ever greater wealth.

Accordingly, in Rawls' view we must start our deliberations about moral justice from behind an imaginary "veil of ignorance," not knowing in advance who would be dealt the most desirable hands in life. If we did so, clearly we would severally subject ourselves to binding obligations that would go beyond individual "consent" as customarily upheld by libertarians: contracts in which "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours."

In addition to such overt contracts of mutual benefit, in Rawls' philosophy there might be implicit contracts in such a society that we do not overtly consent to. For example, if we allow a "squeegee man" at a traffic light to wash our windshield, we would be implicitly bound to tip him, prior agreement or no.

Meanwhile, certain actual contracts that people enter into might be morally invalid — e.g., when one person uses superior knowledge to inveigle another person into a disadvantageous agreement. Banks that sold subprime mortgages to house buyers that hadn't a prayer of paying them back, and then bundled the bad mortgages into marketable securities to augment their own profitability, come to mind here.

To Rawls, a ideal society would serve the interests, first and foremost, of those born without natural gifts and advantages in life: caring parents, stable homes, good schools, etc. Though economic inequalities would still exist, "only those social and economic inequalities ... that work to the benefit of the least advantaged members of society" would be allowed. That's why doctors, for instance, would be seen to deserve higher pay than bus drivers.

This is not socialism. Strict equality of income and wealth would not be enforced. Even so, says Sandel, Rawls' "theory of justice ... represents the most compelling case for a more equal society that American political philosophy has yet produced."

Sandel's (and Aristotle's) Third Way

Still and all, the moral philosophy of Kant as elaborated into political theory by John Rawls is basically a quasi-utilitarian amplification of the libertarian idea of freedom. It does not always match Sandel's preferred way of determining what's just:

A third approach says that justice means giving people what they morally deserve — allocating goods to reward and promote virtue. As we will see when we turn to Aristotle ... the virtue-based approach connects justice to reflection about the good life.

In other words, though Rawls' theory of justice is pretty good, there needs to be more to the politics of social justice. There is, for instance, the question of actively promoting virtue by having our civic institutions —including our national government — be non-neutral (gasp!) as to what constitutes "the good life."

Our society has today become one that is carefully neutral about the proper grounds of justice and social morality. Anything other than neutrality about where the roots of morality lie, we fear, risks promoting intolerance, whether religious or of other kinds. Accordingly our governments, at all levels, bend over backwards to avoid taking stands on important moral questions.

Sandel does not dwell long on the notion of religion as the viable substrate of morality, it must be noted. While reading his book, however, I could not help thinking of our society's strict-neutrality policy as a way by which it avoids taking any sort of stand in favor of religion qua religion.

Debating Affirmative Action

Our society's "liberals" are typically the most adamant about the strict-neutrality policy. Yet Sandel shows that some of the pet goals that liberals seek, including affirmative action in college admissions, are hard to justify without accepting that "justice in allocating access to a university has something to do with the goods that universities properly pursue."

What "goods" should universities properly pursue, then? That is a question that depends on the university's telos: Aristotle's word for the appropriate ends or purposes toward which a thing (such as a university) is intrinsically directed.

A college or university is intrinsically aimed, among other things, toward serving the common good through teaching and research. But when is a university "serving the common good"? Answering that question demands that we come to some agreement as to what "the common good" is.

To do that, we cannot at one and the same time insist on having our civic institutions be fastidiously neutral among warring religious or secular worldviews. We need to be able to choose among "competing notions of the virtues [which an] institution should honor and reward." If we want to promote civic ideals such as the ability of various races and ethnicities to join in this nation's common enterprise, then our colleges and universities must follow through on their telos. They must not shy away from promulgating a non-neutral conception of "virtue."

"Justice is teleological," writes Sandel. "Defining rights requires us to figure out the telos (the purpose, end, or essential nature) of the social practice in question." Who has what rights to admission to Harvard depends on Harvard's purpose/end/essential nature as a university.

"Closely connected to the debate about a university’s purpose," Sandel continues,

is a question about honor: What virtues or excellences do universities properly honor and reward? Those who believe that universities exist to celebrate and reward scholarly excellence alone are likely to reject affirmative action, whereas those who believe universities also exist to promote certain civic ideals may well embrace it.

The question at hand is, then, should our universities and public institutions curry a civic virtue such as mutual respect and tolerance by going out of their to remedy historical injustices against African Americans and other groups — even to the extent of overlooking the lower test scores of black applicants vis-à-vis whites? The answer to that question depends on what politics is for.

The Telos of Politics

A deeper question is, accordingly, can we come together and reason our way toward a telos-honoring answer to the first question? That deeper question concerns the telos of politics itself.

We today hesitate to invest our politics with a determinate telos that "would seem to preempt the right of citizens to decide for themselves," per whatever whims of public opinion are rife at the time, what they want their political system to do. If our primary concern is to use politics and government to maximize individual freedom, and nothing else, we will accordingly set aside Aristotle's ideas about the "purpose of politics." For Aristotle held that politics is not really intended "to set up a framework of rights that is neutral among ends. It is [rather] to form good citizens and to cultivate good character."

Those who deserve the most honor in a society, Aristotle taught, are "those who excel in civic virtue, those who are best at deliberating about the common good." Accordingly, the telos of a university is to produce graduates who are, first and foremost, excellent at deliberating about the common good — and that fact requires colleges to use admissions policies that are broadly inclusive and do not overemphasize purely academic credentials.

If so, though, doesn't such a commitment run smack against our widely accepted idea that we all all "free and independent selves, unbound by moral ties we haven’t chosen"? Concerning affirmative action in particular, if we ourselves never enslaved, or discriminated against, African Americans, then why do our institutions owe African Americans anything in the way of affirmative action, apologies, or reparations?

Sandel uses this example of a policy dear to the hearts of political liberals today to show that the strict neutrality which those same liberals cherish with respect to competing systems of moral thought and religious belief (or unbelief) won't wash. In order to nail down an irrefutable defense of affirmative action, liberals must show how affirmative action programs lend themselves to a particular view of the basis for the "good life."

Moral Individualism vs. Obligations of Solidarity

Sandel shows that liberals' chariness of rooting affirmative action in a particular conception of the good furthers, in an inadvertent way, an ethical approach more typical of today's political conservatives, for it is the one that (among other shortcomings) denies any societal obligation to provide affirmative action for disadvantaged minorities. He calls this approach "moral individualism." According to it:

... to be free is to be subject only to obligations I voluntarily incur; whatever I owe others, I owe by virtue of some act of consent — a choice or a promise or an agreement I have made, be it tacit or explicit.

Moral individualism, Sandel says, is blind to Aristotle's telos of politics: to form good citizens and to cultivate good character. It is also blind to the ways that we are, all of us, morally "encumbered" by the specific histories of the communities of which we are a part: our families, our schools, our religious institutions, our ethnic groups, our unions, our military services, our professional associations, our localities, our states, our nations.

We are all, says Sandel, members of an interlocking network of clans, tribes, associations, and institutions, whose specific stories stamp us with moral imperatives beyond those that pure reason can show to be universal, and beside those obligations we take on voluntarily in ways that moral individualists would uphold.

In this regard, Sandel embraces the ideas of ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre, who writes:

... the young German who believes that being born after 1945 means that what Nazis did to Jews has no moral relevance to his relationship to his Jewish contemporaries.

To which Sandel adds:

MacIntyre sees in [such a] stance a moral shallowness. It wrongly assumes that "the self is detachable from its social and historical roles and statuses."

If our individual selves are non-detachable from our collective pasts, then our historical narratives obligate us. The story of what Germans did to Jews during World War II binds today's Germans to an exquisiteness of sensitivity to never repeating the anti-Semitic past — a past in which it became illegal, under Nazi rule, for Germans to deliberate together openly about the common good.

Americans, for their part, have their own historical narratives that obligate them to offer affirmative action to African Americans ... in order to fully integrate them into the circle of those who excel at deliberating about the common good.

Moral imperatives like these are what Sandel calls the "obligations of solidarity." They sometimes require us to do what we might not like doing, such as (if we are white) ceding spots in the freshman class at Harvard to African Americans with lower test scores. But they also obligate us to do things that we enjoy doing, such as demonstrating our patriotism by rising for our national anthem. Obligations of solidarity are a two-edged sword.

Storytelling Beings

It is the stories of our lives that create our specific obligations of solidarity. We are "storytelling beings," says Sandel with MacIntyre.

Our personal stories differ from one individual to the next. Yet they overlap in terms of our joint membership in clans and tribes that we are born, or move, into.

None of us can make sense of our individual moral and ethical obligations, Sandel says, unless we see how they flow, some of them, from the narrative histories that shape us and take us past the obligations of individual consent that libertarians look to ... and also beyond the "natural, universal duties" that, Kant showed, do not require our consent at all.

The moral duties that our narrative histories impose on us are particular, not universal. People belonging to tribes with other narrative histories are not bound by the same claims of community. We Americans have a duty to salute the Stars and Stripes, while a Frenchman is obligated to salute the Tricolor.

An American is born into one tribe, a German into another. Still, the story of an American Catholic, which is what I am, intersects the story of a German Catholic, which is what Pope Benedict XVI is. The Pope's personal story and my own personal story have in common that we are both Catholics and are therefore both obliged to uphold Catholic beliefs and teachings, unless in good conscience we cannot.

The moral duties that our narrative histories impose on us form, then, intersecting "obligations of solidarity." As such, they don't live and die by our signing on to them voluntarily. We are encumbered by them beyond our intentional consent, and beyond Kant's categorical imperative to do no injustice to any fellow human.

Linking Our Narrative Histories with the Philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, and Rawls

We have obligations of solidarity that the stories of our communal lives impose on us. How does this source of human moral obligation tie into the telos of our political system?

In his chapter on "What Do We Owe One Another?/Dilemmas of Loyalty," Sandel suggests that it is right and proper for leaders of latter-day Germany to have apologized to Jews for the Holocaust, and to have paid "billions of dollars in reparations ... in the form of payments to individual survivors and to the state of Israel." Why so?

The main justifications for public apologies [and for reparations] are to honor the memory of those who have suffered injustice at the hands (or in the name) of the political community, to recognize the persisting effects of injustice on victims and their descendants, and to atone for the wrongs committed by those who inflicted the injustice or failed to prevent it.

Key words here are "injustice ... in the name of the political community." "Injustice" takes us back to Kantian notions of the categorical imperative: universal truths of morality absolutely prohibit doing what Germany under the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe. "In the name of the political community" joins Aristotle with Rawls, and unites both of them with Alasdair MacIntyre, the exponent of the idea that our joint communal histories saddle us with obligations of solidarity.

A circle formed by the moral philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, Rawls, and MacIntyre thereby tells us that utilitarianism, libertarianism, and "moral individualism" are not enough, and that repairing "injustice ... in the name of the political community" can call forth from us a morality of higher norms.

The Crisis in Our Culture

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Pope Benedict XVI's recent book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures is one that should not be missed. As I said in my previous post, it is a radical riposte to post-Enlightenment thinking which, for the foundational Christian insistence on the personal dignity of man, made in God's image, substitutes the absolute liberty of the individual to express himself freely ... as long as doing so mortally offends no other individual or group.

Unfortunately, that Enlightenment postulate contains its own internal contradiction. There is ultimately no way in which such radical freedom of our individual, personal self-expression doesn't run aground on the angry sensibilities of others who despise what we say. We in modern society, accordingly, devise laws to protect us vessels of radical freedom from each other's "hateful" expression. Laws then unavoidably proliferate to enshrine offended citizens' claimed needs for further protection, and state powers grow at the expense of liberty! Thus, the contradiction.

The Christian postulate, that human dignity itself lies at the root of all morality and justice, is grounded in the belief that God made everything, including man, upon which event he beheld his creation, finding "it was very good" (Genesis 1:31, quoted on p. 71). The key word is "behold": God sees us, includes us in his gaze, however small and weak we may be. Therein lies our unimpeachable claim to personal dignity.

And therein lies the personal moral responsibility we each have to use our own eyes in a way that validates the like claim to dignity of every other human person ... rather that to close our eyes to him or her and to treat that other human person as an object to be utilized and/or disposed of at our pleasure.


Secularists who prefer the Enlightenment credo to the Judeo-Christian one are not ogres who are snarlingly, universally blind to others' dignities. Unless and until, that is, the fact that they have put the individual freedom mandate they inherit from the Enlightenment at the center of their value system — in place of the erstwhile religious mandate to publicly circumscribe our own freedoms in deference the claims others make on us — forces them to choose the former credo over the latter, if only not to make liars of themselves.

This, the pope observes, is what happens when abortion rights are said to be within the province of a woman's private discretion, as a radically free individual. When a "privacy" justification for abortion rights is asserted in today's society, it necessarily forces all of us to avert our eyes from the unseen fetus, hidden away in a womb. And we are only too willing to look away, for when we decline to envision that the fetus has a face and eyes of its own, we avoid the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise spring from our instinctive readiness to accord a being with human face and human eyes some sort of claim to inviolability, if we but look upon that face and into those eyes.

The pope thinks our culture is in crisis because we accept abortion-on-demand's legality in the name of radical individual liberty. I find, somewhat to my own surprise, that I agree with him.


Throughout my life, including the last twenty years of it, during which I have called myself a Christian, I have nurtured a strong bias toward accepting unquestioningly the Enlightenment prescription of radical individual liberty. It is this very prescription which the pope says is a distortion of the Christian ethos that gave birth to it.

I have no intention here of giving a full account of the history of my libertarian assumptions, but my attitude in the 1960s toward the War in Vietnam gives you its essential flavor. If I am going to be completely honest with myself, I have to admit that perhaps the major reason I opposed that war as a late-teen and then a twenty-something had to do with the indignation I felt at the thought of being drafted and forced to fight in it.

The question, for me, was more than one of whether the war was right or wrong. It was a question of, "How dare they not ask me whether I think it's a right and just war, before they draft me?"

In other words, my assumption that my own liberty trumped any and all claims that my society made upon me — my assumption that I had no civic responsibility to serve — was something that I never called into question. And to avoid calling it into question, my psychological strategy was to call the war immoral on its very face.

Now, that particular war may indeed have been immoral and unjust ... but so too, I now see, was my assumption that the dictates of radical individaul liberty mandated my right to opt out, at my own personal discretion, from fighting in it.


For me to follow the pope and honor what he says in Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, I'll have to scrap that attitude. It's admittedly tricky to do, for there are indeed Christian justifications for pacifism and nonviolence, ones the pope would respect. And there are indeed Christian criteria for a war's being just, according to which the Vietnam conflict may not have passed muster.

Yet, the pope seems to suggest, when one argues against a war from Enlightenment-enshrined considerations of personal liberty alone, one is building one's house on moral quicksand. Hmmm ... tricky, indeed, to see that the moral conclusion may be the same — this war is a bad war, for example — but the justifications for that conclusion are nevertheless flawed and need to be jettisoned.

Yet this is what the pope is telling secularists. No matter how much religion and secularism (he calls the latter "laicism") may agree on a great many grand moral pronouncements, ultimately what matters is how you get to those pronouncements. Just as the end never justifies the means, the conclusion never justifies the arguments. If a system of argumentation — a philosophy — is flawed and contains an internal inconsistency, at some point morality itself becomes mutilated.

Compassionate Kingdom

"And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" — Micah 6:8


By now it's no secret that my spirituality seems to have evolved into a concern for justice and, what I believe amounts to the same thing, the extolling of humility, kindness, and compassion. With the help of Google I have stumbled upon an odd website, www.compassion.org, that seems to consist of a single page containing four quotations about compassion. I find all four resonant.

The first of these quotes is from the Catholic monk and author Thomas Merton: "Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things." Another site with quotes about compassion cites Merton as saying, "The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another."

The second quotation is from someone I don't know, Arthur Jersild, who (Googling reveals) is a psychologist and professor of education at Columbia: "Compassion is the ultimate and most meaningful embodiment of emotional maturity. It is through compassion that a person achieves the highest peak and deepest reach in his or her search for self-fulfillment."

Quotation number three comes from another source not known to me, Matthew Fox. This article about him appears in Wikipedia. There he is called "a controversial American priest and theologian, and the leading exponent of Creation Spirituality," which is apparently a mystical tradition from the 12th to 15th centuries. The quotation reads, "Compassion is not sentiment but is making justice and doing works of mercy. Compassion is not a moral commandment but a flow and overflow of the fullest human and divine energies."

And the fourth quotation, "The whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, forgiveness," comes from the present Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. The Dalai Lama is the supreme head of Tibetan Buddhism, said to be one in a series of incarnations of the bodhisattva, or enlightenment-being, of compassion.

These quotations, taken together, emphasize: gaining a sense of all beings' mutual interdependence; finding spiritual and emotional maturity; enacting justice and mercy; and facilitating love, patience, tolerance, humility, and forgiveness. Christians have an expression that summarizes it all: living in the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God, also called the kingdom of heaven, is spoken of often in the Gospels and throughout the New Testament, but the meaning of the phrase is a bit elusive. Thus, this question put to Father John Dietzen, whose column answering knotty concerns of Roman Catholic belief appears widely in the Catholic press.

Fr. Dietzen addresses the perplexing problem that the kingdom of God is said to be both present now and coming in the future. Rather than thinking of it as "a static, unchanging condition, something finally finished here or perhaps even in the future," we need to imagine it as "active and full of life, constantly at work in everything [God] continually is creating."

The kingdom is, in fact, "God’s reign, his loving rule over all creation" which we can experience as the "compassionate and magnanimous presence of God." As "an ongoing presence," the kingdom "declares that the rule of God is now." This rule of God is to be experienced as "the Father’s benevolent presence and power active in the world."

Yet the kingdom involves the future just as much as it concerns the present. It is a force working ceaselessly "to re-establish the harmony of creation destroyed by sin." This redemptive process, Fr. Dietzen says, is "part of the mystery of God's creating love." It seeks to establish the perfect justice which our everyday experience finds woefully lacking in this material world.

In view of the reality of the kingdom here and now, yet extending forever into the future, we are urged by Jesus "to trust, not to be afraid. Whatever happens, we are sure of the Father’s benevolent presence and power active in the world. ... The more we are aware of the power of this divine rule among us now and its continuance in eternity, the greater is our confidence that, in St. Paul’s words, nothing can separate us from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Justice Versus Chaos

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris) discusses Jesus' temptation in the desert by the devil at some greater length than the actual story that is presented in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The version of Matthew 4, verses 1 through 11, is perhaps the longest and most canonical one.

Jesus has just been baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist and heard a voice from heaven saying, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." He has accordingly consented to hitch his personal destiny to the living out of a text, specifically, the first Servant Song of the Book of Isaiah as cited by Matthew 12:8: "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I put my Spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles."

Before that can happen, though, Jesus must be tested. Like all who attempt to live by a book, he must receive a second baptism, that of fire and Spirit. It is only thus that he, the Son of God, can fully identify with human weakness while still embodying the Word.

So Jesus fasts in the desert for forty days, led or driven there by the Spirit of God, and is tempted thrice by Satan. Satan first tempts him by seeing whether, in his grievous hunger, he will easily abandon the Word in order to assuage his nagging appetite by turning the very stones into loaves of bread. Jesus passes this test: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."

Changing tactics as befits his role as spiritus vertiginis, the spirit of confusion, Satan then tempts Jesus to do the exact opposite: to dismiss the reality of the physical world in which bread is necessary at all. Satan recommends that Jesus be like an angel and soar across the sky. But Jesus rejects the implicit bifurcation of his bodily experience: "You shall not tempt the Lord your God."

Jesus is in danger of being torn in two by competing extremes — fidelity to the Word, and giving in to the necessities of life in the material world. The sciences of chaos have shown that bifurcation, pressed to the extreme, can in fact turn order to chaos.

King is spot on here: "The mind becomes a whirligig of identities: at one moment one is a bodily appetite and the ideal does not count, then one identifies with the ideal and the body does not count. The mind is caught in a witch's dance — a dance wherein one does not know if he is there and the witch is absent, or if the witch is there and he is absent. Half-real identities alternate with increasing rapidity." Such is the run-up to total chaos, science shows.

Satan's third temptation is thus his most cunning: cynical acquiescence in the chaos of a whirligig world. Satan urges Jesus to, as his worshipful viceroy, seize power over the nations. Instead of proclaiming a single justice to the Gentiles — to the "nations," in the Jewish term — he will merely rule them, one and all, in their disunited multiplicity.

But the science of chaos also shows that there is a hidden new order that can emerge out of sheer chaos, if it is pressed to extreme — a third way between the horns of the dilemma of Word versus world, as it were. Jesus found that way when he refused to kneel to Satan: "You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve."

Hence Jesus, having passed the third and last test, "would give first place to the Word of God; secondly, he would understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything); and, finally, he would never worship the powers of this world," whose legion competing injustices sow chaos (p. 120).

Chaos is accordingly a stand-in for the devil's own confusion as the enemy of not only order but final divine justice. We in our human weakness live in a world that turns whirligig too easily, yet in which a not-quite-yet rule of divine, uniting justice is always "at hand." It behooves us, King writes, to experience the two baptisms Jesus experienced: the first of water and Word, and the second of fire and Spirit.

It admittedly seems a tall order, in a cynical and chaotic world. Yet faith tells us that justice will prevail.

Justice Theology III

In Justice Theology and Justice Theology II I have tried to name justice as the main concern of the Bible. In both cases I feel I have failed to adequately convey what I mean by justice and why I think it's topic number one in holy writ. I have just come across a short story in The New Yorker that I think makes the point perfectly, if elliptically. It is "The Bible," by Marguerite Duras, translated from French by Deborah Treisman.

The story tells of a young man and woman, without names, who meet casually in Paris and proceed to have a passionless affair. Except when they go to bed together, they talk only of "Islam and the Bible." Or, rather, he talks; she, mostly bored, listens. Though he doesn't believe in God (neither does she) he has a lifelong obsession with scripture — Jewish, Christian, Muslim. He is buying a 16th-century Hebrew Bible on layaway! That is his only dream.

The story's last paragraph packs a wallop:

He bought her a pair of stockings; he was a kind man. But since they’d begun sleeping together, she had no joy in her life. One night, she understood why. I am not made for him, she told herself. All her strength, her youthful joie de vivre seemed to shrivel in his presence; she couldn’t help it. Still, she was flattered. In a sense, she was lucky; she told herself that she learned things when she was with him. But those things brought her no pleasure. It was as if she had already known them, so small was her need to learn them. But she did try to please him; in the evening she read the Gospels, as he had asked her to. What Christ said to his mother made her want to cry. That he had been crucified so young, before his mother’s eyes, was even more revolting. But—it wasn’t her fault—she couldn’t go beyond a certain level of emotion. She did not think that he was God, this man. She thought that he was a man who’d had very noble plans; his death gave him back his humanity, which meant that she was unable to read his story without thinking of that of her own father, who had died the year before, crushed by an industrial wagon, one year before his retirement. He’d been the victim of an injustice that had begun long ago. That injustice had never ceased to exist on earth—it continued through the generations of man.

At the risk of ruining its literary delicacy, I take the passage to suggest that the nameless heroine, like so many of us, can make no strong connection between the religion of the Bible and her sense of "an injustice that had begun long ago," that "had never ceased to exist on earth," and that had "continued through the generations of man." Even the injustice committed at Calgary bears, for her, faint resemblance to her own immediate experience of her father's untimely and excruciating death.

It seems to me that the Bible is the story of our humanity: of that unceasing, pervasive injustice, and its eventual remedy.

It seems to me that there is no book that takes the injustice of the world more seriously than the Bible does.

And it seems to me that we have grown tone deaf to the story, as has Duras' heroine ... and her Bible-besotted hero, as well. He can quote Ecclesiastes from memory, yet it is but a vanity to him, a feat. In all his fetishistic obsession with the Koran and the Old and New Testaments there is no comprehension. There is no passion. There is no humanity.

Justice Theology II

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In Justice Theology I started (actually, continued) weaving ideas I got from Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris) into a semblance of a Christian theology based on the idea that the key to understanding the Bible is its concern with justice.

By justice I mean ... what? Intuitively, I'd say, justice is whatever is "meant to be" by God. The world, to the extent that it is not what God had in mind for it, is unjust.

That's a pretty big extent. Injustice, as I think of it, either is co-extensive with evil, or it subsumes it. We hear an awful lot about sin and evil from the pulpit, or at least we used to before religion began downplaying these harsh ideas to keep people in the pews. Nowadays, we have to read theology books to hear much about Christianity's take on evil.

Yet as soon as you start reading up on the "problem of evil" in a theology book, you immediately run into a hitch. Evil is always discussed as a concept within a particular systematic approach to theology. If you read a theology book based on a different systematic approach, you get a different take on evil.

But the people who first spoke the words of the Hebrew Bible, even before they were written down — and the auditors who first listened to them — didn't have a systematic theology. They had an experience of injustice, having been held captive in Egypt, and later in Babylon. The destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem at the hands of pagan foreigners smacked of the possibility that the Jews' just God had punished or deserted them. How to keep their unique faith intact and hold themselves together as a people was more than an intellectual question for them. Their concern for justice was their very identity.


King's book tells us, in speaking about John the Baptist, that

His message concerned justice, and like any good ethician, he spelled it out in detail: "He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none"; tax collectors were told to "collect no more than is appointed," and soldiers were to "rob no one by violence" (Lk 3:11). John was preaching social justice as the [Old Testament] prophets had before him. ... His baptism of "righteousness" called for confession of sins, a washing in the Jordan, and a moral reform. ... [One must begin] the transformation with a moral reform: one committed oneself to the careful observance of a law. Only after the moral reform did one go to the second baptism, a Baptism of Fire and Spirit. John did not administer the second baptism, but he promised another who would (p. 116).

The second baptism would be administered by Jesus, whom John did not yet know when he said, "I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire" (Mt 3:11).

Jesus submitted himself to John's baptism first, before embarking on his own mission. He did this "to fulfill all righteousness." A prophesy of Isaiah thus came true: "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles" (Mt 12:18).

As King points out, Jesus' baptismal commitment to harness his personal future to the preordination of a religious text was quickly put to the test by Satan, who tempted Jesus three times during his forty-day sojourn in the desert. Thus did Jesus prove he would hold fast, and would "give first place to the Word of God" in all its justice and righteousness. From that point on, though, he would also "understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything)" (p. 120).

Accordingly Jesus, in identifying fully with human weakness, went beyond justice without undermining justice in the slightest. How it is even possible for anyone to do that — especially one like Jesus, who was divine — is a riddle, a conundrum, and a paradox.

King likens Jesus' temptation by the devil to the dark night of the soul spoken of by later Christian mystics. After an enchantment by the word of God or any other ethical text, the believer inevitably founders on the shoals of an eventual disillusionment. Ultimately the "difficulties in identifying with a text" come to the fore. Good! As long as the believer does not renounce the Word, the Second Baptism — of fire and Spirit — ensues. Only then does one's true spiritual life really begin.

Parallels with koans used to provoke Zen enlightenment are manifest. The Zen postulant is given by his master a riddle, perhaps "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" This is the koan he must decipher. But it is undecipherable by any normal sort of logic. Good! Only once that is come to grips with is spiritual transformation possible.

But the Zen seeker doesn't just knock on the door of a monastery and get handed a koan right away. He is subjected first to the severest form of discipline, for a very long time, in a sort of religious boot camp. He has to measure up to the highest standard: a stern ethic of right behavior. Only after the Zen master senses the postulant is total in his devotion to the ethic of servitude does the master begin to treat the seeker with any sort of decency.

Likewise, King says, the baptism into righteousness offered by John the Baptist came along with the insistence on an ethical standard of behavior, a submission of the ego and the will to exacting norms. Still and all, "John and his baptism were not final; they were the first and lesser part of a double process" (p. 116). The second and greater part involved a riddle, a Jewish koan if you will. How could a God of pure righteousness and perfect justice identify himself with our own human weakness, even unto death on a cross?

Justice Theology

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In Poetic Justice I took up the subject of justice as the root question of all Western religion, taking up themes broached by Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). In More about Justice I extended my remarks to say that injustice is endemic to our world of experience, both internal or external to the personal soul.

King contrasts the world of sense experience with the Word of God which is spoken to us — and spoken of — in the Bible. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," the gospel of John begins. The point of the gospel is that Jesus Christ is that pre-existent Word.

Words, whether scriptural or not, can enchant us. Stories take us to "another world." In such a story world, justice can win out in the end. Peace and harmony can prevail at last. Order can expunge chaos. What is "meant to be" will actually come to pass in a "new world order."

That is the Bible story in a nutshell. The Bible starts out — after the poetry of God's creation of the universe in Genesis, chapter 1 — in an Eden of peace, harmony, order, and perfect justice. When Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, it is as if a primordial symmetry has been broken. Dynamic change has become possible. The bad news is that dynamic change potentiates conflict, disharmony, chaos, and injustice. The good news (gospel means "good news") is that God, at great personal cost, restores peace, harmony, order, and perfect justice at the "end of days."

Symbolically, perfect justice comes when Christ as the "bridegroom" weds his "bride" — us! We are God's partners in bringing justice to the world!


How are we to understand such things as the "fall," the "redemption," the "end times," and the "kingdom that is to come"? If we take these phrases literally, we may look for an actual, tangible, physical "end of the world" ... and quite soon, since the Bible always talks of God's kingdom as imminently arriving. I don't take them literally. Like King, I take them far too seriously to restrict them to their literal meanings. Instead, I take the Bible's "narrative arc" as a template that can be applied again and again to everyday experience.

I am just beginning to apply it in what is for me a new way. I call it "justice theology."

Justice theology sees injustice as the overriding issue of human experience. By injustice, I mean anything other than what is meant to be by God. It can be social or economic injustice, but it can just as well be interpersonal or even sexual injustice.

It can even be intrapersonal injustice. If I don't deal justly with myself — if, for example, I try to be more of an ultra-pure Pharisee than the admittedly flawed Christian that I really am — then a grievous wrong has been done in the world.

Justice theology, accordingly, doesn't believe in whitewashing the world, any more than it believes in whitewashing the soul. It sees injustice as an unavoidable concomitant of the capacity of the world for evolution and change. The idea is to right wrongs wherever they pop up — not to expect to keep them from popping up in the first place.


You can't right wrongs unless you have an ethical standard, and you can't have an ethical standard if you, in King's phrase, "go native" and elevate "the deed" (i.e., whatever happens) over "the word" (the source of the ethical standard: God). Still, you can be enchanted by the phantasmagoria of events, too.

A phantasmagoria of events is a chaos: ever new, ever fresh, ever purposeless. The Word of God never changes. Ethical standards are, at root, absolute, as are divine purposes. These bespeak immutable order, but we, in our lives, live in territory between order and chaos: the edge of chaos.

This is indeed what science shows today. There are dynamical systems that embody order, pure and simple. There are chaotic systems, like the weather. And then there are systems which, like life on earth, are located between order and chaos. These last systems are the only ones that evolve gracefully. Pure order produces nothing new. Pure chaos cannot sustain that which is produced. Only at the edge of chaos can novelty both appear and be sustained.

Justice theology recognizes that systems at the edge of chaos are continually subject to perturbations and hiccups that push them into chaos proper. That's unjust ... but justice can be restored when the system recovers its poise at the edge of chaos. Result: positive evolutionary change.

Justice on earth is dynamic, because events on the evolving earth are dynamic. We are called by Jesus to be "salt of the earth." Salt ... as in the substance used for preserving meat in Jesus's time. By seeking justice in all of its guises and ramifications, we help bring our world out of chaos, time after time after time.

More about Justice

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In Poetic Justice I took up the subject of justice as the root question of all Western religion, taking up themes broached by Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). From the Old Testament prophets to Jesus, from the letters of St. Paul to Revelation, the message is always that a godly kingdom of heaven, divine and just, is near at hand. The obdurate injustice of our world, of our everyday human experience, will give way to the order, harmony, and peace of a new world ruled by the Word of God.

It is hard for me to speak about this crucial biblical idea — the idea that God's justice wins! — without seeming to say that I have an inerrant sense of what is or is not just in God's eyes. I really don't. All I'm truly saying is that Jesus told the Pharisees, and others who challenged him, about real justice, which was not at all the kind of divine favoritism the Pharisees presumed their holy scriptures promised to them especially.

The Pharisees — and I fear I am pretty much a latter-day Pharisee myself, deep down — sought to export from their closed circle whatever woes living in an unjust world might otherwise bring them. They did this by vilifying and excluding those "unclean" Jews who were poor, ill-educated, crippled, leprous, or otherwise existing outside the Lord's obvious ambit of favor. Along came Jesus and reproached them, the Pharisees, for attempting in that way to immunize themselves against all worldly grievance.

Remember: among Jews at the time the idea of an afterlife was not particularly prominent. If one was not right with God, presumably one knew it by how blessed one was in this life. But God's blessing was not upon the individual so much as upon the nation. Ergo, the Pharisees said, our best bet for a happy life as a people is to cast out from among us whomever seems most infected with God's displeasure.

"Wrong," Jesus preached. "Injustice is part and parcel of the present world. You cannot, in a futile attempt to secure God's favor, export it from your midst by means of excluding the poor and all others whom you don't particularly like from your pristine circle. In fact, that just perpetuates worldly injustice and blocks God's kingdom."

At least for latter-day Pharisees like me, that preaching of Jesus goes against reflex. I admit it ... when I see someone who is sick or deformed or filthy, my first reflex is to get as far away as I can from ... yes, from such signs of injustice. What is less just than being born missing an eye or a limb? What is more foul than being unwashed and having no home to wash in?


It is not hard for me — now, after no small amount of reading and reflection — to see how wrong, how un-Christian, that attitude is ... and how difficult it is to eradicate from my soul.

It begins to look to me as if Jesus knew exactly how difficult it is when he said it is easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter heaven. By rich, he meant those not poor, not visibly unclean, not seemingly out of favor with the Lord. Injustice pervades the inner world just as it does the outer world. Injustice is endemic to our world of experience, whether internal or external to the soul.

If that weren't so, the Bible would make no sense. Everything in the Bible revolves around the notions of justice and injustice. Why is the world so full of injustice and woe? Because of what happened in the Garden of Eden. What can be done about it? Get right with God. How? Follow the commandments. How best to do that? Love God and treat all his people as any "neighbor" ought to be treated. How? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Which means what, exactly? Treat them with justice.


In short, make the kingdom of heaven real, make it come to earth. The Jews speak of this by the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam: "repairing the world." Christians call it "good works." But it's not just about doing good external deeds — it's a spiritual healing of one's inner world as well. As King shows in Enchantments, it requires (metphorically speaking) two baptisms, the first of water and the second of fire and spirit. The first baptism — not the physical act but the inward mark it bestows — gives us our chance at faith, our capacity to become enraptured by the Word of God. The second baptism allows us to re-enter earthly experience, not blinded by the divine light, but changed and charged for the task of reparing the world.

Poetic Justice

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Alibris) touches (p. 112) on what I think may be the root question of all Western religion, why do bad things happen to good people?

We, each one of us, have a built-in sense of rightness, of justice. The evidence of this is that we are all capable of being enchanted by stories whose outcomes are somehow "meant to be":

... the verbal world (especially the world of fiction) is ruled by a "poetic justice" (justice underlies most novels and has a strong rhetorical appeal). A verbal world is a world of form wherein all is regulated by Principle. Accordingly, in a novel, hidden goodness and hidden wickedness eventually become manifest and everyone is suitably rewarded (p. 110).

We have an instinct for a just outcome in a perfect world. Outcomes in this, our world, however, so often fail to satisfy it. Bad things happen. Worse, they happen to good people, for no defensible reason. Not everyone is suitably rewarded. Possibly no one gets perfect justice.


As a Christian who most of the time doesn't really "get" his religion all that well, I find I am prone to making a very bad mistake. It is possible to react to "not being suitably rewarded" by assuming as I do, quite erroneously, that one is in fact being fairly treated in life. If one does not feel all that happy with one's lot, he then may (consciously or unconsciously) imagine he has not been "good" enough to deserve better. The remedy would seem to be to live a "holier," more sin-free life.

But reforming one's life can be taken only so far. After enough of that, one becomes not a good Christian but a latter-day Pharisee, "a whitewashed tomb full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness." Clamping down too hard on the "bad" impulses we all carry around inside us is not what Jesus wants of us.

But why not? Ultimately, the answer seems to be that we and the world we live in are so constituted that we and it cannot be perfectly just, perfectly righteous, perfectly good. As I said in an earlier post, The Problem of the Two Souls, we are all like Faust, with "two souls" dwelling in our bosom. Only the first embodies our sense of perfect justice. The second wants ever fresher and more intense worldly experience, at the expense of any guiding ethic or moral purpose.

King calls it an ongoing conflict between Word and World. The divine Word tells us of a perfect World, not yet ours. But these two worlds, the perfect one and the real one we see and experience, coexist; both are real:

The prophetic wrtings [in the Old Testament] regularly affirm that the two worlds (Word and experience) are not ultimately separate: the God of whom they spoke practices "justice and righteousness in the earth" (Jer 9:24). In making this claim, the prophets had to face the immense difficulty that confronts every theologian: why do bad things happen to good people? If God rules the world in justice, why is injustice so evident? (p. 112)

Sometimes the Hebrew prophets promised retribution soon to come, yet:

... the good continued to suffer and the retribution did not always occur. The World seemed victorious over the Word ... The evident power of the wicked had overcome the sense of justice. But [still the prophets insisted] the Lord would come soon ...

"The great day of the Lord is near and hastening fast," wrote the Old Testament prophet Zephaniah (1:14). In the New Testament, Jesus in the Gospels spoke also of the imminent coming of the kingdom of heaven to earth, saying "not a stone would be left upon a stone (see p. 113). Saint Paul advised in 1st Corinthians 7:31 that "the form of this world is passing away." And the author of the Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, sees "a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away" (21:1).

Whatever this kind of talk may mean — King takes it seriously, but not literally — it clearly has to do with the idea that the words of power that God poured into the prophets will ultimately come true: poetic justice will somehow prevail in the end, here for us on earth.


We all are capable of being put under a verbal spell by a prophet or preacher, today as in earlier ages, and of resonating with such a message. This is King's main point. The enchantment itself is the best "evidence" of the prophetic message coming true:

But what evidence did the prophets present? The enchantment itself. That is, the message of the prophet — the visible world will pass and be replaced by another — tells of the auditors' experience as the prophet speaks. As the people listen, the visible world fades and a new world, a new heaven and a new earth, rise from the scroll of the prophet. The Word replaces earth and sky, for these "roll up like a scroll" and, as long as the spell remains, they are not even remembered (p. 113).

When the spell is later broken — as it is bound to be — how do we react? This, says King, is the principal question of all spiritualty. Do we continue to grant any primacy whatever to the spellbinding Word?

If not, injustice wins. At the end of the day, this is why I insist Judeo-Christian religion has not yet, and never will, grow obsolete.