The August 1986 Reformed Journal featured a 6-page article by Nicholas Wolterstorff entitled “Why Care for Justice?” While it never defines what it means by “Justice,” it stresses throughout that God has a special concern for the weak, the defenseless, the excluded, the miscasts, the outcasts, the outsiders, defining them particularly as the economically disadvantaged. It warns against the “ever-beckoning temptation for the . . . evangelical . . . to assume that all God really cares about for his human creatures here on earth is that they are born again and thus destined for salvation-to assume that the only kind of lostness which God cares about is religious lostness.” It judges that “if we understand the shalom for which God longs in this narrow, pinched way, then all those biblical passages about God’s love for justice must remain closed books to us.”
What concerns us now is not so much the main thrust of the article as its portrayal of God’s “suffering love.” We are assured that “God’s love . . . includes his suffering over the suffering . . . and waywardness of his children. God is pained by the suffering of those whose neck is under the oppressor ‘s boot. He is pained by the suffering of aliens and orphans and widows deprived of protection by law.” “God’s love for the victims of our world is his suffering love. It is in that love . that his love of justice is grounded. The tears of God are the soil in which his love of justice is rooted.” “And what the secularist sees merely as injustice, the believer sees as making God suffer.” “Only if we purge our societies of injustice will God’s suffering love for the victims of the world be relieved. The believer’s doing of justice is grounded in her desire to answer the lament of God and relieve the divine suffering. It is grounded in her own suffering love of God.”
While the Bible indeed assures us that God’s “tender mercies are over all his works” (Ps. 145:9) and even says of His people “in all their affliction he was afflicted, the angel of his presence saved them” (Isaiah 63:9). does the Bible ever portray Him as the powerless “sufferer” who begs for the pity of man?
Although the article abounds in quotations from the Old Testament prophets, one looks in vain for anything like the dominant emphasis throughout those prophets on God’s sovereignty. Consider, as just one example, Isaiah 40: “Who has directed the Spirit of the Lord, or as His counselor. has taught Him? With whom did He take counsel and who instructed Him, and taught Him in the path of justice?” “Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket, and are counted as the small dust on the balance . . . All nations before Him are as nothing, and they are counted by Him less than nothing and worthless …It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers . . .” (vv. 13, 14, 17, 22). Could anything be farther removed from the portrayal of a powerless “suffering god” than this prophetic awe of and testimony to the Almighty? (One is reminded of Blaise Pascal’s remark in his 1654 “Memorial” about the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars.”) Why should this plea for justice contain no hint of the pervasive Biblical testimony to Who and What God is and caricature Him as the pitiable sufferer instead of the Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth? Is it because the “culturally conditioned” Bible’s testimony to God’s sovereignty is no longer acceptable in our anti-authoritarian culture and because “justice” in our time is no longer defined by God’s laws, but only by popular sentiments about “human rights”?
A little reflection on the author’s earlier booklet, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, shows, as reviewers have observed, that for it the Christian faith and life are not defined by the Bible or any unchangeable doctrines it reveals, but by the believer’s subjective “Christian commitment.” Our problem, therefore, with this kind of writing is that in it we are evidently dealing with a different kind of religion, worshipping an imagined deity who is quite different from the Living God who reveals Himself in the Holy Scriptures.*
*We are twice told, in this booklet, for example, that “Some of what God wishes us to believe may be fit and proper for us as his ‘children’ to believe, yet strictly speaking false.” And, “It may be that some of what God says to us is, strictly speaking, false, accommodated to our frailty. Yet it may be that we are obliged to believe it” (pp. 99, 156). The Bible insists God “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18), and warns us “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:11).