I agree with you, Daniel. Bear with me, as I draw this out 
Yale philosopher emeritus (retired in 2002) Nicholas Wolterstorff wrote two books on justice in the 2000s:
Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008); Justice in Love (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2011).
As I mentioned in my paper this year on the Hauerwas panel, I was finishing up a book that draws heavily on Wolterstorff’s work on justice, Justice and Love: A Muslim-Christian Conversation. Of course, it deals with much more than this, but in Ch. 5 I do take up Wolterstorff’s arguments against what he calls “modern day agapism.” Here’s a very, very brief summary of his argument in Justice in Love …
First, he says, one has to take into account the prominent role justice plays in the Bible (that he had argued in detail in the first book). Another way of putting this is “the two imperatives issued by the writers of antiquity”:
“One is the imperative to do justice, coming to us from both the Athens-Rome strand of our heritage and the Jerusalem strand. ‘Do justice,’ said the prophet Micah in a well-known passage. The ancient Roman jurist Ulpian said that we are to render to each person his or her right or due (ius). The other imperative comes to us only from the Jerusalem strand: love your neighbor as yourself, even if that neighbor is an enemy. Do not return evil for evil, said Jesus. The ancient Greek writers praised eros-love and philia-love. Jesus, quoting the Torah, enjoined agape-love.”
Now coming to agapism, he notes that although Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey are all luminaries of this movement, the founding texts were written by the Dane Kierkegaard (d. 1855, Works of Love) and the Swede, Bishop Anders Nygren (d. 1978, Agape and Eros).
For them love is about benevolence and generosity, and especially of the self-sacrificing kind (agape). Barth argued that love was being for the other. Therefore, it’s distinct from eros and philia. Since Jesus enjoins love of enemy, it can only be a deep heart-felt response to God’s forgiveness in Christ, which is the supreme model of agapic love.
No Christian can disagree with that, of course. But what does this have to do with justice, asks Wolterstorff? In one passage of his Works of Love, which speaks to the “inner glory of equality” in all human persons, Kierkegaard raised an important issue. Could he mean that we intuitively respond to the image of God in each person we encounter? Not likely, says Wolterstorff, though Kierkegaard goes no further with this thought. Nygren clearly would have answered this question in the negative. He asserts that the legal requirements of the Old Testament subsumed under the Greek word nomos (law) are completely obsolete in the New Testament scheme. Justice has been superseded by love.
Nygren leans on two parables of Jesus to show that love trumps justice – the workers in the vineyard (Mat. 20:1-16) and the prodigal son (Luke 15). For Nygren, Jesus casts all notions of justice to the wind and focuses on compassion and pure grace. But Wolterstorff strongly disagrees. In the first case Jesus gave each worker the promised wages for a days work. As he said to those who had worked all day, “Friend, am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”
With regard to the prodigal son, Nygren contends once again that the father by throwing a party for his wayward son demonstrated “unjust love.” The elder brother had a right to feel snubbed. Wolterstorff retorts that the father’s answer is actually different: “Look dear son, you have always stayed by me, and everything I have is yours. We had to celebrate this happy day.” The older brother still inherits everything that remains in the father’s estate. He isn’t wronged in any way. And even if you believe retributive justice required punishment, the father’s forgiveness puts that behind him. In fact, this is a feast of forgiveness.
Agapic love has not caused injustice in either of the two parables. For Wolterstorff this illustrates well the conundrum that modern day agapists are left with: to love people sometimes causes injustice. But if this is so, then a loving act would cause one to violate one’s neighbor’s “right not to be so treated.” Earlier in the book he had argued the following (Ch. 2):
“And if he has a right not to be so treated by me, then I ought not to treat him that way. In general it’s true that if someone has a right against me to my not treating him than way, then I have a correlative obligation toward him not to treat him thus. The position of the agapist implies that I am sometimes permitted to do what I ought not to do; sometimes it is even the case that I should do what I ought not to do. That cannot be right. Something has to give in the classical version of modern day agapism.”
This is why, reasons Wolterstorff, Reinhold Niebuhr concluded that justice is for this age and love in its fullest dimension is reserved for the age to come. Quoting Niebuhr, he says that democratic society that promotes the basic rights to life and property, and, even more so, calls for laws to enshrine “moral rights and obligations” is “a closer approximation of the law of love.” Wolterstorff calls this “non-classical agapism.”
But as Wolterstorff has it, there is “a certain structural affinity between justice and the ideal of love.” “True justice,” he explains, “requires that everybody’s rights be honored equally.” This thought, however, leads Niebuhr to a conundrum. Here he is in his Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr:
“The ideal of equality is a part of the natural law which transcends existence, but is more immediately relevant to social and economic problems because it is an ideal law, and as law presupposes a recalcitrant nature which must be brought into submission to it. The ideal of love, on the other hand, transcends all law. . . . It is impossible to construct a social ethic out of the ideal of love in its pure form, because the ideal presupposes the resolution of the conflict of life with life, which is the concern of law to mitigate and restrain. For this reason Christianity really had no social ethic until it appropriated the Stoic ethic.”
Wolterstorff promotes what he calls “care agapism.” What is needed, then, is a better definition of love. Yes, love does “seek to promote the good in someone’s life as an end in itself,” but it must also seek to treat the other in a just way. Justice in love here means ensuring that we treat our neighbor “in a way that befits her worth,” or such that her rights are honored. He explains,
“The understanding that we need, if agapism is to be plausible as an ethical system, is an understanding of love as seeking both to promote the good in a person’s life and to secure that she be treated as befits her worth. To treat her as one does because justice requires it is to love her. Of course, that to which she has a right is itself a good in her life, not something in addition, and so too for being treated as befits her worth. So the more precise way of putting the point is that we need an understanding of love such that seeking to secure for someone the good of being treated as befits her worth is an example of love for her.”
Contra Niebuhr, Wolterstorff (along with Catholic social teaching, I might add) emphasizes Christianity’s social ethic:
“Seeking to promote the flourishing of one’s fellow human beings requires that one also seek to promote the flourishing of a wide variety of social entities of which those individuals are members or by which they are affected – families, clans, neighborhoods, cities, churches, synagogues, clubs, groups, peoples, states, agencies, institutions, enterprises, organizations.”
In the end, Wolterstorff grounds his “care agapism” in the love of God that “acknowledges” and responds to his own image, which he implanted in the human person at creation (and in Genesis 1 God calls this “very good”). This is similar to my own argument in Earth, Empire and Sacred Text: Muslims and Christians as Trustees of Creation. From a Vineyard perspective, I think we would say that the fullness of this image, soiled as it was by the fall and redeemed by the cross, is part of the first fruits of God’s coming kingdom that we are called to demonstrate today at every level of society. This is what Jesus meant when he said we were to be salt and light in a dark world.
Wolterstorff puts it in terms of analytic philosophy:
“To treat the other justly is to advance her life-good in some respect; that is benefaction. It is also to pay her what due respect for her worth requires; that is acknowledgment. In doing justice, benefaction and acknowledgment are united. And because care incorporates acting justly, care likewise unites benefaction with acknowledgment.”
To sum up, I apologize for the length of this. Still, it was too short to do justice to Wolterstorff’s argument that runs through two books!
