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The Primacy of Justice in Moral Theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Daniel C. Maguire
Daniel C. Maguire*
Affiliation:
Marquette University
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Extract

It should warm the self-righteous cockles of Catholic hearts to read Protestant theologian Emil Brunner's remark that “while the Catholic Church, drawing on centuries of tradition, possesses an impressive systematic theory of justice, Protestant Christianity has had none for some three hundred years past.” The cockles, however, are in for a chilling with the realization of how little we have done, particularly in the United States, to give this noble tradition salience and application in Catholic thought, or to give it voice and currency in national and international political discourse. With such an in-house treasure as Brunner noted, why were we content to live as misers responding so little to the poverty in justice theory that scars our national setting? There were some notable exceptions, but they never became mainstreamed in American Catholic life. Why?

The principal reasons, I submit, are these: Catholic thought was (I) prone to conflate the just and the juridical; (II) distracted by charity to the neglect of justice; (III) insufficiently nourished by the justice preoccupations of the Bible; (IV) inattentive to the need to clarify and develop the theories underlying our social justice tradition.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 1983 , pp. 72 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1983

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References

1 Brunner, Emil, Justice and the Social Order (London: Lutterworth, 1945), p. 7.Google Scholar

2 See Curran, Charles E., American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth Century Approaches (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).Google Scholar In this important book Curran discusses the social justice contributions of John A. Ryan, the German-American Catholics, Paul Furfey and the Catholic Worker, John Courtney Murray, and James Douglass and the Catholic peace movement.

3 Gilleman, Gerard, The Primacy of Charity in Moral Theology (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1961), p. xxix.Google Scholar

4 Pius, Pope XI, “Quadragesimo Anno,” A.A.S.m 23 (1931), 223.Google Scholar Bernard Häring, one of the reformers of moral theology, could still write that “Justice regulates our relations with our fellows, with other persons in regard to the material order and material possessions, not in regard to man's interior value in love” (The Law of Christ [Westminster, MD: Newman, 1961, I: 514).Google Scholar

5 Aristotle, , Nichomachean Ethics, 1155a.Google Scholar

6 Mott, Stephen Charles, “Egalitarian Aspects of the Biblical Theory of Justice” in The American Society of Christian Ethics, 1978: Selected Papers from the Nineteenth Annual Meeting, ed. Stackhouse, Max L. (Waterloo, Ontario: Council on the Study of Religion, 1978), p, 8.Google Scholar Mott has developed this significant essay into a book (available in paperback) which presents a superb and sensitive treatment of biblical justice: Biblical Ethics and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

7 See Mott, , “Egalitarian Aspects,” p. 12.Google Scholar

8 What I mean by the prevailing notions of justice in the United States will become clear in the exposition. However, for references to the unsystematized notions of justice that permeate American life and history, see Arieli, Yehoshua, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Snaith, Norman H., The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (London: Epworth Press, 1944 [9th impression, 1962]), p. 70.Google Scholar The Aramaic tsidqah is equated with “showing mercy to the poor.”

10 Ibid., p. 72.

11 Mott, , Biblical Ethics and Social Change, p. 63.Google Scholar

12 See Maguire, Daniel C., A New American Justice (Minneapolis, MN: Winston, 1982), ch. 2.Google Scholar

13 See ibid., pp. 23, 190. This was the philosophy of John Hay as summarized by his biographer, Thayer, William Roscoe, The Life and Letters of John Hay, 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915).Google Scholar

14 See Yoder, John Howard, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972), pp. 34–47.Google Scholar

15 See ibid., pp. 45-46.

16 Aquinas, Thomas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, 5, 2.Google Scholar

17 The theological principle underlying biblical justice is this: “Human justice is a manifestation of grace not only in the sense that it is provided by a gracious God, but also because it is similar in nature to grace and to grace's expression in love” (Mott, , Biblical Justice and Social Change, p. 63Google Scholar).

18 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 158, a. 4, c.

19 Cited in ibid., a. 8 from John Chrysostom, Super Mt. 1. c. nt. 7.

20 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 47, a. 1.

21 Ibid., II-II, q. 158, a. 8; II-II, q. 157, a. 1, ad 3.

22 Maguire, Daniel C., “The Feminization of God and Ethics,” Christianity and Crisis 42 (March 15, 1982), 59–67.Google Scholar

23 See Maguire, Daniel C., The New Subversives (New York: Crossroad, 1982), pp. 77–80.Google Scholar

24 The assumption of my exegesis throughout has been that the good book is not all good. Much of it is descriptive of the sinful persons and ideas that filled the culture from which the Bible grew.

25 See Maguire, A New American Justice. See also Josef Pieper who uses the triangular model and who, with benevolent eisogesis manages to found the clear tripartite division in Acquines: Justice (New York: Pantheon, 1955)Google Scholar; republished in The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966).Google Scholar

26 See Maguire, A New American Justice, ch. 2.

27 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 51, a. 1, ad 3.

28 Thomas Jefferson, to Rev. James Madison, October 28, 1785; quoted in Arieli, p. 159.

29 See Maguire, Daniel C., The Moral Choice (Minneapolis, MN: Winston, 1979), ch. 3.Google Scholar