Journey toward Justice

"Drawing on his experience of being confronted by those who have suffered injustice, Wolterstorff helps us understand why and how such experiences should make a difference for how justice is understood. His reflections on the relations of beauty, hope, and justice are profound and moving."

"I have been so deeply grateful, over many years, for the gift of rigorous scholarship Dr. Wolterstorff has brought to the body of Christ. Now my gratitude expands all the more with his newest gift: his work on biblical justice made accessible for even wider audiences and, most of all, the sharing of his personal journey. This is a book that I will use in many settings for years to come."

"I first started learning from Nick Wolterstorff when I became his Calvin College colleague in 1968. Now, in reading this pilgrimage narrative, I have learned even more from him. Journey toward Justice is not only a fine primer in the basics of Christian political thought--which it surely is. More important, it is an inspiring testimony about what it means to seek the shalom that God intends for the creation, narrated in firsthand encounters with the realities of human suffering."

"Nicholas Wolterstorff's Journey toward Justice is far more than his personal story of how his encounters with suffering people shaped his thinking (and life) around an active concern for justice. The book combines this story with deep and clear thinking, centered in the biblical revelation, about how Christians should think about justice and about the implications of a biblical concern for justice in the contemporary world."

"If you have not read Wolterstorff's great books on justice, you should. This book--accessible and profound--is the easiest place to start."

"Nick Wolterstorff is one of my 'heroes of the faith'--not just because he is a brilliant philosopher (although he is that), and not just because he is a careful and attentive reader of Scripture (although he is that too), but because he is an advocate for justice. His concern with justice is a lived concern, not just a theoretical one. This remarkable book tells the story of his Journey toward Justice. It tells the story of how he came to be an advocate for justice and of how he came to think differently about justice by seeing the faces and hearing the voices of oppressed persons in South Africa, Palestine, and Honduras. In their voices he heard the call of God, and his life and his thoughts were never quite the same. His encounters with people who had been treated unjustly decisively shaped his life and re-formed both his analysis of the concept of justice and his reading of Scripture. I hope this book is widely read. It just may prompt others to listen both to the oppressed and to God--and to hunger for justice."

"Nicholas Wolterstorff has earned our respect and stirred our minds in his long career as a Christian philosopher. He has demanded our attention and struck our conscience in his more recent turn to the theory and practice of justice. Here he captures our imaginations and moves our souls as he tells the story of his journey toward justice--a journey that leads him from wisdom to witness."

"Ideas have consequences, the philosophers tell us. And they are right. But every idea also has a story. This is the tale of how one of American Christianity's most careful thinkers got justice deep down in his soul. Journey toward Justice is nothing if it is not clear. But it is more: by telling the story of how people suffering injustice touched him, Wolterstorff has also made his case deeply compelling. I put this book alongside Lament for a Son as his best writing for the church."

"Nicholas Wolterstorff here explores various ways we humans have come to think about issues of justice. But rather than offer us an anatomy of viewpoints, he asks himself and us what might move us from worldview to engagement. And what moved this philosopher accustomed to canvassing and assessing 'theories' was encountering those suffering the throes of injustice yet enduring them with hope, including black South Africans, Palestinians, and Hondurans--as well as those from the societies dominating them who had come to stand with them. It is clear that a faith community helped to usher this philosopher beyond the blinkers of a Western academic world to face the realities talked about there but never illuminated in this way. What made the difference? Once he learned there was 'something right about starting from the wronged,' it was but a small step to realize how insulated from reality is any Western academic. In the experience that Nick and I shared, the fifteen kilometers dividing prestigious Hebrew University from struggling Bethlehem University spelled less chance for a blinkered view from occupied territory--certainly, of the occupation! Tantur Ecumenical Institute, sandwiched between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Israel and Palestine, taught me how critical can be the location a scholar occupies. This life-imbued philosophical inquiry bespeaks all of that."