Justice Of God Research Articles

Book Review: God's Justice in Romans: Keys for Interpreting the Epistle to the Romans

Book Review: God's Justice in Romans: Keys for Interpreting the Epistle to the Romans

PESSIMISTIC UNIVERSALISM: RETHINKING THE WIDER HOPE WITH BONHOEFFER AND BARTH

AbstractThis article considers Christian universalism. Responding to the charge that this universalism arises from an overly optimistic view of humanity that fails to take seriously evil and sin, or that it has an overly optimistic view of the omnipotence of God's love which impugns God's righteousness and undermines God's justice and holiness, the article advocates a pessimistic approach to Christian universalism, grounding the argument for universal salvation in the sin and unbelief of the Christian. The article draws on Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to support this case, and concludes by pointing to non‐absolute actualistic anthropology as a means for making sense of the Christian life alongside the co‐sinfulness of the Christian and the non‐Christian.

Resurrection: a tale of two anthems sung by Serbs

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a comparative study of two key contenders for Serbian anthem-hood, the royalist song ‘God of Justice’ and the pan-Slavic hymn, ‘Hey Slavs’. Drawing on the theorising of nation and representation, as developed by Benedict Anderson, Michael Billig and others, the purpose of the study is to compare the self-images these songs present to those they enjoin in unison, and to consider the role of those images and the identities they suggest in national/ist ideologies. Neither of the songs discussed in this paper was originally intended to be a national song. Both are in this sense ‘accidental anthems’. The paper will discuss the history of the accidents which have at various times given, and deprived, these songs of anthem status, in Serbia. ‘God of Justice’, originally a song in a patriotic stage play of the 1870s (commissioned to legitimise a young prince's accession to the Serbian throne), was the national song and later the official national anthem of the Principality of (later Kingdom of) Serbia from 1872 to 1919 and then, in a changed form, part of the national anthem of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1919 till 1941. It was resurrected in 2006, in a changed – republican – form to become the national anthem of the Republic of Serbia. The pan-Slavic ‘Hey Slavs’, written in 1842, emerged, a century later, first as a national song of the Communist-led resistance movement in Yugoslavia in 1942 and then became an unofficial national anthem of the Communist-ruled Yugoslav federation; it survived the violent disintegration of that federation in 1991 to serve (once again unofficially) as an anthem of the rump Yugoslavia from 1992 to 2006. Why have these particular songs been chosen for the purpose of representing the Serbian nation to itself and to the world? How has each succeeded and failed in that task? The essay concludes with some speculation on these questions.

God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition. By John Witte, Jr., Reaping the Whirlwind: Liberal Democracy & The Religious Axis. By John R. Pottenger and A Theology of Public Life. By Charles Matthewes

God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition. By John Witte, Jr., Reaping the Whirlwind: Liberal Democracy & The Religious Axis. By John R. Pottenger and A Theology of Public Life. By Charles Matthewes

Judaism: a way of being

Written for observant and non-observant Jews and anyone interested in religion, this remarkable book by the distinguished scholar David Gelernter seeks to answer the deceptively simple question: What is Judaism really about? Gelernter views Judaism as one of humanity's most profound and sublimely beautiful achievements. But because Judaism is a way of life rather than a formal system of thought, it has been difficult for anyone but a practising Jew to understand its unique intellectual and spiritual structure. Gelernter explores compelling questions, such as: How does Judaism's obsession with life on earth versus the world-to-come separate it fundamentally from Christianity and Islam? Why do Jews believe in God, and how can they after the Holocaust? What makes Classical Judaism the most important intellectual development in Western history? Why does Judaism teach that, in the course of the Jewish people's coming-of-age, God moved out of history and into the human mind, abandoning all power but the capacity to talk to each person from inside and thereby to influence events only indirectly? In discussing these and other questions, Gelernter seeks to lay out Jewish beliefs on four basic topics - the sanctity of everyday life; man and God; the meaning of sexuality and family; good, evil, and the nature of God's justice in a cruel world - and to convey a profound and stirring sense of what it means to be Jewish.

God of Justice: Ritual Healing and Social Justice in The Central Himalayas – By William S. Sax

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 35, Issue 4 p. 303-304 God of Justice: Ritual Healing and Social Justice in The Central Himalayas – By William S. Sax Michelle I. Bakker, Michelle I. Bakker Concordia University, MontrealSearch for more papers by this author Michelle I. Bakker, Michelle I. Bakker Concordia University, MontrealSearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 November 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-0922.2009.01391_11.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume35, Issue4December 2009Pages 303-304 RelatedInformation

'Would you condemn me that you may be justified?'

Reading the book of Job can be an uncomfortable, dissatisfying and ambiguous experience. Despite the authoritative rhetoric of the divine speeches, Job's most pressing questions about the operation of God's justice remain forever unanswered. In this essay, Galbraith examines Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of the differend and its potential to provide new insights into the curiously unsatisfying nature of the book of Job. For Lyotard, a differend occurs in a situation where a victim, seeking justice for a wrong, is 'divested of the means to argue' with their accuser due to a lack of a single idiom which both parties can agree upon as a standard of justice. When we read the story of Job in the light of the differend, we uncover, in addition to the more visible injustice of God's physically excessive and arbitrary mistreatment of Job, a radical or absolute injustice operating at the heart of the narrative. Galbraith uses Lyotard's differend to examine the manner by which God shuts down Job's questions, forcing his acquiescence without even considering his complaints, which are inadmissible by the standards of divine justice. The injustice of the story of Job also reveals itself repeatedly in God's totalitarian, universalising strategies, which deny the uniqueness of Job's case, where he is made to suffer arbitrarily because of the wager between God and the Adversary. This universalising tendency repeats itself in the book's final chapters, in which God provides replacements for the children and livestock he had earlier taken violently away from Job, treating animals and even human beings as exchangeable commodities. Again, Job is denied his singularity. Nevertheless, interpreting Job's plight in light of the differend reveals that the occluded injustice manifests itself in the silences of the text, in the tension inherent in Job's illogical pursuit of justice from a God he accuses of injustice, and, finally in Job's eventual, ambiguous/inexplicable silence. The heuristic advantage of the concept of the differend for understanding the book of Job lies in that it allows us to bring out the radical injustice of the Bible's most anti-Christian text.

Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained

Milton scholars have accepted at face value Milton's linking of the Son in Paradise Regained with patient or longsuffering Job. This article argues that Milton's representation of the Son is equally indebted to the Job who questions God's justice in the central dialogue of the book of Job. Job's rhetoric also is a model for the Son's ironic mode of speaking and for Milton's own literary relationship to Scripture.

God of justice: ritual healing and social justice in the central Himalayas

1. Introduction: Fieldwork Among the Harijans 2. God of Justice 3. Landscape, Memory, and Ritual 4. Oracles, Gurus, and Distributed Agency 5. Rituals of Family Unity 6. Families and their ghosts 7. Sending the God Back 8. Postscript: Ritual healing and modernity

Love's Angry Lament: Confronting Our Anger with God: Based on Lamentations 1 – 3

The author examines biblical characters who challenged the justice of God. He contends that these lamenters laid the foundation for the rabbinic tradition of chutzpah. They freely faced God with their disillusionment and anger. Their intimacy with the Divine is exemplary. The author acknowledges the ambiguities of God's response to despair and contextualizes lament in the case of a woman who has been sexually abused and seeks pastoral guidance. This article integrates exegesis and theology with theories of anger and intimacy.

Book Review: God's Joust, God's Justice

Review of John Witte, Jr.'s book God's Joust, God's Justice. This book makes a compelling case for the reintegration of the complimentary disciplines of law and religion and is recommended for both law school and seminary libraries.

Infused Virtue and the Effects of Acquired Vice: A Test Case for the Thomistic Theory of Infused Cardinal Virtues

The Thomist 73 (2009): 29-52 INFUSED VIRTUE AND THE EFFECTS OF ACQUIRED VICE: A TEST CASE FOR THE THOMISTIC THEORY OF INFUSED CARDINAL VIRTUES MICHAELS. SHERWIN, 0.P. University ofFribourg Fribourg, Switzerland SERVAIS PINCKAERS REPEATEDLY affirmed the importance of the infused cardinal virtues for the moral life.1 For Pinckaers, what is at stake in this doctrine is the difference that grace makes in the life of virtue. Grace transforms the source and character of moral excellence. "The first source of moral excellence is no longer located in the human person, but in God through Christ."2 In this reorientation, the most important moral virtues "are not 'acquired' by unaided human effort, but implanted in the human person by the Holy Spirit."3 Nevertheless, as dispositions residing in the powers of the human soul, the infused moral virtues are intimately the excellences of the agent himself. As such, they become the traits of character by means of which the Spirit teaches us the ways of holiness. "Thus, in the context of a gradual education guided by the light of the Gospel, an active cooperation between God and 1 Servais Pinckaers, Morality: The Catholic View (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2001), 71-72; The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 180; "The Sources of the Ethics of St. Thomas Aquinas," in The Ethics ofAquinas, ed. StephenJ. Pope (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 23; "The Place ofPhilosophy in Moral Theology," in The Pinckaers Reader: Renewing Thomistic Moral Theology, edited by John Berkman and Craig Steven Titus (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 6768 . 2 Pinckaers, Morality: The Catholic View, 71. 3 Ibid. 29 30 MICHAEL S. SHERWIN, O.P. the human person can develop."4 Pinckaers, therefore, did not see Aquinas's doctrine on the infused moral virtues as a Scholastic vestige, but as something rooted in the scriptural account of moral development. "Some such theory seems necessary if we are to explain what the Scriptures teach concerning the way to live as followers of Christ."5 A cursory analysis of the way New Testament authors employ the Greek terms for the cardinal virtues seems to support their status as infused by God. Ephesians, for example, describes God as having lavished upon us grace that grants us "all wisdom and prudence [phronesis]" (Eph 1:8), while 2 Timothy (1:7) tells us that "God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power, love and temperance [sophrosyne]," where "power" (dynamis) is one of the New Testament equivalents for the pagan Greek word for courage.6 It is the strength (kratos) that comes from God and emboldens us to resist the devil (Eph 6:10). Lastly, although the New Testament authors radically reinterpret the meaning of justice (dikaiosyne), they affirm that Christ is our justice (1 Cor 1:30) and that in him we become the justice of God (2 Cor 5:21). Prudence, justice, courage, and temperance, therefore, are all described in the New Testament as given to us by God. In this the New Testament authors seem to be following an Old Testament theme that portrays God, through the mysterious action of his wisdom, as teaching the cardinal virtues: "if one loves justice, the fruits of [wisdom's] works are virtues; for she teaches temperance and prudence, justice and courage, and nothing in life is more useful for humans than these" (Wis 8:7). These passages, however, while suggestive, are not of themselves probative. Indeed, many reject the doctrine of infused 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 72. 6 One explanation for the virtual absence of the classical Greek term for courage (andreia) in the New Testament is that since its etymological root is the Greek word for man (aner, andros) the New Testament authors wanted to avoid the connotations of self-sufficiency that the term normally conveys. Instead, as Ceslas Spicq notes in his classic study of New Testament morality (Theologie morale du Nouveau Testament [Paris: Librairie Lecoffre, 1965), 354.)), when offering their theology of courage the New Testament authors appeal to a cluster of...

Where is the God of Justice? Biblical Perspectives on Suffering – By Warren McWilliams

Where is the God of Justice? Biblical Perspectives on Suffering – By Warren McWilliams

Book Review: God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition

Book Review: <b>God's Joust, God's Justice</b>: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition

What's at Stake in Natural Law?

AbstractSomething like natural law is required if Christians are to say that Jesus Christ is as relevant to human beings of every age and in every place that we have ever existed as a race. There must be something stable about the human condition which means that we are all alike in need of a Saviour. That something is the fact that we are created to love God and to love our neighbour. This much is revealed to all humankind. For the Apostle Paul and Thomas Aquinas the natural law was not given as an alternative method of salvation but rather to explain the justice of God's judgment and the utter gratuity of divine grace. Similarly, natural theology is not an assertion that faith in Christ is optional but rather that all human beings are culpable if they do not recognise that there is a god who created them and rewards those who seek God. Natural theology is the minimum content of faith where Christ has not been proclaimed; it is no substitute for explicit faith in Christ when He has been revealed.

Predestination, Freedom, and the Logic of Love

The christian affirmation of predestination is one of the more difficult challenges to the credibility of the Christian faith. The topic is most often avoided entirely in presentations of the Christian faith on a popular level, especially in Catholic circles. This is likely be- cause the very idea that the ultimate destiny of the human person is foreordained makes contemporary Christians instinctively uncom- fortable; it seems to call into question both human freedom and the justice of God, two notions that are cherished by contemporary believers. Yet a doctrine of predestination is an undeniable part of the biblical, traditional, and magisterial heritage of the Church. Is this traditional doctrine comprehensible from the perspective of contemporary belief? The notion of predestination has its roots in Scripture, but it has received much of its development from Augustine, who is the common foundation of later thought on predestination in both the Protestant and Catholic traditions. The Catholic tradition receives its Augustinian heritage on this question through Thomas Aquinas; it is Thomas's expression of the doctrine that will be explored here. (For the sake of simplicity, consideration will be limited to his sig-

Newes from the Dead (review)

Reviewed by: Newes from the Dead Elizabeth Bush Hooper, Mary; Newes from the Dead;. Roaring Brook, 2008; [256p] ISBN 978-1-59643-355-7 $15.95 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 This fictionalized account of a ripped-from-the-headlines event (the headlines of 1650, that is) opens with servant girl Anne Green slipping back into a state of consciousness following her hanging for the crime of infanticide. With her body still immobilized from the trauma, Anne tries to make sense of her present condition and, uncertain whether she's dead or alive, she passes the time by reviewing the sad chain of events that brought her to the gallows. Seduced by her employer's grandson, she delivered a premature, stillborn baby; in an effort to keep the family name unsullied and the grandson's propitious engagement on track, Sir Thomas Reade used his influence to have Anne charged with infanticide and hanged. While a seemingly dead Anne muses on this injustice, a team of scholars and physicians prepares to dissect her body, which they have purchased from the family at the time of the execution. A flicker of eye movement, a faint rale, and an uncertain pulse halt the proceedings, and as the attendant Sir Thomas bellows to carry on with the dissection, the medical men pool their strategies for reviving Anne, demonstrating how God's justice has been manifest through this miracle—and securing their own professional laurels into the bargain. Anne's comatose chronicle isn't the most convincing narrative vehicle, and Hooper's detailing of Anne's sexual encounters and the melodramatic build-up to the dissection-that-almost-was propel readers into role of prurient voyeur that she seems to criticize in Anne's contemporaries. Still, the based-on-fact story is undeniably compelling, and teens needn't wait until Halloween for a brush with the macabre. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Merit in the Midst of Grace: The Covenant with Adam Reconsidered in View of the Two Powers of God

Abstract: The position of Barth and others, that the covenant with Adam is thoroughly legalistic, is based on the incorrect assumption that grace and works cannot coexist as covenant principles. However, the difficulty of seeing the harmony between these principles is real. This article reconsiders the covenant with Adam in light of the medieval concept of the two powers of God, or as we shall argue here, the two perspectives on God's power. These two perspectives, part of the original intellectual milieu in which covenant theology arose, demonstrate that the divine covenant with humanity may include aspects of both God's grace and human merit simultaneously. God's grace is apparent de potentia absoluta, from the perspective of God's absolute power, and God's justice and the possibility of Adam's merit are apparent de potentia ordinata, from the perspective of God's ordained power. Both perspectives, what God could do and what he has in fact chosen to do, are valid and necessary perspectives for understanding God's covenant dealings.

God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition (review)

General and Miscellaneous God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition. By John Witte, Jr. [Emory University Studies in Law and Religion.] (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2006. Pp. xiv, 498. $30.00 paperback.) This, the latest and widest-ranging of Professor Witte 's explorations of the overlapping realms of law, theology, and history, is engaging, thoughtful, and respectful of the different intellectual and religious traditions with which he deals. It covers three distinct topics, human rights law, the American churchstate relation, and family law: For each, Witte uses the same methodology. He examines the contributions of the various religious traditions, Catholic, Protestant, and as far as he finds them applicable, Orthodox, Jewish, and Islamic. He relates all these to the contribution of the secular Enlightenment tradition, and tries to develop a synthesis that will allow today's Christians to live in love and peace with their neighbors. His conclusions are decent, humane, and ecumenical, and his treatment of debatable questions is very fair to both sides. Among other valuable discussions, he has a thorough and sympathetic account of the attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church and the post-Communist Russian government toward evangelizing initiatives from We stern Europe and America, and an enlightening examination of the legislative history of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. But he has fallen into a few historical gaffes. On page 300, for instance, he says that the Tametsi decree of the Council of Trent made parental consent a requirement for marriage. It did not. Rather, it provided that although the marriage of minors without parental consent should be discouraged, it was not invalid. Parental consent has never been required, or supposed to be required, for the marriage of adults. On page 234, he says, In Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, the Court refused to uphold a federal law forbidding contracts with foreign clergy, a vital issue for Catholic clergy. The federal law in question did not forbid contracts with foreign clergy; it forbade contracts with foreign workers generally. The Court did not refuse to uphold it; it refused to apply it. The lawfulness of making contracts was not a vital issue for Catholic clergy, who (unlike the Anglican priest involved in the Holy Trinity case) are generally assigned to their positions rather than contracted for. Such errors of detail-and these are not the only ones-may seem trivial in a work as broad in scope as this. But they undermine confidence. As the author sweeps across many centuries and several disciplines, many different readers will find him covering some subjects with which they are familiar, and many subjects with which they are not. …

Comments and Questions on Evil and the Justice of God

Comments and Questions on Evil and the Justice of God