Mirror of Justice

I want to echo the enthusiasm from Rick and Marc about the excellent roundtable discussion at Notre Dame last Friday about Nick Wolterstorff's recent book, The Mighty and the Almighty. The meeting was a model of interdisciplinary engagement among law professors, theologians, philosophers, and historians. Building on Wolterstorff's earlier book, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, 2010), The Mighty and the Almighty defends a rights-protective, limited, non-perfectionist state based on a creative interpretation of Romans 13 and other texts. As one observer noted, Wolterstorff argues that the state in Christian political theology providentially comes to look like a modern liberal democracy, a view at odds both with the rejection of legitimate political authority in authors such as John Howard Yoder and with Calvinist or Thomist perfectionism about the state in most Reformed and Catholic accounts. From my standpoint, there is much to agree and disagree with in the book--the rejection of "perfectionism," for example, might depend on a certain framing of the perfectionist/anti-perfectionist distinction. But thanks to Rick for hosting such an important and worthwhile conversation about an important and worthwhile book by one of the era's great Christian philosophers.