Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs is a magisterial book. In it and in its smaller forthcoming companion volume Justice and Love, Wolterstorff has gotten justice right. This, in case the thrust of my terse comment wasn't plain enough, is very high praise. I'll register a few small gripes and suggest a shift in emphasis. But these mild criticisms, even if I am correct in making them, don't take much away from the greatness of Wolterstorff's extraordinary achievement or from the basic correctness of his position.

Together with two of my colleagues at Yale Divinity School, David Kelsey (emeritus) and John Hare, I have started a multiyear project entitled "God and Human Flourishing." That project provides the angle from which I write. I will ask of Wolterstorff's books two principal questions: What is the account of human flourishing that they contain? And what is the relation between God and human flourishing thus understood? A conception of justice and the relationship between love and justice will turn out to be central in answering both of these questions.

Part of the foundation of Wolterstorff's proposal about justice—and about the relation between justice and love—is an account of human flourishing. He distinguishes his own account from two prevalent positions. A flourishing life is neither merely an "experientially satisfying life," as many contemporary Westerners think, nor is it simply a life "well-lived," as a majority of ancient Western philosophers have claimed. Instead, argues Wolterstorff, explicating the moral vision of the Christian Scriptures, human flourishing consists in "the life that is both lived well and goes well." The "life lived well" component brings out the agent dimension of human flourishing and of the moral order that underpins it; a well-lived life is one that a person leads well. The "life goes well" component brings out the recipient dimension of human flourishing and of the moral order that underpins it; the life that goes well is one in which a person enjoys good things and right kinds of relationships. In a sense, Wolterstorff's third account of human flourishing is a synthesis of the prevalent two.

Justice and rights are closely linked with life's going well. As we will see shortly, more is needed than only the presence of justice for a person's life to go well. But when a person is wronged—when people do not relate to her justly—her life isn't going well even if she may be leading it well.

What does it mean for a person to be wronged? Modifying Kant's famous principle, Wolterstorff offers the basic rule for treating human beings without wronging them: "Act always in such a way as to allow respect for the worth of human beings to trump balance of life-good considerations." Here I can leave aside complicated discussions about how it is, precisely, that the quality of wronging a person attaches to a certain kind of action and what kind of relation obtains between wronging and respect. What's most important here is the underlying principle of justice: Treat persons commensurate to their worth! A person is just to the extent that she doesn't treat persons with disrespect. A society is just to the extent that its members aren't treated with disrespect and are able to enjoy "the goods to which they have a right." Indeed, for Wolterstorff, treatment commensurate to worth is the principle of obligation in relation to everything, not only in relation to persons. It's the Ur-principle of justice.

Life isn't going well for a person who is not respected as she should be; her flourishing has been diminished. She has a right to be treated better. Since rights generate correlative obligations, the agent dimension of the moral order and the "living well" part of human flourishing come into the picture as well. A person isn't living well if she fails to respect others, and she is thereby diminishing her own flourishing, not just the flourishing of those persons she is wronging. Committing injustice, you aren't living well precisely because you are making the life of others not go well. When you are practicing justice, you are living well and are thereby helping the life of others go well. That, in rough outline, is what needs to be said about the relation between justice and human flourishing.

In the Christian tradition, however, human flourishing is related principally to love, not to justice—or so I think. The ultimate maxim of action isn't the principle of justice but the command of love—love of God and love of neighbor. So how is love related to justice and how are both linked to human flourishing?

A powerful tradition in Protestant theology—most stringently expressed in Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros—sees love as paramount, and love and justice as irreconcilable. Wolterstorff spills a good deal of ink in both Justice and Justice and Love countering this tradition by establishing the importance of rights in Scripture, as well as showing that love and justice are not mutually exclusive. As he puts it in another of his texts on the topic, there is justice in love, whether that love is the love of the three persons of the Trinity, the perfect love of the redeemed in the world to come, or the imperfect love of those who are on the march through history.

Think of love as care and it's easy to see how love and justice are coordinated rather than opposed. Here is how Wolterstorff sums up his position in Justice and Love: "To care for one's neighbor is to recognize the worth of the neighbor and seek to respect that worth and have it respected … . But also, caring about the neighbor may take the form of seeking to enhance his wellbeing beyond what justice requires, and often without worrying whether or not justice requires it."

Love as care has two dimensions. The one is justice, committing a person to recognize a neighbor's worth and act in accordance with it. The other is benevolence, committing a person to enhance a neighbor's wellbeing. Since for Wolterstorff respect for rights trumps enhancement of life-goods, the pragmatic order of importance of the two dimensions of love as care is clear: first justice, then benevolence.

One way to interpret how justice and benevolence relate within the command of love is to say that justice is obligatory and benevolence supererogatory. Wolterstorff's formulation—that caring "about the neighbor may take the form of seeking to enhance his wellbeing" —could suggest that he considers benevolence as the supererogatory component of the love command. Yet that is not the case. He clearly recognizes the duty of charity—"a duty to treat someone a certain way when that person does not have a right against one to one's treating her that way." But the two duties—the duty of justice and the duty of benevolence—are different. First, the duty of benevolence is a third-party duty, a duty to God to be benevolent toward the neighbor, not directly a duty to the neighbor. Second, the duty of justice trumps the duty of benevolence. It is not permissible to wrong anyone to enhance his or anyone else's life-goods; in the "practice of agape we must never fail to do what justice requires." So when we are commanded to love the neighbor, we are commanded to do justice as well as to practice benevolence. Both are duties, just different kinds of duties and, given our finitude, prioritized duties.

What are the consequences for human flourishing of the claim that benevolence and justice together sum what love of neighbor commits a person to do? We've seen that a person lives well when she respects (and strives for all to respect) the rights of others. Should we now not say that she lives well when she also seeks to enhance the well-being of others (as well as of herself!)? We've seen that for life to go well, a person's rights must be respected. Shouldn't we now say that for life to go well with her, she also needs for others to help enhance her well-being through acts of benevolence? I think we should, and the proof is the obvious indispensability of benevolence in the life of a child. A fully flourishing life is a life of benevolence, not just justice, a life of mutual generosity, not just of mutual respect for rights. This is so even if we agree that people can flourish in an important sense even when they are being wronged, let alone when they are merely not being cherished.

Wolterstorff never puts things quite that way (partly because he is looking at human flourishing primarily as it relates to justice), but I don't see that he would object. Here is what he does say. In addition to enjoying "those life- and history-goods to which one has a right and of honoring the rights of others to such goods," if they are to flourish people need to live in harmony with and delight in the physical world, fellow human beings, God, and themselves. And that, I think, is not possible without a dimension of care which Wolterstorff calls "gratuitous benevolence." When I care, then I attend not just to a person's rights—respecting them as well as making sure that others respect them—but also to her needs, her wants, and her delights; then I take an interest in her, in her particularity, and for her own sake, and I seek to enhance her life-goods. It takes mutual generosity of this sort, as well as mutual respect for rights, for human beings to flourish fully.

Wolterstorff's principle for ordering our obligations—"first justice, then benevolence"—is correct. But in the Christian account of how things are, the principle is correct only if it is situated within the moral vision ordered by the principle, "because love, therefore justice." This kind of ordering of moral vision is already implied in making justice a dimension of love as care. Care is the overarching category; honoring rights is one crucial thing we do when we care. But care would not be complete without the other part—benevolence understood as enhancing the good of the other beyond what justice requires and for the other's own sake.

But it is not the case that justice + benevolence = care. Care is more encompassing than justice and benevolence combined. It is because we care for the well-being of others that we act benevolently. The same holds for acting justly. Doing justice is motivated by more than just concern for justice. It is possible that some might do justice just because it matters to them as an abstract entity, "justice as such." If there are any such people, however, they are rare. In the Holy Scriptures, for instance, people consistently do justice not for the sake of doing justice but because they care. This is true of God as well. God loves justice, we read. Wolterstorff rightly interprets thist to mean that God loves justice "because God loves the members of society—loves them, too, not with the love of admiration but with the love of benevolent desire [or care]. God desires that each and every human being shall flourish." Human beings should emulate God in this regard—love each other with love as care and therefore act justly in relation to one another and help justice to be done between people. It is love for those who have been or might be wronged that gets the practice of justice going (whether the wronged person is the other or the self), and what gets justice going is love not just as attraction, and not just as attachment, but love as care.

The priority of love over justice in the Christian moral vision is reinforced by the fact that the idea of wronging persons first surfaces in the Christian Scriptures in the case of God's forgiveness. It's via God's forgiveness that, according to Wolterstorff, we get historically to the notion of inherent rights. Here's how he traces the logic of the process: (1) God forgives; (2) God must have been wronged; (3) God must have been deprived of that to which God has a right; (4) that right was not conferred on God but is inherent; (5) in the New Testament humans are to forgive each other as God forgives; (6) human beings therefore have inherent rights. In sum, in the Holy Scriptures rights surface when wrongs are forgiven.

If Wolterstorff's tracing of the emergence of the idea of inherent rights to God's forgiveness on which human forgiveness is modeled is correct, then something peculiar is going on. When we speak of forgiveness, we have in view the benevolence part of care—that part of care which goes beyond justice—and we have picked out one crucial dimension of benevolence, namely, the victim's forgoing of retributive rights against the wrongdoer. So again, love (now understood as particular kind of benevolence) precedes justice. My point is not that you can't conceptualize rights without forgiveness; I agree with Wolterstorff that it's the other way around: you can't conceptualize forgiveness without rights. My point is rather this: the fact that in the Holy Scriptures "rights talk" surfaces for the first time when wrongs are forgiven is a clear indicator as to where the emphasis in the moral vision of these texts lies—not in honoring rights, indispensable as this duty is, but in "care" or "benevolent desire." Without "benevolent desire" or care no justice would be pursued, and we might even have no conception of inherent rights.

So God's love, Wolterstorff's argument implies, is crucial for the notion of inherent rights just as it is crucial for their respect. God's love will be crucial once again in his theistic grounding of human rights. A salient strand of Wolterstorff's argument in Justice is that the notion of inherent rights, and more specifically also the notion of human rights, is historically traceable to the Hebrew Bible and more broadly the Christian Scriptures. Complementing this historical argument is a theological and philosophical one: if human rights are to be grounded at all, they must be grounded theistically.

The first step in Wolterstorff's argument is to show that non-theistic attempts to ground human rights fail. They must appeal either to human capacities and functions or to human nature. Take first the appeals to human capacities and functions. These appeals always leave some human beings outside the company of the privileged bearers of rights. For instance, persons such as infants, or those who suffer from Alzheimer's disease, are left out if we take reason to be the capacity in question. Capacities and functions approaches don't ground human rights, but the rights of those who possess the capacity or can exercise the function in question. Similarly, secular appeals to human nature for the grounding of human rights make sense only if they refer to properly functioning human nature. They therefore falter for reasons similar to those for which the "capacities and functions" approaches falter. There is little reason to ascribe human rights to a human being with a seriously malfunctioning human nature.

In Wolterstorff's judgment, many theistic attempts to ground human rights fail for the same reasons as the secular ones do. Theistic attempts do add an important dimension to the discussion—the creation of human beings in God's image. But it all depends on how one understands the image of God. If "the image of God" refers to some human capacity or function, it's again capacity or function that grounds human rights, and theistic accounts then share the basic weakness of the non-theistic ones.

For the successful theistic grounding of human rights, argues Wolterstorff, we need "some worth-imparting relation of human beings to God that does not in any way involve a reference to human capacities." What might this relation be? The relation of "being loved by God," believes Wolterstorff. He writes, "The witness of the Christian scriptures is that we are one and all equally loved by God, no matter what our present capacities. That gives us bestowed worth. My suggestion is that natural human rights are grounded in that bestowed worth." So Wolterstorff has led us once again back to God's love for human beings. God's love doesn't just motivate doing justice; God's love doesn't just bring to the surface inherent rights of human beings; God's love also grounds natural human rights.

If human rights are grounded in divine love, then the crucial question is: Which kind of love grounds human rights, there being at least four kinds of love in Wolterstorff's account of things—love as attraction, as advantage, as attachment, and as benevolence? The question is of some importance because Wolterstorff argues that "benevolent desire" [=care] motivates doing justice and that benevolence in the form of "forgiveness" first brought to expression the inherent rights of persons. But that's not what he thinks when it comes to grounding human rights.

Wolterstorff is explicit: Human rights are not grounded in divine love as benevolence, but in divine love as attachment—more precisely, in divine attachment to those who possess a human nature. Human rights can't be grounded in benevolence, he claims, because benevolence doesn't bestow worth—only enhances it. Love as attraction and love as advantage—two other loves that Wolterstorff discusses in Justice and Justice and Love—obviously don't bestow worth; the first only recognizes it, and the second might even diminish it. Only divine love as attachment bestows worth, and it does so the way a child's attachment to a teddy bear bestows worth on the teddy bear quite irrespective of the "objective" qualities of the toy. So, only divine love as attachment grounds human rights, argues Wolterstorff. Is that correct?

Examine more closely God's attachment to human beings as compared to human attachments. It's clearly different from human attachments in some important regards. First, even if it's true that human attachment bestows worth on the object of attachment, humans get attached to objects that have antecedent worth, and then add new worth to them by their attachment. A child's toy has become a "beloved" toy, but it was an attractive or otherwise valuable toy to begin with—otherwise he wouldn't have attached himself to it. In contrast, God's attachment to human beings is such that God doesn't find antecedent worth—at least not worth apart from the worth that God continually pours into human beings by being their Creator and Sustainer (that, of course, under the assumption that to be a creature means that the entity in question has nothing of its own that hasn't been given to it by God).

Second, human attachments are for the most part formed on account of some benefit that the "attacher" receives (as is the case with a child's toy), though it is possible for attachments to grow out of a serendipitously initiated history of benevolence (as might be the case when someone finds a wounded animal and starts tending it). In contrast, God can derive no benefit from humans, and God's "attachment" to human beings can only be a case of "self-binding" of the Creator to human creatures so as to keep bestowing on them gifts through which they live and flourish.

Third, most human attachments come about over time, as a result of a process of bonding. There is such a thing as love at first sight; but that's more love of attraction than love of attachment, even if it does bind the lover to the object. It's different with divine attachment to humans. God's "self-binding" is always already present in its completeness as an accompaniment of divine creating and sustaining activity.

Fourth, human attachments are as a rule preferential; I am attached to this person, this object, this landscape, but not to every person, each object, and all landscapes. In contrast, God's attachment to human beings is non-preferential; God is attached to each and every human being, not only to some—at least God must be attached to all human beings if God's attachment is to ground inherent human rights.

How, I ask, is this kind of divine attachment significantly different from divine benevolence? Just like the divine kind of attachment, benevolence is non-preferential, it is non-developmental, it is given irrespective of the worth of a person (though it must show sensitivity to the particularities of the person, for otherwise it could not promote her wellbeing), it involves self-commitment to the promotion of another person's wellbeing for her own sake, and as such is self-motivated.

My sense is that we have to ground human rights in an account of divine love that bursts the boundaries of love as attachment and that comes closer to a particular form of benevolence. First, human beings come to be because Love, which is God, has "projected" itself outside the rim of the Trinitarian circle so that there would be both objects and agents of love other than God. The love out of which human beings come to be as bearers of worth is fecund delight in there being additional objects and agents of love—delight in the sheer "thatness" of such creatures. Second, the divine love with which human beings are loved as created is care for the flourishing of these objects and agents of love—their flourishing as both recipients of love and givers of love.

You may give the name "attachment" to God's generative delight in the "thatness" of creatures who give and receive love and to God's caring for their flourishing. With all this in view, you may even go a step further and by using biblical terminology incorporate Locke's idea of God's ownership to describe each human being in relation to God as a "treasured possession"—a term originally used of the people of Israel (Deuteronomy 14:2). But it is God's generative delight in and care for creatures who can themselves give and receive love that ultimately bestows worth on human beings. So it seems to me.

If I have understood Wolterstorff correctly and if I myself was thinking clearly, I have done two things. First, I have fine-tuned his proposal here and there, perhaps the most significant case of such fine-tuning being critique of grounding human rights in divine love as attachment. Second, I have suggested that we foreground what he kept in the background. For him, justice is very much in the foreground and love is in the background. That's partly a function of the rhetorical purpose of at least one of his books; after all, he is writing about justice, and he is interested in love primarily insofar as it relates to justice. But even so, in these two texts he has unduly "backgrounded" love. One way to put it is that I have sought to correct a slight injustice that Wolterstorff has done to love. But rectify this slight injustice, and Wolterstorff has offered an incomparably superb analysis of one fundamental aspect of human flourishing.

Miroslav Volf is Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale University Divinity School and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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