The recruitment visit is on "compassionate ministry" and "social justice". It brought to mind an excellent lecture that I heard from Michael Baxter of the University of Notre Dame. He documented how the American Roman Catholic Church adopted the same distinct categories: mercy and justice to define their "social witness." As this developed, Baxter argued that it meant practically that the bishops lobbied Washington DC while the nuns ran the "works of mercy, i.e., compassion. Individual congregations might be called upon to support one or the other "cause" through voting or financial support, but direction action was left to the "specialists." Baxter argued that such categories fit the church's social witness within the constructs of the liberal society, and thus basically neutered the witness of the church before it even started, by assigning "compassion" and "justice" to specialized ministries with the church, thereby separating these acts from the life of eveyday congregations. The church's social witness does not find its end within the church, but outside it.

Here is where theological errors, no matter how well intentioned, without critical engagement with the liberal political system in which we live, leads to long terms errors that bring God's judgment upon the church. As the evangelical right has moved to a neo-conservative embracement of American political hegemony, the evangelical left, which ironically called evangelicals to political activity within the categories provided by the liberal democracy, produce the same errors but on another side.

John Milbank and Conor Cunningham have an interview in Belief and Metaphysics that is relevant (pp. 501-04). The interview begins with a question on liberation theology -- probably as a kind of litmus test to see if one sides with the "capitalist oppressors" or "the poor and oppressed." Milbank's response is helpful as he tries to avoid the "trap". He responds:

This is a question that I perhaps have to answer with a certain amount of caution, because it could well be that in terms of politics I am on the same side as the liberation theologians, but nonetheless I often have a lot of problems with them in theological terms." Milbank engages Gutierrez's a Theology of Liberation as an important work. Yet he accurately notes: "in advocating a greater integration of grace and nature in the social sphere, Gutierrez opted for a Rahnerian account of our natural orientation to the supernatural, rather than the account favoured by Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar. . . . For Rahner, there is at once too much stress on nature aspiring to grace and as predetermining the way it can be received and also on the specific superadded anticipation of grace as dincontinuous with nature ('the supernatural existential'). De Lubac and Balthasar, by contrast, are much more abruptly paradoxical: all true nature is obscurely orientated to the beatific vision , and yet grace transforms nature (without destroying it) down to its very roots. In sociopolitical terms this suggests a much greater haziness between the secular and the religious and a greater capacity for theology to reinterpret social realities."

Milbank chases this -- he didn't speak in sound bites very well for the interview: "the problem with liberation theology, as I see it, is its enormout confidence in modernity and its location of theology within this normative framework. . . . the earlier tradition of Christian socialism was much more critical of Enlightenment and modernity, and concomitantly tried to develop its version of socialism more directly out of theologicla resources than liberation theology has done."

Milbank arises at a conclusion much like Baxter: "The ethical consequence of this was that it much more sustained the idea that justice is only fulfilled as love, mercy and forgiveness than liberation theology has done, even though it also insisted that there is an ordo amoris in love, that love itself must be distributed justly. Liberation theology by contast too often surrenders to a relativism of a supposed circumstance in making justice primary, whereas if one insists on th euniversal primacy of charity and the attainment of real substantive social reconciliation, one can in fact make a more radicl -- because theological -- challenge to current social conditions."

Social justice then is not the solution, for it is run by state agents. Milbank rightly sees that "the political consequences of the greater theological stress of earlier Christian socialism were often an advocacy of co-operative or guild socialism which less of a role for the state and an insistence on the importance of intermediary associations, the widest possible distribution of private property (which remains valid) in the interest of the common good, and decentralization wherever this is most appropriate."

It seems to me what Milbank here describes is very similar to the food distributions that take place weekly at Mid-City. We are still having over 400 persons per week that move through our building, getting staples for food for the common good -- we distribute justly, although this takes some work because of tendencies to hording by some. But more, it's a place of love. We bless the food as Christ blessed the loves and fishes and more often than not, everyone eats there fill with even some left over for the next day. We don't bring the kingdom to God here; we are merely an occasion for God to bring forth the kingdom that those who participate are able to receive.

Saturday 160 persons went through the line -- receiving bread, oranges, sweets, salad (cabbage for the Russians to make "borsch"!) and an expression of thanks for coming on the way out. Miraculously, 160 persons passed through in 28 minutes -- without any rush, harsh words, but smiles, laughter and thanksgiving. With the 15 or so volunteers, and others who had helped unload before, we neared 200 persons through.

Justice finds its culmination in love because if truly justice, it involves the worship of the Triune God, the Creator of Heavens and Earth. As we learn to think "justice", we need to think seriously, as Alasdair MacIntyre has taught us to ask, "Whose Justice" -- for the account of justice that we give might be very important to whether we receive the kingdom of God and God's justice -- not the justice of the politics of the world around us, either on the right or on the left.