Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics by Lisa Sowle Cahill (review)

This excellent book by Lisa Sowle Cahill, J. Donald Monan, sj, Professor of Theology at Boston College, unpacks the ethical meanings of Christian faith in a globalized world fraught with injustice, oppression, and environmental destruction. Cahill aims to demonstrate (1) biblical and theological warrants for commitment to justice, (2) why the justice of a Christian’s actions are a criterion of the authenticity of her theology, and (3) the validity of Christian hope for social improvement. She begins by sketching a pragmatic basis for these arguments. She shows how Christian Scriptures, doctrines, and practices are moral resources for opposing violent oppression, but also how they can be used by the marginalized and oppressed as a basis for non-violent appeals and actions that work to correct the Church’s own exclusionary notions and ethos.

Chapter 2 outlines a sketch of the human condition drawn from biblical narratives of creation and the fall, the stories of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, and the book of Job. Against this backdrop, chapter 3 presents the teaching and way of Jesus and his proclamation of the coming reign of God as a basis for Christian ethics. Chapter 4 studies the patristic Christologies of Nicaea and Chalcedon, noting the complementary trajectories of Spirit and Word Christologies. Cahill prefers the former and notes that hope for the coming of God’s reign was eclipsed in the theology of this era. Chapter 5 looks at the Holy Spirit as God’s empowering presence, working in the Church and the world to move history closer to the God’s reign.

Chapter 6 returns to the cross, studying its soteriological meaning in the New Testament and subsequent Christian theology. Cahill identifies five goals that atonement theories must accomplish: (1) the cross must be portrayed not as good in itself but as a consequence of love that seeks the good, (2) both sinners and victims must be shown to be saved by the cross, (3) justification and sanctification must both be affirmed, (4) the meaning of the cross must undergird a politics consistent with Jesus’s option for the poor and proclamation of God’s coming reign, and (5) this meaning must also support an understanding of the Church that fosters Christian participation in such politics (228–229). As she moves through each doctrinal locus, Cahill comments on recent discussions and reformulations of them and how these doctrines have been expressed liturgically or in informed public statements or actions by churches. Her examples are drawn from across the globe but with attention to their local context.

Chapter 7 shifts the discussion from the ethical nature and implications of Scripture and theology to ethical theory. It presents a “revised version of Thomistic natural law” (249). Cahill argues that all human beings have the faculties of intellect and will, and emotions, affections, and imagination, all of which influence each other. Human beings are also embodied, relational, and social. Finally, all have a capacity for self-transcendence, which many express religiously. These characteristics create a capacity for reflexivity, so that human nature can change, even though these characteristics remain constant. From Aquinas she draws a list of basic human goods that are common across cultures, even though understood differently in each, including the preservation of life, having and raising children, becoming educated, and living in a justly ordered society. Finally she argues that the notion of human equality, which can be argued for in multiple ways, requires that all have access to these goods. A discussion of just war theory injects some Niebuhrian Christian realism into her Thomistic framework. A discussion of natural law and ecology extends her notion of goods to include “goods proper to every creature” (284). Discussing the eschatological orientation of Christian faith leads to an exploration and defence of Christian hope in chapter 8, the bulk of which is devoted to a study of how women worked for peace recently in war-torn Liberia. It concludes with...