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She tells the story of Jason, a fourteen year old boy with profound intellectual disabilities who was born with spina bifida. He has an enlarged head and, because his arms and legs have often been broken due to a bone disease, his limbs are twisted. He cannot feed himself and must be carefully bathed and diapered. He is cared for by Felicia Santos, who is a professional caregiver. Weiss Block reports on a particular visit, a visit that she says changed her life, when she witnessed Felicia “leaning forward, talking softly to Jason. He was smiling. I stood for a few minutes before speaking and watched their interaction. What I witnessed between them was the purest love - the kind of love that asks for nothing in return.” That is what charity-formed justice looks like. Such a view of justice shaped by the works of mercy will doubtless be dismissed as “philanthropy.” But that is exactly the perspective that must be rejected if the justice that is the Church is not to be identified with the justice of the nation-state. Wolterstorff worries that such justice will lack the universality necessary to sustain appeals to justice as such. But no theory of justice will be sufficient to do that work. Rather than a theory, God has called into the world a people capable of transgressing the borders of the nation-state to seek the welfare of the downtrodden. What we need is not a theory of justice capable of universal application. Rather what we need is what we have. What we have is a people learning again to live in diaspora. And we are reminded that Israel’s political vocation took the form of a politics of diaspora through which she becomes a blessing to all people. Such a political vocation has been given to the church insofar as she has been joined to Israel’s Messiah, requiring her to be on pilgrimage to the ends of the world seeking reconciliation through the works of mercy. Such is the justice of God.
— Stanley Hauerwas Do Human Rights have a foundation in Hebrew and Christian Scriptures? – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
