• Lecturer: David Novak (University of Toronto) 
• Respondent: Michael Walzer (Institute for Advanced Study)
• Required Readings:

Genesis, 9:1 – 17; 18.

Plato: Euthyphro.

Listen to the lecture here:

David Novak's Opening Lecture (0:00 - 49:00)

   [Theologian Robert Jenson challenges Leo Strauss's characterization...] "Athens and Jerusalem were two revelations - about which people in these respective communities reasoned... In the Hellenistic Age, the reason Jerusalem was able to incorporate Athens in a way that Athens was unable to incorporate Jerusalem was that its revelation was more powerful... The revelation at Mt. Sinai to the entire people is clearly more powerful, more intense, and more direct than the revelations to Socrates or Plato."

 

     "[On Plato's account, Justice] is loved [by the gods] because of what it is. The gods are plural, the gods are subordinate to something that is greater than the gods. Why is it that we want to affect justice? We want to affect justice not because of the status of all of the subjects of justice, but we want to do justice because we want to instantiate a heavenly order on earth. The plurality of the gods automatically means that none of these gods or even all of these gods together when they agree are what is the minimal definition of the name God put forth by Anselm: That which nothing greater can be conceived. These gods cannot be the Absolute, the Absolute for Plato ultimately becomes the form of the good."

     "There can't be a standard called ‘Justice' to which God is answerable... Abraham is saying to God: ‘You are God. You are the creator of the world. There is no a priori for you. You can do whatever you want... however if you expect us to imitate your governance by both judging and law-making, then you have to act in a way that is both intelligible and inspiring'... Justice becomes the coherence of divine action not the correspondence of divine action to some prior standard."

 

Michael Walzer's Response (49:00 - )

     “The crucial question here when Abraham argues with God invoking an idea of justice, or righteousness: Is this his own idea, an idea that he has invented or discovered or is it an idea revealed by God, Himself or an idea implicit, so to speak, in the divine order, the grammar of the created universe? And one way to address that question, or to begin addressing it, is to ask what Abraham might have learned from the first mass slaughter and that is the flood.”

 

     “I have always been disturbed by the absence of children from the Biblical accounts of mass killing, not only from the flood story and the Sodom story, but also from the account of the extermination of the seven Canaanite nations by Joshua and of the Amalekites by Saul; nor do children appear in God’s instructions to the Assyrians to destroy Judah and Jerusalem. Even when the children are Israelite children… they don’t figure in, they don’t provide a reason for rejecting a policy of radical destruction.”

 

     “Refusing a divine command to kill the innocent – that’s a sign of human righteousness. And I can’t find any Biblical argument or story or law that would lead us to think that this understanding of rightness and of righteousness is anything other than a human discovery or convention… Now, of course, the men and women who… reject the argument that massacres are necessary are God’s creatures. And He may well be proud of what we have done, He may say “my children have defeated me,” which he does not allow Abraham actually to do; or He may be angry and say that we are a stiff-necked people or a wicked and lawless generation. More likely, He will be silent leaving it up to us to figure it out for ourselves.”