Final question. At this point in your long and consequential life, how would you describe the story of your life? What’s characterized it, and what do you think are the most important ways in which faith has shaped you, the most important things faith has offered you?
I wrote a whole book on this — it’s called “In This World of Wonders.” I grew up in a tiny farming village in Minnesota, and I remain deeply loyal and fond of the people, my relatives and the people in that little farming village. In my odyssey, going to college, becoming a philosopher, what strikes me most, I suppose, is this: that as a philosopher rather than, when I was 25 years old, sort of laying out an agenda, a 13-volume work or something like that, for reasons that God only knows, I’ve responded to the challenges that fell on my doorstep.
One of the challenges is just what we’ve been talking about. I didn’t — and apart from Eric, I would never have written any of those things or thought about any of those things. But there are other examples. In 1975, I was sent by Calvin College, where I was teaching, to a conference in South Africa. Apartheid was still in force, but the conference was not about apartheid. The conference was about higher education and the tradition of Reformed Protestantism. There were a number of Dutchmen there, and the Dutch were very angry about apartheid, and they could speak — Afrikaans and Dutch are basically the same language. The Dutch would succeed in question periods, after a lecture, inserting a comment about apartheid: Professor So-and-So, I appreciated what you said in the last part of your lecture. However, I wonder how you relate that to apartheid. And the Afrikaners were getting very angry. So finally they consented to have a session devoted just to apartheid at 10 at night. And Peter, it was one of the most moving experiences of my life.
What happened was that the so-called colored from South Africa began to speak up, and they spoke about the daily humiliations that they experienced, and they issued a call for justice. Many of the Afrikaners at the conference said: But justice is not the issue. We are a charitable people, and there are 11 different nationalities here. We’re trying to bring it about that each of them develops in their own way, their clothing, their arts, their poetry, and so they have to be separated, pulled apart.
I saw so-called benevolence being used as an instrument of oppression. And I felt powerfully that though I hadn’t given a single philosophical thought to the issue of justice before that moment, I was being — for me, it was a religious experience — I was being issued a call by God to speak up for these suffering people and then, more generally, to start talking more about justice. The fact that I’ve written three or four books about justice stemmed from that experience, which I call the challenges dropped on one’s doorstep. When I think back on my life, almost all of it, as a philosopher, it has been not my own agenda but responding to grief and injustice.
