Cross-posted from Radical Religion.

“Justice language” is, in my experience, the greatest stumbling block in an otherwise rich and productive dialogue between socially-engaged Christians and Buddhists. It should not be so, but last night’s Presidential announcement of the death of Osama Bin Laden shows us precisely why this stumbling block exists. Last night, Obama announced that “justice” had been served. In this case, the clear implication was that the death of Bin Laden was part and parcel of this “justice.” But was it?

I don’t think that Amos had this kind of thing in mind when announcing that God wanted justice to “roll down like waters” (Amos 5:24). In fact, I don’t think that there’s any language about “justice” in the gospels which would support Obama’s view thereof. The word he was looking for last night is “vengeance,” which I’m pretty sure God has reserved for Godself (Deut 32:35; Rom 12:19; Heb 10:30).

If we think instead of what “justice” should mean in any theosocial context, we can come quickly to the notion expressed in the sermons given on the “Kingdom of God” (or Kin-dom or just basileia). Justice is merciful care for the downtrodden. Justice is a social order in which human bodies are not violated for profit or any selfish intent. Justice looks more like the community described in Acts 2:44-47 in which the community held no private property and distributed any material goods among themselves according to the need of each. No word about revenge is spoken in that description. No word of revenge has any place in justice at all.

If justice then is more about mercy and compassion, it is not only more consistent with Buddhist understandings of human relationship, but it is also precisely the opposite of what’s been pronounced “justice” in this political context.

Cross-posted from my newly-formed and post-Union blog Radical Religion.

Irene Monroe has a good take on Manning Marable’s new biography of Malcolm X up at her Huffington Post blog. I will leave her comments for you to read, but please do. She is an excellent writer with a much-needed perspective on race and sexuality in American culture. It doesn’t hurt that she’s a Union alumna either.

More to the point of this posting’s title, I began to wonder upon reading Rev. Monroe’s piece whether we might be on the brink of some kind of Schweitzer-esque quest for the “Historical Malcolm X.” Schweitzer’s 1906 volume The Quest of the Historical Jesus is a great introduction to the field of historical Jesus studies. In a nutshell, the central question here is what new light might be shed on faith claims to Jesus based on historical research into the person Jesus of Nazareth.

With Marable’s new book shedding new light on the person of Malcom X, do we need a similar re-evaluation of the claims we can make to his legacy as well? Do we need to consider a “Malcolm of History” versus a “Malcolm of Faith” as we do with Jesus? I do not wish to draw a soteriological parallel between these two figures. Rather, I want to raise again the question of whether the facts-that-happened version of history is more important than the usable past. I don’t have a solid answer, but I do have my sympathies for Martin Marty’s view of history and Michel Foucault’s view of discourse and narrative here.

In my own estimation, new historical evidence might shed light on a figure’s past in terms of the facts-that-happened. Such evidence, however, may or may not have much bearing on the usable past version of history as a story we tell ourselves about a particular figure or event. Malcolm X remains simultaneously the person described in his autobiography and the person described by Marable. He was always both, just as we are all both the people we believe ourselves to be and the people who match our self-perceptions.