ABSTRACT
There is a great deal of confusion today about how we should understand poverty, about what poverty is, and also about how best to respond to poverty, how to deal justly in relation to the issue of poverty. Some people see poverty as a central issue of social justice. Christian theology says three main things about love and justice. The first is that love is to be understood primarily in the light of the gracious, generous, altruistic love that is seen in Jesus Christ; love is agape, not eras. The second is, in the words of Paul Tillich, that 'justice is just because of the love that is implicit in it'. The third point is developed particularly cogently by Reinhold Niebuhr, who speaks of love in politics as the 'impossible possibility'. Some recent feminist discussions of love and justice provide similar resources to those from theology for the refreshment and enrichment of contemporary understandings of justice.
