Christians and Social Justice

I'm skeptical that controversy has innate value for establishing truth. It never settles...but rather, unsettles...the questions it raises: a pornography of thought, that stimulates desire it can only frustrate. Controversy is essentially a masturbatory exercise of mental and emotional self-indulgence.

One symptom of our society's sickness is that we've created for ourselves a class of "commentators," whose business (literally) is promoting controversy and partisan ill-will. It's a mark of the American Church' waywardness that large numbers of Christians follow such deceivers.

I usually consider it plays into that sickness, and those "commentators' " juvenile desire for attention, to treat their manufactured controversies as worthy of serious thought. But God can use even those to His glory...if Christians are driven to find what HE says on the controversial topic.

One "commentator" recently told Christians to run from any church that teaches such "code-word" doctrines as "social justice" and "economic justice," which are (he says) "perversions of the gospel." Pronouncement such as his, on what the CHURCH should be and should do, must especially drive Christians to re-study and discuss scripture.

This particular controversialist has no part in that discussion. His operative ideas of "the gospel," "the Church," and "scripture" are the false ones of Mormonism. But he doesn't base his claim to manipulate Christians' thinking on "religion;" rather, on being a spokesman for "conservative" ideas. Since many Christians regard the "conservative" label as an imprimatur of political correctness, they buy his disparaging attitude toward "social justice." It's consequently worth examining that attitude against scripture.

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Folklore is that the Inuit have dozens of words for "snow." I'm no ethnolinguist, but I doubt their native language has even one word for "tropical jungle." The vocabulary of the world's political-social system is similarly unsuited for the Church' discussion of economic and social justice: the world's vocabulary embodies the world's thoughts, all of them long-proven flawed and inadequate. More to the point, its human views are complete misdirection for the Church' thinking about biblical teachings.

The AMERICAN Church has additional problems thinking about "justice" (or "liberty," or "freedom," or "rights," etc.). Our national culture has re-defined those biblical concepts in unscriptural ways. Our difficulty speaking to this society about "justice" (for example) is that American society means something different than we do by those words. A further difficulty is that we too are children of American society, and have our own struggle to let the mind of Christ (rather than our society's counterfeit) be our thinking.

The world-system's ideas of "social justice" are counterfeits. The Church must reject them. We are commanded to "take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ" (II Corinthians 10:5): no ideas except those of our Head have a place in Christians' thinking. On that consideration, the Church errs when it predicates acceptance or rejection of "social justice" on the world-system's false ideas and definitions.

The "commentator" above exemplifies that error. He helpfully wrote on a chalkboard for his TV audience, "My definition of social justice is the forced redistribution of wealth, with a hostility to individual property, under the guise of charity and/or justice." The definition by which he rejects "social justice" is manifestly that of the American world-system: indeed, of the narrow "conservative" faction of that human system.

Counterfeits are revealed by comparison with the genuine. False ideas from a lying religion or from human cultures are useless for that purpose. Scripture is the only place we will find the genuine: Jesus' idea of social justice, which we are commanded to make our own operative thinking.

The Bible says far too much about social and economic justice...which is basically righteous conduct toward other people, and with our resources...for even a summary review. Any who honestly wish to know God's mind on those heads can't miss it in scripture. But a keynote for Christians is probably Jesus' first public teaching.

"The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

'The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.'

"Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, 'Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.'

(Luke 4:17-21, NASV)

Jesus announces He is the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy. When John sends to ask if He is the Messiah, Jesus refers again to His deeds in fulfillment of this prophecy. (Matthew 11:4-6) Lest we "spiritualize" Jesus' deeds beyond the plain sense of scripture, the word He uses for "poor" denotes "beggars crouching on the street." (When He means the "poor in spirit," He says so, as in the Sermon on the Mount.) Jesus holds Himself out as the Manifestation of God's Mercy to all victims of sin: and names first those victimized by the world's unrighteous economic system.

Nor does Jesus play the blame game. Ministering to victims is not contingent on whether their suffering results from their personal failings or the failings of others (John 9:2). God's glory is Jesus' whole point and purpose: and God's glory is manifest in our righteousness toward those suffering poverty, imprisonment, illness, despair...no matter how they got into that condition.

Denying that human societies and economies...including our own....foster injustice is simply a lie. Denying the mercy God entrusts to us, to sufferers we deem unworthy...who IS worthy ?...is counter-scriptural. Those attitudes, whether derived from the teachings of a false religion or a false political faction, are emphatically not the mind of Christ. They must never be the thinking of those who follow Jesus.

Let all who have followed false teachings seek instead to know the mind of Christ. Let us all search out what scripture teaches, and follow Truth. Church, REPENT !!