Pastor Bob

Justice as ‘social’ is an inversion of God’s cry for justice.

God’s cry is always for personal justice before Him. Justice comes not out of the general will of society, nor when humanly defined groups are reordered in society by state or other coercive interventions. True Biblical Justice is always Personal Justice: something experienced profoundly personally, and particularly, and effected in this world only when the state, mob, and every individual personally, bow their knees to what God has said about their individual neighbour.

There is no ‘social’ justice for the same reason that there is absolutely no sense to a claim of ‘social’ generalized love. What God desires in this world is rendered inclusively down to the least and smallest of all – God is not passionate about some general collective political thing that looks at individual experiences with ambivalence, and so which may or may not meet the heart-cry of individual people. God cares about persons: about you; about your neighbour. And justice and love only have meaning if they attend to persons accordingly.

A husband is not a ‘good’ or ‘just’ husband just by being generally loving to everyone, or by some ambiguous (or morally dodgy) notion of love for ‘wives’ or ‘women’. A good husband is responsive to the particular individual needs of his own wife. A parent is not a ‘good’ or ‘just’ parent just by generally being protective, providential, loving, and kind for ‘kids’. A good and just parent knows each of their individual children, in their particularity and difference, and responds lovingly at that level.

Our son Owain has Down Syndrome. Owain is not better cared for in general terms, as if all Down Syndrome kids require the same things, nor is he attended to more effectively if he’s anonymized and aggregated into some political or social entity called the ‘special needs community’. Communities are formed by relationships, not by humanly contrived categories or social classifications. Owain is not a statistic. Owain is not a representative or expression of some collective group – his identity is not established by someone else’s political fiction. And we’re certainly not going to be better at loving Owain if we treat him that way! Why would it be true for others to do so? Pragmatic necessity? Christian theological truth about persons does not ever arise from pragmatism.

It is Owain’s Image Bearing and individuality which calls out for his care, not his social category.

In fact, those social or collectivized notions actually do radical violence to Owain’s true identity: He is not to be defaced by any such social project. He can only be cared for well, as God intends, and so experience love and justice in this world, when he is received as Owain, a personal bearer of God’s Image in the world. Our fundamental equality before one another, and his, is grounded there.

We should not underestimate the danger which arises from anthropologies based on group-identities. Collectives, groups, and social short-hand labels, inherently and destructively divide society because they differentiate one human being from another. Only the valuation of individual persons as bearers of the Imago Dei honours what God says; only that theological anthropology lays the ground for true works of love and justice.

We must press further, then, for justice. We must also say a state is not a ‘good’ or ‘just’ state by general thrusts of positive liberties wrought by coercion, or even deliberately crushing the needs of one under the guise of some claim to general care for all, or for some contrived group. There is no justice down that horrific road. Justice comes only by attention to individuals in their particularity, because only that truly honours what God says about bearers of His Image in the world. Because the state can never see or pragmatically function down at that individual resolution, it should be very, very, limited in its interactions and interventions lest under the ambivalence of ‘social justice’ it does harm, committing injustice against one for the sake of another. There is no moral ground for the coercion of a bearer of the Imago Dei, and so the state should be chained like a dog, loosed only when an individual faces a prowling wolf.

Indeed, humility and moral proximity absolutely forbid social aggregations or approximations of ‘justice’ by force, and also forbid the up-delegation of moral responsibility to a massive state which cannot effect it. Instead, true Christian justice demands a radical political ethic resolutely fixated on guarding the liberty God has given to every individual, and which therefore calls social institutions (family, church, charity, business, etc.), and each individual, to respond to persons with accurate care because they are most proximate by God’s design. Liberty, which is not a negotiable, is nevertheless only befitting a virtuous people, indeed.

We do not, therefore, advocate ‘social justice’, especially in the trendy secular sense, because it is tragically depersonalized and therefore incapacitated. We look not to groups or systems, because God does not look at our plight, or us, that way. Indeed, it is worth saying that the only thing that defaces persons more than notions of groups are notions of society in terms of systems, and with that the idea that some better system offers anything of moral use. Absolutely not.

To the contrary: God is not looking for a better system, a better politick, or a better social definition of your neighbour.

God is looking at you, personally.

And God sees your neighbour, personally.

Biblical justice is always personal justice, because God sees our world in that incredible and definitive resolution. So, be assured that you are deeply loved, because God cares for you personally; and also be aware that a great call is upon your life, because God’s love for your neighbour insists you to join with Him in that particular, personal, care too. A state cannot do it for us, as if in our stead. Instead, seeing past every group label that defaces, we must do just and right things, lovingly, in every interpersonal interaction we have.

Proximity is part of God’s call on your life, and that is the only truly ‘social’ aspect of justice.

We do not come to conclusions about Truth by listening to two sides of a debate, ‘diagonalizing’ between them, and naming a third path built out of the positives we like, or empathize with, from both sides.

Truth is not built out of human perspectives. Nor is the road to truth some open minded assemblage of partial truths, or negotiated settlements. We certainly can affirm, with Augustine, that all truth is God’s truth, wherever it may be found, but we absolutely do not come to conclusions about truth by picking up all the scraps and shoving them into a social theory.

Truth is not scattered tragically lost through the world, like puzzle pieces only waiting to be found by us, (or by ME), or the specially educated or empowered, and re-assembled.

Truth is something revealed in one solitary person: Jesus Christ. Now, because the world was made through Him, we do indeed see His fingerprints and the echoes of His voice wherever we go; we can affirm the beautiful, good, and true, as far as that goes.

But when we want to know Truth, we must go directly to Him personally. God’s plan is not for us to run about effecting some kind of epistemological (or political) plebiscite with whomever or whatever we might encounter, and then summing it all up in a theory or structures or systems to approximate something that will pass for truth. What chaotic nonsense! What we need is to know the mind of Christ and His perception insofar as He shares it in His Word, or directs us even in our observations by His Spirit. There is no bypassing that solitary means to knowing Truth: knowing Him personally first is the basis even for the legitimate use of reason in this world.

We know who individual human beings are because of who God says they are.

We know beauty and goodness because God, His Word, and His original design and intent in creation, is the measure of such things.

We know what true love is by who God is, and how He acts and models love for us.

We know what family, marriage, cooperative work, and even trade are like by what God created and instituted in the Garden.

We know what is morally right by His self-revelation as Father, Son, and Spirit, and how they relate, and then by God’s own direct commands: most spectacularly by the glorious command to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbour as ourselves.

This means we absolutely do not come to conclusions about society or justice by way of a social theory, critical or otherwise. We do not come to better accounts of history merely by arbitrarily preferring the perspectives of those we considers losers, over or against those we assess as victors. A critical posture does not automatically create the antithesis needed for some utopian synthesis. And we never know anything about our neighbour by contrived progressive schemes of category, classification, or conjecture about shallow or prejudicial tribalistic associations, class, race, or nation.

The fact that our knowledge of truth is always partial, because we are not God, does not invite posturing ourselves as more entitled or powerful because we esteem ourselves better at gathering up the scraps, but demands rather that all all human interpersonal relationships be defined rigorously by humility and the rejection of coercion. We have only what God has disclosed – and God does not reveal in order to make us personally powerful, but simply to help advance His Kingdom rule.

Of the seven deadly sins, the one I see most today in media and culture probably isn’t what you’d expect. Lust? Greed?

Actually, I’d say envy.

At least our culture, even in the midst of its lust and greed, still acknowledges those as sins. But envy? Envy is slick in its self-justifications. And we’re so blind to envy that we even wrap it up in virtuous talk . . . Today it wears the political cloak of ‘social justice’ and even when we dodge the self-righteous spur of ‘eat the rich’, we still like to pretend we’re Jesus, listing and ready to throw all the ‘woes’ we’re so sure apply to those others who have more than we do. Our envy comes served up on platters of pride, and even some ostensibly Christian leaders dish it out as if it were righteousness.

But we don’t speak to wealth and power today like Jesus does, with concern for those whose souls may be lost by the distraction and vanity of wealth. ‘Woe’ is not a cry of anger, as if threatening a strike or declaring punishment with a scoff. “Woe” is the agonized outcry one makes when you see someone else in the midst of grievous loss. ‘Woe’ is the word of heartache and distress we might use at the sight of a fatal bus crash underway before our eyes.

The truth about our culture, and us, is that we do not look at the wealthy and think ‘woe’. We look at them and think, ‘how dare they!’ In contrast to Jesus, we want to speak to wealth and power in order to strike a blow at those that have it, even in order to grab what we think they have and give it out where we think it should go. We approach the rich not with Jesus-like love and concern for the people most proximate to the dangers of mammon, but with vengeance and anger because they got to curl up in mammon’s bed. And we do that, perhaps in part, because of the popular lie that wealth comes only by the exploitation of someone else. That is false; wealth is created when human beings apply their reason and creative work to nature, as God designed, using it in order to produce things of beauty and value.

More than falling for that lie, however, (and perhaps the reason we are so easily beguiled by it), we approach the rich differently than Jesus because we have no filters for our own envy.

The dangers of wealth are practically met first by intentional generosity. If you’re of wealth, there is no escaping the radical call of responsibility laid upon you by God. The poor of the earth are all about you, and God is going to ask you hard questions about what has been entrusted to you, and what you did with it. Your ability to create wealth is itself a beautiful gift, perhaps even a vocation, but one with responsibilities before God. Woe to you if you receive much that way, but share little – you’re in danger. Live your life that way, and it may be that you’ve already seen all the wealth you’ll ever know. Woe to the wasting of your gift! But if you give and share, I expect you’ll feel God’s pleasure as you do.

Now, if you read that paragraph above, and think it only applies to others, then woe to you too, because envy is lying to you. You know it’s because of our envy, and not really our greed, that we live in such denial about how radically wealthy we in the west actually are? Because if you live in the West, wake up, lest envy tell you that you’re not really actually wealthy, and so not so seriously obligated to give and share and care for your neighbour. Envy will try to trick you into playing the game that you’d give or share more if you just had a little more, or if you had as much as _____ does. Watch out! Woe to you! Envy has you flying down a terrible path to destruction!

And beware even more: envy also uses the wealth or power of others to whisper mammon’s lie that you would only wear it’s ring of power for good. If you think Jesus wants you to help the poor by harming someone else, or by advocating that others be harmed, say by taking what they have, you are not in touch with Jesus. Instead of shouting and making excuses for coercion or even theft, why don’t you lead by radical giving yourself? Of course, envy tells us that the poor are always someone else’s responsibility. And we’ve even politically systematized that lie by voting for people who take care of the whole poverty thing for us. That bureaucratic way means the ‘really wealthy’ can have their stuff taken and redistributed to those other people in a way that frees us from ever being by their side. Because the truth is that a lot of the poor are people we don’t really like or trust . . . The poor, you know, whom Jesus loves.

Not even Robin Hood fell for the lies we’ve believed. Robin Hood didn’t steal from the rich. He stole from an evil king and state that overtaxed its own people into poverty, and he lived with the poor in the forest.

Immanuel Kant said that envy is “a propensity to view the well-being of others with distress, even though it does not detract from one’s own. [It is] a reluctance to see our own well-being overshadowed by another’s because the standard we use to see how well off we are is not the intrinsic worth of our own well-being but how it compares with that of others. [It] aims, at least in terms of one’s wishes, at destroying other’s good fortune.”

That sounds right to me. Though shalt not covet. One of the big ten. Beware envy, my friends.

Christian notions of grace are not about allowing exceptions.

God’s grace does not make exceptions to ‘the rule’, nor does it try to make exceptions themselves into ‘the rule’, and we do not imagine a God who just shrugs off or minimizes things that are wrong because of complexities or difficulties. That may be some human attempt at being nicer or sounding merciful, but it is the mere making of excuses when set next to the radical claims and power of divine grace.

Christian thinking does not look at wrongs and justify or minimize them because certain circumstances seem to leave no other options. We are not being kind when we shrug and excuse something because anything otherwise seemed impossible.

This world is broken and traps us in sin. When we face a situation that seems impossible to resolve, or is caught between two awful options, we have been trapped in sin. Humanistic notions of grace want to relieve the pressure because we can’t imagine what else a person could have done. That may even signal a heart of empathy. But we do not get to real and healing grace simply by naming mitigating factors and declaring exceptions that should change the standards in that case. Christian grace never pretends that something wrong was ok, even when the right seems impossible.

Even when trapped with no other options, the person you’re trying to care for is wrapped up in something wrong, or has directly done something wrong. When any person goes against the original design, no matter the reasons, the damage must be attended to and healed. Brushing the wrong or the failure off as an unavoidable mistake, or because the circumstances were worse or unfair, will leave that sin like a septic abscess leaking guilt and doubt into a person’s soul. Escapist kindness, in the long run, can indeed kill. Escapist, I say, because you’re not healing the other person; you’re trying to make them and yourself more comfortable because you can’t figure out what else they could have done either.

What you’re actually doing at that point is more like hospice care, trying to take pain out of a dying soul, than it is participating in real healing or the curing of a soul.

Those situations which seem so horribly unfair, in which we feel powerless to do what’s supposed to be right, whether because of context or even birth, do not excuse our sin. This world has been savaged. It is radically broken, and we are all inevitably trapped in that wreckage. The world is a collapsed building of blood and dust, and every human being is in the rubble trying to claw their way out. And the Christian notion of grace begins by being honest about how bad that situation actually is, by acknowledging that everyone of us are equally born into it, and that no human scheme solves the problem.

Our Christian notion of grace, in contrast to a message of exceptions and pleas with particulars as excuses, affirms that wrongs in this world, however broken it may be, are still so serious that they require death.

And then God does the dying.

Context and complexity may make it easier for me to understand why we need God’s mercy. But that does not change the seriousness of the problem. It’s only because of His divine death in Jesus, in His grace – without ever playing the minimizing humanistic compromise game – that He forgives right in the midst of a full declaration of what was wrong.

You feel there wasn’t a better choice or way out. You think others could manage it because they had options or opportunities or privilege. Nonsense. We’re all radically in the wreckage. We’re all dead in it. We’re all complicit in it. And the only hope for any of us is the death and new life of Christ.

Now, the way we treat each other should be saturated in kindness, understanding, and mercy. But don’t fall for exceptions as a means to making new rules, particularly by schemes to reframe the circumstances in more favourable terms. That road leaves people without hope, and that’s not actually the good you intend.

The real answer is that there are no excuses for what happened or what you’ve done. The microfibres of moral acts are too small for us to assess perfectly, but we feel their grain . . . so guilt secretly persists even when we hear the rationalizations of ourselves or others dusting and polishing over the top. Even when we tell ourselves there was nothing else we could do, or we list all the external factors that make our case distinct from others who didn’t have it so hard. There are no excuses – and no need for them.

It was wrong. It was never ok. It was so wrong we don’t even really understand how it started or how we got tied into it. And all our hope now is on Christ, who knows what it means to live among the broken, who loves you and me, and who has already begun the surgery of soul care.

Confession without excuses, equivocations, or exceptions, just means laying on His table so He can begin to cut into us, and heal.