Two principles clarify the relationship between the church and matters of social justice. First, the activities of the collective and institutional local church should be viewed distinctly from the activities of the church's individual members as they disperse to fulfill their various roles in life. Second, the church's activity must be understood in light of the church's hope.
The Bible calls individual Christians to live lives of justice and generosity toward others. Organically, Christian disciples scatter and represent Christ powerfully and in ways the Bible does not call the institutional church to act. An analogy might be helpful here. A married man goes to work as a married man and goes to the store as a married man, and the fact that he's married affects how he interacts with others at work and the store, but neither his work nor shopping are an intrinsic part of being married. In the same way, a member of a church follows Christ in all sorts of ways that are not tied to the work that God entrusts to the local church in any institutional fashion. But the individual's membership should affect how he does everything outside the gathered church.
Individually, people are made for God and are to be devoted to him supremely. Christians should have hearts of compassion for all people, not merely because they are part of creation but especially because they are made in God's image (Prov 14:31) and because we ourselves have known such undeserved generosity from God (Luke 6:32–36; 2 Cor 8:8–9; Jas 2:13). It is a privilege to serve any human being. And it is a joy to reflect God's own just character (Isa 1:17; Dan 4:27) as well as the sacrificial love of Christ. In this sense ministries of compassion and justice are wonderful signs of Christ's giving himself for us in the gospel.
In other words, Christians should desire to see non-Christians know the common blessings of God's kindness in providence (e.g., food, water, family relations, jobs, good government, justice). It is therefore both appropriate and wise for Christians and congregations to take action to this end. Furthermore, the temporary institutions of this world (like marriage) are worthy of sincere Christian attention, thought, energy, and action. Christian teaching must not platonically devalue this world. Instead, Christians are called to do all things unto the Lord (see Col 3:17). Paul in Romans 9–10 is a model of Christian aspirations for the eternal good of non-Christians.
At the same time Christ gave the church a unique institutional mandate to preach, display, model, and express the good news of Jesus Christ.1 And in obedience to that institutional mandate, Christian congregations have both the liberty and the responsibility to take prudent initiatives in advocating mercy or justice in our community as opportunities arise, perhaps collectively in the name of the church and certainly as individuals in the name of Christ.2
What all this means is that congregations may take action in the cause of this-worldly justice, but they are not required to. Certainly Christians are called to live lives of love toward others. And Scripture in no way denies the right or ability of a congregation to care for the physical needs of non-Christians in its area. But neither does Scripture require the local congregation to organize as a whole to alleviate the physical needs of non-Christians in the community.3
Each local church has the freedom to choose particular actions for serving the welfare of its community in order to witness to the community directly, or a church is free to do this more remotely by cooperating with other congregations and Christians by forming denominations, educational institutions, and a great variety of boards, charities, and other organizations.
Churches should teach and pray for and expect their members to be involved in a wide variety of good works,4 some of which may be held up as examples to other members. This can be done without leading the congregation as a whole to own or support those particular ministries (by congregationally funding or staffing them). Pastors and church leaders can personally set an example of care for others.5
At the same time, social action or "mercy ministries" (e.g., soup kitchens, medical clinics, etc.) must never be mistaken for evangelism. They may be a means to evangelism, but they are not evangelism. The church's main responsibility is gospel proclamation.6 Nothing must obscure the church's central obligation to preach the gospel. Expounding Scripture in the local church equips members to understand and express God's character of justice and mercy appropriately to the world. And this rightly means touching on issues of poverty, gender, racism, and justice from the pulpit.7 Such teaching, however, should normally occur without committing the church to particular public policy solutions. For example, Christian preachers could strenuously advocate the abolition of human trafficking without laying out specific policy proposals for how to do it. Christian preaching can speak to what ought to be done without assuming it has the expertise to untangle all the means necessary for achieving those good ends.
A non-Christian's greatest need is to hear the gospel. The proclamation of the gospel addresses the greatest part of human suffering caused by the fall. It is central to fulfilling the Great Commission (Matt 28:18–20). And it is central to fulfilling the great commandments (Mark 12:29–31; cf. Gal 6:2). For the Christian these commandments must lie at the heart of any cultural mandate (Gen 1:28).8
What is the church's ministry to the world? It may be important first to consider what it is not. The Christian congregation is not required to take institutional responsibility for the physical needs in the unbelieving community.9 The Scriptures do make Christians responsible to care for the needs of the members of their own churches,10 though even here the New Testament makes further qualifications.11 Paul's instructions to Timothy concerning the care of widows seems to indicate the church was to care for Christian widows (1 Tim 5:3–16). Yet such care was to be given only when there was a lack of family support. Paul instructed family members to care for their own needy first, if at all possible (v. 16). By the same token, we might conclude that support that can be acquired from outside the church (for instance, from the state) should be preferred over using church funds, thus freeing church funds to be used elsewhere.
In summary, congregations must carefully prioritize the responsibilities unique to the church. It is proper for Christians to be concerned with education, politics, and mercy ministry, but the church itself is not the structure established by God for addressing such concerns. Such matters are the proper concern of Christians in schools, governments, and other structures of society. In fact, churches must be careful not to let such concerns distract them from their main and unique responsibility, that of embodying and proclaiming the gospel. John Murray put it well:
To the church is committed the task of proclaiming the whole counsel of God and, therefore, the counsel of God as it bears upon the responsibility of all persons and institutions. While the church is not to discharge the functions of other institutions such as the state and the family, nevertheless it is charged to define what the functions of these institutions are.12
Local church leaders should therefore be careful to protect the practice and priority of evangelism in the life of the local church. Furthermore, leaders should protect the church from being divided unnecessarily over issues that are not essential for a local church to agree on (e.g., nuclear disarmament, constitutional amendments, art outreaches, or various kinds of ministries in the community).
Suffering is an inevitable part of this fallen world. Poverty, war, famine, death, and other tragic effects of the fall will not end except by the bodily, visible return of Christ (see Mark 14:7; John 12:8; Rev 6:1–11). The heavenly city will come down; it won't be built up, constructed from the ground up, as it were (Heb 11:10; Rev 21:2). Its coming is as one-sided as creation, the exodus, the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the regeneration of the individual heart. It is a great salvation act of God. If human culture can ever be said to be redeemed, it will be God doing it, not us.
The gospel's main thrust is not to renew the fallen structures of this world but rather to create a new community of those purchased by the blood of the Lamb (Rev 5:6–12) and washed with his Word (Eph 5:26–27). Only through the fulfillment of God's promise to forgive sin are all of God's other promises fulfilled. The joy of being reconciled to God and the prospect of being in his presence is superior to all the goods of this world. No gospel that describes Scripture's sweeping narrative as culminating in the coming of the kingdom but neglects to explain how individuals can be included in that kingdom is any true gospel.
Scripture presents no hope that society will be broadly and permanently transformed by the preaching of the gospel (see Matt 24:21–22,29), which is not to deny that great good will be done through the church's faithful stewardship of the gospel. Individual conversions will have profound effects for good on people, not only in eternity but in this life. Studies suggest that conservative evangelicals tend to give more to the poor than religious liberals.13 Certainly, many individual conversions have resulted in personal reformations and particular social improvements.14 But the church is called to herald no vision of a this-world utopia. The trajectory of unredeemed human history as recorded in the Bible is always toward judgment. Consider the flood, Babel, Canaan, Egypt, Jerusalem, Babylon, Rome, and the final judgment depicted in Revelation 19.
The heavenly city in Scripture, though bearing some continuity with our own age (perhaps Rev 21:24), is presented as arriving only after a radical disjunction with our current history, including the judgment of the wicked.15 The material world is to be restored only after going through a change as significant as death (2 Pet 3:7). This is why Jesus told Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world. . . . But now my kingdom is from another place" (John 18:36). Christ's kingdom will come to this place (Acts 1:6–8), though when he comes, he will renew this place (Rom 8:21).
In the Bible, God's people are given great hope. God's people begin in a garden (Genesis 2–3) but end in a city (Revelation 21–22). The garden is Eden, and God created it to be the perfect environment for those made in his image. It had everything humans would need, from food to work to companionship. Most of all, the garden enjoyed God's own presence, and God enjoyed unbroken fellowship with his people in the garden.
Sin destroyed the fellowship between God, man, and creation. But the destruction made way for an even grander display of God's glory in the church. In another garden Christ faced Adam's choice—to follow his own will or the will of his heavenly Father. In God's mercy and grace, Christ, the second Adam, chose to follow God's will and to take him at his word. What followed was the most terrible suffering by the only person ever undeserving of such suffering. Then, after he had borne the sins of his people as a substitute, and after he had exhausted the claims of God's wrath against them, Christ was raised in victory over sin and death. He then poured out his Spirit and created his church.
From there, God's people have spread around the world to share the good news of Jesus Christ. The mission of the church will succeed. Jesus promised his disciples that the gates of Hades would not prevail against his church (Matt 16:18). Christians may wonder at God's patience with the church and fear for our own poor stewardship of the church, but we cannot be anything other than confident about the church. It will succeed.16 The church is God's plan and purpose.
The culmination of history is pictured in the end of Revelation as a heavenly city, an eternal society of light in which God himself is personally present. The fellowship of Eden has been restored. Only this time the number of inhabitants has been multiplied many millions of times over, as has the intimacy of fellowship since God's own Spirit inhabits all those who trust in Christ alone for the forgiveness of their sins. The garden has become the city. Faith gives way to sight. God's glory is magnified as the eternal love between the three persons of the Trinity is reflected forever in the interpersonal love shared between the bride and the groom, the church and Christ.
Christ's prayer for his disciples in John 17:26 will then be fully answered: "I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them." In the heavenly city Christians will enter fully and eternally into the love of God. The church on earth today presents the glimmering and growing picture of this coming reality.
1 James Bannerman carefully distinguished the local church from the individual believer (James Bannerman, The Church of Christ, vol. 1 [repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1960], 3).
2 Acts 1:8; Gal 6:10. Protestant pastors and theologians like Jonathan Edwards and C. H. Spurgeon have referred in a general fashion to the "spirituality of the church." When used by these authors, the phrase is roughly equivalent to the purity and holiness of the church. But the phrase has also been given a more technical meaning in the context of conversations about political establishment and compromise, particularly among southern Presbyterians like J. H. Thornwell and R. L. Dabney. Here the phrase "spirituality of the church" refers to the need for keeping the proper concerns of the church in focus and eschewing worldliness. For instance, the church should not concern itself with affairs of the state, say advocates of the spirituality of the church. And it should guard its own purity by its own authority, rather than asking the state to protect it (see R. L. Dabney, Lectures in Theology, 4th ed. [Richmond: Presb. Committee of Publication, 1890], 873–87). After all, advocates of "the spirituality of the church" drew a connection between the distinct authorities of church and state and the distinct focuses of church and state. "The church is to teach men the way to heaven and to help them thither. The state is to protect each citizen in the enjoyment of temporal rights. The church has no civil pains and penalties at command; because Christ has given her none and because they have no relevancy whatever to produce her object—the hearty belief of saving truth. (See John 18:36; 2 Cor 10:4)" (Dabney, Lectures in Theology, 874–75). Two crucial proponents of the doctrine were Stuart Robinson, The Church of God (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1858), esp. 84–93, and Thomas E. Peck, Notes on Ecclesiology (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1893), esp. 119–55. Against the idea that this was a solely southern doctrine, see Charles Hodges's comments on the floor of the 1861 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church: "The doctrine of our church on this subject is, that the state has no authority in matters purely spiritual and that the church has no authority in matters purely secular or civil. That their provinces in some cases overlie each other . . . is indeed true. . . . Nevertheless, the two institutions are distinct, and their respective duties are different" ("The General Assembly," Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 33 [1861], 557; see 561); cf. J. H. Thornwell, Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, vol. 4 (1875; repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 448–51; B. M. Palmer, Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell (1875; repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 501. Similar to Abraham Kuyper's "sphere sovereignty" ideas, the spirituality of the church in this more refined usage restricts the church's concerns to matters of the gospel and issues directly related to the gospel. Cf. Calvin, Institutes, II.xv.3–4; IV.xx.1. Other matters (like a concern for education, politics, and mercy ministries for nonchurch members) are proper concerns for Christians to have, but the church itself is not the structure for addressing such concerns. They are the proper concern of Christians in schools, governments, and other structures of society. In fact, if such concerns came to be the focus of the church, they could potentially distract the church from its main and unique responsibility, that of living out and proclaiming the gospel. A helpful summary of this nineteenth-century discussion can be found in Daryl G. Hart, Recovering Mother Kirk (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 51–65; David VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 247–67; cf. Preston D. Graham Jr., A Kingdom Not of This World: Stuart Robinson's Struggle to Distinguish the Sacred from the Secular During the Civil War (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002). For a contemporary treatment of at least the implications of this, see Brian Habig and Les Newsom, The Enduring Community: Embracing the Priority of the Church (Jackson, MS: Reformed University Press, 2001).
3 The gospel is, properly speaking, preached, not done (though the individual's actions can certainly affirm it; see John 13:34–35 [even here Christian love for one another points to the gospel!]). Social ministry done by the church should be self-consciously engaged in with the hope, prayer, and design of sharing the gospel. J. Gresham Machen wrote that "material benefits were never valued in the apostolic age for their own sake, they were never regarded as substitutes for spiritual things. That lesson needs to be learned. Social betterment, though important, is insufficient; it must always be supplemented by God's unspeakable gift" (J. Gresham Machen, ed. John Cook, New Testament, 345–46).
4 See Prov 19:17; 21:3; Luke 10:25–37; Acts 9:36; Heb 13:1–3; Jas 1:27.
5 So John Wesley "began the year 1785, by spending five days walking through London, often ankle deep in sludge and melting snow, to beg 200 pounds, which he employed in purchasing clothing for the poor. He visited the destitute in their own houses, 'to see with his own eyes what their wants were, and how they might be effectually relieved.'" Wesley was 81 years old! (L. Tyerman, Life and Times of Wesley [New York: Harper & Bros., 1872], III.458).
6 "Evangelism is the most basic and radical ministry possible to a human being" (Tim Keller, "The Gospel and the Poor," Themelios 33, no. 3 [December 2008]: 17).
7 Consider God's concerns evidenced in Isa 1:10–17. God cares about the ethical behavior of those who are not his special covenant people. Christian churches in prosperous areas should warn their congregations about the dangers of accumulating wealth. Many Christians throughout history have read the Bible as being more suspicious of wealth than Christians in modern America seem to be. Everyone from Augustine to Wesley has written eloquently of the dangerous gravity of wealth and the worldly pull it can have on Christians. Such teaching need not be opposed to careful financial planning, but it should cause more vigilance, more wariness, and even suspicion of wealth. Fresh attention should be given to cautionary passages like Matt 6:21; Luke 12:34; 1 Tim 6:17–19; and Jas 5:1–6. According to the Bible, wealth can be more spiritually dangerous than poverty.
8 Note the cultural advances that were in the line of Cain—building a city, raising livestock, music, metalworking (see Gen 4:17,20–22).
9 Many texts which seem to promote the idea of taking responsibility for our community's physical well-being (e.g., Mic 6:8, Matthew 25; Galatians 6; 1 John 3) are about our charity to members of the covenant community—believers, not non-Christian members of the community at large.
10 Matt 25:34–40; Acts 6:1–6; Gal 6:2,10; Jas 2:15–16; 1 John 3:17–19.
11 For example, 2 Thess 3:10; 1 Tim 5:3–16.
12 John Murray, "The Relation of Church and State," in Collected Writings of John Murray, vol. 1 (Banner of Truth, 1976), 255.
13 See Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Though John Wesley lamented the temptation of wealth, he gave eloquent testimony to the power of the gospel to practically improve someone's life. He observed in 1787 that "I fear, wherever riches have increased . . . the essence of religion, the mind that was in Christ, has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore, I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality; and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches. How then is it possible that Methodism, that is, the religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue in this state? For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence, they proportionably increase in pride, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no way to prevent this? this continual declension of pure religion? We ought not to forbid people to be diligent and frugal; we must exhort all Christians, to gain all they can, and to save all they can: this is, in effect, to grow rich! What way then, I ask again, can we take that our money may not sink us to the nethermost hell? There is one way, and there is no other under heaven. If those who gain all they can, and save all they can, will likewise give all they can, then the more they gain, the more they will grow in grace, and the more treasure they will lay up in heaven" (Tyerman, vol. III, 520).
14 See Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37, no. 3 (September 1998); also Robert Wuthnow's Acts of Compassion.
15 See Ps 102:26; Isa 13:10; 34:4; 51:6,16; 65:17; 66:22; Matt 5:18; 24:29,35; 1 Cor 7:31; 2 Pet 3:10–13; 1 John 2:17; Rev 6:12–14; 21:1.
16 Eph 2:10; 1 Thess 5:24.