WITH THE EXEGESIS OF twelve common social justice texts behind us, we are now in a position to offer some summary statements and suggestions. Let’s put the statements and suggestions together and call them “Seven Modest Proposals on Social Justice.”
In recent years there’s been so much talk about the poor and social justice that some conservative Christians, especially if that conservatism is political as well as theological, are tempted to tune out anytime a well-intentioned evangelical chastises the church for neglecting “the least of these.” It’s the theological equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion: every passionate, radical new Christian action will produce an equal and opposite reaction. In other words, the more some Christians talk about the poor, the more other Christians will get sick of hearing about it.
But there actually is a lot in the Bible about the poor, even more if you expand the category to include wealth, money, possessions, and justice. The Old Testament Law contained numerous laws to ensure the fair treatment of the poor and to provide for their modest relief. Job’s righteousness, at least in part, consisted in his compassion for the weak (see Job 29). The Psalms extol a God who promises to rescue the needy. The prophets denounce the rich oppressors and call for mercy and justice toward the helpless. Jesus warned against the accumulation of riches and found that society’s outsiders generally trusted him more than the powerful insiders. The apostles, for their part, spoke against greed and the love of money and encouraged God’s people in sacrificial generosity. And then there’s Genesis 1, Genesis 9, and Psalm 8, where we see that every human being is made in God’s image, possessing inherent worth and dignity. This alone is reason enough to care for our fellow man.
Most importantly, New Testament passages like 2 Corinthians 8–9 and Galatians 6:1–10 demonstrate the gospel motivation for mercy ministry. Because we have been given grace in Christ, we ought to extend grace to others in his name. Tim Keller is right: ministering to the poor is a crucial sign that we actually believe the gospel.1
If we love God and know his love, we will gladly embrace Scripture’s commands that require, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, “that I do whatever I can for my neighbor’s good, that I treat others as I would like them to treat me, and that I work faithfully so that I may share with those in need.”2
Just as some Christians are in danger of overreacting against social justice, other Christians, in an effort to be prophetic, run the risk of making the Bible say more about the poor and social justice than it actually does. Here are a few examples of oversell.
For starters, the alleviation of poverty is simply not the main story line of Scripture. Some Christians talk like the Bible is almost entirely about the poor, as if the story from Genesis to Revelation is largely the story of God taking the side of the poor in an effort to raise the minimum wage and provide universal health care. As we tried to show earlier, the biblical narrative is chiefly concerned with how a holy God can dwell with an unholy people. Granted, one aspect of living a holy life is treating the poor with compassion and pursuing justice, but this hardly makes poverty the central theme in the Bible. If our story does not center on Jesus Christ, and the story of Jesus Christ does not center on his death and resurrection for sin, we have gotten the story all out of whack.
Likewise, we must remember that the “poor” in Scripture are usually the pious poor. They are the righteous poor, the people of God oppressed by their enemies yet still depending on him to come through on their behalf (see, e.g., Psalms 10; 69; 72; 82). This does not mean “the poor” should be evacuated of any economic component.3 After all, the pious poor are very often the materially poor. But it does mean that the poor whom God favors are not the slothful poor (Prov. 6:6–11; 2 Thess. 3:6–12) or the disobedient poor (Prov. 30:9), but the humble poor who wait on God (Matt. 5:3; 6:33).
We should note that almost all the references to caring for the poor in the Bible are references to the poor within the covenant community. As we saw in the last chapter, the “least of these” in Matthew 25 are our brothers in Christ, most likely traveling missionaries in need of hospitality. Paul was eager to help the poor (Gal. 2:10), but his concern was for the impoverished church in Jerusalem. It is simply not accurate to say, “The Bible is clear from the Old Testament through the New that God’s people always had a responsibility to see that everyone in their society was cared for at a basic-needs level.”4 You can make a good case that the church has a responsibility to see that everyone in their local church community is cared for, but you cannot make a very good case that the church must be the social custodian for everyone in their society. Christians are enjoined to do good to all people, but the priority is “especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:10). When we can’t do every good thing we want to do, this verse from Galatians tells us what to do first.
Justice, as a biblical category, is not synonymous with anything and everything we feel would be good for the world. We are often told that creation care is a justice issue, the gap between rich and poor is a justice issue, advocating for a “living wage” is a justice issue. But the examination of the main social justice texts has shown that justice is a much more prosaic category in the Bible. Doing justice means not showing partiality, not stealing, not swindling, not taking advantage of the weak because they are too uninformed or unconnected to stop you. We dare say that most Christians in America are not guilty of these sorts of injustices, nor should they be made to feel that they are. We are not interested in people feeling bad just to feel bad, or worse, people thinking there is moral high ground in professing most loudly how bad they feel about themselves. If we are guilty of injustice individually or collectively, let us be rebuked in the strongest terms. By the same token, if we are guilty of hoarding our resources and failing to show generosity, then let us repent, receive forgiveness, and change. But when it comes to doing good in our communities and in the world, let’s not turn every possibility into a responsibility and every opportunity into an ought. If we want to see our brothers and sisters do more for the poor and the afflicted, we’ll go farther and be on safer ground if we use grace as our motivating principle instead of guilt.
The biblical view of wealth, poverty, and material possessions is not simple. On the one hand, the poor seemed to be on much safer ground around Jesus than the rich. But on the other hand, we see all throughout the Bible examples of godly rich people (Job, Abraham, well-to-do women following Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea).
On the one hand, riches are a blessing from God (as seen in the patriarchs, the Mosaic covenant, Proverbs, and the accounts of the kings in Kings–Chronicles). But on the other hand, there is almost nothing that puts you in more spiritual danger than money (“It is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven” is how Jesus put it).
On the one hand, Jesus and the prophets had very little positive to say about the rich and sympathized more with the poor. On the other hand, God put the first man and woman in a paradise of plenty, and the vision of the new heavens and the new earth is a vision of opulence, feasting, and prosperity.
And then you have the famous “middle class” passage:
Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that is needful for me,
lest I be full and deny you
and say, “Who is the Lord?”
or lest I be poor and steal
and profane the name of my God. (Prov. 30:8–9)
It is impossible to give a one-sentence summary of the Bible’s perspective on money.5
Whenever we try to absolutize one strand of scriptural teaching about money we get into trouble. If you look only at the Old Testament promises of covenant blessing, you’ll end up with the prosperity gospel. If you take the Magnificat and nothing else, you might end up a Marxist revolutionary. We’re not suggesting the Bible teaches a little prosperity gospel and a little Marxism. What we’re suggesting is that we must understand individual passages within the larger narrative.
God is a God of cosmic delight. The good life is presented in Scripture as a life of security and affluence, a life of abundance with God as the center and source of our delight. Poverty is not the ideal. Prosperity is.
And yet . . . and yet, the covenant blessings of riches are transmuted in the New Testament to a higher spiritual plane (Eph. 1:3). Our glorious inheritance awaits us in the next life (1:11–14). No doubt, this inheritance will include the material. But this new world with all its material prosperity is not close to being fully realized in this broken world. Part of the problem is that we live in the proverbial already and not yet. Heaven will be all abundance, but we’re still on earth. So the enjoyments of God’s good gifts must always be tempered by the call to share with those in need.
Yet on the other hand—you knew there was another hand—the call to simplicity must never silence the good news that God gives us all things richly to enjoy (1 Tim. 4:3–4). The Lord takes away, but he also gives (Job 1:21). The righteous accept both halves of the equation. We are in danger if we don’t. As John Schneider puts it, “If the radical Christians and those who are sympathetic with their approach oversimplify the moral relationship in Scripture between affluence and evil, then advocates of the Prosperity Gospel oversimplify the relationship between affluence and the moral good.”6 In other words, neither affluence nor austerity—abundance nor asceticism—is virtuous in its own right.
Perhaps Gilbert Meilaender, the well-respected Christian ethicist, best sums up the tension.
Christians can, therefore, adopt and recommend no single attitude toward possessions. When they attempt to understand their lives within the world of biblical narrative, they are caught in the double movement of enjoyment and renunciation. Neither half of the movement, taken by itself, is the Christian way of life. Trust is the Christian way of life. In order to trust, renunciation is necessary, lest we immerse ourselves entirely in the things we possess, trying to grasp and keep what we need to be secure. In order to trust, enjoyment is necessary, lest renunciation become a principled rejection of the creation through which God draws our hearts to himself.7
To be a Christian, then, is to receive God’s good gifts and enjoy them the most, need them the least, and give them away most freely.
We’ve already used “social justice” dozens of times. And yet you may have noticed that we’ve offered no definition of the term. That’s because there really isn’t one. We’ve used the term as it is commonly conceived, that is, as something ambiguously connected with poverty and oppression. We’d rather not use the term at all, but it is so much a part of popular parlance that we didn’t feel we could do without it.
But if we are going to use the term, at the very least we’d like to encourage Christians to be much more careful with it. Entire books are written without ever defining what makes justice social or what makes a society just. As Michael Novak argues:
[Social justice] is allowed to float in the air as if everyone will recognize an instance of it when it appears. This vagueness seems indispensable. The minute one begins to define social justice, one runs into embarrassing intellectual difficulties. It becomes, most often, a term of art whose operational meaning is, “We need a law against that.”8
For many Christians, social justice encompasses everything from hunger relief to combating sex trafficking to reducing carbon emissions. If something can be deemed a “social justice” issue, it frightens away opposition, because who in his right mind favors social injustice? But what are we actually talking about when we advocate for social justice?
As far as we know, the term was first used in 1840 by a Sicilian priest and then given prominence by another Italian thinker in 1848 and by John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism a few years after that.9 The roots of the concept go back to William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), where Godwin argues that every individual in a society is entitled to share in the wealth produced by the society. Hence, the rich giving of their wealth to help the poor is not a matter of charity, but one of justice.10 In later thought, “social justice” often implies some form of command economy where the ruling class oversees an equal distribution of the society’s resources. Christians of a certain bent have pursued this vision of economic equality as a matter of justice, while other believers have feared in this vision the erosion of personal responsibility and individual liberty. Social justice may sound like heaven to some, but it sounds the alarm for others.
In order to get a handle on the meaning of “social justice,” one author has differentiated between what he calls the constrained and unconstrained views of justice.11 In the unconstrained view, justice is a result so that wherever people don’t get “their fair share” or don’t have as much as others, there is injustice. Most people assume this unconstrained view when they speak of social justice. For example, the Reformed Church in America (Kevin’s denomination), in one of its official study materials, includes a glossary that defines justice as “the fair, moral, and impartial treatment of all persons, especially in law. Includes concepts of right relationships and equitable distribution of resources.” By this definition the inequality of opportunities, income, or outcomes is considered an injustice, a situation that in and of itself is sinful. It implicates all (or most) of us in society, and demands immediate redress. In the unconstrained vision, the society has a lump of resources, and if they are not shared roughly equally, then we do not have social justice.
In the constrained vision, by contrast, justice is a process in which people are treated fairly (the first half of the RCA definition). The goal is not forced redistribution, for no one distributed the resources in the first place, and no one is wise enough to allocate them for the good of all. Justice, in this vision, is upheld through the rule of law, a fair court system, and equitable treatment of all persons regardless of natural diversity.
It seems to us that the constrained vision is closer to the way the Bible speaks of justice. Justice in a fallen world is not an equality of outcome, but is equal treatment under a fair law. This doesn’t mean that in the constrained vision we shouldn’t care for the poor, or that we simply shrug our shoulders and say, “Oh well,” when we see people struggling through life with far fewer opportunities and resources than the rest of us. After all, those who “have,” have (at least in part) because of favorable circumstances mostly out of their control (where they live, what family they belong to, what resources they have access to, what virtues and vices were modeled for them, etc.). It would be a mistake to think the middle class are not poor simply because they work harder and play by the rules. But as much as we may want a society of equal opportunity, no human being or human institution can make this happen. Some will always be born smarter, richer, better looking, more athletic, more connected, and so on. The door of opportunity will be opened wide for some, and others will have to beat it down.
Given this reality, the quest for cosmic justice sounds like a noble one, but we have to ask ourselves the hard questions: How do we determine what opportunities should be equalized? What is the cost of trying to fix these imbalances? Who has the power or knowledge to do so competently and benevolently? It’s one thing to see that some are advantaged more than others. It’s another to insist that justice demands state-sponsored attempts to ensure that opportunities are equalized.
The Christian will be generous and compassionate toward the suffering and the disadvantaged, realizing that all we have is a gift from God and that we share God’s image with the poor. But in the constrained vision, this care is a matter of love and compassion, not automatically a matter of justice.12
The point is that we don’t all mean the same thing by “social justice,” and therefore we should be careful to define what we mean if we use it. We should explain our conception of social justice and take pains to demonstrate why that conception is supported by Scripture, rather than just assuming a vague sense that “I wish things weren’t this way.” At the very least it would be good to recognize that using an ambiguous phrase like “social justice” to rally for our cause or defend our side without understanding what each other is really talking about is not terribly helpful.
The principle of moral proximity is pretty straightforward, but it is often overlooked: The closer the need, the greater the moral obligation to help. Moral proximity does not refer to geography, though that can be part of the equation. Moral proximity refers to how connected we are to someone by virtue of familiarity, kinship, space, or time. Therefore, in terms of moral proximity Greg is closer to the other Southern Baptist churches in town than to First Presbyterian in Whoville. But physical distance is not the only consideration. In terms of moral proximity, too, Kevin is closer to his brother-in-law who lives in Australia than to a stranger who lives on the other side of Lansing.
You can see where this is going. The closer the moral proximity, the greater the moral obligation. That is, if a church in Whoville gets struck by lightning and burns down, Greg’s church in Kentucky could help them out, but the obligation is much less than if a church down the street in Louisville goes up in smoke. Likewise, if a man in Lansing loses his job, Kevin could send him a check, but if his brother-in-law on the other side of the world is out of work, he has more of an obligation to help. This doesn’t mean we can be uncaring to everyone but our friends, close relatives, and people next door, but it means that what we ought to do in one situation is what we may do in another. Moral proximity makes obedience possible by reminding us that before Paul said “let us do good to everyone,” he said, “So then, as we have opportunity” (Gal. 6:10).
The principle of moral proximity has other biblical precedence. In the Old Testament, for example, the greatest responsibility was to one’s own family, then to the tribe, then to fellow Israelites, and finally to other nations. From Jubilee laws to kinsman redeemers, the ideal was for the family to help out first. They had the greatest obligation. After all, as Paul says, if you don’t provide for your family, when you can, you are worse than an unbeliever (1 Tim. 5:8). If family can’t help, the circle expands. Those closest to the person or situation should respond before outside persons or organizations do.13 The reason the rich man is so despicable in Luke 16 is the same reason the priest and the Levite in Luke 10 are such an embarrassment: they have a need right in front of them, with the power to help, and they do nothing.
Obviously, this principle of moral proximity gets tricky very quickly. With modern communication and travel we have millions of needs right in front of us. So are we under an obligation to help in every instance? The answer must be no, or all of us will live under a crushing weight of guilt. The intensity of our moral obligations depends on how well we know the people, how connected they are to us, and whether those closer to the situation can and should assist first.
There are no easy answers even with the principle of moral proximity, but without it God’s call to compassion seems like a cruel joke. We can’t possibly respond to everyone who asks for money. We can’t give to every organization helping the poor. Some Christians make it sound like every poor person in Africa is akin to a man dying on our church’s doorstep, and neglecting starving children in India is like ignoring our own child drowning right in front of us. We are told that any difference in our emotional reaction or tangible response shows just how little we care about suffering in the world. This rhetoric is manipulative and morally dubious. It doesn’t work either—not in the long run. Some Christians, in response to the every-dying-child-should-be-like-my-own logic, will kick into high gear and do as much as they can, at least for a time. But just as many Christians eventually give up on ever doing much of anything because the demands are so many. Without the concept of moral proximity we end up just putting “helping the poor” in the disobedience column and start thinking about football.
We must distinguish between generosity and obligation, between a call to sacrificial love and a call to stop sinning. In 1 John 3:17 John asks, “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” Clearly, the failure to give is in this case a grave sin. But in 2 Corinthians 8–9 Paul’s demands are much less demanding. The difference is moral proximity. First John 3 is a reference to fellow Christians in their midst who are destitute and need relief, not just to any brother anywhere. So if a family in your church loses everything in a flood, and insurance won’t replace most of it, you have an obligation to do something. If you let them starve or live out on the street, you do not have the love of God in you. But if the same thing happens to a whole bunch of families in a church three states over, it would be generous of you to help, but the obligation is not the same.
The principle of moral proximity is no excuse to ignore your neighbor in need. Neither does it preclude the appropriate urging some of us need to venture outside our safe circles of moral proximity. Almost any ethical principle can be twisted to ill effect. But the concept is important. It reminds us that we can’t possibly be the same kind of good neighbor to everyone in the world, nor must we. Supporting AIDS relief in Africa is a wonderful thing to do, but a failure to do so does not automatically make a church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a gospel-less, selfish church. But if that same church did nothing to help their people when the river flooded in 2008, then they do not understand the love of Christ. Moral proximity should not make us more cavalier to the poor. But it should free us from unnecessary guilt and make us more caring toward those who count on us most.
If Christians are to truly help the poor, and not just help ourselves feel better, we must arm ourselves with more than good intentions. Sometimes well-meaning Christians accomplish little or even have a negative effect on the people they are trying to help because they do not understand basic economic realities. We realize that few people picked up this book hoping for a primer on economics, but let us at least point to three basic economic realities that Christians cannot afford to ignore.14
Rich Plus Poor Does Not Equal Zero
First, wealth in the modern world is not a zero-sum game. Most people assume that economic transactions, on either a micro or macro scale, always entail a winner and a loser. So if someone is $50,000 richer this year, someone else must be $50,000 poorer. The sum of all economic transactions together is zero. The winners are offset by the losers.
The assumption behind this myth is that there is a fixed pie of wealth that everyone must share. So if you get two pieces of pie, someone else will get none. But the economic reality is that wealth can be created. The pie gets bigger. A recession occurs when a country’s economy (measured by the gross domestic product) shrinks for two consecutive quarters. Recessions are a big deal because they don’t happen all that often, which tells you that the economy as a whole is usually growing. Through increased productivity, technological innovation, and smart investment, wealth is not simply transferred; it grows.
Consequently, the rich do not have to get rich at the expense of the poor. Christians often worry about the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, but a growing gap does not necessarily mean a growing problem. In the last few decades, both in the United States and around the world, the rich have gotten richer, but the poor have gotten richer too. By one estimate, from 1970 to 2006 poverty fell by 86 percent in South Asia, 73 percent in Latin America, 39 percent in the Middle East, and 20 percent in Africa. Although there is still dire suffering, the overall global trend has been good for the past several decades. The percentage of the world population living in absolute poverty (less than $1 a day) went from 26.8 percent in 1970 to 5.4 percent in 2006.15
Because wealth can be created, it is misleading to always speak of wealthy countries (or individuals) “controlling” a certain percentage of wealth or “taking” a certain amount of health-care dollars, as if the rich people raided the cookie jar first and left nothing for the poor people. The biggest consumers of goods and resources are also the most productive creators of jobs and wealth.
Along the same lines, one of the geniuses of capitalism is that it discourages hoarding. This is not to suggest that people are less given to avarice now than they have always been. But whereas in the ancient world the greedy miser might store up excess grain for himself and nobody else (see Luke 12), today the wealthy invest their riches in stocks, or pour their resources into a start-up company, or at least put their money in the bank, which will in turn lend the money to others. There’s little incentive to hide a billion dollars under your mattress or to do nothing with your grain except build bigger barns in which to hoard it. But there is every incentive to put that money to work back in the economy. Even when the wealthy spend their money on things that might offend middle-class sensibilities, their conspicuous consumption is nevertheless providing jobs for the yacht maker, the high-end clothing designer, and the Hummer dealership, not to mention the builder, the landscaper, and the pool maintenance man.
One other point needs to be made before moving to the second economic reality. Charity alone is not the solution to world poverty. Direct handouts work best as a form of relief, but as a means of economic development the record is mixed at best. This doesn’t mean we don’t give. But it means the problems of hunger, malnutrition, and grinding poverty will not be solved by rich nations giving more money, either by individuals or by whole nations. After fifty years and more than $1 trillion of aid to Africa, the results are less than inspiring.16 This is because poverty will be overcome only when wealth is created, and wealth creation requires certain conditions.17 The rule of law must be enforced, social capital (i.e., trust) must be increased, and property rights must be respected.18 In most cases, poor nations are not poor because Westerners are rich, nor are they poor because they are less industrious or less capable than workers in the West. They are poor because they live and work in a system (often corrupt) that does not have the proper political, legal, and social structures in place to allow for the skills, brains, and ingenuity of the poor themselves to unleash the same wealth-creating process we have seen in the West. Where these measures have been put in place, nations have typically gotten richer. Such is the common grace afforded to all in a market system. As Christian economists Victor Claar and Robin Klay have remarked, “Markets are often providentially used to accomplish what no amount of Christian charity or political activism alone could achieve.”19 Or as some wag once put it, Bill Gates and Microsoft have done more to alleviate poverty in India than Mother Teresa.20
Thinking beyond Stage One
A second economic reality is that we must always consider the law of unintended consequences. In his classic Economics in One Lesson Henry Hazlitt sums up the whole economics in a single sentence: “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or public policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”21 Remembering this one lesson—the law of unintended consequences—can help Christians think more carefully about a whole host of issues.
We may not all agree on what economic policy is best (because these matters require prudential judgments on which Christians can legitimately differ), but we should at least agree that good intentions are not enough. For example, it may seem like a good idea to give away mosquito nets for free in Africa, but experience with this approach has shown that when something is free, people don’t value it and won’t use it. Better to charge a nominal fee. It may seem like a good idea to build buildings for the poor in other nations or to buy their medicines for them, but this can create patterns of dependency and rob them of the dignity that comes with taking care of their own problems.22 It may seem noble to rail against “sweatshop” labor in other countries where the workers make a tiny fraction of what a similar job might yield in the West, until you realize that these may be the most desirable jobs they have, even with wages that seem unfair to us.
Closer to home, minimum wage laws may seem like a great way to help the working poor, but in reality they make employers less likely to create new entry-level positions and more likely to eliminate certain jobs entirely. Similarly, it may help the domestic sugar beet farmers to impose a harsh tariff on sugar from other countries, but it won’t help those employed by the candy plant when it moves to another country to avoid the high sugar tariffs.23 Subsidizing a failing industry may help the workers in that field, but it also delays the inevitable realignment of the workforces and props up unprofitable practices through the profits of others. Fair-trade coffee may be a good way to help Third World farmers sell their beans for a higher price, but it can also artificially distort market prices, making farmers dependent on the good will of others for their livelihood and discouraging them from making the necessary innovations and modernizations that will render them more productive and, in the long run, more profitable. We could go on and on with these examples, but the point should be clear: don’t just look at what you hope to accomplish for one group; look at what incentives you are creating and how, unintentionally, everyone else will be affected.
Real World Problems, Real World Solutions
Third, economics takes place in the real world, and the real world will never be utopia. This means we cannot simply ditch one system because it doesn’t do everything we want. We must consider whether things would be better or worse under a different system. We may wish that wealth were more evenly distributed. And as Christians we must certainly encourage generosity. But redistribution becomes something else entirely when it is no longer voluntary. Not only is generosity robbed of its moral virtue, but we must also consider whether anyone or any group has the necessary skill and character to preside over such a redistribution. Who has the omniscient wisdom to decide what a job is worth or what the value of goods and resources should be? Who will decide whether affordable milk is more important than a better living for dairy farmers? Who will determine whether lower salaries for engineers and factory workers are a good trade-off for cheaper automobiles? Prices and wages convey invaluable information about what is needed and where. No enlightened ruler or board or administration can possibly manage millions of people with as much knowledge as the market can.
Even if such knowledge could be obtained, whom would we entrust with such power to enforce our vision of social justice? History teaches us that people who sacrifice liberty for equality end up with neither. Instead you end up with rival factions and interest groups all clamoring for favors from those handing out the money. Think K Street times a thousand. An economy based on competition and cooperation through voluntary exchange may not alleviate all the effects of the fall we would like, but it is much more effective at producing wealth and much more protective of personal dignity and freedom than a system that pursues its vision of cosmic justice through coercive force and the concentration of power.
In so many ways the social justice discussion would be less controversial and more profitable if we stopped talking about justice and started talking about love. Is it unjust for poverty to exist in the world alongside such wealth? Are we implicated in injustice because we live in a society with so many have-nots? Is it a moral obligation, a matter of justice, for a church in Spokane to do something about AIDS in Uganda? Doubtful. But should we love wildly, sacrificially, and creatively here, there, and everywhere? Absolutely.
Much of what is promoted in the name of social justice is exceedingly virtuous. More people interested in serving overseas, more people digging wells, more people giving away their money, more people adopting children, more people taking an interest in their neighborhoods—all these are encouraging signs of life in the evangelical church. The problem is that social justice has too often been sold with condemnation by implication and the heavy hand of ought. It seems much better to simply encourage churches and individual Christians to love. It’s as if evangelicalism has been awakened to social concerns and now we want to smite one another’s consciences while we’re at it. It’s too easy to wield “social justice” like a two-by-four to whack every middle-class Christian who tithes, prays, works hard, deals fairly with others, and serves faithfully in the local church but doesn’t have time to give to or be involved in every cause. If we need fifty hours in every day to be obedient, we’re saying more than the Bible says. It is hard to prove that most evangelical Christians are guilty of grave injustices toward the poor. Let’s not stir up guilt where it doesn’t belong.
On the other hand, it is not hard to prove that there is more we can do to love. Micah 6:8 and Matthew 25 may not smack the rhetorical home run we want them to, but we already have “do good to all people,” be “salt and light,” and “love your neighbor” to clear the bases for us. If we want every church to move into the city, drink fair-trade coffee, focus on ending world hunger, and feel like guilty oppressors when we don’t do these things, we’re going to have a hard time backing that up with Scripture. But if we want every church to look outside itself, exercise love beyond its doors, and give generously to those in need (especially those on its member list), we will have ample biblical support.
All that is to say, as we see the physical needs all around us, let’s motivate each other by pointing out salt-and-light opportunities instead of going farther than the Bible warrants and shaming each other with do-this-list-or-you’re-sinning responsibilities. We would do well to focus less on prophetic “social justice” announcements and more on boring old love. Love creatively. Love wildly. Love dangerously. Don’t miss all that the Bible says about living rightly and living justly. Read through a book like Keller’s Generous Justice and come to grips with verse after verse of God’s heart for the weak, the vulnerable, and the oppressed. Don’t skip these verses. Don’t be suspicious of everyone who is concerned for “social justice.” We really ought to love everyone, not all in the same way, but when we can, where we can, however we can.
1Tim Keller, "The Gospel and the Poor," Themelios 33, no. 3 (December 2008): 8–22.
2See the entry Lord's Day 42 in Kevin DeYoung, The Good News We Almost Forgot (Chicago: Moody, 2010), 198–201.
3These last two sentences echo George Eldon Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 243.
4Richard Stearns, The Hole in Our Gospel (Nashville: Nelson, 2009), 123.
5The previous four paragraphs come, slightly altered, from DeYoung, The Good News We Almost Forgot, 200–201.
6John R. Schneider, The Good of Affluence: Seeking God in a Culture of Wealth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 5.
7Gilbert Meilaender, "To Throw Oneself into the Wave: The Problem of Possessions," in The Preferential Option for the Poor, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 85.
8Michael Novak, "Defining Social Justice," First Things (December 2000): 11–13; available online at http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/defining-social-justice-29. John Goldingay, in his book on Old Testament ethics, also highlights this problem of definition: "The notion of social justice is a hazy one. It resembles words such as community, intimacy, and relational, warm words whose meaning may seem self-evident and which we assume are obviously biblical categories, when actually they are rather undefined and culture relative." After discussing the origin of the phrase "social justice" in nineteenth-century Roman Catholic thought, Goldingay explains how the phrase came to be used subsequently: " 'Social justice' then implies the idea of a 'just society,' one in which different individuals and groups in society get a 'fair share' of its benefits. But Christians disagree about what constitutes a just society and how we achieve it (for instance, how far by governmental intervention to effect income redistribution and how far by market forces and the encouragement of philanthropy). . . . The meaning of the phrase social justice has become opaque over the years as it has become a buzz expression." Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, vol. 3, Israel's Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009), 500.
9Ibid.
10See Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 212–17.
11Ibid., 192–229.
12We realize that some evangelicals have given a more expansive definition. For example, Tim Keller would say that justice, at its most basic, means fairness (Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just [New York: Dutton, 2010], 3). But justice also "means to live in a way that generates a strong community where human beings can flourish" (177). In the end, we agree with Keller that a just person will live in the ways he outlines in the book, but we think it fits the evidence better to say that doing justice means treating people equitably. The kings of Israel and Judah were unjust because they were cheats, not so much because they failed to provide strong communities.
13This is sometimes called "subsidiarity," especially in Catholic social thought.
14For a look at basic economic principles and the legitimacy of democratic capitalism from a Christian perspective, see Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem (New York: HarperOne, 2009); Victor V. Claar and Robin J. Klay, Economics in Christian Perspective: Theory, Policy and Life Choices (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007); and Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Lanham, MD: Madison, 1991). Wayne Grudem's Business for the Glory of God: The Bible's Teaching on the Moral Goodness of Business (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003) is a short primer on why business is compatible with Christian principles. For an eye-opening account of how tough love has proved effective on poverty and naïve good intentions disastrous, see Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1992). See also the resources available from the Acton Institute, www.acton.org.
15Figures are from VOX Research, "Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income," http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4508.
16See Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009); William Easterly, White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin, 2006).
17See David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Are Some So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998).
18See Hernando DeSoto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2003), for a detailed discussion of this.
19Claar and Klay, Economics in Christian Perspective, 161.
20We hope you read this footnote before this one sentence is all over the Internet! Of course, this statement measures only economic outcomes. It does not judge the heart. So we are not saying that Bill Gates is more virtuous or more praiseworthy than Mother Teresa—only that his actions as a businessman undoubtedly contributed more to the material well-being of India as a whole.
21Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (1946; repr., San Francisco: Laissez Faire, 1996), 5; emphasis original.
22See the excellent book by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself (Chicago: Moody, 2009).
23See Claar and Klay, Economics in Christian Perspective, 38–39.