When justice and love are rightly understood, love is not in conflict with justice but love incorporates justice.1
—NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF
Shortly after the close of World War II, the newly formed United Nations convened a group of diverse leaders—headed by Eleanor Roosevelt—and charged them with a daunting and unprecedented task. They knew from the outset that they needed to proceed with urgency—the window of opportunity would be closing fast as the two nations that emerged from the war as global superpowers would soon be locked into a political, military, and ideological stalemate that would characterize the second half of the century. The time was then or never.
The story of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a fascinating one, involving strong personalities with sharp differences of opinion, but held together by a common goal. In opposing the Axis powers during the war, the Allies had insisted that massive violations of human dignity—like those perpetrated by Hitler—be condemned by the larger community of nations. To give that rhetoric actual force required that the victors create an international bill of rights, a document that would establish standards of human dignity applicable to all people, nations, and governments.
The Declaration was ratified in December 1948 by the UN General Assembly without a single dissenting vote. It has subsequently influenced the concepts found in numerous national constitutions and international treaties. It remains the source document and standard for international humanitarian efforts and organizations to this day. This declaration helped justify the eventual overthrow of apartheid in South Africa and the opposition of the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe. It is the foundation for our asylum laws in the United States.
In many respects, however, this effort ran counter to all of previous human history. It had long been the belief and practice that the manner in which a national government treated its own people was its own business, and other nations had no right to interfere. More basically, the unvarying practice throughout the ages was for the powerful to do as they pleased while the weak suffered the consequences. In convening this commission—largely at the insistence of religious and humanitarian groups—and in ratifying this Declaration, the community of nations was both condemning the atrocities that had been witnessed in Europe during Hitler’s reign, and giving a voice to the weak and vulnerable for decades into the future in a radically unprecedented way.2
We all agree human rights are a good and necessary thing, but what does a story about Eleanor Roosevelt and justice have to do with faith?
THE BIG QUESTION
There is a huge question at the very heart of this conversation about faith and pursuing God. It is the sort of inquiry that must be answered at the onset, or all of our striving is likely to miss the point. It is the big-picture question: What is God up to? The answer to this defines and shapes all of our subsequent questions.
What is God’s purpose in creation, the incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the resurrection, the calling of disciples, the forming of the church, the giving of the Holy Spirit? What is God’s grand scheme, His master plan? What did Jesus mean when He taught His disciples to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10)?
Discovering God’s will for our own lives can only be grounded in a correct understanding of His will at large. The musician plays best who understands her instrument’s role in the entire symphony. The actor carries his part well only to the extent that he understands something of the whole play. Every actor’s lines and every instrument’s scores are written not for their own sakes but for the contribution they make to the total production.
Yet, perhaps because of the radical individualism of the culture of which we’re a part, many Christians seem to miss this truth.
We pray and seek God’s will as though He has a specific will for each of us—for each of the seven billion people alive today. I think it’s more accurate to understand Him as having one will that involves separate roles for each of those seven billion people. Rather than seeing myself as the central figure, I need to learn what the whole puzzle looks like so I can find where my little piece fits.
HARMONIZING RIGHTEOUSNESS
The words justice and righteousness, although synonyms, have come to mean different things to us in English. Justice tends to be applied primarily to matters of criminal justice or legal justice, while righteousness has shifted more and more to mean a form of personal or religious purity.
This means when we come to read these words in our English translations today, we get a different sense than was originally intended by the writers of parts of the Bible or those who translated it into English. In the Greek New Testament, though, there’s a single word for both justice and righteousness (showing the synonymous relationship): δικаιοσύνη.
This word, transliterated dikaiosune, was the Greek term for the broadest sense of justice. I possess a tribute coin from the time of Nero that was used to get grain rations in the Roman province around Egypt. It has the word dikaiosune on one side and has the goddess Justicia (where we get our Lady Liberty) with scales in one hand and grain in the other hand. In many ways, this is a “social justice” coin from the Roman period around the same time Paul was writing his letter to the Romans.
In numerous passages relevant to the present discussion, because of both the breadth of the original word and how the word righteousness has shifted in meaning in modern culture, the use of “righteousness” obscures the impact of what is being written. The classic example comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, specifically, Matthew 5:10: “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of δικаιοσύνη, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Most English versions use the word righteousness here, but whereas we might be teased for our personal morality, we are not likely to be “persecuted” for it.
Frequently, however, promoting justice and combating injustice exposes one to persecution, since injustice tends to be lucrative for the one perpetrating it. In this passage, as elsewhere, what Jesus had in mind was justice, not morality.
Or what about the beginning of Matthew 6:1–5, where Jesus literally defined the meaning of justice/righteousness in saying, “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Anticipating that His listeners will be generous, He continued, “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others.”
Righteousness here is tied to generosity to the poor. How far is this from the cultural understanding of righteousness as identified with personal purity?
We either have to redefine righteousness to bring it back into alignment with its synonym (justice) or we may need to think of translating it as justice.
Imagine how we would understand Jesus’ teaching if we read, instead of the translation we’re used to, the following: “But seek first his kingdom and his justice, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33). This is of no small importance if we are talking about our biblical understanding of what it means to follow Jesus, be faithful and obedient, and pursue God’s will for our lives.
SO WHAT IS GOD UP TO?
Understanding God’s master plan requires focusing on Jesus and the redemption He came to bring. The Father, Son, and Spirit created a very good universe, and then created a special set of beings with whom to have a special intimacy. Those beings, having free will, chose to write their own score, which had disastrous ramifications for themselves, the rest of the orchestra, and the symphony itself. At a point in space and time, God’s Son, Jesus, stepped in to make things right.
We are all familiar with a mission statement. Jesus gave us His mission statement at the public launch of His ministry, in Luke 4, when He applied a famous prophecy from Isaiah to Himself:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (vv. 18–19)
Jesus’ mission, in His life as well as in His death and resurrection, was to bring about a world made new—a world made right—to initiate the process of restoring the whole creation, bringing it back in line with how God intended it to be. And the specific representations of brokenness that Jesus named—as stand-ins for all of the world’s brokenness that He came to redress—were the poor, the enslaved, the blind, and the oppressed.
The good news is that God is setting about to make the world right in Christ, and through those who follow Him.
God’s plan is that justice would once again prevail on earth, and His will for each of His followers is that they work in concert with Him to that end. That being so, we need to understand justice as central to our walking by faith, as our prayers serve to align our will with God’s will for a just world.
Jesus Himself underscored this—and reaffirmed His mission statement—in one of the last recorded speeches before His capture and trial. Here He identified the criterion that He will use at the final judgment to distinguish between those on whom He will bestow His favor and those whom He will reject.
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ ” (Matthew 25:34–36)
The criteria is whether or not we fed and clothed the poor, visited the sick, welcomed the stranger, and visited those in prison. Jesus’ criterion is justice.
This is not to say that we gain eternal salvation through what we do. But the clear implication is that those who are themselves made right with God—through Christ’s atoning death on the cross—will naturally take up the work Christ came to do, the ministry of reconciliation to which He has called us as His ambassadors.3
We don’t stray away from good doctrine or truth by focusing on justice and compassion for those in the margins—rather, we find Jesus and truth in the margins.
We cannot run after some sort of personal theology that is divorced from a robust and accurate kingdom theology. Yet many of us do. In America, we have come to see peace as a lack of conflict and strife; we define it by reference to what it excludes rather than what it includes. It is in many ways a negative, rather than a positive, definition. But biblical peace, shalom, is a much richer concept. Nicholas Wolterstorff, an eminent Christian philosopher, described it this way:
I have come to think that [“peace”] is a very poor translation. Shalom is flourishing, flourishing in all dimensions of one’s existence: in one’s relation to God, in one’s relation to one’s fellow human beings, in one’s relation to the natural world, in one’s relation to oneself. And over and over when the prophets speak of shalom, they make clear that shalom requires justice. Human flourishing requires that we treat each other justly.4
It is just that sort of justice-laden shalom that Jesus came to teach. To follow Him in faith requires our understanding of this, God’s master plan.
DEFINING SOCIAL JUSTICE
Let’s take a moment to redefine the phrase social justice. The most helpful way to think of and define a phrase is to split the words apart. In the case of social justice, it’s simply justice with a modifier in front of it. We use modifiers all the time for justice; we speak of criminal justice, international justice, and retributive justice. If we are talking about justice with regard to immigrants, widows and orphans, the poor, or exploited workers—examples of justice in society—then “social justice” is an appropriately helpful way to describe it, just as “criminal justice” is descriptive when discussing law and order.
Or look at it this way: truth tells us what is; justice tells us what ought to be.
Truth and justice are universals. They are hallmark aspects of creation. Accordingly, all the areas of justice—or slices of the justice pie—are necessary because justice itself is necessary.
Justice, therefore, is not just a good thing. Rather, justice is a lens by which we look at and evaluate other things. It is a standard God intends to have as a part of His kingdom. Scripture says that justice is the foundation of God’s throne (Psalm 89:14) and the scepter by which He rules (Psalm 45:6).
Our understanding of God should compel justice. Conversely, our understanding of justice is one of the ways by which we are meant to understand God more clearly. When we have a greater understanding of God and of justice, we begin to grasp what God is up to in this world.
When a child cares about and participates in something the father does, there is a degree of like-mindedness, understanding, or appreciation that otherwise couldn’t be there to the same degree. For example, a son who gets to pack a lunch, grab a fly rod, and go to the river with his dad, who is passionate about fly-fishing, comes to know the heart of his father in a way otherwise not possible. Likewise, when we walk into the world with God, pursuing justice and seeing others and creation through His eyes, we come to know Him better. “For the LORD is a God of justice” (Isaiah 30:18).
Put another way, when we study justice we learn about God. And when we study God we learn about justice. Since justice is rooted in the character of God and flows from the heart of God, they are inseparable.
The question, then, is whether social justice is part of the biblical mandate for justice. In other words, does it fit with what the Bible says about God’s justice more broadly?
The answer is a resounding yes.
Social justice has to do with protecting and standing with the vulnerable in society. It is about voluntarily working toward, listening to, empowering, and restoring dignity to every person. Fighting human trafficking, opposing gender violence, caring for AIDS orphans, welcoming the immigrant, and feeding the poor—all these efforts are undergirded by the explicit biblical claim that every person is created in the image of God.
Justice is a theological necessity, an ethical imperative, and certainly more than just “another good thing.”
For all the tension and debate around the term, what we can’t miss is that justice in the social arena—that is, social justice—is part of a biblical justice mandate. We can debate strategies, political platforms, best practices for economics, job creation, and aid programs, but at the end of the day, what is nonnegotiable is God’s heart for justice at the center of our cities and as a part of His kingdom. God desires social justice as much as spiritual growth, compassion as much as confession, and sacrificial giving as much as receiving.
JESUS, NOT JUSTICE?
It was after the Friday night of The Justice Conference (2013) in Philadelphia, and a group of about forty nonprofit leaders, pastors, and justice workers were in a hotel suite for an after-party. There was music, deep dialogue, and camaraderie. Then something was said that struck—at least for me—a discordant note.
A young pastor said, “I’m all for justice, but at the end of the day, I want Jesus, not justice.”
I’m sure this young pastor had good motives, and that he thought he was being spiritual and getting his priorities straight. Although, like the rest of us, he was working to combat injustice and to follow God’s heart for justice, he wanted to make it clear that in the end, he saw justice as a good thing, but not a necessary thing (like Jesus).
In the ensuing conversation, many of the others in the room seemed to agree with him.
Even though I was standing against the wall in the back of the room, my body language must have shown that I was bothered because my friend called out to me and said, “Ken, what do you think?”
I took the next five minutes to correct what I believe is a common category fallacy, and by extension a false dichotomy. The fallacy is pitting two things against each other that are not necessarily opposed. Here is what I told my friends:
In philosophy we make a distinction between substances and properties. Substances have properties, and properties are possessed by substances.
People are substances, for example, and we have properties too: I have the property of being five foot ten, being a husband and a father, being the son of John and Bonnie Wytsma, being intuitive in personality type, and being American in nationality.
Some properties are essential to what makes up the substance or person, and others are less important. As horrific as it would be, if I lost my right leg in a car crash, I’d still be Ken Wytsma. If, on the other hand, you tried to remove from me that I am a father or the son of John and Bonnie—you would no longer be talking about Ken Wytsma. These are essential and defining characteristics of me.
We are told in 1 John 4:8, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (ESV). Love—a property—is so closely associated with God—a substance5—that the substance cannot be known apart from entering into possession of the property love.
It is the same with Jesus and justice. Jesus is a substance, whereas justice is a property. And this particular property, justice, is an essential attribute of Jesus, so closely identified with Him as to make it incoherent to think of Him as separate from this property.
Remember, Jesus’ mission statement was all about justice, and social justice in particular. The psalmist wrote, “The LORD is known by his . . . justice” (Psalm 9:16). In Isaiah 59:14–20, Jesus (the Messiah/Redeemer) is identified as God’s own right arm of justice.
Justice was Jesus’ mission, what He did in healing people and advocating for the poor, and the mandate He left His followers—that we should do likewise, and love one another. In fact, justice and Jesus are so closely linked that whatever we do for the poor, vulnerable, or oppressed is as if we are doing it literally to Him and for Him.
Justice is an essential attribute of Jesus that affects everything—our ethics, our relationships, and our ability to attain intimacy with Him. Put another way, there has never been a time in history where Jesus was present and justice was not. There never will be a time—in the future of the world or in your own life—where God’s Holy Spirit is at work while justice is absent. You can’t have “Jesus, not justice.” They are inseparable. Pitting the two against each other is a category fallacy (these two things being complementary) and a false dichotomy. They are not simply words on cardboard squares: one with the letters J-E-S-U-S and the other with J-U-S-T-I-C-E, that we choose between. This isn’t a question of grammatical priority or which vocabulary word is most important. Forcing a choice between the two is unnecessary and oversimplifies the dynamic nature of Jesus—not as a word, but as a person.
Where Jesus is, justice is present. Justice is at the heart of who He is. Justice is a priority because Jesus came to bring about a world made right.
I’m not sure if everyone in the room that night in Philadelphia caught the argument, but it is one I believe is important if we are to correct false perceptions about justice and its relation to our calling and God’s will for our lives.
JUSTICE AS A BAD LIFE STRATEGY
There’s some bad news involved in discovering what God is up to. Engaging in justice—and especially, seeking to redress injustice—is not the shortest route to fulfilling the American Dream.
In material terms, in terms of personal comfort and ease, living justly is likely to be counterproductive. At least in a human economy, generosity does not pad one’s own bank account. Stopping to help someone else takes time away from one’s own pursuit of leisure, or pleasure, or financial gain.
As just one example, consider the issue of immigration and immigration reform. In the United States, and even in the church in America, there has been persistent opposition to any legal reforms that would facilitate the process by which currently undocumented immigrants could attain citizenship or legal status. This is despite the fact that nearly all of us are the descendants of immigrants and that throughout Scripture God explicitly demonstrates that immigrants have a special place in His heart and economy.6
The arguments generally given against such reforms all revolve around the question, “How will this affect me or my bottom line?” and the conclusion that they (immigrants) will somehow inconvenience me.
It’s true; doing the just thing can often be inconvenient. This is likely why God in Scripture repeatedly commands His people to care for the immigrant, because He knows that the possibility of inconvenience will otherwise cause people to abdicate their responsibility to the strangers among them. Inconvenience is no justification at all for not acting justly.
But more than convenience, comfort and personal security often may be at stake. In fact, combating injustice can be very risky business, dangerous to one’s health and life. Centuries before Christ, Plato wrote (in book 2 of Republic) that “the truly just person will be crucified.” Gaining equal rights for black Americans cost Martin Luther King Jr. and many others their lives. Nelson Mandela’s battle to abolish apartheid meant twenty-seven years in prison.
All over the world today, those engaged in heeding Christ’s call to be His hands and feet to “the least of these”7 are fully cognizant that this entails risks both known and unforeseen.
WHEN DREAMS GET IN THE WAY
As a leader, I am often inundated by Christian leadership books and essays on goal setting and life planning (having a bucket list of what I hope to do before I die).
Bucket lists can be idolatrous, however—things that can end up driving us instead of God’s direction for us. Idols are incredibly dangerous because they reshape the entirety of lives.
I have a friend, Keith, who followed God into some of the poorest places in the world by putting on hold education, business ventures, and even involvement with the US rugby team. But what if he had been guided by the thought, I want to see Rome, climb the Himalayas, drive a motorcycle down Route 66, and retire to a lake home in Wyoming before I die? Would he have ended up running a relief and development organization years later, helping millions of people in poverty? Would he have an adopted daughter whom God brought into the life of his family while ministering overseas?
Sometimes dreams or overly defined life goals can get in the way of God’s plans. Certainly, God can use goals, and often does, but we always have to hold them in loose hands, recognizing that God could want us to head a different direction, or stop short of reaching a goal, or do something that would make all of our dreams and goals unattainable because of how God chooses to use us.
This brings us right back to the issue of walking in faith and surfaces another paradox.
THE JUST SHALL LIVE BY FAITH
A common theme in the Old and New Testaments is that “the just shall live by faith.”8 Why is it that the just person must live by faith?
It is simply this: if we are not looking out for ourselves, then we have to trust that God is looking out for us. If—in following Christ’s call on us to give our lives away on behalf of the voiceless oppressed—we have to put ourselves in places and situations over which we have little or no control, then we have to lean into God’s sovereignty. If God’s direction takes us through unhealthy or dangerous paths, we can only move forward in full reliance upon Him.
It is a paradox—albeit one clearly stated by Jesus Himself and later by His disciple John and His apostle Paul9—that the person who wants to find true life must first be willing to lay it down, to die to self. But the blessing in the paradox is this: as we give over control to God, He will look after us.
“The just will live by faith” simply states the obvious: that if I live outside of myself, if I live to give and serve, if I think of others as being as important as myself, if I live for justice—what ought to be—I have to trust that somehow I am going to be taken care of. I have to believe that it truly is better to give than receive, and that God really does watch over and sustain the just.
This is not to say that God’s will for our individual lives is of supreme importance, much less that obedience to His call will mean that He preserves us from sickness, suffering, or even death. But we can be assured that only as we take our rightful place in His master plan can we find the path to all the blessing He has in store for us.
Eleanor Roosevelt, who spent her later years immersed in the creation of a document that furthered the cause of justice all over the world, prayed the following prayer every night:
Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying: make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.10
Jesus is out to set our world right. Because our world is not right, we are faced with the tension of the way things are (truth) and the way they ought to be (justice). In Christian discipleship, therefore, joining Jesus’ justice project means stepping out in faith and relishing the paradox—finding our lives as we’re giving them away.
For the LORD loves the just and will not forsake his faithful ones.
—PSALM 37:28