Some people genuinely enjoy controversy. It can be exhilarating. It can get you followers and notoriety. It can cure boredom. Demonstration also has its uses. It can give vent to anger or bring attention to injustice. According to Christian faith, demonstration and controversy, especially against civil authorities, can be either righteous or unrighteous. Like anger, it can flare up for mixed reasons of varying legitimacy, and it can motivate some of the best human action and some of the worst. Sadly, the line between these differences is very narrow, and our condition tends toward easily sliding into the unrighteous. Hence the Christians emphasis on humility, forgiveness, godliness and discipline. 

Most Christians are taught that a love of controversy is a damaging and unhealthy preoccupation (2 Timothy 2:23; Titus 3:9-10; James 4:1). Instead, we are to habitually seek unity and peace. Yet, Jesus and his apostles did enter into controversy and taught us to do so in principled, focused ways. They did so especially to vindicate true righteousness and real faith, and in some cases to call out justice owed. 

Justice can be denied on individual, social, and institutional levels. Much of our current attention to justice is on an institutional/systemic level, indicting the structures and hierarchies that govern our society. God’s written word is not naïve about the reality that injustice is endemic to even the most fundamental human hierarchies. 

The Tension of Affirmation and Reformation

Every Christian should desire not only to know when to advocate for justice through public controversy and demonstration, but also when and how not to. In this essay I will lay down two fundamental concepts that God gives us to live out in dynamic tension: 

1. Reformation of corrupt authority:

God is righteous and demands his image bearers live in righteousness. God is an inter-social being (a trinity), and we are inherently social creatures. It follows that much of righteousness consists in giving others their due. Therefore, when God demands righteousness, he demands we act justly. Part of achieving just action in a fallen world is the will to perceive and remedy injustice affecting others. The nearer and more egregious the injustice, the greater our personal duty. Since social creatures create coalitions and systems, we must expect the existence of injustice manifesting in all our types of organization. 

2. Affirmation of order:

In the present world, under the curse and fall, civil authorities are a necessary common grace to encourage good and restrain evil. This need is also a result of humans being social creatures. We require both developing and restraining institutions, along with the authoritative hierarchies they often involve. Traditionally these break down into civil society and civil authority. God institutes civil authorities among humans for their good, knowing that they are also always subject to some level of corruption. Various authorities, some natural (e.g. parents) and some remedial (e.g. police) are considered right authorities that Christians should support and obey as the will of God. 

All Christians have fleshly incentives to emphasize one of these biblical demands to the neglect of the other, rather than holding them in the vital tension that faithfulness requires. 

Some Christians emphasize the civil good of government and the necessity of obeying that government in order to maintain social order for religious freedom, to show the social benefit of Christian faith, and to avoid the anarchy that comes from the imprudent disempowerment of government authority. People who see this as the controlling principle will recognize that all governments will have some amount of corruption and will produce a certain amount of injustice. However, in the fallen world, we are often choosing between better and worse (trade-offs), rather than between good and evil (solutions). Essentially, they say, “Yes we have problems, but if we debilitate right authorities in order to reform them, then our attempt at justice will unleash more wickedness and chaos, leading to even more injustice.” This perspective is more tempting to people who “have it good” under any current order or who are more conservative in temperament. We can see an example of this in those who recognize that there may sometimes be racial inequities in police use of non-lethal force against Black Americans and sometimes unjust killing of people of all races by police, yet this recognition does not undermine their overall support of government and its order-keeping function.¹

Conversely, those who suffer under the injustices of the present situation more acutely or who are more liberal in temperament tend to emphasize the first principle, believing that the controlling principle must be a push toward the acquisition of justice. From this perspective, pursuing this end justifies some undermining of governing institutions, and the more corrupt the institutions are in their judgment, the more loss of order is acceptable in the attempt to reform them. They ask, “What good is it to support a right authority that doesn’t do right?” This perspective asserts that if corruption is not constantly reformed, all authority will devolve into tyranny, ultimately mocking the God of justice.²

Christian Scripture teaches the importance of both impulses and holds them in a vital tension through the virtue of prudence.³ God has woven these together in his teaching and has shown this tension in the actions of Jesus and his apostles as an example from which we can learn. Our situations may be dissimilar to those of the apostles, but the principles displayed by their choices can guide us in finding God’s good will in our present applications. 

Authority and Reformation in Scripture

According to the testimony of Scripture, God has instituted civil authorities for the good of mankind as a common grace,⁴ necessary due to our corruption in the fall, to encourage good and restrain evil. God does this despite the fact that the authorities themselves will also always be subject to some level of corruption. The people of God are directed to support and obey various right authorities.

An account tracing both lines through Scripture would start in Genesis 1 and end in Revelation 22. In Genesis 1, God calls us to take authority and dominion. In Chapter 2, he begins to order society with work and law. In Genesis 3, deception and the curse subvert right authority leading to the flourishing of injustice in subsequent chapters. This pervasive injustice forces people to struggle to find some semblance of order and righteousness today. 

Beginning with the Abrahamic covenant, God institutes the two forms of authority and reformation to direct his covenant people: The Law and the Prophets. The Law is God’s regulative order over his people, establishing the nature of his relationship of provision and obedience with them. It includes a set of social laws⁵ meant to move people toward ever-increasing righteousness and justice. Humans proved very bad at responding freely and virtuously to this covenant. Consequently, God sent a series of prophets as his reforming and renewing authority to call the people back to real worship and obedience, including reforming injustice. In fact, idolatry, injustice, and violence are connected in the prophets (Ezekiel 9:9, 22:3ff). These two institutions worked together until Christ fulfilled both. To understand how these two come together in New Covenant faith in Christ, we must understand them as gifts preparing us for Christ.

Justice through the Law and the Prophets

Genesis 1 begins with the heavens and the earth being “formless and void.” God methodically creates good and beautiful order out of the disorder and chaos that preceded. This is important, because when God creates human beings, he tells them that they are to take dominion over creation. Bringing flourishing order to chaos is their work, and they are creation’s right authority. By Genesis 3, humans sin by breaking the hierarchical order God had laid down in the garden,⁶ and both wickedness and chaos ensue. In a few short verses, brother kills brother, polygamy begins, revenge is glorified, and people divide into tribes that are hostile to each other, even while people are seeking to develop as ordered societies. Evil and chaos overcome the good until God reports that “every thought of humanity was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5), leading him to respond with the flood. Human beings under the curse are incredibly corruptible, even while still bearing the image of God. It is, in fact, the moral agency that comes with our authoritative position as image-bearers that enables us to both form productive hierarchies and engage in such corruption with its attending injustices.⁷

So, when God came to Abraham, he chose to make a people. In formally ordering that people in the book of Exodus more than 400 years after Abraham, he liberated them from oppression. Yet God did not liberate his people into anarchy or chaos, but into an order of liberty in which they were called to do the good by obeying his will, revealed in the Law and enforced by the prophets. 

Obeying the law brought righteousness in both forms: toward God (just worship), and toward people (worthy justice). God called his people to cultivate virtue so that in the state of liberty, they would be free to live righteously by obeying his law. God knew that this would not happen on its own among individual and disconnected people. The needed both formational institutions for ordered development and cooperation and a reforming element to renew ever corrupting human hierarchies. God knew that the institutions (hierarchies) of his law and the additional institutions his people would create would grow corrupt. Because of this, he made provisions within the Law itself for a class of people called prophets. So long as a prophet’s word came true, and they were proven to be authentic prophets, people were to heed them as reforming voices. God knew that though his law was sufficient in itself to bring about righteousness, the human condition required the reforming pressure of the prophetic ministry.

We must understand that God consistently demands our responsiveness to law, institutions, and mechanisms of human order to abate the horrific wickedness and chaos that follow without these common or God-ordained graces of authority. Whatever we do to support justice, it must be done in keeping with God’s institution of the moral law and institutions of human order, both within the church and without.

It is not only the Law that testifies to God’s interest in justice, but also the story of how his people responded 

to it. That story keeps us from evaluating the Law or people as abstractions and making our ideologies utterly unrealistic. Reading the Old Testament tells us that humanity’s predictable tendencies regarding worship and justice produce a terrible predicament. 

Three facts surrounding humans and authority emerge. Humans are terrible at:

1. Governing themselves without organized authority

2. Submitting to necessary instituted authorities

3. Resisting becoming corrupt in having and using necessary authority

Without authority (often in the form of institutions), humans descend into anarchy. Yet, we don’t like authority, and we resent it when it coerces us (thereby necessitating those right authorities have some measure of coercive power). Then, also, we have difficulty not growing corrupt when holding authority, and we have difficulty admitting our growing corruption. Last, and inconveniently, we worship the God who hates anarchy and corruption, which are always forms of injustice. 

The Link Between Worship and Justice

There are many examples of this in the Old Testament and in the teachings of Jesus. For example, in the very first chapter of the longest prophetic book, Isaiah, God refers to his own people as, “a sinful nation, a people whose guilt is great, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruption! They have forsaken the Lord: they have spurned the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on him” (Isaiah 1:4, NIV). This had led to their breakdown as a society: 

From the sole of your foot to the top of your head there is no soundness—only wounds and welts and open sores, not cleansed or bandaged or soothed with olive oil. Your country is desolate, your cities burned with fire; your fields are being stripped by foreigners right before you, laid waste as when overthrown by strangers. 

— Isaiah 1:6-7

In verse 10, he calls the leaders of Judah “you rulers of Sodom,” and the people “you people of Gomorrah”—the two cities destroyed by fire from the sky for being utterly evil and chaotic. Neither the leader nor the citizens can claim innocence.

So why was God so upset with his people? Were they worshiping idols? Had they 

stopped sacrificing and worshiping God as King? No. In fact, these people were engaging in formal worship. They were making sacrifices of fattened animals, more than enough burnt offerings, sacrifices of whole bulls, as well as lambs and goats—sacrifices of considerable expense. They consistently appeared before him at the site of worship. They held assemblies where people came together and worshiped God. They had festivals at the new moon and at the times God had appointed. 

Yet, God calls these “trampling of my courts” and says of their worship practices, “They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them” (Isaiah 1:12-13). God says he’s responding to their extravagant worship in this way because, “[their] hands are full of blood.” He tells them, 

Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. (1:17)

Then comes that very famous verse that many people have heard repeatedly in church: 

Come now, let us reason together says the Lord, though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall become like wool. (1:18, ESV)

He goes on in verses 21-23: 

How the faithful city has become a whore, she who was full of justice! Righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers. Your silver has become dross, your best wine mixed with water. Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not bring justice to the fatherless, and the widow’s cause does not come to them.

Not only does the book of Isaiah go on like this, but so do many other prophetic books.⁸ Micah 6:8 is well-loved for its eloquent expression of this common theme. It says, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (NIV).

Most people don’t know the context of this verse. Why are people asking, “How can I please God?” It is because they are suffering under God’s judgment of their choice to engage in widespread injustice and sin. They have been destroying their own society and rejecting God in how they carry themselves. God says that no act of worship can atone for this other than repentance. Consider what he says in verses 6-7: 

With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? (NIV)

Verse 8 comes as an answer to these questions. Injustice and wickedness cannot be washed away by worship from an unrepentant person or an unrepentant community. We cannot, with sacrifices, bribe God to overlook our evil and injustice, nor can we relate to him as if righteousness toward God is independent to our unrighteousness toward his image-bearers. Only repentance can lead to forgiveness, and only acting with justice and mercy can show God real faith—since it shows we believe he is good, not only powerful.

This is why Christians have always been right when they claimed that justice must go along with worship, and that faith that does not produce active righteousness is not faith. We are called to gracious striving—participation with God as we grow in godliness. 

Jesus did not make this fundamental dynamic of true spirituality obsolete. Rather, he completely fulfilled it. Nothing has changed with the advent of Christ other than that this truth about pursuing God has become internalized, spiritualized, and entirely universal. Belief in Christ that does not transform us to be like Christ is not Christian.

The purpose of the Law was always to transform us into people who, in our virtuous character, resemble the God who gave that Law. The purpose of the prophets was always to call us out of our neglectful disobedience and participation in injustice into the 

real spiritual and moral heart of God—to love him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. To worship and do justice through love and righteousness. This very dynamic is what we see in the person of Christ and in the transformation that he brings. These very truths are not changed at all but are clarified and amplified to all creation.

Order and Justice in a World of Chaos and Oppression

(This next section will no doubt annoy or anger many readers. However, this part of the New Testament teaching of the church and society cannot be omitted if we are going to obey the whole counsel of God. I want to encourage you to read the whole section, not assuming you know what I’m going to say or what the implications of what I am saying are.)

In the present human condition, we are always in danger of descending into wickedness and chaos. Until the administration of the new heavens and the new earth, authorities will be instituted among peoples, and those authorities, even when profoundly corrupt, are virtually always better than chaos and anarchy. The Bible takes this very far. Two simple but quite extreme examples:

1.

King David is seen as profoundly heroic because he twice refuses to kill the incredibly corrupt and insane King Saul because he was “the Lord’s anointed.” David believed that it was not his right to remove God’s right authority, even though God had promised to give him that authority.

2.

In Romans 13 the apostle Paul says that every government instituted among men is instituted by God, since it is under his providence. The apostle most likely wrote this when Nero was Emperor of the Roman Empire. Nero was a profoundly insane and murderous brigand and an incredibly brutal persecutor of Christians, under whom probably both the apostles Peter and Paul were martyred viciously. 

These are not isolated examples. The New Testament refers several times to how Christians and churches should seek to live in peace within a profoundly unjust society that utilized extreme authoritarian hierarchies in which they were a tiny, hated minority. We are told in 1 Timothy 2:2-4 that “it is good and pleasing” to God that we pray prayers of support towards those in governmental authority, seeking to live peaceful and quiet lives, largely left alone to live in religious freedom as a minority group in the larger Greco-Roman society.⁹ If left alone, the health of Christ would make them flourish. If they flourished in that unjust society, they could be the city on a hill that both makes disciples and has a reforming influence. According to this passage, the purpose of this is to make the gospel look good in society. The apostle recognized that being loud or difficult to govern would give Jesus a bad name, and he wanted to make sure that non-Christians and leaders in authority could see that Christian faith is supportive of ordered society and not anarchist or insurrectionist (read “radical”) in its impulses. 

The New Testament apostles avoided political action whenever they could. They sought to obey authority whenever possible, to be respectful to power, and to make sure the Christians lived in line with public order. This is the practice of the apostles, and it follows the practice of Christ. 

Many have tried to form a portrait of Christ as a political revolutionary and say that there is conflict between Jesus and particularly the Apostle Paul, however, Jesus was not a political agitator or revolutionary in practice either. The Gospels contain several stories of political groups seeking to get him involved on their behalf or to get him in trouble with those in power, but he doesn’t take the bait. He also avoided political involvement geographically by teaching in and around Galilee and in remote places. Although many scholars have sought to paint Jesus as a political radical or revolutionary, he was not in the sense we mean this today. Jesus practiced decidedly anti-revolutionary tactics by which he intentionally avoided political controversies. The same Jesus who told his disciples to carry a sword for self-defense (Luke 22:36) rebuked Peter when he drew it for revolutionary justice against the State (Matthew 26:52; Luke 22:49-52¹⁰).

However, though Christ and the apostles were anti-revolutionary in practice, their message and practices were revolutionary in a prophetic way. The Christian message has always been revolutionary in that it has always been greatly at odds with the functional status quo. From the beginning, it taught the total moral equality of all human beings and the complete dignity demanded by the fact we are created in the image of God. This was how the church created “fellowship” among all people, and, by this radical example, it fundamentally opposed the entire political structure of the Roman Empire. The universal nature of Christian faith and the faithful application of its ethics made inevitable the eventual collision of New Testament Christian faith and public justice regarding the worst forms of human oppression. The moral influence of the church grew to the point that in 390 AD the Bishop Ambrose could demand repentance and penance from the Roman Emperor Theodosius for the massacre of Thessalonica, and the emperor submitted.

In this short essay, I will not discuss the many places where Jesus speaks about injustice in his ministry. However, one should take note especially of the books of Matthew and Luke. I recommend reading one of them over the next couple of days and paying attention to where and how Jesus confronts something unjust in the society in which he is ministering. He almost never proscribes a new public policy, but he makes clear that it is an injustice, explains why it is and calls every individual there to grapple with the truth. 

Some have argued that Jesus may not have been radical in his tactics, because Jesus and the apostles were leading a tiny movement in extremely brutal times in which there were few civil rights or liberal institutions to protect Christians working more directly for social change. Further, the duty of a citizen under totalitarian regimes is different than the duty of a citizen in a democratic republic. It’s hard to know how much of their practice was guided by their discernment of what was wise in their situation rather than by what they believed was simply right. Yet, we should never think Jesus chose not to do something because of the risk, or that he lacked the rural popularity to foment political agitation. As Christ’s people, we must try to understand the dynamics of how the God of justice wants us to interact with institutions of order and form a distinctively Christian understanding of advocacy, and therefore protest. When this is not done, Christians tend to be easily captured by dismissive affirmations of the status quo or by populist concatenations of enraged radicalism. Neither produces the righteousness of God.

God himself doesn’t universally approve of either human authority or revolution. He is willing for there to be meaningful and painful disorder if a system needs a reset. Some believers think we may be living in such a moment. They think the situation has been bad enough for long enough that undermining the good of order is needed to reform it. There is biblical support for this idea. In different moments, Jesus pointed out illegitimate actions of both Jewish and Greco-Roman authority. Though he never led a rebellion, he did engage in certain acts of disobedience to the Jewish rulers and did not placate Rome to save himself. The apostles also demonstrate this readiness to disobey in specific circumstances. It should be conceivable to Christians that if a government holds back justice egregiously, we must say to that government, in the words of Peter and John, “decide for yourselves whether it is right for us to obey you or God” (Acts 4:19). One might call this the “liberal” or “progressive” (in the generic sense) perspective. This logic of civil disobedience that rejected violent revolution is a prudential application of the tension between the good of authority and the need to pressure that authority to support justice.

The danger for the contemporary Christian is to be seduced by secular and fleshly positions that champion either view in its totality, failing to see the legitimacy of the opposing view. Instead of seeking to find a prudent, temperate, unifying, and loving way to seek both justice and order progressively and in their proper interrelation, worldly advocates often use a simplistic version of their view to seek the power to overwhelm the other side and pressure it into capitulation. 

As ambassadors of a kingdom that has both ordered authority and a just king, refusing to buy into this pressure from either side is a critical act of resistance to worldliness. We must recognize that both affirmation and reformation of existing orders are God-given means of establishing and maintaining justice, and in so doing, of worshiping our holy God. We must not dare to lightly cast aside affirmation; to do so would be an injustice in itself. And we must not dare to forsake reformation in its proper time for the sake of restoring justice.

Footnotes

1. It is also true that more progressive people tend to heartily approve of and strongly affirm government coercive authority when it comes to large regimes of redistribution of wealth that they approve of. They often recognize that this redistribution is forcible, unequal, and not based on merit, but is nevertheless necessary to engineer a just society where wealth is distributed unequally. They are willing to affirm such authority when it contradicts liberty, and often do not see this as the same logical reasoning by which conservatives affirm other uses of government authority. Christians are supposed to try to avoid such double standards and make sure that we have a consistent and Biblically informed way of sorting out what authority we should support, and what authority must be resisted to be reformed.
2. This tendency can be found among conservatives and libertarians in places where they believe progressive governmental power is hegemonic and expressing itself in systemically biased ways: in the press, the university, in gun rights, in freedom of speech and religion, or in corporatist-governmental collusion in public discourse. Neither of these tendencies are the property of one ideological group. This makes principled and Christ-centered discernment all the more important to keep from being ideologically possessed.
3. Prudence is the most complex virtue, because it is informed by wisdom and all the rest of the virtues.
4. Common grace is grace everyone has equal access to as a person in God’s created ecosystem. That does not mean we all receive common graces in equal amounts. Rain and sun are a biblical example of common grace, and yet some people suffer droughts, and others get more sunlight than others. Yet common graces are wholesome goods of creation that one need not be redeemed to benefit from.
5. Laws are the context-specific applications of universal moral principles.
6. In Genesis 2 the order of authority is God-Man-Woman-Creation. In Genesis 3 authority runs Creation (serpent)-Woman-Man-God. God rejects this attempted inversion, and it is considered part of the sin of the fall.
7. One of the profound problems with critical theory of various kinds is its inability to deal with human wickedness as something other than a reaction to external stimuli. The Christian insistence that human beings are image-bearers, and therefore bearers of reason, moral conscience, and moral liberty can be at odds with views that consider only social forces and neurology as relevant in understanding human behavior. This puts Christian faith at fundamental odds with most secular forms of critical theory, and large swaths of such theories must be rejected by Christians. However, that does not mean that valid observations and important insights will not come to us through intellectually stillborn theories.
8. See the book of Amos for one example.
9. See 1 Thessalonians 4:11 for a similar example.
10. This section of Luke 22 is a profoundly strong metaphor of corruption and revolution—and the normal wickedness of both. Judas is the archetype of corruption and cynicism, betraying the Son of Man with a kiss. The other disciples are the archetype of anger and violence, that Jesus also rebukes. In verse 52, he rebukes those who come to arrest him that they came with swords and clubs, because they should know he is not leading a rebellion of any kind—and that he would not resist them with power. Therefore, however we paint Jesus as a revolutionary, we must strongly distinguish that his teachings about human love were revolutionary because they were profoundly different, rather than that his teachings were revolutionary in that he encouraged revolution. To say that Jesus’ teachings were revolutionary means that they would lead to incredible change, and in the end a profound transformation of human society. But it precisely means the opposite of the military meaning of the word “revolution.” To fail to distinguish between these two is to commit the fallacy of equivocation—using the same word to mean two very different things, and to sneak in the meaning of one on the back of the meaning of the other.