Taking seriously the prophetic call to justice, we should be concerned when someone of integrity in our shared society claims that we are participating in significant unhealed injustices. The Scriptures also teach that the poor themselves cry out, and that righteous people will and must hear their cry (Deuteronomy 24:15; Proverbs 21:13; James 2:15ff). However, the voices of the prophet and the poor should not be confused with the voice of the false prophet, the fool, or the wicked. All five of these kinds of people will speak with anger and indignation. The Christian must discern which kind of voice is speaking and therefore how to respond—with repentance or resistance.

Reforming injustice while affirming beneficial and right order is not easy in the midst of many voices, especially in complex social systems. History has taught us that we are not very good at:

1. Understanding why durable problems exist

2. Deeply understanding the weight of others’ perspectives

3. Making sure our actions do good rather than just feel good

4. Not making other things worse when we make one thing better

It is common for both the solution of those in power and those under injustice to be profoundly lacking in some area of knowledge. Incumbent leaders have an incentive to consider only solutions that support their possession of power, the form of scientific data they possess, and their way of doing things. Disenfranchised people may think that “lived” experience is sufficient to know how a problem should be solved.¹ If these groups maintain a combative posture, they will fight over resources and ideologies, when the necessary knowledge, leadership, and resources for reform are distributed across both groups. 

This is why reconciliation and trust are among the first beneficial actions of people who want a better future. This move from repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation to collaboration and reform can be seen in Christian ministries like Compassion International, the ministry of John Perkins, and other groups that believe that God’s wisdom is dispersed—not possessed by the educationally privileged alone or by those with lived experience alone. 

I am not saying that minority groups do know answers to some or many of their own problems. Many American Black leaders are top level scholars who have also personally experienced injustice, discrimination, and poverty. However, Christians should recognize that we must discern between the voices of learned, experienced, and virtuous reform leaders and false prophets of revolutionary zeal who believe anger and experience are sufficient justification to foment ill-conceived and harmful action. Conversely, Christians must discern between incumbent or empowered leaders who want to maintain their power or profit and those who are earnestly striving to reform a system that makes things better without making many other things worse. We should never fall into the simplistic and prejudiced notion that we can trust a leader because of where she comes from or the position that he holds. 

The Justice Grace Demands

However, even if systemic injustice is not to blame, those who suffer are always to be objects of love and encouragement. And even if suffering is not caused by injustice, sufferers are still the proper objects of mercy and encouragement. We have a duty to them beyond libertarian justice (that we should not harm them) to what we might call analogical justice (because God helped us when we were poor in every way, and since we can’t help the God who needs nothing in return, we should help our fellow man in need). Helping others because God helped us is based in grace but is still treated in Scripture as a sort of justice.²

When extrapolated, analogical justice is also the dynamic of justice that requires that we offer aid to those diminished by misfortune or a way of gracious restoration to those who fail in a blameworthy way. They may not have been materially “wronged,” but their inherent dignity demands we concern ourselves with their being “righted.”³ This is why we should care to lift up those who are discouraged and whose lives are broken down. The gospel doesn’t just command minimal help. We must bear with one another in love, weep with those who weep, and carry the burdens of those who are suffering. If we cannot see that free grace can imply moral demands, we don’t understand the nature of grace. The logic of John 3:16-17 shows that grace demands justice: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him would have everlasting life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” It goes on to say in verse 18 that anyone who does not believe in the Son is “condemned already because he has not believed in God’s one and only Son.” That is, grace is given freely and not deserved. However, grace itself makes moral demands upon those to whom it is offered, and it requires a certain just response.⁴

This means that, regardless of the cause of someone’s suffering (be it injustice directly perpetrated by us, injustice endemic to a system from which we benefit, an injustice not personally related to us at all, or caused by the sufferer’s personal misfortune or failures) our responsibility is to extend genuine compassion and to strive to raise sufferers up from their condition. Repentance and compassionate service are bedrocks of Christian worship and devotion.

Inhibiting Factors in Our Response to Injustice

It is important to address a few blind spots that prevent us from responding appropriately and fully to injustice.

1.

The pervasive influence of the flesh: The flesh, which we are killing in Christ, has no interest in justice when there is nothing for us to gain in it. Conservative Christianity rightly affirms the prevalence of what Scripture calls “worldliness” throughout the world’s individuals, yet often fails to recognize that this same worldliness must affect the systems such worldly people inhabit. In particular, worldliness leads people to take what advantages they can while suppressing the opportunities and rights of others. This is a form of oppression and a form of what modern activists call “privilege,” or when sufficiently ingrained by one group against another, “supremacy.” That is not to say that all the claims of progressives, Christian or not, are true and accurate. It is to say that an understanding of the flesh ought to predict that human societies will constantly be developing suppressions that form social privileges and immunities for some and not others, and that the material injustices they generate deserve our reformative attention. 

2.

The tri-fold injustice of sin: Every Christian must see that every sin is: 1) an individual action of injustice against God’s rule, 2) an injustice against ourselves, and 3) an injustice against those we sin against.

When people bound together in social connection live under sin, by the leading of the flesh and under the influences of devils, they will sin not only against God, but also against each other and against themselves. Sinning against God will produce wrath. Sinning against themselves will produce degradation. Sinning against others will produce injustice. To see and apply the full work of the cross, we must apply it to everything. The salvation that God offers will not lead to utopia in this life, but its application moves out towards everything in this life. Loving God in worship means loving our neighbor as ourselves, and the first thing we want for ourselves it to be treated justly. This means that is you have a high view of sin, you have to have a high view of injustice: you have to expect to see it expressing itself as much as self-degradation, and blame-worthy actions for which God can express wrath. 

Not only is sin an offense against God, a degradation of ourselves, and a producer of injustice toward others, but a recognition of one of these effects of sin enhances our recognition of the others. If we don’t quake in recognition of the depth of injustice that our sin produces, we don’t have a Biblically serious view of sin, and we can’t hope to summon the strength, courage, humility, and endurance to correct injustice.

3.

The importance of both corporate injustice and personal accountability: We often stumble in relating the concepts of corporate injustice and personal accountability to God. Many Christians fear that attention to corporate injustice comes at the expense of the gospel’s emphasis on personal sin and its specific effect on our relationship with God Almighty. This thought is historically right and theologically wrong. Over the history of American theology, liberal/modernist theologians who have walked away from clear concepts of personal sin and its offense against God himself have focused more on the “social gospel” in the work of improving society through pursuing justice by emphasizing race, gender, and class. Their attention to this area of injustice is necessary. However, theologically, this is a false dichotomy.⁵ Scripture claims God’s attitude towards sin incorporates all three levels of analysis I’ve discussed in these essays: Sin is worthy of divine wrath and requires atonement and reconciliation. Sin is self-degradation and requires freedom and healing. Sin is an act of injustice that does not give the other in creation its due and requires solidarity and amelioration.

Closing Exhortations

As we reason through these things together as the church, I implore you to cling to the foundation of the gospel, its Christ, and a thematic and unified understanding of the written Scriptures. In responding to injustice, let us not be captured by the world, deceived by devils, or give ourselves to the interests of our flesh. We should not indulge these whether by:

1. Holding on to structural injustices that benefit us

2. Flinging accusations at people we think are insufficiently “woke”

3. Neglecting conscience in order to placate a mob-like crowd that threatens us with social ostracization

4. Giving sway to our rage over real injustices, leading to new injustices

Let the Christ who is King be king. Let us pursue the mind of Christ together, not the mind of this world. And let us keep in step with the Spirit, even if he should prance in a different direction than the consensus of our social media feed. In doing so, let us pursue loving one another in the body of Christ—not only because these are our closest brothers and sisters, but because these others are our best partners in conversation and learning. They have committed themselves to the truth, and yet are very different from ourselves. Only with them, with Christ as the head, can we truly become one body—both unified and useful. Only if we can love our brothers can we prove we love Jesus. Only if we can prove we love Jesus in this way can we really love the world we are sent to without being of it. 

Lastly, keep striving to be a multicultural and multiethnic church, “that we may manifest the life of the risen Christ through us” (HPC Bylaws, Article II section 8b). The best context in which to understand justice is among a people who are deeply committed to Christ and the Scriptures, and who have very little else culturally in common.

Footnotes

1. For example, poor people who struggle to find housing may think they know how the housing situation should be fixed. However, having struggled as a tenant or home buyer isn’t the same as understanding how to alleviate housing problems on the scale of a city, or sometimes even for themselves. Many of these problems are more complicated than they can see, and their contribution to their own problem is often underappreciated.
2. Analogical justice however, when enforced by the coercive power of government authorities, can breach our duty to libertarian justice and fall quickly into corruption. Because analogical justice is substantiated not by the dictates of liberty, but of love and grace, coercing charitable justice will predictably lead toward legalized theft and blame-based demagoguery. This increases injustice and shuts down the flow of fellowship and trust in which generosity and concern flourishes. The works of generosity also require relationship and discernment of case-by-case specifics that cannot be done through the impersonal means of government agencies. Agencies will need policies, and the specificity and discretion that makes charity work is usually lost.
3. Like helping a sailor ”right” a sailboat that has been flipped over, so that he can sail the boat again for himself.
4. For example, if I give one of my kids an ice cream cone because I want to, I give it out of grace. And yet, if my child doesn’t say, “thank you,” they have wronged me. For though they didn’t deserve the ice cream cone inherently, and I gave it freely, grace inherently still deserves to be thanked once it is given. Similarly, if God gives us a way of salvation through the incredibly gracious cost of the death of his Son, and we reject it, rejecting grace is itself unjust, and rejecting such a grace, damnable. This is something like analogical justice.
5. Although this should be viewed as profoundly unfaithful to God, one can see how it developed historically. It appeared in which American modernist theology developed, there was a strong cultural understanding of the dictates of personal morality, and the advent of Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche-ism, and Freudianism created a sense in the fields of biblical studies that the old way of understanding God must be made scientific and modern. Letting go of supernatural theology concerning God himself and being complacent under an American moral consensus, these theologians turned their eyes to very profound injustices that did certainly exist in American society, especially as the maturation of the civil rights movement inspired more liberationist works.