Social Policy and Faith

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

ONE - WHAT IS DOING JUSTICE?

TWO - JUSTICE AND THE OLD TESTAMENT

THREE - WHAT DID JESUS SAY ABOUT JUSTICE?

FOUR - JUSTICE AND YOUR NEIGHBOR

FIVE - WHY SHOULD WE DO JUSTICE?

SIX - HOW SHOULD WE DO JUSTICE?

CHAPTER 7 - DOING JUSTICE IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE

EIGHT - PEACE, BEAUTY, AND JUSTICE

NOTES

Acknowledgements

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY TIMOTHY KELLER

The Reason for God

BELIEF IN AN AGE OF SKEPTICISM

The Prodigal God

RECOVERING THE HEART OF

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

Counterfeit Gods

THE EMPTY PROMISES OF MONEY,

SEX, AND POWER, AND THE

ONLY HOPE THAT MATTERS

DUTTON

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Copyright © 2010 by Timothy Keller

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1. Christianity and justice. 2. Social justice—Religious aspects—Christianity.

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To the Deacons and Deaconesses of Redeemer Presbyterian

Church and the leaders of Hope for New York, with

admiration and respect

INTRODUCTION

WHY WRITE THIS BOOK?

Unrolling the scroll, he found the place where it is written: The Spirit of the

Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach

good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to

proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the

prisoners.

Luke 4:17-18

These are the words Jesus read in the synagogue in

Nazareth when he announced the beginning of his ministry.

He identified himself as the “Servant of the Lord,”

prophesied by Isaiah, who would “bring justice” to the world

(Isaiah 42:1-7). Most people know that Jesus came to bring

forgiveness and grace. Less well known is the Biblical

teaching that a true experience of the grace of Jesus Christ

inevitably motivates a man or woman to seek justice in the

world.

While I was working on this volume, I heard two questions

from friends: “Who are you writing this for?” and “How did

you come to be interested in the subject of justice?” The

answers to these questions are a good way to introduce the

book’s themes.

Who Is This Book For?

There are four kinds of people who I hope will read this

book. There is a host of young Christian believers who

respond with joy to the call to care for the needy.

Volunteerism is the distinguishing mark of an entire

generation of American college students and recent

graduates. The NonProfit Times reports that teens and

young adults are leading “enormous spikes in applications

to volunteer programs.” Alan Solomont, chairman of the

board of the Corporation for National and Community

Service, says that “[this] younger generation . . . is more

interested in service than other generations.”1 Volunteering

rates among young adults dropped off significantly in the

1970s and 1980s, but “current youngsters grew up in

schools that were more likely to have service learning

programs . . . starting young people on a path of community

service much earlier than before.”2

As a pastor whose church is filled with young adults, I

have seen this concern for social justice, but I also see many

who do not let their social concern affect their personal

lives. It does not influence how they spend money on

themselves, how they conduct their careers, the way they

choose and live in their neighborhoods, or whom they seek

as friends. Also, many lose enthusiasm for volunteering over

time.

From their youth culture they have imbibed not only an

emotional resonance for social justice but also a

consumerism that undermines self-denial and delayed

gratification. Popular youth culture in Western countries

cannot bring about the broad change of life in us that is

required if we are to make a difference for the poor and

marginalized. While many young adults have a Christian

faith, and also a desire to help people in need, these two

things are not actually connected to each other in their

lives. They have not thought out the implications of Jesus’s

gospel for doing justice in all aspects of life. That connection

I will attempt to make in this book.

Justice and the Bible

Another kind of person who I hope will read this book

approaches the subject of “doing justice” with suspicion. In

the twentieth century the American church divided between

the liberal mainline that stressed social justice and the

fundamentalist churches that emphasized personal

salvation. One of the founders of the Social Gospel

movement was Walter Rauschenbusch, a German Baptist

minister whose first pastorate was on the edge of New York

City’s Hell’s Kitchen in the 1880s. His firsthand

acquaintance with the terrible poverty of his neighborhood

led him to question traditional evangelism, which took pains

to save people’s souls but did nothing about the social

systems locking them into poverty. Rauschenbusch began to

minister to “both soul and body,” but in tandem with this

shift in method came a shift in theology. He rejected the

traditional doctrines of Scripture and atonement. He taught

that Jesus did not need to satisfy the justice of God, and

therefore he died only to be an example of unselfishness.3

In the mind of many orthodox Christians, therefore, “doing

justice” is inextricably linked with the loss of sound doctrine

and spiritual dynamism. However, Jonathan Edwards, the

eighteenth-century author of the sermon “Sinners in the

Hands of an Angry God,” was a staunch Calvinist and hardly

anyone’s idea of a “liberal.” Yet in his discourse on “The

Duty of Charity to the Poor,” he concluded, “Where have we

any command in the Bible laid down in stronger terms, and

in a more peremptory urgent manner, than the command of

giving to the poor?”4

Unlike Rauschenbusch, Edwards argued that you did not

have to change the classic Biblical doctrine of salvation to

do ministry to the poor. On the contrary, such ministry flows

directly out of historic evangelical teaching. He saw

involvement with the poor and classic Biblical doctrine as

indissolubly intertwined. That combination is relatively rare

today, but it shouldn’t be. I am writing this book for people

who don’t see yet what Edwards saw, namely, that when

the Spirit enables us to understand what Christ has done for

us, the result is a life poured out in deeds of justice and

compassion for the poor.5

Others who I hope will give this book a hearing are the

younger evangelicals who have “expanded their mission” to

include social justice along with evangelism. 6 Many of them

have not only turned away from older forms of ministry, but

also from traditional evangelical doctrines of Jesus’s

substitutionary atonement and of justification by faith alone,

which are seen as too “individualistic.”7 These authors

usually argue that changes in theological emphasis—or

perhaps outright changes in theological doctrine—are

necessary if the church is going to be more engaged in the

pursuit of social justice. The scope of the present volume

prevents us from looking at these debates about atonement

and justification. However, one of its main purposes is to

show that such reengineering of doctrine is not only

mistaken in itself, but also unnecessary. The most traditional

formulation of evangelical doctrine, rightly understood,

should lead its proponents to a life of doing justice in the

world.

There is a fourth group of people who should find this

book of interest. Recently there has been a rise in books and

blogs charging that religion, to quote Christopher Hitchens,

“poisons everything.”8 In their view religion, and especially

the Christian church, is a primary force promoting injustice

and violence on our planet. To such people the idea that

belief in the Biblical God necessarily entails commitment to

justice is absurd. But, as we will see, the Bible is a book

devoted to justice in the world from first to last. And the

Bible gives us not just a naked call to care about justice, but

gives us everything we need—motivation, guidance, inner

joy, and power—to live a just life.

I have identified four groups of readers who seem at first

glance to be very different, but they are not. They all fail at

some level to see that the Biblical gospel of Jesus

necessarily and powerfully leads to a passion for justice in

the world. A concern for justice in all aspects of life is

neither an artificial add-on nor a contradiction to the

message of the Bible.

Why Am I Interested in Justice?

How did I get interested in this subject? Practicing justice

did not come naturally to me as a child. Growing up, I

shunned the only child I knew well who was poor—Jeffrey, a

boy in my elementary and middle-school classes who lived

“under the Eighth Street Bridge.” In my school’s tightly

ordered social system, there were the Insiders and Uncool

Outsiders. Then there was Jeffrey, in a category by himself.

His clothes were ill-fitting thrift store garments, and he

smelled bad. He was mocked mercilessly, excluded from

games and conversations, and penalized in classwork, since

few wanted to cooperate with him on assignments and

projects. I confess that I avoided him most of the time

because I was one of the Uncool Outsiders and was hoping

to improve my social status. Instead of identifying with

Jeffrey and recognizing the injustice of how he was being

treated, I turned on the only kid who was more of a social

outsider than I was.9

When I entered college in the late 1960s, however, I

became part of a generation of students transfixed by the

Civil Rights Movement. I learned about the systematic

violence that was being carried out against blacks and civil

rights workers in the South. I remember being especially

astonished by the image of James Meredith being gunned

down in broad daylight on a voting rights march in 1966,

with his assailant calmly looking on in one of the

photographs. I was amazed that something as unjust as

segregation could have been so easily rationalized by an

entire society. It marked the first time I realized that most

older white adults in my life were telling me things that

were dead wrong. The problem was not just a “few

troublemakers.” Black people did have a right to demand

the redress and rectifying of many wrongs.

“You’re a Racist,You Know”

Although I had grown up going to church, Christianity began

to lose its appeal to me when I was in college. One reason

for my difficulty was the disconnect between my secular

friends who supported the Civil Rights Movement, and the

orthodox Christian believers who thought that Martin Luther

King, Jr. was a threat to society. Why, I wondered, did the

nonreligious believe so passionately in equal rights and

justice, while the religious people I knew could not have

cared less?

A breakthrough came when I discovered a small but

thoughtful group of devout Christian believers who were

integrating their faith with every kind of justice in society. At

first I merely imported my views on racial justice and added

them onto the theology I was learning as a Christian. I didn’t

see what later I came to realize, that in fact the Bible

provides the very basis for justice. I learned that the

creation account in Genesis was the origin for the idea of

human rights in the West10 and that Biblical prophetic

literature rang with calls for justice. Years afterward I

discovered that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and

’60s I so admired was grounded much more in the African-

American church’s Christian views of sin and salvation than

in secularism.11

When I went to seminary to prepare for the ministry, I met

an African-American student, Elward Ellis, who befriended

both my future wife, Kathy Kristy, and me. He gave us

gracious but bare-knuckled mentoring about the realities of

injustice in American culture. “You’re a racist, you know,” he

once said at our kitchen table. “Oh, you don’t mean to be,

and you don’t want to be, but you are. You can’t really help

it.” He said, for example, “When black people do things in a

certain way, you say, ‘Well, that’s your culture.’ But when

white people do things in a certain way, you say, ‘That’s just

the right way to do things.’ You don’t realize you really have

a culture. You are blind to how many of your beliefs and

practices are cultural.” We began to see how, in so many

ways, we made our cultural biases into moral principles and

then judged people of other races as being inferior. His case

was so strong and fair that, to our surprise, we agreed with

him.

While I was in my first pastorate in Hopewell, Virginia, I

decided to enroll in a doctor of ministry program, and my

project (the “thesis” of the course) was on training deacons.

In Presbyterian church organization there are two sets of

officers—elders and deacons. Deacons had historically been

designated to work with the poor and needy in the

community, but over the years this legacy had been lost,

and instead they had evolved into janitors and treasurers.

My program advisor challenged me to study the history of

the office and to develop ways to help Presbyterian

churches recover this lost aspect of their congregational life.

I took the assignment, and it was a transformative process

for me. I went to the social work department of a nearby

university, got the full reading list for their foundational

courses, and devoured all the books. I did historical research

on how church deacons served as the first public social

service structure in European cities such as Geneva,

Amsterdam, and Glasgow. I devised courses of skill-training

for deacons and wrote material to help church leaders get a

vision not only for the “word” ministry of preaching and

teaching, but also for “deed” ministry, serving people with

material and economic needs.12

After my pastorate in Virginia, I went to teach at

Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. In my department

were four faculty members who lived in the inner city and

taught urban ministry. Each week I would go to the

department meeting a bit early and have fifteen minutes or

so alone talking with the chairman, Harvie Conn. Harvie was

passionately committed to living and working in the city,

and he was keenly aware of the systemic injustice in our

society. As I look back on those times, I realize I was

learning far more from him than at the time I thought I was.

I read his little book Evangelism: Doing Justice and

Preaching Grace13 twenty-five years ago and its themes

sank deep into my thinking about God and the church.

Inspired by Harvie’s teaching and by all the experiences I

had in urban churches in Philadelphia during the 1980s, I

answered an invitation to move to the middle of New York

City in 1989 and begin a new congregation, Redeemer

Presbyterian Church.

On Grace and Being Just

There are many great differences between the small

southern town of Hopewell, Virginia, and the giant

metropolis of New York. But there was one thing that was

exactly the same. To my surprise, there is a direct

relationship between a person’s grasp and experience of

God’s grace, and his or her heart for justice and the poor. In

both settings, as I preached the classic message that God

does not give us justice but saves us by free grace, I

discovered that those most affected by the message

became the most sensitive to the social inequities around

them. One man in my church in Hopewell, Easley Shelton,

went through a profound transformation. He moved out of a

sterile, moralistic understanding of life and began to

understand that his salvation was based on the free,

unmerited grace of Jesus. It gave him a new warmth, joy,

and confidence that everyone could see. But it had another

surprising effect. “You know,” he said to me one day, “I’ve

been a racist all my life.” I was startled, because I had not

yet preached to him or to the congregation on that subject.

He had put it together for himself. When he lost his

Phariseeism, his spiritual self-righteousness, he said, he lost

his racism.

Elaine Scarry of Harvard has written a fascinating little

book called On Beauty and Being Just.14 Her thesis is that

the experience of beauty makes us less self-centered and

more open to justice. I have observed over the decades that

when people see the beauty of God’s grace in Christ, it

leads them powerfully toward justice.

This book, then, is both for believers who find the Bible a

trustworthy guide and for those who wonder if Christianity is

a positive influence in the world. I want the orthodox to see

how central to the Scripture’s message is justice for the

poor and marginalized. I also want to challenge those who

do not believe in Christianity to see the Bible not as a

repressive text, but as the basis for the modern

understanding of human rights. Throughout this book, I will

begin each chapter with a call to justice taken directly from

the Bible and show how these words can become the

foundation of a just, generous human community. I don’t

expect to bring every reader all the way to agreement, but I

do hope to introduce many to a new way of thinking about

the Bible, justice, and grace.

ONE

WHAT IS DOING JUSTICE?

And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice,

to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:8 15

“I Didn’t Know Who Was Going to

Shoot Me First”

I recently met with Heather, a woman who attends my

church in New York City. After graduating from Harvard Law

School she landed a lucrative job with a major law firm in

Manhattan. It was a dream come true for most aspiring

young professionals. She was a high-powered corporate

lawyer, she was “living the life” in the big city, and yet it

was all strangely unsatisfying. She wanted to make a

difference in the lives of individuals, and she was concerned

about those in society who could not afford the kind of fees

her clients paid her firm. For a fraction of her former salary,

she became an assistant district attorney for New York

County, where so many of the criminals she prosecutes are

those who have been exploiting the poor, particularly poor

women.

When I was professor at a theological seminary in the mid-

eighties, one of my students was a young man named Mark

Gornik. One day we were standing at the copier and he told

me that he was about to move into Sandtown, one of the

poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods in Baltimore. I

remember being quite surprised. When I asked him why, he

said simply, “to do justice.” It had been decades since any

white people had moved into Sandtown. For the first couple

of years there it was touch and go. Mark told a reporter,

“The police thought I was a drug dealer, and the drug

dealers thought I was a police officer. So, for a while there, I

didn’t know who was going to shoot me first.” Yet over the

years Mark, along with leaders in the community,

established a church and a comprehensive set of ministries

that have slowly transformed the neighborhood.16

Although both Heather and Mark were living comfortable,

safe lives, they became concerned about the most

vulnerable, poor, and marginalized members of our society,

and they made long-term personal sacrifices in order to

serve their interests, needs, and cause.

That is, according to the Bible, what it means to “do

justice.”

Justice Is Care for the Vulnerable

Micah 6:8 is a summary of how God wants us to live. To walk

humbly with God is to know him intimately and to be

attentive to what he desires and loves. And what does that

consist of? The text says to “do justice and love mercy,”

which seem at first glance to be two different things, but

they are not.17 The term for “mercy” is the Hebrew word

chesedh, God’s unconditional grace and compassion. The

word for “justice” is the Hebrew term mishpat. In Micah 6:8,

“mishpat puts the emphasis on the action, chesedh puts it

on the attitude [or motive] behind the action.”18 To walk

with God, then, we must do justice, out of merciful love.

The word mishpat in its various forms occurs more than

two hundred times in the Hebrew Old Testament. Its most

basic meaning is to treat people equitably. So Leviticus

24:22 warns Israel to “have the same mishpat [“rule of law”]

for the foreigner as the native.” Mishpat means acquitting or

punishing every person on the merits of the case, regardless

of race or social status. Anyone who does the same wrong

should be given the same penalty. But mishpat means more

than just the punishment of wrongdoing. It also means to

give people their rights. Deuteronomy 18 directs that the

priests of the tabernacle should be supported by a certain

percentage of the people’s income. This support is

described as “the priests’ mishpat,” which means their due

or their right. So we read, “Defend the rights of the poor and

needy” (Proverbs 31:9). Mishpat, then, is giving people what

they are due, whether punishment or protection or care.

This is why, if you look at every place the word is used in

the Old Testament, several classes of persons continually

come up. Over and over again, mishpat describes taking up

the care and cause of widows, orphans, immigrants, and the

poor—those who have been called “the quartet of the

vulnerable.”19

This is what the LORD Almighty says: Administer true

justice, show mercy and compassion to one another. Do

not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the immigrant

or the poor.

Zechariah 7:10-11

In premodern, agrarian societies, these four groups had no

social power. They lived at subsistence level and were only

days from starvation if there was any famine, invasion, or

even minor social unrest. Today this quartet would be

expanded to include the refugee, the migrant worker, the

homeless, and many single parents and elderly people.

The mishpat, or justness, of a society, according to the

Bible, is evaluated by how it treats these groups. Any

neglect shown to the needs of the members of this quartet

is not called merely a lack of mercy or charity, but a

violation of justice, of mishpat. God loves and defends those

with the least economic and social power, and so should we.

That is what it means to “do justice.”

Justice Reflects the Character of God

Why should we be concerned about the vulnerable ones? It

is because God is concerned about them. Consider the

following texts:

He executes justice [mishpat] for the oppressed and

gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets prisoners free,

the LORD gives sight to the blind, he lifts up those who

are bowed down, the LORD loves those who live justly.

The LORD watches over the immigrant and sustains the

fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of

the wicked.

Psalm 146:7-9

The LORD your God . . . defends the cause [mishpat ] of

the fatherless and the widow, and loves the immigrant,

giving him food and clothing.

Deuteronomy 10:17-18

It is striking to see how often God is introduced as the

defender of these vulnerable groups. Don’t miss the

significance of this. When people ask me, “How do you want

to be introduced?” I usually propose they say, “This is Tim

Keller, minister at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New

York City.” Of course I am many other things, but that is the

main thing I spend my time doing in public life. Realize,

then, how significant it is that the Biblical writers introduce

God as “a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows”

(Psalm 68:4-5). This is one of the main things he does in the

world. He identifies with the powerless, he takes up their

cause.

It is hard for us to understand how revolutionary this was

in the ancient world. Sri Lankan scholar Vinoth

Ramachandra calls this “scandalous justice.” He writes that

in virtually all the ancient cultures of the world, the power of

the gods was channeled through and identified with the

elites of society, the kings, priests, and military captains,

not the outcasts. To oppose the leaders of society, then, was

to oppose the gods. “But here, in Israel’s rival vision,” it is

not high-ranking males but “the orphan, the widow, and the

stranger” with whom Yahweh takes his stand. His power is

exercised in history for their empowerment.” 20 So, from

ancient times, the God of the Bible stood out from the gods

of all other religions as a God on the side of the powerless,

and of justice for the poor.

Is God on the Side of the Poor?

This emphasis in the Bible has led some, like Latin American

theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, to speak of God’s

“preferential option for the poor.”21 At first glance this

seems to be wrong, especially in light of passages in the

Mosaic law that warn against giving any preference to rich

or poor (Leviticus 19:15; Deuteronomy 1:16-17). Yet the

Bible says that God is the defender of the poor; it never

says he is the defender of the rich. And while some texts

call for justice for members of the well-off classes as well,

the calls to render justice to the poor outnumber such

passages by a hundred to one.

Why? Rich people can certainly be treated unjustly, but

philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff says it is a simple fact that

the lower classes are “not only disproportionately vulnerable

to injustice, but usually disproportionately actual victims of

injustice. Injustice is not equally distributed.”22 It stands to

reason that injustice is easier to perform against people

without the money or social status to defend themselves.

The poor cannot afford the best legal counsel, as my friend

Heather knew very well. The poor are more often the victims

of robbery, one of the most common forms of injustice, and

ordinarily law enforcement is much quicker and more

thorough in its response to violence against the rich and

powerful than against the poor. Wolterstorff concludes, “One

has to decide where lie the greatest injustices and where

lies the greatest vulnerability. Other things being equal, one

focuses one’s attention on those.”23 In short, since most of

the people who are downtrodden by abusive power are

those who had little power to begin with, God gives them

particular attention and has a special place in his heart for

them. He says:

Speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves,

for the rights of all who are destitute. . . .

Proverbs 31:8

If God’s character includes a zeal for justice that leads him

to have the tenderest love and closest involvement with the

socially weak, then what should God’s people be like? They

must be people who are likewise passionately concerned for

the weak and vulnerable. God injected his concern for

justice into the very heart of Israel’s worship and community

life with these texts:

Cursed be anyone who withholds the justice due to the

immigrant, the fatherless, and the widow. Then all the

people shall say, “Amen!”

Deuteronomy 27:19

This is what the LORD says: “Do what is just and right.

Rescue from the hand of his oppressor the one who has

been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the immigrant,

the fatherless, or the widow, and do not shed innocent

blood in this place.”

Jeremiah 22:3

Israel was charged to create a culture of social justice for

the poor and vulnerable because it was the way the nation

could reveal God’s glory and character to the world.

Deuteronomy 4:6-8 is a key text where Israel is told that

they should keep God’s commands so that all the nations of

the world will look at the justice and peace of their society,

based on God’s laws, and be attracted to God’s wisdom and

glory.24

This is why God can say that if we dishonor the poor we

insult him, and when we are generous to the poor we honor

him (Proverbs 14:31). If believers in God don’t honor the

cries and claims of the poor, we don’t honor him, whatever

we profess, because we hide his beauty from the eyes of the

world. When we pour ourselves out for the poor—that gets

the world’s notice. Even when Christians were a small

minority in the Roman Empire, their startling charity to the

poor evoked great respect from the populace. To honor him

we must defend the poor and needy (Jeremiah 22:16).

Justice Is Right Relationships

We must have a strong concern for the poor, but there is

more to the Biblical idea of justice than that. We get more

insight when we consider a second Hebrew word that can be

translated as “being just,” though it usually translated as

“being righteous.” The word is tzadeqah, and it refers to a

life of right relationships. Bible scholar Alec Motyer defines

“righteous” as those “right with God and therefore

committed to putting right all other relationships in life.” 25

This means, then, that Biblical righteousness is inevitably

“social,” because it is about relationships. When most

modern people see the word “righteousness” in the Bible,

they tend to think of it in terms of private morality, such as

sexual chastity or diligence in prayer and Bible study. But in

the Bible tzadeqah refers to day-to-day living in which a

person conducts all relationships in family and society with

fairness, generosity, and equity. It is not surprising, then, to

discover that tzadeqah and mishpat are brought together

scores of times in the Bible.

These two words roughly correspond to what some have

called “primary” and “rectifying justice.” 26 Rectifying justice

is mishpat. It means punishing wrongdoers and caring for

the victims of unjust treatment. Primary justice, or

tzadeqah, is behavior that, if it was prevalent in the world,

would render rectifying justice unnecessary, because

everyone would be living in right relationship to everyone

else.27 Therefore, though tzadeqah is primarily about being

in a right relationship with God, the righteous life that

results is profoundly social. A passage in the book of Job

illustrates what this kind of righteous or just-living person

looks like:

I rescued the poor who cried for help, and the fa-

therless who had none to assist him. The man who was

dying blessed me; I made the widow’s heart sing. I put

on righteousness [tzadeqah] as my cloth- ing; justice

[mishpat] was my robe and my turban. I was eyes to the

blind and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy; I

took up the case of the immi- grant. I broke the fangs of

the wicked and snatched the victims from their teeth.

Job 29:12-17

If I have denied justice [mishpat] to my menservants

and maidservants when they had a grievance against

me, what will I do when God confronts me? . . . If I have

denied the desires of the poor or let the eyes of the

widow grow weary, if I have kept my bread to myself,

not sharing it with the fatherless—but from my youth I

reared him as would a father, and from my birth I

guided the widow—if I have seen anyone perishing for

lack of clothing, or a needy man without a garment, and

his heart did not bless me for warming him with the

fleece from my sheep, if I have raised my hand against

the fatherless, knowing that I had influence in court,

then let my arm fall from the shoulder, let it be broken

off at the joint. . . . these also would be sins to be

judged, for I would have been unfaithful to God on high.

Job 31:13-28

Francis I. Anderson points out in his commentary on Job

that this is one of the most important texts in the Scripture

for the study of Israelite ethics. It is a complete picture of

how a righteous Israelite was supposed to live, “and to [Job],

right conduct is almost entirely social. . . . In Job’s

conscience . . . to omit to do good to any fellow human

being, of whatever rank or class, would be a grievous

offence to God.”28

In Job’s inventory of his life we see all the elements of

what it means to live justly and do justice. We see direct,

rectifying justice when Job says, “I took up the case of the

immigrant; I broke the fangs of the wicked and snatched the

victims from their teeth.” This means Job confronted people

who exploited the vulnerable. In our world, this could mean

prosecuting the men who batter, exploit, and rob poor

women. But it could also mean Christians respectfully

putting pressure on a local police department until they

respond to calls and crimes as quickly in the poor part of

town as in the prosperous part. Another example would be

to form an organization that both prosecutes and seeks

against loan companies that prey on the poor and the

elderly with dishonest and exploitive practices.

Job also gives us many examples of what we could call

primary justice or righteous living. He says that he is “eyes

to the blind and feet to the lame,” and “a father to the

needy.” To be a “father” meant that he cared for the needs

of the poor as a parent would meet the needs of his

children.29 In our world, this means taking the time

personally to meet the needs of the handicapped, the

elderly, or the hungry in our neighborhoods. Or it could

mean the establishment of new nonprofits to serve the

interests of these classes of persons. But it could also mean

a group of families from the more prosperous side of town

adopting the public school in a poor community and making

generous donations of money and pro bono work in order to

improve the quality of the education.

In chapter 31 Job gives us more details about a righteous

or just life. He fulfills “the desires of the poor” (verse 16).

The word “desire” does not mean just meeting basic needs

for food and shelter. It means that he turns the poor man’s

life into a delight. Then he says that if he had not shared his

bread or “the fleece from my sheep” with the poor, it would

have been a terrible sin and offense to God (verses 23 and

28). This certainly goes beyond what today we would call

“charity.” Job is not just giving handouts, but rather has

become deeply involved in the life of the poor, the

orphaned, and the handicapped. His goal for the poor is a

life of delight, and his goal for the widow is that her eyes

would “no longer be weary.” He is not at all satisfied with

halfway measures for the needy people in his community.

He is not content to give them small, perfunctory gifts in the

assumption that their misery and weakness are a

permanent condition.

When these two words, tzadeqah and mishpat, are tied

together, as they are over three dozen times, the English

expression that best conveys the meaning is “social

justice.”30 It is an illuminating exercise to find texts where

the words are paired and to then to translate the text using

the term “social justice.” Here are just two:

The Lord loves social justice; the earth is full of his

unfailing love.

Psalms 33:5

And

This is what the LORD says: “Let not the wise man boast

of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or

the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts

boast about this: that he understands and knows me,

that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness and social

justice on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the

LORD.

Jeremiah 9:23-24

Justice Includes Generosity

Many readers may be asking at this point why we are calling

private giving to the poor “justice.” Some Christians believe

that justice is strictly mishpat—the punishment of

wrongdoing, period. This does not mean that they think that

believers should be indifferent to the plight of the poor, but

they would insist that helping the needy through generous

giving should be called mercy, compassion, or charity, not

justice. In English, however, the word “charity” conveys a

good but optional activity. Charity cannot be a requirement,

for then it would not be charity. But this view does not fit in

with the strength or balance of the Biblical teaching.

In the Scripture, gifts to the poor are called “acts of

righteousness,” as in Matthew 6:1-2. Not giving generously,

then, is not stinginess, but unrighteousness, a violation of

God’s law. Also, we looked at Job’s description of all the

things he was doing in order to live a just and righteous life

in Job 31. He calls every failure to help the poor a sin,

offensive to God’s splendor (verse 23) and deserving of

judgment and punishment (verse 28). Remarkably, Job is

asserting that it would be a sin against God to think of his

goods as belonging to himself alone. To not “share his

bread” and his assets with the poor would be unrighteous, a

sin against God, and therefore by definition a violation of

God’s justice.

Another passage, from the prophecy of Ezekiel, makes a

very similar list to the one that we have in Job 31.

Suppose there is a righteous man [tzaddiq] who does

what is just [mishpat] and right [tzadeqah]. He does not

. . . oppress anyone, but returns what he took in pledge

for a loan. He does not commit robbery but gives his

food to the hungry and pro- vides clothing for the naked.

He does not lend at usury or take excessive interest.

Ezekiel 18:5, 7-8a

This just man does not use his economic position to

exploit people who are in a weaker financial position. Most

interesting is how the text pairs “he does not commit

robbery” with the explanatory clause that he actively gives

food and clothing to the poor. The implication is that if you

do not actively and generously share your resources with

the poor, you are a robber. You are not living justly.31 This

connection of generosity and care with mishpat is not

confined to this text. Each of the following texts calls those

who do justice to share their resources with the needy,

because God does:

He defends the cause [mishpat] of the fatherless and

the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and

clothing. And you are to love those who are aliens, for

you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.

Deuteronomy 10:18-19

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the

chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set

the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to

share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor

wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to

clothe him. . . ?

Isaiah 58:6-7

Despite the effort to draw a line between “justice” as legal

fairness and sharing as “charity,” Ezekiel and Job make

radical generosity one of the marks of living justly. The just

person lives a life of honesty, equity, and generosity in

every aspect of his or her life.

As we continue our study, we will see there are valid

reasons why many become concerned when they hear

Christians talk about “doing justice.” Often that term is just

a slogan being used to recruit listeners to jump on some

political bandwagon. Nevertheless, if you are trying to live a

life in accordance with the Bible, the concept and call to

justice are inescapable. We do justice when we give all

human beings their due as creations of God. Doing justice

includes not only the righting of wrongs, but generosity and

social concern, especially toward the poor and vulnerable.

This kind of life reflects the character of God. It consists of a

broad range of activities, from simple fair and honest

dealings with people in daily life, to regular, radically

generous giving of your time and resources, to activism that

seeks to end particular forms of injustice, violence, and

oppression.

TWO

JUSTICE AND THE OLD TESTAMENT

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is

profitable.

2 Timothy 3:16

Christians and the Ceremonies

Before looking at some other passages that show how the

Biblical concept of justice took form in the society of Israel,

we must consider the thorny question: Are the laws of the

Old Testament binding on Christians today?

Even though Christians believe that all of Scripture is

authoritative, the coming of Christ fulfilled many of the Old

Testament laws in such a way that they no longer bear on

believers directly. One clear example of this is how the New

Testament tells believers to regard the “ceremonial” laws of

Moses. The numerous “clean laws” of Israel touching diet,

dress, and other forms of ceremonial purity, as well as the

entire sacrificial system and temple worship ordinances, are

no longer considered binding on Christians, because Christ

came and fulfilled them. In the New Testament book of

Hebrews, we are told that Jesus is the final Sacrifice and the

ultimate Priest, and so believers must no longer offer up

animal sacrifices. Nor, as Jesus taught (Mark 7:17-23), do

Christians have to obey the clean laws that determined if a

worshipper was ceremonially clean and qualified for

worship. Why not? It was because Christ’s atoning sacrifice

brings us the reality to which the sacrifices pointed, and in

Christ believers are permanently made “clean” and

acceptable in God’s sight.

Nevertheless, as Biblical scholar Craig Blomberg points

out, “Every command [from the Old Testament] reflects

principles at some level that are binding on Christians (2

Timothy 3:16).”32 That is, even the parts of the Old

Testament that are now fulfilled in Christ still have some

abiding validity. For example, the principle of offering God

sacrifices still remains in force, though changed by Christ’s

work. We are now required to offer God our entire lives as

sacrifices (Romans 12:1- 2), as well as the sacrifices of

worship to God and the sharing of our resources with others

(Hebrews 13:5).

And consider the book of Leviticus with all its clean laws

and ceremonial regulations. These laws are not directly

binding on Christians, but when Paul makes his case that

Christians should lead holy lives, sharply distinct from those

of the nonbelieving culture around them, he quotes

Leviticus 26:12. (See 2 Corinthians 6:16-17.) So the coming

of Christ changes the way in which Christians exhibit their

holiness and offer their sacrifices, yet the basic principles

remain valid.

Christians and the Civil Law of Moses

However, our concern here is not the ceremonial laws of

Moses. What about the “civil” laws, the laws of social justice

that have to do with the forgiving of debts, the freeing of

slaves, and the redistribution of wealth? In the Old

Testament believers comprised a single nation-state, with

divinely appointed land apportionments and with a religious

law code backed up by civil sanctions. Israel was

characterized by theocratic rule in which both idolatry and

adultery were offenses punished by the state. But in the

New Testament this changed. Christians now do not

constitute a theocratic kingdom-state, but exist as an

international communion of local assemblies living in every

nation and culture, under many different governments to

whom they give great respect but never absolute

allegiance. Jesus’s famous teaching to “render to Caesar the

things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are

God’s” (Matthew 22:21) signaled this change in the

relationship between church and state to one of “non-

establishment.”

Though believers are still a “covenant community,” a

people who are bound together to obey God’s will, the

church is not the state. So the apostle Paul, for example,

calls for the rebuke of an adulterer in the Corinthian church.

And if he does not repent, says Paul, expel him from

membership in the community (1 Corinthians 5).

Nevertheless, Paul does not demand his execution, as would

have been the case in Israel. The church is not a

government that rewards virtue and punishes evildoers with

coercive force. But despite this massive change, do we have

reason to believe that the civil laws of Moses, though not

binding, still have some abiding validity? Yes.

Several factors should guide us. We should be wary of

simply saying, “These things don’t apply anymore,” because

the Mosaic laws of social justice are grounded in God’s

character, and that never changes. God often tells the

Israelites to lend to the poor without interest and to

distribute goods to the needy and to defend the fatherless,

because “the LORD your God . . . defends the cause

[mishpat] of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the

alien, giving him food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:17-

18). If this is true of God, we who believe in him must

always find some way of expressing it our own practices,

even if believers now live in a new stage in the history of

God’s redemption.

Also, in the next chapters we will see that New Testament

writers do continue to look back to these social justice laws

and base practices within the New Testament church upon

them. For example, though the laws of gathering manna in

the wilderness are obviously not applicable today, in 2

Corinthians 8:13-15 Paul can use them to require economic

sharing and radical generosity among Christians. Just as

Israel was a “community of justice,” so the church is to

reflect these same concerns for the poor.

Christians and Society

But even if we can apply the social legislation of Old

Testament Israel in some ways to the New Testament

church, can we apply it to our society at large? Here we

must be far more cautious. The laws of social justice in

Israel were principles for relationships primarily between

believers. Israel was a nation-state in which every citizen

was bound to obey the whole law of God and also was

required to give God wholehearted worship. This is not the

situation in our society today.

Nevertheless, the Bible gives us an example of a believer

calling a nonbelieving king to stop ruling unjustly (Daniel

4:27). In the book of Amos, we see God holding

nonbelieving nations accountable for oppression, injustice,

and violence (Amos 1:3-2:3). It is clearly God’s will that all

societies reflect his concern for justice for the weak and

vulnerable. So, like the ceremonial laws, the civil laws have

some abiding validity that believers must carefully seek to

reflect in their own lives and practices, not only as members

of the church, but as citizens of their countries.

For example, many Biblical passages warn judges and

rulers against taking bribes. “Do not pervert justice

[mishpat] or show partiality. Do not accept a bribe, for a

bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and twists the words of the

righteous” (Deuteronomy 16:19). The poor person cannot

afford to offer incentives to lawmakers and judges to decide

matters for his benefit, but the rich and powerful can do

this, and this is why bribery is so heinous to God. It

marginalizes the poor from power. Bribery, of course, can

take many modern forms. Poor people cannot make major

contributions to a legislator’s campaign fund, for example.

Do we want to say that these laws against bribery have no

abiding validity? Should we insist that Christians should not

try to see our own society’s laws reflect this particular kind

of Biblical righteousness? Of course not.

With these caveats and cautions in mind, then, let’s look

at the kind of society God called Israel to be, and see what

we can learn from it.

A Community of Justice

One of the best places to see what God’s just society was

supposed to look like is Deuteronomy 15. Here we read two

verses that seem at first glance to be in tension with each

other. In verse 11 it says, “There will always be poor people

in the land, therefore I command you to be openhanded . . .

toward the poor and needy in your land.” Yet just before, we

read this:

There should be no poor among you, for in the land the

LORD your God is giving you to possess as your

inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully

obey the LORD your God and are careful to follow all

these commands I am giving you today.

Deuteronomy 15:4-5

Despite the initial appearance, there is no contradiction.

Surrounding verses 4 and 5 are a set of laws known as

“shemitta” law, from the Hebrew word for “release.” At the

beginning of the chapter we read:

At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts.

[Literally make a “release,” shemitta.] This is how it is to

be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan he has

made to his fellow Israelite.

Deuteronomy 15:1-2

This directed that any Israelite who fell into debt had to be

forgiven those debts every seventh year. Not only could

creditors no longer demand payment, but they had to

release the pledges of collateral taken for the debt.

Collateral was usually a portion of land from which produce

could have been used to repay the loan.33 This law of

release was a powerful and specific public policy aimed at

removing one of the key factors causing poverty—long-

term, burdensome debt.

Later, in verses 7 through 11, using emphatic Hebrew

constructions that can only be conveyed in English with lots

of adverbs, such as “richly” (verse 4), “fully” (verse 5),

“freely” (verse 8), and “generously” (verse 10), there was a

powerful call to give to and help the poor until their need is

eliminated.

If there is a poor man among your brothers in any of the

towns of the land that the LORD your God is giving you,

do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward your poor

brother. Rather be openhanded and freely lend him

whatever he needs.

Deuteronomy 15:7-8

The poor man was not to be given merely a token

“handout.” Rather, credit and help were to be extended

until he was completely out of poverty. The generosity

extended to the poor could not be cut off until the poor

person’s need was gone and until he reached a level of self-

sufficiency. Now we can understand how the passage could

say, “There should be no poor among you.” God’s concern

for the poor is so strong that he gave Israel a host of laws

that, if practiced, would have virtually eliminated any

permanent underclass.

Besides the laws of release, there were the laws of

“gleaning.” Landowners could not gather all the grain their

land could produce. They had to leave some of it for the

poor to gather themselves (Leviticus 19:9- 10; 23:22). In

other words, they were to voluntarily limit their profit-taking.

Gleaning was not, however, what would ordinarily be called

an act of charity. It enabled the poor to provide for

themselves without relying on benevolence. On the other

hand, Deuteronomy 23:24-25 protected the landowner from

those who might try to overglean. The Bible is not a classist

tract that sees the rich as always the villains and the poor

as always virtuous.

In addition, there were the laws of tithing. All Israelites

gave one-tenth of their annual income to the Levites and

priests for the upkeep of the temple.34 However, every third

year the tithes were put in public storehouses so that the

poor and “the aliens, the fatherless, and the widows” would

receive them (Deuteronomy 14:29).35

Lastly, there was the remarkable “year of Jubilee.”

Every seventh year was a “Sabbath” year in which debts

and slaves were freed (Deuteronomy 15:1-18).36 But every

seventh Sabbath year (every forty-ninth year) was declared

a “Jubilee.” In that year not only were debts to be forgiven,

but the land was to go back to its original tribal and family

allotments made when the Israelites returned to the land

out of Egypt. Over a fifty-year period some families would

economically do better and acquire more land while others

would fare more poorly and have to sell some of their land—

or lose it altogether and become workers and servants. But

every fifty years the land was to go back to its original

owners (Leviticus 25:8-55).

“Here, if ever,” writes Craig Blomberg, “is the ultimate

relativization of private property. On average, each person

or family had at least a once-in-a-lifetime chance to start

afresh, no matter how irresponsibly they had handled their

finances or how far into debt they had fallen.” 37

If we combine the requirements of radical generosity with

the regulations on profit-taking and property use, we are not

surprised that God could say, “There should be no poor

among you.” This does not mean that people would not

continue to fall into poverty. But if Israel as an entire society

had kept God’s laws perfectly with all their hearts, there

would have been no permanent, long-term poverty.

Justice and Our Political Categories

We now need to face one of the main concerns of those who

object to Christians talking so much of “social justice.” Kevin

DeYoung states the problem in this way:

While the general principle—help the poor, don’t harm

them—is abundantly and repeatedly clear in Scripture,

the application of this principle is less so. For example,

does a passage like Isaiah 58 support state-sponsored

redistribution efforts? Christians can and do argue for

this, but this text certainly doesn’t require this solution

to poverty.

Deuteronomy 15 and the other Mosaic legislation that we

have surveyed seem to answer DeYoung’s question with a

“yes.” Israel did redistribute money, assets, and even land

from the well-off to the poor, with the help of state-

sponsored laws and institutions.

But as we’ve pointed out, Israel was a theocratic nation-

state in covenant with God. We do not have anything like

this today. We have been arguing that everything in the Old

Testament has some abiding validity, though it must be

applied with great care. Take the laws of gleaning, for

example. I know of no one who believes that the Bible

requires Christians to turn Old Testament gleaning into law

in the United States. But what do the gleaning laws reveal to

us about God’s will for our relationships? Why was it that

landowners were not allowed to harvest out to the margins

of their field? God did not want them to squeeze every cent

of profit out of their land, and then think that by giving to

charity they were doing all they could for general

community welfare. The gleaning laws enabled the poor to

be self-sufficient, not through getting a handout, but

through their own work in the field.

How can business owners follow the same principles

today? They should not squeeze every penny of profit out of

their businesses for themselves by charging the highest

possible fees and prices to customers and paying the lowest

possible wages to workers. Instead, they should be willing to

pay higher wages and charge lower prices that in effect

share the corporate profits with employees and customers,

with the community around them. This always creates a

more vibrant, strong human community. How could a

government follow the gleaning principle? It would do so by

always favoring programs that encourage work and self-

sufficiency rather than dependency.

For another example, see how Paul uses Exodus 16:18 in 2

Corinthians 8. In the desert God provided for the material

needs of the people with manna that appeared in the

mornings and that had to be gathered. Even though some

were more able gatherers of manna than others, all manna

was distributed equitably so that no one received too much

or too little for their needs (Exodus 16:16-18). Any manna

that was hoarded simply spoiled—it became rancid and full

of maggots (verses 19-21). In 2 Corinthians 8:13-15 Paul

interprets this as an abiding principle for how we are to deal

with God’s material provision for us. He likens our money to

manna. Paul teaches that the money we have is as much a

gift of God as the manna was a gift to the Israelites in the

desert. Though some are more able “gatherers”—that is,

some are better at making money than others—the money

you earn is a gift of God. Therefore, the money you make

must be shared to build up community. So wealthier

believers must share with poorer ones, not only within a

congregation but also across congregations and borders.

(See 2 Corinthians 8:15 and its context.) To extend the

metaphor—money that is hoarded for oneself rots the soul.

We have seen a number of ways in which the social justice

legislation of the Old Testament has abiding validity, yet we

must recognize that everything I have just outlined is

inferential. The Bible has many very direct and clear ethical

prescriptions for human life. But when we come to the Old

Testament social legislation, the application must be done

with care and it will always be subject to debate. For

example, while we have seen that the Bible demands that

we share our resources with the needy, and that to fail to do

so is unjust, taken as a whole the Bible does not say

precisely how that redistribution should be carried out.

Should it be the way political conservatives prescribe,

almost exclusively through voluntary, private giving? Or

should it be the way that political liberals desire, through

progressive taxation and redistribution by the state?

Thoughtful people have and will argue about which is the

most effective way to help the poor. Both sides looking for

support in the Bible can find some, and yet in the end what

the Bible says about social justice cannot be tied to any one

political system or economic policy. If it is possible, we need

to take politics out of this equation as we look deeper into

the Bible’s call for justice.

In Craig Blomberg’s survey of the Mosaic laws of gleaning,

releasing, tithing, and the Jubilee, he concludes that the

Biblical attitude toward wealth and possessions does not fit

into any of the normal categories of democratic capitalism,

or of traditional monarchial feudalism, or of state socialism.

The rules for the use of land in the Biblical laws challenge all

major contemporary economic models. They “suggest a

sharp critique of 1) the statism that disregards the precious

treasure of personal rootage, and 2) the untrammeled

individualism which secures individuals at the expense of

community.”38

What Causes Poverty?

One of the main reasons we cannot fit the Bible’s approach

into a liberal or conservative economic model is the

Scripture’s highly nuanced understanding of the causes of

poverty. Liberal theorists believe that the “root causes” of

poverty are always social forces beyond the control of the

poor, such as racial prejudice, economic deprivation,

joblessness, and other inequities. Conservative theorists put

the blame on the breakdown of the family, the loss of

character qualities such as self-control and discipline, and

other habits and practices of the poor themselves.

By contrast, the causes of poverty as put forth in the Bible

are remarkably balanced. The Bible gives us a matrix of

causes. One factor is oppression, which includes a judicial

system weighted in favor of the powerful (Leviticus 19:15),

or loans with excessive interest (Exodus 22:25-27), or

unjustly low wages (Jeremiah 22:13; James 5:1-6).

Ultimately, however, the prophets blame the rich when

extremes of wealth and poverty in society appear (Amos

5:11-12; Ezekiel 22:29; Micah 2:2; Isaiah 5:8). As we have

seen, a great deal of the Mosaic legislation was designed to

keep the ordinary disparities between the wealthy and the

poor from becoming aggravated and extreme. Therefore,

whenever great disparities arose, the prophets assumed

that to some degree it was the result of selfish individualism

rather than concern with the common good.

If this were all that the Bible had to say about poverty, we

might be tempted to assume that the liberals were right,

that poverty comes from only unjust social conditions. But

there are other factors. One is what we could call “natural

disasters.” This refers to any natural circumstance that

brings or keeps a person in poverty, such as famine

(Genesis 47), disabling injury, floods, or fires. It may be fair

to say, also, that some people lack the ability to make wise

decisions. It is not a moral failing, they are simply unable to

make good choices because they lack insight.39

Another cause of poverty, according to the Bible, is what

we could call “personal moral failures,” such as indolence

(Proverbs 6:6-7), and other problems with self-discipline

(Proverbs 23:21). The book of Proverbs is particularly

forceful in its insistence that hard work can lead to

economic prosperity (Proverbs 12:11; 14:23; 20:13), though

there are exceptions (Proverbs 13:23).

Poverty, therefore, is seen in the Bible as a very complex

phenomenon. Several factors are usually intertwined. 40

Poverty cannot be eliminated simply by personal initiative or

by merely changing the tax structure. Multiple factors are

usually interactively present in the life of a poor family. For

example: A person raised in a racial/economic ghetto (factor

#1) is likely to have poor health (factor #2) and also learn

many habits that do not fit with material/social

advancement (factors #2 and 3). Any large-scale

improvement in a society’s level of poverty will come

through a comprehensive array of public and private,

spiritual, personal, and corporate measures. There are many

indications that scholars are coming to have a more

balanced, complex view of poverty and are breaking

through the older Right-Left deadlock.41

A Case Study

Mark Gornik, who I introduced in chapter 1 and who is a

founder of New Song Church and ministries in Baltimore,

makes a compelling case that “systematic exclusion”

creates many poor inner-city neighborhoods. He uses the

history of his former neighborhood, Sandtown, as an

example. In the early and mid-twentieth century, the

neighborhoods east of Sandtown, near the industrial jobs in

the city’s center, were reserved for white immigrants, and

the more prosperous neighborhoods to the west were also

for whites only. Segregation saw to this. African-American

newcomers from the South had to move into Sandtown, a

place where the only jobs available were as low-wage

domestic workers for wealthier families to the west. Many

white-owned businesses would not hire African-Americans at

all, or they did so for only menial work. Sandtown landlords

shoehorned people into overcrowded and substandard

housing. “This combination of circumstances led to a

subsistence existence.”42

By the 1970s, the industrial and manufacturing job base

of the city of Baltimore was in sharp decline. New jobs were

created in the suburbs and exurbs, places that were too

expensive for many urban residents to live and inaccessible

to them by transportation lines. The new jobs that were

produced required advanced degrees, since the culture was

shifting from a manufacturing to a service and knowledge

economy. In just fifteen years, jobs in the city that required

only a high school education (blue collar jobs) decreased by

45 percent, while jobs that required training past high

school or college increased 56 percent.43 Residents of inner-

city neighborhoods, with their weak and failing schools,

were completely unequipped to make the shift toward these

jobs with the rest of society. Lower paying service-sector

jobs were all that was left, without the retirement and health

benefits and job security of the older manufacturing jobs,

and those better-paying manufacturing jobs disappeared

altogether for the residents of Sandtown.44 Many people just

gave up on finding formal work.

The resulting economic weakness in the neighborhood led

to the kind of exploitative behavior toward the poor that the

Bible condemns. Landlords did not live in the neighborhood.

They provided abysmal services and maintenance, or

abandoned their buildings altogether. Banks and lending

institutions engaged in various forms of redlining, making it

impossible for neighborhood residents to get home loans or

insurance or credit cards.45 Crime rose and the victims were

usually members of the neighborhood. Businesses that were

important for healthy communities moved out, and in their

place came gun dealers, check-cashing centers, liquor

stores, and porn shops, all of which encouraged the worst

kinds of behavior in urban residents. 46

During the middle and late twentieth century, government

policy encouraged middle-class people to leave the city,

further isolating communities like Sandtown. For example,

intrusive freeways were built to enable people to live in the

suburbs and commute by car to center city jobs, and many

of these building programs bisected or devastated urban

neighborhoods, as chronicled in Robert Caro’s classic The

Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.47

Gornik’s research and narrative make a convincing case—

the poverty of an inner-city neighborhood like Sandtown was

not initially the product of individual irresponsible behavior

or family breakdown. A complex range of structural factors

led to the exclusion of the neighborhood’s residents from

the resources they needed to thrive. And before that, the

poverty of African-Americans emigrating into Baltimore from

the South was due in great part to the legacy of slavery and

Jim Crow laws. But the results of these factors were

addiction, family breakdown, criminal activity, depression,

the disintegration of community, and the erosion of personal

character. This is why the problems of the poor are so much

more complex than any one theory can accommodate. What

it takes to rebuild a poor neighborhood goes well beyond

public policy or social programs. It takes the rebuilding of

families and communities and individual lives. This is why

Gornik not only established programs of social service, but

he also began a church that called people to spiritual

conversion.48

The three causes of poverty, according to the Bible, are

oppression, calamity, and personal moral failure. Having

surveyed the Bible on these texts numerous times, I have

concluded that the emphasis is usually on the larger

structural factors. In many countries of the world, corrupt

governments, oppressive economic orders, and natural

disasters keep hundreds of millions of people in poverty. In

our own country, the weak educational system that society

provides for inner city youth sets them up for failure. But

when we add personal wrongdoing and crime to the larger

forces of exclusion and oppression, we have a potent

mixture that locks people into poverty. Taken in isolation no

one factor—government programs, public policy, calls to

personal responsibility, or private charity—is sufficient to

address the problem.

“If He Cannot Afford . . .”

In an out-of-the-way part of the Hebrew Bible, in Leviticus 5,

there are prescriptions for making confessions and offering

sacrifices to God at the tabernacle in order to seek

forgiveness for sins. There is an eye-glazing number of

diverse rules and regulations for how to make atonement for

various sins—what the penitents must do, what kind of

animal sacrifices they had to bring, what the priests had to

do, and so on. Then suddenly the text adds that if the

worshipper “cannot afford” the standard offerings, “he is to

bring as an offering a tenth of an ephah of fine flour for a sin

offering. . . . In this way the priest will make atonement for

him for any of these sins he has committed, and he will be

forgiven” (Leviticus 5:11-13). One Bible commentary

responds to this:

A person who knew he could come to God with nothing

more than a cupful of flour and a confession of his sin

and still receive forgiveness was learning something

fundamental about the grace of God . . . even the most

powerful in the land knew that God was not impressed

by the most lavish sacrifices. . . .49

Remember what Vinoth Ramachandra said. In the religions

of the surrounding cultures, the gods identified particularly

with the kings and others at the top of society. It made

sense—the rich could build the gods magnificent temples

and give sumptuous offerings. Why wouldn’t they be

considered the favorites of the gods? But the Biblical God is

not like that at all. He does not call everyone to bring

sacrifices of the same kind and value, for that would have

automatically make it easier for the rich to please God.

Instead, God directs that each person should bring what

they can, and if their heart is right, that will give them

access to his grace.

For indeed, grace is the key to it all. It is not our lavish

good deeds that procure salvation, but God’s lavish love and

mercy. That is why the poor are as acceptable before God as

the rich. It is the generosity of God, the freeness of his

salvation, that lays the foundation for the society of justice

for all. Even in the seemingly boring rules and regulations of

tabernacle rituals, we see that God cares about the poor,

that his laws make provision for the disadvantaged. God’s

concern for justice permeated every part of Israel’s life. It

should also permeate our lives.

THREE

WHAT DID JESUS SAY ABOUT JUSTICE?

When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your

friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich

neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so

you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite

the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. . . .

Luke 14:12-13

“But That’s the Old Testament!”

When I was a young pastor at my first church in Hopewell,

Virginia, a single mother with four children began attending

our services. It became clear very quickly that she had

severe financial problems, and several people in the church

proposed that we try to help her. By that time I had begun

to share my doctoral research with some of the church’s

deacons. I pointed out that historically church deacons had

given aid in exactly these circumstances. So the deacons

visited her and offered to give her church funds for several

months to help her pay off outstanding bills. She happily

accepted. Three months later it came out that, instead of

paying her bills with the money we had been giving her, she

had spent it on sweets and junk food, had gone out to

restaurants with her family multiple times, and had bought

each child a new bike. Not a single bill had been paid, and

she needed more money.

One of the deacons was furious. “No way do we give her

any more,” he said to me. “This is the reason that she’s

poor—she’s irresponsible, driven by her impulses! That was

God’s money and she wasted it.” I countered with some

passages from the Bible on doing justice for the fatherless

and the needy. “But that’s the Old Testament,” he said, and

argued that today it was Christians’ job to spread the good

news about Jesus. “Christians should not be concerned

about poverty and social conditions, but about saving

souls.”

We have been making the case that the Bible calls us to

be deeply involved in defending and caring for the poor, but

indeed, we have so far looked at the Hebrew Scriptures, that

part of the Bible that Christians call the Old Testament. My

deacon was not a trained theologian, but his intuition is a

common one, namely that while the Old Testament talks a

lot about evil and justice, Jesus talks mainly about love and

forgiveness. Anders Nygren, the influential author of Agape

and Eros, published in the 1930s, argued this forcefully at a

scholarly level. “God’s attitude to men is not characterized

by justitia distributiva, but by agape [love], not by

retributive righteousness, but by freely giving and forgiving

love.”50 Nygen’s argument was that, for God, love and

justice are mutually exclusive, they don’t mix at all. In this

view Christ has overcome justice and now all our

relationships should be based on spontaneous love and

generosity, not justice. Justice is all about “rights” and legal

obligations, but Christ’s salvation is a grace that is

undeserved. Christians should not be concerned with

getting people their rights. The gospel is about love and

service, about forgiveness and caring for people regardless

of their rights.

Jesus and the Vulnerable

This reasoning seems plausible at first glance. However,

when we study the gospels we find that Jesus has not

“moved on” at all from the Old Testament’s concern for

justice. In fact, Jesus has an intense interest in and love for

the same kinds of vulnerable people. Nor can it be argued

that this concern is a lower priority for Jesus. When some of

John the Baptist’s disciples came and asked him if he truly

was the Messiah, he said:

Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The

blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have

leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised,

and the good news is preached to the poor.

Matthew 11:4-5

Here is the same care for the vulnerable that

characterizes the heart of God. While clearly Jesus was

preaching the good news to all, he showed throughout his

ministry the particular interest in the poor and the

downtrodden that God has always had.

Jesus, in his incarnation, “moved in” with the poor. He

lived with, ate with, and associated with the socially

ostracized (Matt 9:13). He raised the son of the poor widow

(Luke 7:11-16) and showed the greatest respect to the

immoral woman who was a social outcast (Luke 7:36ff).

Indeed, Jesus spoke with women in public, something that a

man with any standing in society would not have done, but

Jesus resisted the sexism of his day (John 4:27).51 Jesus also

refused to go along with the racism of his culture, making a

hated Samaritan the hero of one of his most famous

parables (Luke 10:26ff) and touching off a riot when he

claimed that God loved Gentiles like the widow of Zarephath

and Naaman the Syrian as much as Jews (Luke 4:25-27).

Jesus showed special concern for children, despite his

apostles’ belief that they were not worth Jesus’s time (Luke

18:15).

Lepers also figured greatly in Jesus’s ministry. They were

not only sick and dying, but were the outcasts of society.

Jesus not only met their need for physical healing, but

reached out his hand and touched them, giving them their

first human contact in years (Mark 1:41; Luke 5:13). He

called his disciples to give to the poor in the strongest and

most startling ways, while praising the poor for their own

generosity (Mark 12:42-43).

His own mother prophesied that he would “fill the poor”

but turn the rich away empty (Luke 1:53). Yet Jesus also

showed true justice by opening his arms to several classes

of people who were not just poor. He ate with and spoke to

tax collectors, the wealthiest people in society, yet the most

hated, since they acquired their gains through collaborating

with the Roman forces of occupation. The first witnesses to

Jesus’s birth were shepherds, a despised group considered

unreliable, yet God revealed the birth of his son first to

them. The first witnesses of Jesus’s resurrection were

women, another class of people so marginalized that their

testimony was not admissible evidence in court. Yet Jesus

revealed himself to them first. The examples are too many

too enumerate.

Look at two of Jesus’s directions to his followers regarding

the poor. In Luke 14, he challenged people to routinely open

their homes and purses to the poor, the blind, and the

maimed.

When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your

friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich

neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so

you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite

the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. . . .

Luke 14:12-13

The great eighteenth-century hymn-writer and ex- slave

trader John Newton marveled at the far-reaching

implications of these words. “One would almost think that

Luke 14:12-14 was not considered part of God’s word,” he

wrote, “nor has any part of Jesus’s teaching been more

neglected by his own people. I do not think it is unlawful to

entertain our friends; but if these words do not teach us that

it is in some respects our duty to give a preference to the

poor, I am at a loss to understand them.”52

What was Jesus saying here? Later in this same chapter,

Jesus tells his disciples that they must “hate” their fathers

and mothers if they are going to follow him (Luke 14:26).

This sounds shocking to us, but it is a Semitic idiomatic

expression. Jesus did not mean literally that we should hate

our parents, since this would contradict his own teaching

(Mark 7:9-13) and the Ten Commandments. Rather, the

expression meant that your love and loyalty for Jesus should

so exceed all other loyalties that they look like “hate” by

comparison. This way of speaking sheds light on Jesus’s

statement about banquets.

In Jesus’s day, society operated largely on a patronage

system. People with means created influence networks by

opening doors and giving resources to people who in turn

provided business opportunities and political favors, and

watched out for their patron’s interests. In this kind of

culture, banquets were necessary. They were expensive, but

they paid off because that was the way that business was

done. Dinners were ways to sustain and reward current

patronage relationships and also were opportunities for

creating new ones. That is why the only people you invited

were your own peers and existing relations, as well as “your

rich neighbors.”

Jesus’s advice would have looked like economic and social

suicide. He commanded that his disciples should share their

homes and build relationships not with people from their

own social class (or higher) who would profit them, but with

people who were poor and without influence, who could

never pay them back with money or favors. When Jesus

said, “don’t invite your friends for dinner” he should not be

taken literally, any more than when he said we should hate

our father and our mother. Indeed, Jesus often ate meals in

homes with his friends and peers. Rather—to put this in a

more modern context—he is saying that we should spend

far more of our money and wealth on the poor than we do

on our own entertainment, or on vacations, or on eating out

and socializing with important peers.

Jesus bluntly and shockingly contradicted the spirit and

practice of the patronage system of his day, telling his

disciples to give without expecting repayment (Luke 6:32-

36; 14:13-14) and, if possible, in secret (Matthew 6:1-4). His

followers’ help of the poor was thus motivated by a sense of

simple justice (e.g., Luke 18:1-8) and a real concern to

alleviate misery (e.g., Luke 10:25-37, “mercy”). The

patronage system was characterized by neither compassion

nor justice. It did not unite a society divided by class and

race—it sustained the status quo. Jesus’s ethic of love

attacked the world system at its root.

In a second passage, Jesus exhorts his disciples to “sell

your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for

yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that

will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no

moth destroys” (Luke 12:33). He also famously told the rich

young ruler to sell all his possessions and give them to the

poor (Matthew 19:21; Luke 18:22). What do we say to such

strong injunctions? It can be argued that the command to

the rich young ruler was not a universal. As evidence, we

can point to Jesus’s encounter with the rich tax collector

Zacchaeus, who, when converted, happily told Jesus that he

was giving one half of all his wealth to the poor. Jesus

responded positively. He didn’t say, “No, that’s not enough.”

What is Jesus’s point, then, in these exhortations? It must be

at least this—that his believers should not see any of their

money as their own, and they should be profoundly involved

with and generous to the poor.

Jesus and the Prophets

Jesus not only shared the Old Testament’s zeal for the cause

of the vulnerable, he also adopted the prophets’ penetrating

use of justice as heart-analysis, the sign of true faith. At first

glance, no two things can seem more opposed than grace

and justice. Grace is giving benefits that are not deserved,

while justice is giving people exactly what they do deserve.

In Christ we receive grace, unmerited favor. Nevertheless, in

the mind of the Old Testament prophets as well as the

teaching of Jesus, an encounter with grace inevitably leads

to a life of justice.

Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, and Micah all leveled the

charge that, while the people attended worship, observed

all religious regulations, and took pride in their Biblical

knowledge, nevertheless they took advantage of the weak

and vulnerable. The prophets concluded that, therefore,

their religious activity was not just insufficient, it was deeply

offensive to God. In Isaiah chapters 1 and 58 the message is

chilling:

When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my

eyes from you. . . . Your hands are full of blood. . . . Learn to

do right! Seek justice [mishpat ], encourage the oppressed.

Defend the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.

Isaiah 1:17

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the

chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set

the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to

share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor

wanderer with shelter . . . ?

Isaiah 58:6 -7

The implications of this accusation are clear. Justice is not

just one more thing that needs to be added to the people’s

portfolio of religious behavior. A lack of justice is a sign that

the worshippers’ hearts are not right with God at all, that

their prayers and all their religious observance are just filled

with self and pride. In Isaiah 29:21, when the people are

charged with “depriving the innocent of justice,” God’s

conclusion is that “these people come near to me with their

mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far

from me.”

Jesus’s criticism of the religious leaders in Mark 12 was

identical. He said: “Watch out for the teachers of the law. . .

. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy

prayers. Such men will be punished most severely” (Mark

12:38, 40). Behind their excessive religious observances are

lives that are insensitive to the vulnerable classes. In Jesus’s

view, this revealed that they did not know God or his grace

at all. 53

The echoes of the prophets’ preaching became even

clearer in Luke 11:38- 42, where Jesus turned his gaze on

the Pharisees, whom he describes as “full of greed and

wickedness” (verse 38). They were very religious but they

“neglect justice and the love of God” (verse 42).54 Like

Isaiah, Jesus taught that a lack of concern for the poor is not

a minor lapse, but reveals that something is seriously wrong

with one’s spiritual compass, the heart. He prescribes a

startling remedy: “You Pharisees clean the outside of the

cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed. . . . Give what

is inside to the poor, and everything will be clean for you”

(Luke 11:41). The metaphor is striking. Biblical scholar Joel

Green explains it this way: “The disposition of one’s

possessions signifies the disposition of one’s heart.”55 The

purification of the heart through grace and love for the poor

are of a piece; they go together in the theology of Jesus.

Perhaps the passage in Jesus’s teaching that is most

directly like Isaiah 1 and 58 is the famous parable of “the

Sheep and the Goats” in Matthew 25:31-46. There Jesus

compared Judgment Day to the common task of shepherds

who had to identify and remove the goats from the flock. On

that day, he taught, there will be many people who claim to

have believed in him who he will reject. His true sheep, he

insisted, have a heart for “the least of these my brethren,”

which Jesus defined as the hungry, the stranger, the

“naked,” the sick, and the imprisoned (verses 35-36). If we

assume that Jesus was using the term “brethren” in his

usual way, to refer to believers, then he was teaching that

genuine disciples of Christ will create a new community that

does not exclude the poor, the members of other races, or

the powerless, and does deal with their needs sacrificially

and practically.56

Jesus gave us a long list of his disciples’ activities. They

were to give food and drink to the hungry, which meant

emergency relief. But the “strangers” were immigrants and

refugees, and they were to get much more than food. They

were to be “invited in.” They were not merely sent to a

shelter but were to be welcomed into the disciples’ homes

and lives and, it is implied, given advocacy, friendship, and

the basics for pursuing a new life in society. Those who were

“naked” were likely very close to what we might call the

homeless—the poorest of the poor. The disciples were to

“clothe” them. The sick were to be “looked after.” The Greek

word used for this is episkopos, which meant to give

oversight and supervision. That meant that the ill and

diseased were to be given comprehensive care until they

were well. Finally, the disciples were to “visit” prisoners,

which meant they were to give them comfort and

encouragement. It is a remarkably comprehensive list. This

is the kind of community that Jesus said his true disciples

would establish. Believers should be opening their homes

and purses to each other, drawing even the poorest and

most foreign into their homes and community, giving

financial aid, medical treatment, shelter, advocacy, active

love, support, and friendship.

But there is something even more startling about this

discourse of Jesus. Jesus did not say that all this done for the

poor was a means of getting salvation, but rather it was the

sign that you already had salvation, that true, saving faith

was already present.57 How does he show that? He tells the

sheep, “When you embraced the poor, you embraced me,”

and to the goats he says, “When you ignored the poor, you

ignored me.” This meant that one’s heart attitude toward

the poor reveals one’s heart attitude toward Christ. Jesus

was saying, “If you had opened up your hearts and lives to

them, then I would know you have opened up your hearts

and lives to me. If you were closed to them, I know you were

closed to me.” No heart that loves Christ can be cold to the

vulnerable and the needy. Why is that? The answer for that

must wait until chapter 5. At this point, we simply recognize

the implications. Anyone who has truly been touched by the

grace of God will be vigorous in helping the poor.

A Whole Cloth

In both the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus delivers a

famous discourse, which is usually called the Sermon on the

Mount. For centuries readers have acknowledged the beauty

of its high ethical standards. What is not noticed very often

is how Jesus weaves into a whole cloth what we would today

call private morality and social justice. Along with the well-

known prohibitions against sexual lust in the heart, adultery,

and divorce there are calls to give to the poor (Matthew 6:1-

4) and to refrain from overwork and materialism (Matthew

6:19-24).

In Western society these sets of concerns have often been

split off from one another. In fact, each of America’s two

main political parties has built its platform on one of these

sets of ethical prescriptions to the near exclusion of the

other. Conservatism stresses the importance of personal

morality, especially the importance of traditional sexual

mores and hard work, and feels that liberal charges of

racism and social injustice are overblown. On the other

hand, liberalism stresses social justice, and considers

conservative emphases on moral virtue to be prudish and

psychologically harmful. Each side, of course, thinks the

other side is smug and self-righteous.

It is not only the political parties that fail to reflect this

“whole cloth” Biblical agenda. The churches of America are

often more controlled by the surrounding political culture

than by the spirit of Jesus and the prophets. Conservative

churches tend to concentrate on one set of sins, while

liberal ones concentrate on another set. Jesus, like the Old

Testament prophets, does not see two categories of

morality. In Amos 2:7, we read, “They trample the heads of

the poor; father and son go in to the same girl.” The prophet

condemns social injustice and sexual licentiousness in

virtually the same breath (cf. Isaiah 5:8ff). Such

denunciations cut across all current conventional political

agendas. The Biblical perspective sees sexual immorality

and material selfishness as both flowing from self-

centeredness rather than God-centeredness.

Raymond Fung, an evangelist in Hong Kong, tells of how

he was speaking to a textile worker about the Christian

faith, and he urged him to come and visit a church. The man

could not go to a service on Sunday without losing a day’s

wages, but he did so. After the service Fung and the man

went to lunch. The worker said, “Well, the sermon hit me.” It

had been about sin. “What the preacher said was true of me

—laziness, a violent temper, and addiction to cheap

entertainment.” Fung held his breath, trying to control his

excitement. Had the gospel message gotten through? He

was disappointed. “Nothing was said about my boss,” the

man said to Fung. When the preacher had gone through the

list of sins, he had said, “Nothing about how he employs

child laborers, how he doesn’t give us the legally required

holidays, how he puts on false labels, how he forces us to do

overtime. . . .” Fung knew that members of the

management class were sitting in the congregation, but

those sins were never mentioned. The textile worker agreed

that he was a sinner, but he rejected the message of the

church because he sensed its incompleteness. Harvie Conn,

who related this story in one of his books, added that gospel

preaching that targets some sins but not the sins of

oppression “cannot possibly work among the overwhelming

majority of people in the world, poor peasants and

workers.”58

Jesus’s New Community

The early church responded to Jesus’s calls for justice and

mercy. The apostle Paul viewed ministry to the poor as so

important that it was one of the last things he admonished

the Ephesian church to do before he left them for the last

time. In his farewell address, Paul was able to ground this

duty in the teaching of Jesus. “We must help the poor,” he

said, “remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said, ‘It

is more blessed to give than to receive’” (Acts 20:35). You

don’t use your “last words” without saying something that is

all-important to you. For Paul it was: “Don’t only preach—

help the poor.”

Though the church was no longer a nation-state like Israel,

the New Testament writers recognized the concern for

justice and mercy in the Mosaic legislation and applied it to

the church community in a variety of ways. Many Mosaic

laws worked toward diminishing the great gap that tends to

grow between rich and poor. From the law of “Jubilee”

(Leviticus 25) to the rules for gathering manna in Exodus 16,

the principle was to increase “equality.” When Paul wrote

the Corinthian church to ask for an offering to relieve

starving Christians in Palestine, he quoted Exodus 16:18 and

then said, “At the present time your plenty will supply what

they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you

need. Then there will be equality” (2 Corinthians 8:14).

The New Testament book of James contains some of the

most severe condemnation of those who keep their wealth

to themselves. James says to the rich: “You have hoarded

wealth in the last days. . . . Look!

The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your

fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters

have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived

on earth in luxury and self-indulgence” (James 5:1-6). This

call could have been lifted right from Isaiah, Jeremiah, or

Amos.

No Needy among Them

The book of Acts gives us the most extensive look at the

how the early Christians lived their lives together. The very

earliest glimpse is in Acts 2:42-47. The gift of the Spirit is

given in Acts 2:38, and what results is koinonia—a well-

known Greek word that is usually translated “fellowship.”

However, the meaning of the word is unpacked in verses 44-

45: “All the believers were together and had everything in

common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to

anyone who had need.” Since there were three thousand

initial converts, according to Acts 2:41, it almost certainly

does not mean they formed a commune and actually shared

living quarters. Later, in Acts 4, we are told that those

believers with more in the way of wealth and possessions

frequently liquidated them and gave the cash to the

apostles, who then distributed it to those members of the

community who were poor (Acts 4:34-37). Because of this

radical generosity,

there were no needy persons among them. For from

time to time those who owned lands or houses sold

them, brought the money from the sales, and put it at

the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as

he had need.

Acts 4:34-35 59

This statement is more significant than it looks.

Remember the key Old Testament text, Deuteronomy 15, in

which God declared that if his people obeyed him as they

should, no permanent poverty could exist in their midst.

“There should be no poor among you” (Deuteronomy 15:4).

This was the pinnacle of the “social righteousness”

legislation of the Old Testament, which expressed God’s love

for the vulnerable and his zeal to see poverty and want

eliminated. It is remarkable, then, that Acts 4:34 is a direct

quote from Deuteronomy 15:4. “It cannot be accidental that

Luke, in his portrayal of the beginnings of the . . .

community of the Holy Spirit, chose to describe them in

words taken almost directly from [Deuteronomy 15:4].”60 In

Deuteronomy, believers were called to open their hands to

the needy as far as there was need, until they were self-

sufficient. The New Testament calls Christians to do the

same (1 John 3:16-17; cf. Deuteronomy 15:7-8).

Acts gives us more insight into the love and justice of the

early church. Just as in the Old Testament a special class of

officials was set apart to help with the needy—priests and

Levites—so in the New Testament, some were set apart for

the same work. The church in Jerusalem conducted a

ministry called the “daily diakonia” (Acts 6:1). This was a

daily distribution of food and other resources to poor widows

who were fully supported by the church. This ministry grew

until it became too big and complicated for the elders to

administer, so they set apart a new group to lead it. Later in

the epistles of Paul, those leading this ministry are called

“deacons” (Philippians 1:1; 1 Timothy 3:8-13). The Greek

word diakonia came to mean “humble service to practical

needs” in the New Testament, and “diaconal ministry” was a

crucial part of the community life of the early church.

But while Christians are to definitely care for the material

needs of their brothers and sisters within the Christian

community, are they under obligation to care for their poor

neighbors, the poor of the world? It is true that the social

legislation of the Old Testament is largely about caring for

the needy inside the believing community. Also most

examples of generosity in the New Testament are of care for

the poor within the church, such as the support for widows

(Acts 6:1-7; 1 Timothy 5:3-16). Even Jesus’s parable of the

Sheep and the Goats uses the test of caring for those whom

Jesus calls “the least of these my brothers,” probably

referring to poor believers. Some of this is common sense.

Our first responsibility is to our own families and relations (1

Timothy 5:8), and our second responsibility is to other

members of the community of faith (Galatians 6:10).

However, the Bible is clear that Christians’ practical love,

their generous justice, is not to be confined to only those

who believe as we do. Galatians 6:10 strikes the balance

when Paul says: “Do good to all people, especially the family

of faith.” Helping “all people” is not optional, it is a

command. We don’t have to look only to the New Testament

to learn this. One of the four vulnerable classes protected by

the Hebrew prophets was that of the immigrant. While

foreigners residing in Israel could convert, the injunction to

provide them with shelter and guard their legal rights was

not qualified by whether they had entered the covenant or

not. That showed that Israel’s justice and compassion was

not to be confined to only its own believing community.

But the most famous and powerful statement of Jesus on

what it means to love our neighbor is found in his parable of

the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25- 37). That important

teaching deserves a chapter of its own.61

FOUR

JUSTICE AND YOUR NEIGHBOR

Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the

man who fell into the hands of the robbers?

Luke 10:36

Who Is My Neighbor?

The single mother, the woman our deacons were so

frustrated with, was literally our church’s neighbor. She

rented a small house just a few feet away from our church

property. Even the deacons who were the most negative

about her behavior felt some kind of responsibility to help

her. Why? Because one of the main themes of the Bible is

that believers should love their neighbor. This was part of

the Mosaic law (Leviticus 19:18), and its language is cited

repeatedly in the New Testament (Matthew 5:43; 19:19;

Romans 13:9; Galatians 5:14; James 2:8). However, the text

that most informs Christians’ relationships with their

neighbors is the parable of the Good Samaritan.62

In Luke 10:25 an expert in Biblical law stood up in public

and asked Jesus a question. Luke tells us that the law expert

wanted to put Jesus to the test, to trap him. Perhaps he had

seen how so many irreligious people flocked around Jesus

(Luke 15:1-2), people who did not diligently obey the law in

every facet of their lives, as did the Pharisees and other

religious leaders. The man may have been thinking

something like this: “Here is a false teacher who shows little

respect for the necessity of obeying the law of God!” So he

asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” He may

have expected Jesus to say something like, “Oh, you only

have to believe in me,” or some other statement that would

reveal him to be unconcerned with full obedience to God’s

Word.

Jesus, however, responded by asking the man a question.

“What is written in the law?” The only way to answer such a

question is either to spend a week reciting the whole body

of Mosaic regulations, or to give a summary of them. The

man took Jesus to mean the latter. It was commonly

understood that the entire Biblical moral code could be

summarized as two master commandments—to love God

with all the heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to love

one’s neighbor as oneself. The law expert recited these.

“That’s right,”

Jesus replied. “Do them, and you will live.” Just obey those

two commands fully, Jesus said, and you will have eternal

life.

It was a brilliant move. One of the problems with moralism

—the idea that you can merit God’s salvation by your good

works and moral efforts—is that it is profoundly hypocritical.

It cannot live up to its own standards. The Pharisees

concentrated on complying with the legal details of God’s

law. “You tithe mint, dill, and cummin,” Jesus once said to

the religious leaders (Matthew 23:23). That is, in seeking to

obey God’s law to give away a tenth of all their income,

they were careful to even tithe 10 percent of the cooking

herbs out of their garden. By devoting themselves to this

level of diligence, they comforted themselves that they

were keeping themselves acceptable to God.

But here Jesus beats them at their own game. In effect

Jesus’s message was something like this: “Have you actually

looked at the kind of righteous life that all these specific

laws are really after? Have you seen what kind of life God

really wants from you? Do you love God with every fiber of

your being every minute of the day? Do you meet the needs

of your neighbor with all the joy, energy, and fastidiousness

with which you meet your own needs? That is the kind of life

you owe your God and your fellow human beings. God

created you and sustains your life every second. He has

given you everything and therefore it is only fair that you

give him everything. If you can give God a life like that, you

will certainly merit eternal life.”

This was, of course, an impossibly high standard, but that

was the point. Jesus was showing the man the perfect

righteousness the law demanded so that he could see that

he was ultimately powerless to fulfill it. To use other

language, he was seeking to convict the man of sin, of the

impossibility of self-salvation, by using against him the very

law he knew so much about. Jesus said in effect: “My friend,

I do take the law seriously, even more seriously than you do.

If you can do what it commands, you will live.” He was

seeking to humble the man. Why? It is only if we truly see

the love God requires in his law that we will be willing and

able to receive the love God offers in his gospel of free

salvation through Jesus. Jesus was encouraging the man to

seek the grace of God.

The law expert is shaken by Jesus’s move. The text tells us

“he wanted to justify himself ” (verse 29), which, of course,

is what Jesus had discerned about his heart already. But

Jesus’s first effort was not enough to put him off his self-

justification project. Though he felt the weight of Jesus’s

argument, the man saw another way to defend himself. He

countered, “Who is my neighbor?”

The implication was clear. “OK, Jesus,” he was saying.

“Yes, I see that I have to love my neighbor—but what does

that really mean, and who does that really mean?” In other

words, the law expert wanted to whittle down this command

to make it more achievable, and to keep his works-

righteousness approach to life intact. “Surely,” he implied,

“you don’t mean I have to love and meet the needs of

everyone!”

The Good Samaritan

In response, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. A

Jewish man was riding through a mountainous, remote area

where he was robbed, beaten, and left in the road “half-

dead” (verse 30). Along came first a priest and then a

Levite, one of the temple workers who assisted the priests.

These were both people who should have stopped to give

aid, because the Jew was their brother in the faith. However,

they “pass by on the other side,” possibly because it would

have been extremely dangerous to stop on a desolate road

in a region infested with highwaymen.

Then a Samaritan came along the road. Samaritans and

Jews were the bitterest of enemies. Samaritans were seen

by Jews as racial “half-breeds” and religious heretics, and so

there was great animosity between them. Yet when the

Samaritan saw the man in the road, he was moved with

compassion. He braved the danger by stopping, giving him

emergency medical aid, and then transporting him to an

inn. He then paid the innkeeper and charged him to care for

the man until he had fully recuperated. That would have

been a substantial expense.

What was Jesus doing with this story? He was giving a

radical answer to the question, What does it mean to love

your neighbor? What is the definition of “love”? Jesus

answered that by depicting a man meeting material,

physical, and economic needs through deeds. Caring for

people’s material and economic needs is not an option for

Jesus. He refused to allow the law expert to limit the

implications of this command to love. He said it meant being

sacrificially involved with the vulnerable, just as the

Samaritan risked his life by stopping on the road.

But Jesus refuses to let us limit not only how we love, but

who we love. It is typical for us to think of our neighbors as

people of the same social class and means (cf. Luke 14:12).

We instinctively tend to limit for whom we exert ourselves.

We do it for people like us, and for people whom we like.

Jesus will have none of that. By depicting a Samaritan

helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful

way to say that anyone at all in need—regardless of race,

politics, class, and religion—is your neighbor. Not everyone

is your brother or sister in the faith, but everyone is your

neighbor, and you must love your neighbor.

Objections to Jesus

I have preached this parable over the years, and it always

raises a host of questions and objections, many of which

sound like the kind of questions that the law expert would

have asked. No one has helped me answer these questions

more than Jonathan Edwards, who was minister of the

congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts, from

1729 to 1751. Despite how long ago he wrote, both the

questions he fielded and the answers he gave are

remarkably up-to-date.

Edwards became aware of growing poverty and increasing

social stratification in his town.63 Some of the reasons for

this were socioeconomic. By 1730, most of the town’s

usable land had been parceled out, and it was difficult for

newcomers or young families to get an economic foothold.

Conflicts grew between creditors and debtors, long-term

residents and newcomers, old and young. But Edwards also

believed that the reason for the rising tension between the

haves and the havenots was spiritual. In 1733 he preached

a sermon entitled “The Duty of Charity to the Poor.”64 The

word “neighbor” is found in the sermon nearly sixty times,

and the discourse stands as one of the most thoroughgoing

applications of the parable of the Good Samaritan to a body

of believers that can be found anywhere. 65 The heart of the

sermon is a set of answers to a series of common objections

Edwards always heard whenever he preached or spoke

about the duty of sharing money and goods with the poor.

All of the questions sought to put limits on the Biblical

injunction to love their neighbor.

One of the objections was “Though they be needy, yet

they are not in extremity. [They are not destitute.]” I

remember one of my parishioners responding to one of my

sermons in a similar manner. “All the poor people in my part

of town have nice TV sets. They aren’t starving,” he said.

But Edwards says that this hardheartedness is not in accord

with the Biblical command to love your neighbor as yourself.

We don’t wait until we are in “extremity” before doing

something about our condition, he argued, so why should

we wait until our neighbor is literally starving before we

help?66 Edwards goes further, and asks if Christians who say

this remember that we are to love others as Christ loved us.

“The Christian spirit will make us apt to sympathize with our

neighbor when we see him under any difficulty . . . we ought

to have such a spirit of love to him that we should be

afflicted with him in his affliction.”67 Christ literally walked in

our shoes and entered into our affliction. Those who will not

help others until they are destitute reveal that Christ’s love

has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the

gospel should make them.

Another objection comes from people who say they “have

nothing to spare” and that they barely have enough for their

own needs. But one of the main lessons of the Good

Samaritan parable is that real love entails risk and sacrifice.

Edwards responds that when you say, “I can’t help anyone,”

you usually mean, “I can’t help anyone without burdening

myself, cutting in to how I live my life.” But, Edwards

argues, that’s exactly what Biblical love requires. He writes:

We in many cases may, by the rule of the gospel, be

obliged to give to others when we can’t without

suffering ourselves. . . . If our neighbor’s difficulties and

necessities are much greater than ours and we see that

they are not like to be relieved, we should be willing to

suffer with them and to take part of their burden upon

ourselves. Or else how is that rule fulfilled of bearing

one another’s burdens? If we are never obliged to

relieve others’ burdens but only when we can do it

without burdening ourselves, then how do we bear our

neighbor’s burdens, when we bear no burden at all?68

Two other objections Edwards takes on are that the poor

person “is of a very ill temper; he is of an ungrateful spirit”

and “he has brought himself to his [poverty] by his own

fault.” These are both abiding problems with helping the

poor. These objections were behind the deacon’s opposition

to giving the single mother next door any more aid. We all

want to help kind-hearted, upright people, whose poverty

came upon them through no foolishness or contribution of

their own, and who will respond to our aid with gratitude

and joy. However, almost no one like that exists. As we saw

in chapter 2, the causes of poverty are complex and

intertwined. And while it is important that our aid to the

poor really helps them and doesn’t create dependency,

Edwards makes short work of these objections by, again,

appealing to the gospel itself.

In dealing with the objection that many of the poor do not

have upright, moral characters, he counters that we did not

either, and yet Christ put himself out for us:

Christ loved us, and was kind to us, and was willing to

relieve us, though we were very hateful persons, of an

evil disposition, not deserving of any good . . . so we

should be willing to be kind to those who are . . . very

undeserving.69

When answering the objection that the poor have often

contributed to their condition, Edwards is remarkably

balanced yet insistently generous. He points out that it is

possible some people simply do not have “a natural faculty

to manage affairs to advantage.” In other words, some

people persistently make sincere but very bad decisions

about money and possessions. Edwards says we should

consider the lack of this faculty to be almost like being born

with impaired eyesight:

Such a faculty is a gift that God bestows on some, and

not on others. And it is not owing to themselves. . . .

This is as reasonable as that he to whom Providence has

imparted sight should be willing to help him to whom

sight is denied, and that he should have the benefit of

the sight of others, who has none of his own. . . .70

But what if their economic plight is more directly the

result of selfish, indolent, or violent behavior? As Edwards

puts it in the language of his time, what if “they are come to

want by a vicious idleness and prodigality”? He counters

that “we are not thereby excused from all obligation to

relieve them, unless they continue in those vices.” Then he

explains why. Christ found us in the same condition. Our

spiritual bankruptcy was due to our own sin, yet he came

and gave us what we needed.

The rules of the gospel direct us to forgive them . . .

[for] Christ hath loved us, pitied us, and greatly laid out

himself to relieve us from that want and misery which

we brought on ourselves by our own folly and

wickedness. We foolishly and perversely threw away

those riches with which we were provided, upon which

we might have lived and been happy to all eternity.71

At this point, the listener may discern a loophole. Edwards

says that we should not continue to aid a poor person if that

person continues to act “viciously” and to persist in the

same behavior. Yet Edwards has a final blow to strike. What

about the rest of the person’s family? Sometimes, he says,

we will need to give aid to families even when the parents

act irresponsibly, for the children’s sake. “If they continue in

the same courses still, yet . . . if we can’t relieve those of

their families without them having something of it, yet that

ought not to be a bar in the way of our charity.”72

Using this argument of Edwards, I got our deacons to

continue their aid to the single mother. As time went on it

became clearer to the deacons that the reason she had

squandered the church’s money on restaurants and new

bikes was that she felt terribly guilty for the poor life she

was giving her kids. “It’s so hard being the child of a single

mom in this town. And I can’t buy them the nice things

other kids get.” When she had the church’s money in hand,

she could not resist the temptation to take the children out

to restaurants and buy them bikes, because it made her

children feel like they were now part of a normal family.

When we began to look at her in this light, her behavior

not only made more sense, but our hearts were touched.

Her actions were not simply selfish. Nevertheless, she had

not kept her word to us, and we showed her that what she

had done was shortsighted. She needed to get out from

under her most urgent debts, like utility bills, rent, and

medical fees. Then she needed to have a plan to acquire

better skills and a better job. To give her children a better

life she needed a plan and the discipline to carry it out. We

were willing to help her with that longer-term plan if she

would work with us responsibly in the near term. The

deacons recognized, however, that her children needed a lot

of support. They needed “big brothers” and “big sisters,”

tutors and mentors who did not steal their love from their

mother but strengthened their respect for her. In other

words, this family needed much more than a financial

subsidy.

She agreed to work with the deacons, and over a longer

period of time, the family’s life began to improve. Without

the Good Samaritan parable, and the thorough, thoughtful

application of its principles by Jonathan Edwards, we would

have missed this whole opportunity. We might have said,

“When you talk about loving our neighbor, you can’t mean

someone like her, can you?”

The Great Samaritan

One of the remarkable “twists” that Jesus gave to his

parable was the placement of the Jewish man in the story.

Remember that Jesus was telling this story to a Jewish man,

the law expert. What if Jesus had told the parable like this?

A Samaritan was beaten up and left half dead in a road.

Then a Jewish man came along the road. He saw him

and had compassion on him and ministered to him.

How would the law expert and his Jewish hearers have

responded? They most likely would have said, “This is a

ridiculous story! No self-respecting Jew would ever do such a

thing. This is just what I suspected. You make unrealistic,

outrageous demands on people.”

But instead, Jesus put a Jew in the road as the victim. In

other words, he was asking each listener to imagine himself

to be a victim of violence, dying, with no hope if this

Samaritan did not stop and help. How would you want the

Samaritan to act if that was your situation? Wouldn’t you

want him to be a neighbor to you, across all racial and

religious barriers? Of course you would. Jesus was saying

something like this:

What if your only hope was to get ministry from

someone who not only did not owe you any help—but

who actually owed you the opposite? What if your only

hope was to get free grace from someone who had

every justification, based on your relationship to him, to

trample you?

And so Jesus ended the story with a question: “Who was

the neighbor to the man in the road?” The law expert must

admit that it was “the one who showed mercy” (verse 37).

He had to agree that, if he had been the needy man in the

road, and had been offered neighbor-love from someone

from whom he would have expected rejection, he would

have nonetheless accepted it. It was only then that Jesus

says: “Go and do likewise.” He had made his case, and the

law expert had no rejoinder. Your neighbor is anyone in

need.

But the law expert did not have the vantage point to see

what we can see. According to the Bible, we are all like that

man, dying in the road. Spiritually, we are “dead in

trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:5). But when Jesus came

into our dangerous world, he came down our road. And

though we had been his enemies, he was moved with

compassion by our plight (Romans 5:10). He came to us and

saved us, not merely at the risk of his life, as in the case of

the Samaritan, but at the cost of his life. On the cross he

paid a debt we could never have paid ourselves. Jesus is the

Great Samaritan to whom the Good Samaritan points.

Before you can give this neighbor-love, you need to

receive it. Only if you see that you have been saved

graciously by someone who owes you the opposite will you

go out into the world looking to help absolutely anyone in

need. Once we receive this ultimate, radical neighbor-love

through Jesus, we can start to be the neighbors that the

Bible calls us to be.

FIVE

WHY SHOULD WE DO JUSTICE?

Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily

food. If one of you says, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm

and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical

needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself,

if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

James 2:15-17

Our family moved to Manhattan in 1989 to plant a new

church, Redeemer Presbyterian. Because it was a brand-new

church in a very secular place, many of the people who

came into our congregation had little in the way of church

background. One woman who was very prosperous

discovered that her new faith brought with it many new,

hitherto unthinkable ideas about race and class. Specifically,

she realized that she now had more in common with

Christians who were poor than she did with many others of

her own social class. In fact, she recognized in poor

believers a love for God and a wisdom that she considered

often superior to her own. Any sense of superiority or even

paternalistic pity toward the poor began to fade away.

What was going on? The experience of the grace through

the gospel of Jesus was changing this woman’s attitudes

and motivation, even before she came into any contact with

the ethical injunctions to give to the poor. It is to this all-

important subject we turn in this chapter.

The Importance of Motivation

You could make a good argument that our problem in

society today is not that people don’t know they should

share with others and help the poor. Most people do know

and believe this. The real problem is that, while knowing it,

they are insufficiently motivated to actually do it. Therefore,

there is no greater question than how to motivate people to

do what they ought for the hungry and poor of the world.

Arthur Leff, former professor at Yale Law School, wrote:

Looking around the world, it appears that if all men are

brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither

reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked

to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no

reason why anything should.73

Leff chalks up our failure not to the fact we don’t know

what is right to do—we do—but to the lack of a sufficient,

driving motivation to do it. One of the concerns of Leff’s

essay is that we now live in a relativistic age, in which it is

virtually impossible to convince people that there is an

absolute moral standard that they must bow to, whether

they like it or not. So to get people to be just and generous

we appeal to love, or to practical reason. For example, we

argue: “Don’t you see that it is eminently practical to honor

human rights, to care about the environment, to generously

direct resources toward the poor, to live peaceably with

those of different races, religions, and nationalities? The

world will be such a better place for everyone if we all do

this!” But nothing has worked, he concludes.

I think Leff is correct, that appeals to love and mercy do

not work any more than appeals to reason. If so, philosopher

Richard Rorty is wrong in his analysis. In “Human Rights,

Rationality, and Sentimentality” he agrees with Leff and

others that we now live in a relativistic age, in which no one

has any right to say there are moral absolutes. Rorty writes

that, to the question “Why should I care about a stranger, a

person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find

disgusting?” the older answer was “Because you have a

moral obligation to her.” We can no longer give that answer

in our society, Rorty argues, because who is to say what the

universal moral obligations are? Instead, Rorty says:

A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad,

sentimental story which begins “Because this is what it

is like to be in her situation—to be far from home,

among strangers,” or “Because she might become your

daughter-in-law,” or “Because her mother would grieve

for her.” Such stories, repeated and varied over the

centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful,

people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless

people—people whose appearance or habits or beliefs

at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our

sense of the limits of permissible human variation. 74

Leff, for his part, disagrees, and with good cause. Was it

sad, sentimental stories that ended apartheid in South

Africa or segregation in the South, or was it very direct

political action? Do we think more sad, sentimental stories

could change the views of the Serbs toward Bosnians, and

vice versa?

Now we can see what an important and powerful resource

the Bible gives us when it provides not merely the bare

ethical obligation for doing justice, but a revolutionary new

inner power and dynamism to do so. The Bible gives

believers two basic motivations—joyful awe before the

goodness of God’s creation, and the experience of God’s

grace in redemption.

Honoring the Image

One Biblical motivation for doing justice is to look to the

beginning of the Bible, to the creation, where Genesis 1:26

-27 tells us: “So God created man in his own image.” What

does being an “image” mean? It conveys the idea of being a

work of art or of great craftsmanship. Human beings are not

accidents, but creations. Without a belief in creation, we are

forced to face the implication that ultimately there is no

good reason to treat human beings as having dignity. Chief

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said it well when he

wrote:

When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to

man a significance different in kind from that which

belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.75

Contrast this with the implications of the Biblical view of

humanity, made in the image of God, made to live with God

for eternity. C. S. Lewis writes:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a

mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these

are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. It

is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry,

snub, and exploit. . . .76

The word “image” also can mean “to resemble,” as a child

resembles a parent, or “to represent,” as a mirror reflects

and represents an object. A mirror can’t depict an object in

all its dimensions, yet the image upon it is a true likeness.

What is it about us that resembles or reflects God? Over the

years thinkers have pointed to human rationality,

personality, and creativity, or to our moral and aesthetic

sense and our deep need for and ability to give love in

relationships. All of this and much more goes into being the

image of God, though we must beware of trying to nail it

down into a list.

The Bible teaches that the sacredness of God has in some

ways been imparted to humanity, so that every human life

is sacred and every human being has dignity. When God put

his image upon us, we became beings of infinite,

inestimable value. In Genesis 9:5-6, we read the reason that

God considered murder to be so heinous. “For your lifeblood

I will surely demand an accounting,” he said, “. . . for in his

own image God has made man.” In James 3:9, the writer

castigates sharp-tongued people. It is a considerably less

serious evil than murder, and yet he forbids all verbal abuse

because such miscreants “curse men, who have been made

in God’s likeness.” There is something so valuable about

human beings that not only may they not be murdered, but

they can’t even be cursed without failing to give them their

due, based on the worth bestowed upon them by God. The

image of God carries with it the right to not be mistreated or

harmed.

All human beings have this right, this worth, according to

the Bible. Notice that neither Genesis nor James limits the

prohibition on abusive behavior to “good” people.

Regardless of their record or character, all human beings

have an irreducible glory and significance to them, because

God loves them, indeed, he “loves all that he has made”

(Psalms 145:9, 17). He loves even those who turn away from

him (Ezekiel 33:11; John 3:16).77 This bestows a worth on

them. Nicholas Wolterstorff gives us an example of how this

works. He imagines some foreigner, knowing nothing about

U.S. history, becoming perplexed to find that the Mount

Vernon estate in Virginia is preserved as a national

monument and treated as an object of such great worth.

After all, she might observe, there are quite a number of old

Virginia plantation houses of much greater architectural

merit and beauty than Mount Vernon. We would respond

that this was the house of George Washington, the founder

of our country, and that explains it. The internal merits and

quality of the house are irrelevant. Because we treasure the

owner, we honor his house.78 Because it was precious to

him, and we revere him, it is precious to us. So we must

treasure each and every human being as a way of showing

due respect for the majesty of their owner and Creator.

The Image of God and Civil Rights

I’m not sure that we understand what a radical notion this

is. Aristotle said famously that some people are born to be

slaves. Why did he think that? Aristotle and other Greek

philosophers believed that the dignity of human beings

resided in certain capacities, in particular, rationality. In

their view, rational beings had dignity and rights worthy of

respect, but not all human beings were equally rational.

Aristotle wrote:

. . . [H]e who participates in rational principle enough to

apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave

by nature. Whereas the lower animals cannot even

apprehend a [rational] principle; they obey their

instincts. . . . Nature would like to distinguish between

the bodies of freemen and slaves, making the one

strong for servile labor, the other upright, and although

useless for such services, useful for political life in the

arts both of war and peace. . . . It is clear, then, that

some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and

that for these latter slavery is both expedient and

right.79

Aristotle was merely reflecting our natural intuitions. Does

our actual experience of life lead us to believe that every

human being is equally valuable and has equal dignity? No.

The default mode of the human heart is to label some

people “barbarians.” We still do it today, but in ancient

times, it was just common sense that some kinds of people

had dignity and deserved respect while others did not at all.

The doctrine of the image of God, however, allows no such

distinctions. A recent book by Richard Wayne Wills, Martin

Luther King, Jr., and the Image of God (Oxford, 2009), makes

the case that the doctrine of the image of God was at the

very heart of the Civil Rights Movement. In a sermon

entitled “The American Dream,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said:

You see, the founding fathers were really influenced by

the Bible. The whole concept of the imago dei, as it is

expressed in Latin, the “image of God,” is the idea that

all men have something within them that God injected.

Not that they have substantial unity with God, but that

every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God.

And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it

gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a

nation: There are no gradations in the image of God.

Every man from a treble white to a bass black is

significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every

man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn

that. We will know one day that God made us to live

together as brothers and to respect the dignity and

worth of every man. This is why we must fight

segregation with all of our nonviolent might.80

The image of God, then, is the first great motivation for

living lives of generous justice, serving the needs and

guarding the rights of those around us. It brings humility

before the greatness of each human being made and loved

by God. C. S. Lewis expressed it this way:

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory

should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that

only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud

will be broken. . . . This does not mean that we are to be

perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment

must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind)

which exists between people who have, from the outset,

taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority,

no presumption. And our charity must be a real and

costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of

which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or

indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies

merriment. . . .81

Recognizing God’s Ownership

There is another important way in which the doctrine of

creation motivates Christians toward sharing their resources

with others. If God is the Creator and author of all things,

that means everything we have in life belongs to God.

In Genesis 1, God gives Adam and Eve “dominion” over

the creation. This was a call to leadership, but it was also a

call to stewardship. God made Adam and Eve “rulers over

the works of [God’s] hands” (Psalms 8:8) but “the earth is

the Lord’s, and everything in it” (Psalms 24:1). In other

words, God gave humanity authority over the world’s

resources but not ownership. We have received what we

have in the way a fund manager receives other people’s

money to invest, or as, in ancient times, the steward of an

estate received his authority over the estate. The steward of

a great estate lived comfortably and enjoyed the fruits of his

labor, but he never made the mistake of thinking that the

wealth under his care was all his. He was tasked to manage

it in a way that pleased the owner and was fair to his fellow

servants.

This concept is counterintuitive for most Americans. We

believe that if we have had success in life, it is mainly the

result of our own hard work, and we therefore have an

absolute right to use our money as we see fit. But while the

Bible agrees industriousness or the lack of it is an

irreplaceable part of why you are successful or not (Proverbs

6:9-11; 10:4), it is never the main reason. If you had been

born on a mountaintop in Tibet in the thirteenth century,

instead of a Western country in the twentieth century, then

no matter how hard you worked, you wouldn’t have had

much to show for it. If you have money, power, and status

today, it is due to the century and place in which you were

born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of

which you earned. In short, all your resources are in the end

the gift of God. That is why David, the wealthiest man in

Israel, prayed:

Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the

glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything

in heaven and earth is yours. . . . Wealth and honor

come from you; you are the ruler of all things. In your

hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength

to all. . . . But who am I, and who are my people, that we

should be able to give as generously as this? Everything

comes from you, and we have given you only what

comes from your hand.

1 Chronicles 29:11-14

Because David understood this principle—that ultimately

all we have is a gift of God—he does not view his wealth as

fully his own. Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke

concludes, after studying both the word mishpat and its

kindred word tzadeqah (righteousness), that in the Old

Testament

the righteous [tzaddiq] . . . are willing to disadvantage

themselves to advantage the community; the wicked

are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage

themselves.82

Therefore, just men and women see their money as

belonging in some ways to the entire human community

around them, while the unjust or unrighteous see their

money as strictly theirs and no one else’s. After all, they

earned it, and that’s the main reason they have it. That view

of life is naïve, as we have seen, and it collides head-on with

the Bible. So in Deuteronomy 24 we read:

When you are harvesting your field and you overlook a

sheaf, do not go back and get it. It is for the immigrant,

the fatherless, and the widow. . . .

Deuteronomy 24:14,17,19

The reference to the harvest was an exhortation to

landowners to allow the poor to “glean.” If we read this text

closely, we see that part of the landowner’s harvest was

“for” the immigrant and poor. That means that in God’s

eyes, it was actually theirs.83 We should be careful not to

think this means that the land belonged to the poor—it

belonged ultimately to God and provisionally to the

landowner. In God’s view, however, while the poor did not

have a right to the ownership of the farmer’s land, they had

a right to some of its produce. If the owner did not limit his

profits and provide the poor with an opportunity to work for

their own benefit in the fields, he did not simply deprive the

poor of charity but of justice, of their right. Why? A lack of

generosity refuses to acknowledge that your assets are not

really yours, but God’s.

Here is another example. Think of the millions of children

and teenagers in this country who have grown up in poverty.

They attend failing schools and live in an environment

unconducive to reading and learning. By the time they are

in their teens many of them are functionally illiterate. This

locks them into poverty or worse. It is estimated that a

majority of convicts in prison are illiterate. Who is to blame?

Conservatives may argue that this is the parents’ fault. It

is due to a failure of moral character and the breakdown of

the family. Liberals, however, see it as a failure of

government to stem systemic racism and to change unjust

social structures. But nobody says that it is the children’s

fault they were born where they were. Those children are in

poverty largely because they were not born into a family like

mine. My three sons, just by being born where they were,

have a far better chance to have a flourishing, happy life in

society. There is an inequitable distribution of both goods

and opportunities in this world. Therefore, if you have been

assigned the goods of this world by God and you don’t share

them with others, it isn’t just stinginess, it is injustice.

Responding to God’s Grace

As important as the doctrine of creation is, the most

frequently cited Biblical motivation for doing justice is the

grace of God in redemption. This theme does not just begin

in the New Testament. In Deuteronomy, Moses said to the

people:

Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-

necked any longer. For the LORD your God is God of

gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and

awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no

bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the

widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and

clothing. And you are to love those who are aliens, for

you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.

Deuteronomy 10:16 -19

The Israelites had been poor, racial outsiders in Egypt.

How then, Moses asks, could they be callous to the poor,

racial outsiders in their own midst? Through Moses, God

said: “Israel, you were liberated by me. You did not

accomplish it—I performed it for you, by my grace. Now do

the same for others. Untie the yoke, unlock the shackles,

feed and clothe them, as I did for you.”84 Of particular

interest is Moses’s exhortation to “circumcise your hearts”

(verse 16). Circumcision was the external sign that a family

had come into a covenant relationship with God. Heart

circumcision was a passionate commitment to God on the

inside. Meeting the needs of the orphan, the widow, and the

poor immigrant was a sign that the Israelites’ relationship

with God was not just formal and external but internal as

well.

The logic is clear. If a person has grasped the meaning of

God’s grace in his heart, he will do justice. If he doesn’t live

justly, then he may say with his lips that he is grateful for

God’s grace, but in his heart he is far from him. If he doesn’t

care about the poor, it reveals that at best he doesn’t

understand the grace he has experienced, and at worst he

has not really encountered the saving mercy of God. Grace

should make you just.

Another example of this reasoning is found in Isaiah 58:2.

God sees the Israelites fasting. The only fast commanded by

law was for the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur (Leviticus

23:26 -32). All during the year the Israelites were to obey

the moral law diligently, but God knew that this was not

something that they would ever do satisfactorily or

sufficiently. Our sins create a barrier between God and us,

but by his grace the Lord makes a provision for sin. So once

a year the high priest entered the sanctuary of the

tabernacle and offered a blood sacrifice, atoning for the sins

of the people. The Day of Atonement meant that God’s

relationship with his people was based on grace and

forgiveness. That was why fasting was an appropriate way

to observe Yom Kippur. By abstaining from pleasures,

particularly food, they exhibited humility before God and

showed they believed in the basic message of Yom Kippur,

namely, that we are all sinners saved by grace.

But God was deeply displeased with the Israelites’ fasting:

Why have we fasted,” they say, “and you have not seen

it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not

noticed?” “Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you

please and exploit all your workers. . . . Is this the kind

of fast I have chosen, only a day for a man to humble

himself? Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed and

for lying on sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a

fast, a day acceptable to the LORD?”

Isaiah 58:3-5

God sees economically comfortable people abstaining

from food, “going without” for a day or two, but not being

willing to abstain from exploiting their workers. Though they

demonstrate the external sign of belief in grace—fasting—

their lives reveal that their hearts have not been changed.

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the

chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set

the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to

share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor

wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to

clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh

and blood?

Isaiah 58:3,5-7

Fasting should be a symbol of a pervasive change across

the whole face of one’s life. People changed by grace should

go, as it were, on a permanent fast. Self-indulgence and

materialism should be given up and replaced by a sacrificial

lifestyle of giving to those in need. They should spend not

only their money but “themselves” (verse 10) on others.

What is this permanent fasting? It is to work against

injustice, to share food, clothing, and home with the hungry

and the homeless. That is the real proof that you believe

your sins have been atoned for, and that you have truly

been humbled by that knowledge and are now living a life

submitted to God and shaped by knowledge of him. People

who fast and pray ritually but still show pride and

haughtiness toward the poor and needy reveal that no true

humbling has ever penetrated their hearts. If you look down

at the poor and stay aloof from their suffering, you have not

really understood or experienced God’s grace.

It is difficult not to think of the elder brother in Jesus’s

parable of the prodigal son. The people God addresses, like

the elder brother, complain that God is not doing their will,

and that they deserve his support since they have been so

obedient. But the truth is that their obedience is only formal

and external; it is filled with self-righteousness and is

motivated by a desire to control God, not actually serve him.

Such people show they are complying with religious

observances as a way of “getting ahead” with God and

others. This deadly spiritual condition shows itself in a lack

of loving service toward others, and particularly an

indifference to the poor.

Justification and Justice

Is the reasoning of the New Testament any different? No, not

at all. One of the main themes of the writings of Paul is

justification by faith. Many religions teach that if you live as

you ought, then God will accept and bless you. But Paul

taught that if you receive God’s acceptance and blessing as

a free gift through Jesus Christ, then you can and will live as

you ought. During the Reformation, reformers like Martin

Luther and John Calvin rediscovered and restated this

doctrine. Though we deserve the wrath of God and

punishment for our sin, Jesus Christ came and stood in our

place. He lived the life we should have lived and therefore

earned the blessing of salvation that such a perfect life

deserves. But at the end he died on the cross and took the

curse that our imperfect lives deserve. When we repent and

believe in Jesus, all the punishment we are due is taken

away, having been borne by him, and all the honor he is due

for his righteous life and death is given to us. We are now

loved and treated by God as if we had done all the great

things that Jesus did.85 Martin Luther gave this teaching a

classic, bold expression in the preface to his commentary on

the Galatians:

There is a righteousness which Paul calls “the

righteousness of faith.” God imputes it to us apart from

our works. . . . [Now] though I am a sinner in myself,

with regard to the moral law, . . . yet in that

righteousness I have no sin, no sting of conscience, no

fear of death. I have another righteousness and life

above this life, which is Christ the Son of God.86

When we come to the New Testament book of James, we

find what at first appears to be a contradiction of Paul, who

wrote that Christians are “justified freely by his grace”

(Romans 3:24) and “justified by faith apart from observing

the law . . . apart from works” (Romans 3:28; 4:6). But

James says:

What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have

faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?

. . . So faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

James 2:14,17

The contradiction is only apparent. While a sinner can get

into relationship with God by only faith (Paul), the ultimate

proof that you have saving faith is the changed life that true

faith inevitably produces (James).87 To bring Paul’s and

James’s teaching together, we can say: “We are saved by

faith alone, but not by a faith that remains alone. True faith

will always produce a changed life.”

However, James does not merely say that true faith will

change one’s life in general. He goes on to describe the

“works” that he says always accompany a living, justifying

faith.

Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily

food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well;

keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his

physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith

by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

James 2:15-16

If you look at someone without adequate resources and do

nothing about it, James teaches, your faith is “dead,” it is

not really saving faith. So what are the “works” he is talking

about? He is saying that a life poured out in deeds of service

to the poor is the inevitable sign of any real, true, justifying,

gospel-faith. Grace makes you just. If you are not just,

you’ve not truly been justified by faith.

Justification is the doctrine that God has not given us our

“just deserts.” Why, then, would the doctrine and

experience of justification lead a person to become more

involved in doing justice?

A Higher View of the Law

Let’s think for a moment about the alternatives to the

doctrine of justification by faith. Some people believe that if

human beings try hard enough to obey God they can be

saved. But believing that is to have an understanding of the

law that is a much “lower bar.” Jesus raised the bar infinitely

when he said, “You’ve heard it said, ‘Do not kill’ . . . but I say

to you anyone who is angry with his brother . . . who says to

his brother, ‘You fool’ . . . will be in danger of the fire of hell”

(Matthew 5:21-22). The view that we can only be justified by

grace rests in a very high view of the demands of God’s law.

Why can we never be saved by our own moral efforts? It is

because the law of God is so magnificent, just, and

demanding that we could never fulfill it.

There are other people who believe that God is not really

alienated from the human race because of our sin. In this

view, all Jesus did on the cross was to exhibit God’s love for

us. There was no punishment to be taken or penalty to be

paid. There was no “divine wrath” to be appeased. But

again, in this view we have a much lower view of God’s law.

The classic Christian doctrine is that on the cross Jesus

actually saved us by standing in our place and paying our

debt to the law of God. If the Lord takes his law so seriously

that he could not shrug off our disobedience to it, that he

had to become human, come to earth, and die a terrible

death—then we must take that law very seriously too. The

law of God demands equity and justice, and love of one’s

neighbor. People who believe strongly in the doctrine of

justification by faith alone will have this high regard for

God’s law and justice. They will be passionate about seeing

God’s justice honored in the world.

A New Attitude toward the Poor

At the beginning of the chapter I recounted the experience

of a prosperous woman who, after finding faith in Christ,

discovered that any sense of superiority toward the poor

was swept away. In the introduction I mentioned my friend

Easley, who discovered that the doctrine of justification

opened his eyes to his own racism. How does this happen?

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3),

and most scholars over the centuries have understood that

God’s blessing and salvation come to those who

“acknowledge spiritual bankruptcy.”88 It means to see that

you are deeply in debt before God, and you have no ability

to even begin to redeem yourself. God’s free generosity to

you, at infinite cost to him, was the only thing that saved

you. What if, however, you aren’t poor in spirit? That would

mean you don’t believe you are so sinful, morally bankrupt,

and lost that only free grace can possibly save you. You may

find the classic Christian doctrines about humanity’s deep

sin and lostness to be too harsh. On the contrary, you

believe that God owes you some things—he ought to answer

your prayers and to bless you for the many good things

you’ve done. Even though the Bible doesn’t use the term,

by inference we can say that you are “middle-class in

spirit.” You feel that you’ve earned a certain standing with

God through your hard work. You also may believe, as we

noted in the last chapter, that the success and the

resources you have are primarily due to your own industry

and energy.

My experience as a pastor has been that those who are

middle-class in spirit tend to be indifferent to the poor, but

people who come to grasp the gospel of grace and become

spiritually poor find their hearts gravitating toward the

materially poor. To the degree that the gospel shapes your

self-image, you will identify with those in need. You will see

their tattered clothes and think: “All my righteousness is a

filthy rag, but in Christ we can be clothed in his robes of

righteousness.” When you come upon those who are

economically poor, you cannot say to them, “Pull yourself up

by your bootstraps!” because you certainly did not do that

spiritually. Jesus intervened for you. And you cannot say, “I

won’t help you because you got yourself into this mess,”

since God came to earth, moved into your spiritually poor

neighborhood, as it were, and helped you even though your

spiritual problems were your own fault. In other words, when

Christians who understand the gospel see a poor person,

they realize they are looking into a mirror. Their hearts must

go out to him or her without an ounce of superiority or

indifference.

In his letter to the church, James says that the poor

Christian “ought to take pride in his high position” but the

rich Christian “ought to take pride in his low position,

because he will pass away like a wild-flower” (James 1:9-

10). This is a wonderfully paradoxical statement. Every

Christian in Christ is at the same time a sinner who deserves

death and also an adopted child of God, fully accepted and

loved. This is true of Christians regardless of their social

status. But James proposes that the well-off person who

becomes a believer would spiritually benefit by especially

thinking about her sinfulness before God, since out in the

world she gets nothing but acclaim. On the other hand, the

poor person who becomes a believer would spiritually

benefit by especially thinking about her new high spiritual

status, since out in the world she gets nothing but disdain.

Here we see why later James can say that concern for the

poor and generous sharing of wealth are the inevitable signs

of someone who has understood the gospel of grace. The

world makes social class into bottom-line identities. You are

your social status and bank account—that is the basis for

your self-regard. But in the gospel these things are demoted

and made peripheral. Someone who does not show any

signs of at least gradual identity transformation in this

manner does not give evidence of having really grasped the

gospel. Thus James can say that faith without respect, love,

and practical concern for the poor is dead. It’s not justifying,

gospel faith.

A New Attitude for the Poor

The gospel changes the identity of the well-off, so they have

a new respect and love for the poor. But, as James says, the

gospel also changes the self-understanding of the poor

person. In an essay, “Shopkeeper’s Gold,” Croatian

theologian Miroslav Volf tells of visiting Pastor Mark Gornik

and walking the streets of Sandtown with him. The

devastation of the U.S. neighborhood reminded Volf of

Vukovar in his homeland, “but this time the destroyer was

not war but racial tensions, crime, and economic ruin.”89 As

they walked, Gornik made a point, “almost in passing,” that

startled Volf. As he was explaining the blight of the inner

cities he suggested that the doctrine of justification by

grace contains untapped resources for healing. “He should

know,” Volf thought. For some ten years he had been living

and working in Sandtown and had seen transformation

taking place, one house at a time.

Volf was shocked because, as a professor of theology at

Yale, he knew that many in the church had completely

abandoned the doctrine of justification. “They deem it

generally useless or at least unhelpful when it comes to

healing even lesser social pathologies than the cycle of

poverty, violence, and hopeless-ness.” Others retain their

belief, and in fact fiercely defend it, but Volf had not heard

any proponent of the classic teaching apply it as Gornik had.

“How could the dead streets receive life from a [seemingly]

dead doctrine?” he asked himself. But as he reflected, he

got insight.

Imagine that you have no job, no money, you live cut off

from the rest of society in a world ruled by poverty and

violence, your skin is the “wrong” color—and you have

no hope that any of this will change. Around you is a

society governed by the iron law of achievement. Its

gilded goods are flaunted before your eyes on TV

screens, and in a thousand ways society tells you every

day that you are worthless because you have no

achievement. You are a failure, and you know that you

will continue to be a failure because there is no way to

achieve tomorrow what you have not managed to

achieve today. Your dignity is shattered and your soul is

enveloped in the darkness of despair. But the gospel

tells you that you are not defined by outside forces. It

tells you that you count; even more, that you are loved

unconditionally and infinitely, irrespective of anything

you have achieved or failed to achieve. Imagine now

this gospel not simply proclaimed but embodied in a

community. Justified by sheer grace, it seeks to “justify”

by grace those declared “unjust” by a society’s

implacable law of achievement. Imagine, furthermore,

this community determined to infuse the wider culture,

along with its political and economic institutions, with

the message that it seeks to embody and proclaim. This

is justification by grace, proclaimed and practiced. A

dead doctrine? Hardly!90

“Pushing the Button”

Many people who are evidently genuine Christians do not

demonstrate much concern for the poor. How do we account

for that? I would like to believe that a heart for the poor

“sleeps” down in a Christian’s soul until it is awakened. I

think the reason that this sensibility has not been more

aroused in the Christian world is due to the failure of my

own class—pastors and Christian leaders. We tend to try to

develop a social conscience in Christians the same way the

world does—through guilt. We tell them that they have so

much and don’t they see that they need to share with those

who have so little. This doesn’t work, because we have built-

in defense mechanisms against such appeals. Almost no

one really feels all that wealthy. Even the well-off don’t feel

rich compared to the others with whom they live and work.

I believe, however, when justice for the poor is connected

not to guilt but to grace and to the gospel, this “pushes the

button” down deep in believers’ souls, and they begin to

wake up. Here is an example of the kind of argument that

accomplishes this. It comes from a sermon by a young

Scottish minister early in the nineteenth century, preaching

on the text “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts

20:35):

Now, dear Christians, some of you pray night and day to

be branches of the true Vine; you pray to be made all

over in the image of Christ. If so, you must be like him in

giving . . . “Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he

became poor” . . . Objection 1. “My money is my own.”

Answer: Christ might have said, “My blood is my own,

my life is my own” . . . then where should we have

been? Objection 2. “The poor are undeserving.” Answer:

Christ might have said, “They are wicked rebels . . . shall

I lay down my life for these? I will give to the good

angels.” But no, he left the ninety-nine, and came after

the lost. He gave his blood for the undeserving.

Objection 3. “The poor may abuse it.” Answer: Christ

might have said the same; yea, with far greater truth.

Christ knew that thousands would trample his blood

under their feet; that most would despise it; that many

would make it an excuse for sinning more; yet he gave

his own blood. Oh, my dear Christians! If you would be

like Christ, give much, give often, give freely, to the vile

and poor, the thankless and the undeserving. Christ is

glorious and happy and so will you be. It is not your

money I want, but your happiness. Remember his own

word, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”91

SIX

HOW SHOULD WE DO JUSTICE?

If I have denied the desires of the poor or let the eyes of

the widow grow weary, if I have kept my bread to

myself, not sharing it . . . if I have raised my hand

against the fatherless, knowing that I had influence in

court, then let my arm fall from the shoulder, let it be

broken off at the joint.

Job 31:16-19

Doing justice is an important part of living the Christian life

in the world. I personally came to that conclusion long ago.

What I have wrestled with for many years since is the

question of how to practically answer this call today.

Always Thinking of Justice

When Job says, “I put on righteousness as my clothing;

justice was my robe and turban” (Job 29:14), he is speaking

about a social consciousness that infused his daily life as

completely as his clothing covered his body.92 He shared his

money and food with the poor. He cared for the blind, the

crippled, and the poor widow. He was also a legal advocate

for the immigrant and the orphan.

The vision is comprehensive. Job says he wears justice,

suggesting that it is always on his mind, he is always

looking for ways to do it. Psalm 41:1 says, “Blessed is the

man who considers the poor,” and the Hebrew word

translated as “considers” means to give sustained attention

to a subject and then to act wisely and successfully with

regard to it. God does not want us to merely give the poor

perfunctory help, but to ponder long and hard about how to

improve their entire situation.93

A Christian man I know owns a chain of car dealerships. As

is standard practice in the industry, his salesmen were

authorized to negotiate the price of the car with their

customers. At one point, however, the CEO did some

research and uncovered the fact that, in general, men were

more persistent negotiators than women, and Anglos

pressed their interests much more determinedly than

African-Americans. In other words, black women, who were

often poorer, were paying more for cars than more

prosperous customers. The owner realized that this time-

honored business practice took advantage of a class of

people that needed help and protection. The policy was

obviously not illegal, and few people would have considered

it immoral. But it ended up being exploitative. So the

company changed the policy to one of no negotiation—the

listed price was the price. This would not have occurred to

most people, but this Christian businessman was

“considering” the poor, and seeking to integrate the doing

of justice into all aspects of his private and public life.

I once asked him, was this “good business” on his part?

He replied that that there may be some future benefits for

the company but that they would be minor, unquantifiable,

and they didn’t matter. They made the changes because the

practice was taking economic advantage of people with

fewer resources. “Do not take advantage of a widow,” said

Exodus 22:22. Most ethics courses in business school

provide many case studies in which business owners and

employees are urged to do the honest and just thing. But

what motivation is given? Here is a typical answer:

Businesses can often attain short-term gains by acting

in an unethical fashion; however, such behaviors tend to

undermine the economy over time.94

The argument is: Be ethical, and you will gain a long-term

advantage for yourself and your business.

But the Bible says that the righteous disadvantage

themselves to advantage others, while “the wicked . . . are

willing to disadvantage the community to advantage

themselves.”95 In this case, the Christian business owner

was willing to permanently disadvantage his business, if it

meant doing justice.

Doing justice, then, requires constant, sustained reflection

and circumspection. If you are a Christian, and you refrain

from committing adultery or using profanity or missing

church, but you don’t do the hard work of thinking through

how to do justice in every area of life—you are failing to live

justly and righteously. 96

Levels of Help

Often we don’t need to go looking for opportunities to do

justice. Churches and Christians who seek to do justice have

poor families and neighborhoods nearby. The problems

seem vast and intractable. How do we even begin to think

about how we can help?

Mary was a woman whose husband was descending into a

downward spiral of addiction and anger. The family’s debts

grew to insupportable levels. She had been out of the

workforce for many years to raise her children and had no

marketable skills, no individual credit record, and no

savings. Other members of her family lived at some

distance and in any case had no financial resources to offer

her. Her husband was at first opposed to her going back to

work, and later he left the family.

Mary approached the diaconate of our Redeemer Church

in New York City with much fear and trepidation. In many

ways she was in the same position as the widows of ancient

times—socially and economically vulnerable, without the

social capital with which to bring her family through the

difficulties. The deacons and deaconesses helped Mary at

first by giving her money from the church’s diaconal fund for

basic household expenses, and then by walking with her

through the long process of achieving financial self-

sufficiency, including finding a job, learning to deal with

lawyers and judges, and getting a more affordable

apartment. Just as crucial as all other forms of help, Mary

got love and new friendship as well as professional

counseling, which helped her through her time of personal

crisis.97

Mary illustrates the fact that vulnerable people need

multiple levels of help. We will call these layers relief,

development, and social reform. Relief is direct aid to meet

immediate physical, material, and economic needs. The

Good Samaritan provided relief when he gave physical

protection, emergency medical treatment, and a rent

subsidy (Luke 10:30-35). Common relief ministries are

temporary shelters for the homeless and refugees, food and

clothing services for people in need, and free or low-cost

medical and counseling services. Relief also means caring

for foster children, the elderly, and the physically

handicapped through home care or the establishment of

institutions. A more assertive form of relief is advocacy, in

which people in need are given active assistance to find

legal aid, housing, and other kinds of help, such as

protection from various forms of domestic abuse and

violence.

The next level is development. This means giving an

individual, family, or entire community what they need to

move beyond dependency on relief into a condition of

economic self-sufficiency. In the Old Testament, when a

slave’s debt was erased and he was released, God directed

that his former master send him out with sufficient grain,

tools, and resources for a new, self-sufficient economic life

(Deuteronomy 15:13-14). Old Testament scholar Christopher

Wright urges us to think out the implications of the various

Old Testament laws of release, gleaning, and Jubilee for our

own time. Wright says:

[God’s] law asks us . . . to find means of ensuring that

the weakest and poorest in the community are enabled

to have access to the opportunities they need in order

to provide for themselves. “Opportunities” may include

financial resources, but could also include access to

education, legal assistance, investment in job

opportunities, etc. Such things should not be leftovers or

handouts, but a matter of rights. . . .98

Wright then lays out a good list of what is entailed in

helping a poor family or individual climb out of a state of

constant dependency. It includes education, job creation and

training, job search skills, and financial counseling as well as

helping a family into home ownership. “Development,” of

course, is far more time consuming, complex, and expensive

than relief.

The Needs of Poor Communities

We have considered what it takes to help an individual or a

family. But what does it take to help entire neighborhoods to

self-sufficiency? Most of the best answers to that question

begin with a look at the life and work of John M. Perkins.

Perkins, born in 1930, founded ministries in both rural and

urban areas of Mississippi, as well as urban Los Angeles. His

work has included a dizzying variety of programs, including

day care, farm co-ops, health centers, adult education

centers, low-income housing development, tutoring, job

training, youth internships, and college scholarship

programs, as well as very vigorous evangelism and new

church planting.99 Perkins’s approach at the time was

revolutionary, because he combined very traditional,

evangelical Christian theology and ministry with a holistic

vision for both ministry to the whole person and rebuilding

entire poor communities.

Charles Marsh, professor at the University of Virginia,

makes a strong case that Perkins and his movement have

taken up and carried on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision for

“the beloved community.”100 After King’s death, Marsh

argues, the Civil Rights Movement lost its “unifying spiritual

vision”—its belief that social reform could come through

grassroots, local communities of faith. The movement came

to rely completely on politics and government. But without

denying the importance of public policies such as

integration, equal employment opportunity, and welfare,

“Perkins . . . concluded that government programs alone

failed to address the deeper sources of hopeless-ness in

black communities.”101

When Perkins tied social reform, economic development,

and vigorous evangelism all together into a seamless whole,

he confounded both the secularized liberal civil rights

establishment and the conservative churches. Leaders of

both sides did not know how to regard him, but many

younger Christian leaders were inspired, and in 1989 they

formed the Christian Community Development Association,

which now includes hundreds of churches and local

development corporations.

Relocation and Redistribution

When John Perkins explained his philosophy of ministry, he

always named three basic factors. One he called

“relocation,” though others have called it “reneighboring a

community.” Traditional private charity and most

government programs provide help to the poor, but service

providers do not live in the community and therefore have

no firsthand knowledge of the needs of the neighborhood, or

any real accountability to the residents.102 Perkins

advocated that those helping the neighborhood live in it.

Perkins also spoke of “redistribution,” something others

have called “reweaving a community.” John Perkins saw that

simply putting welfare checks in the hands of the poor in

small towns only ended up transferring capital into the

accounts of the wealthy bankers and store owners on the

other side of town. A healthy neighborhood is one with safe

streets, responsive public institutions, physical beauty, good

schools, a good economy, good social-recreational

opportunities, and wide participation in political life.103

“Reweaving” aims to bring these things about. There must

be a full range of measures designed to redirect the flow of

financial capital, social capital, and spiritual capital back

into the community instead of out of it.

By “financial capital,” we of course mean the ability to

attract businesses that not only provide goods for

customers, but also keep wealth and financial capital in the

community itself. Typically, in blighted neighborhoods there

are few jobs, and the businesses that are there (even the

banks) are those that take capital from local consumers to

spend and invest it in other neighborhoods. 104 Even the

employers that do exist in poor communities—such as

hospitals, clinics, government centers, and schools—usually

employ people who neither live nor spend their income in

the neighborhood where they work. All this creates a flow of

financial capital out of the community.

By “social capital,” Perkins meant the training and

retaining of local leadership. For this to occur, the local

schools must be strong and local businesses and institutions

must employ people from the community, since that is the

way that persons become more valuable and productive as

they grow in their skills. Typically, in blighted

neighborhoods, the schools are failing and the businesses

and institutions are run by people who do not live there. All

this creates a flow of “social capital” out of the community.

“Spiritual capital” refers to the spiritual and moral

influence of the churches in the neighborhood. The

weakening of neighborhoods economically and socially goes

hand-in-hand with their spiritual weakening. Strong

Christians and churches have left as fast as, if not faster

than, others.

Mark Gornik makes it clear that if we are talking of

community development, it must mean that the people of

the community are “the primary agents of action.” The

community residents themselves must be the main “locus of

analysis and planning” and they must be in control of the

type and pace of change that will affect their families, lives,

and economic life.105 Any other kind of “help” usually keeps

residents in dependency, because it doesn’t really bring

social and economic capital into the neighborhood. Business

owners and agency heads need to be neighbors, living their

lives there, spending their money there, bringing their real

estate values and relational networks there. That is what

rebuilds community.

Racial Reconciliation

There is a third important factor in John Perkins’s strategy

for rebuilding poor communities. He names it “racial

reconciliation.” In both private charity and government

agencies, many of the providers are of a different race than

the care receivers. While Perkins insisted that leadership for

development be based in poor communities, he also

“invited outsiders [usually Anglo] to play a critical role in

fostering indigenous leadership.” He did this while many

civil rights organizations “often radicalized and politicized

the role of the outsider at the expense of people in poor

communities.” 106

These two factors—inviting outsiders to play a role along

with insisting that the residents of poor communities be

empowered to control their own destiny—meant that the

leadership for community development had to be

multiethnic and interracial. It is always much easier for the

leaders to be of one race—whether just indigenous

members of the community or only professional helpers

from outside the neighborhood. But Perkins knew that the

combination, if it could be made to work, was powerful. This

was one of Perkins’s most important contributions and

challenges. What is best for the poor community—a

nonpaternalistic partnership of people from different races

and social locations—was also one of the gifts that the

gospel makes possible.

The Bible provides deep resources for racial

rapprochement. Its depiction of creation cuts the nerve of

racism at its source. It insists that all human beings are “of

one blood” (Acts 17:26). The account of Adam’s creation is

crucial for an understanding of race. Here is a comment

from the Mishnah, the first major commentary on the Bible

compiled by Jewish Bible scholars. “Why did God create only

one human being? So that no one can say to a fellow human

being: My father was better than yours.”107 Because all are

created in the image of God, no one race is inherently

superior to any other.

Where does racism come from? In Genesis 11, the story of

the Tower of Babel tells us that the people of the earth were

marked by pride and a lust for power. As due punishment for

this pride, we are told that God “confused their speech.”

They could not understand each other or work together and

as a result they scattered into different nations. We must

not miss the profound message of this account—that human

pride and lust for power leads to racial and national division,

strife, and hatred. One scholar sums up the teaching of the

passage like this: “The division into different people groups

with different languages was a consequence of human

disobedience.”108 Immediately thereafter, in Genesis 12,

God comes to Abraham and promises to bring a salvation

into the world that will bless “all the families [mispahah] of

the earth.” This word “families” means people-groups,

nations, or races. God is distressed that the unity of the

human family has been broken, and declares his intention to

take down the walls of racism and nationalism that human

sin and pride have put there.

Grace and Race

The New Testament completes the story. In Acts 2, when the

Holy Spirit descends on the church on the day of Pentecost,

another miracle occurs. While at Babel people who spoke

the same language couldn’t understand each other, at

Pentecost, everyone who spoke different languages could

nonetheless all understand the preaching of the gospel by

the apostles. It was a reversing of the curse of Babel. It was

a declaration that the grace of Jesus can heal the wounds of

racism. At Pentecost the first gospel preaching was in every

language, showing that no one culture is the “right” culture,

and that in the Spirit we can have a unity that transcends all

national, linguistic, and cultural barriers. The result,

according to Ephesians 2:11-22, is a community of equal

“fellow-citizens” from all races. According to 1 Peter 2:9,

Christians are a “new ethnic.” Partnership and friendship

across racial barriers within the church is one of the signs of

the presence and power of the gospel. In Christ our racial

and cultural identities, while not insignificant, are no longer

primary to our self-understanding. Our bond with others in

Christ is stronger than our relationship to other members of

our own racial and national groups. The gospel makes us all

like Abraham, who left his home culture but never “arrived”

in another one. So, for example, Chinese Christians do not

renounce their Chinese identity to become something else,

yet the gospel gives them critical distance from their own

culture, enabling them to critique their own cultural idols.

In the final chapters of the Bible, a time is envisioned in

which God’s people are united from “every tribe and

language and people and nation” (Revelations 5:9; 7:9;

11:9; 14:6). At the climax of the world’s history, brought

about by the death and resurrection of Jesus, there will be

the end of all racial division and hatred.

Between the promise of Genesis 12 and its fulfillment in

Revelation, the Bible strikes numerous blows against racism.

Moses’s sister Miriam was punished by God because she

rejected Moses’s African wife on account of her race

(Numbers 12). Jonah was condemned because he regarded

Nineveh primarily on the basis of race and politics (their

prosperity threatened Israel), instead of on the basis of their

spiritual need. The apostle Peter, through a vision and the

conversion of Cornelius the Gentile centurion, was taught

about the sinfulness of racial and ethnic bias (Acts 9:34).109

He was brought to see that “God does not show favoritism

but accepts from every nation those who fear him and do

what is right” (Acts 9:35-37). Despite this testimony,

sometime later the apostle Paul saw Peter refusing to eat

with Gentile Christians, and he confronted him about his

racism. He told Peter he was “not acting in line with the

gospel ” (Galatians 2:14). To act “in line with the gospel” is

to live consistently with the truth that we are sinners saved

by sheer grace. Racial prejudice is wrong because it is a

denial of the very principle that all human beings are

equally sinful and saved by only the grace of God. A deep

grasp of the gospel of grace, Paul says, should erode our

racial biases. One Christian theologian wrote:

Once faith is exercised, a Christian is free . . . to wear

his culture like a comfortable suit of clothes. He can shift

to other cultural clothing temporarily if he wishes to do

so, as Paul suggests in I Corinthians 9:19-23, and he is

released to admire and appreciate the differing

expressions of Christ shining out through other

cultures.110

The Bible’s theological attack on racism is powerful, and

in response many idealistic Christians have set out to form

communities that are “multicultural,” but this is far, far

easier said than done. There is no such thing as a neutral,

culture-free way to do anything. If you form a governing

board made up of people from different races, how will your

board go about making decisions? Anglo, African-American,

Hispanic, and Asian cultures all have distinct approaches to

things like fact-finding, authority, persuasion, time frames,

ratification of agreements, and so on. So which culture’s

way of decision-making will prevail? And why should it be

that culture’s method? And if you think you can craft a

culture-free way to make decisions as a group, you are very

naïve.

Despite the cultural differences, the Bible says that these

barriers can and must be overcome. What Christians have in

common goes deeper than their cultural dissimilarities. And

because the gospel gives Christians a new critical distance

from their own race’s perspective and values, they have the

ability to reach out and better work with people of other

cultures, whether they believe the Christian faith or not.

When this theology of grace and race permeates the

consciousness of a Christian, a church, and a community,

the resulting unity of relationships becomes both a means

to reneighboring and reweaving and a direct witness to the

world of the reality of the gospel.111

Reform and Changing Systems

We said that there were three “levels” for doing justice and

helping the needy. Besides relief and development (both

individual and corporate) there is social reform. Social

reform moves beyond the relief of immediate needs and

dependency and seeks to change the conditions and social

structures that aggravate or cause that dependency.

Imagine a sequel to the Good Samaritan parable. The

months go by and every time he makes his trip from

Jerusalem to Jericho he finds another man in the road,

beaten and robbed. Finally the Samaritan says, “How do we

stop the violence?”

The answer to that question would be some kind of social

reform—instituting a new social arrangement that stops the

flow of victims because of a change in social conditions.

Sometimes the social reform that works is simply putting

more police on the street. But another way to accomplish

the goal would be an effort like the TenPoint Coalition, a

network of Boston clergy who sought to stem the tide of

gang killings in Boston in the 1990s. The coalition built

bridges between institutions that previously had not worked

together or that had even worked against one another. It

partnered with families, local churches, and the Boston

Police Department and U.S. District Attorney’s Office to do

gang mediation and intervention, and reentry mentoring for

ex-offenders, and to provide other services.112 This

approach goes beyond just helping individuals. It seeks to

change social arrangements and social institutions. In some

cases, it means changing laws.

We have discussed how careful we must be in applying

the Mosaic social legislation to our present society. Yet the

Bible gives us examples of people who were zealous for

social justice outside of the nation-state of Israel. As we

have seen, Job is a prime example. 113 He tells us that he

not only clothed the naked, but he “broke the fangs of the

wicked and made them drop their victims” (Job 29:17).

Daniel called a pagan government to account for its lack of

mercy to the poor (Daniel 4:27). These are examples of

what we have been calling “rectifying” justice. Everywhere

we look we see the need for this kind of justice. There are

city agencies that are not fair in the attention and resources

they give to middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods over

poor ones. There are judges who take bribes, legislators who

are “bought” by special interest money, banking policies

that discriminate against neighborhoods, building code

inspectors in the pocket of landlords and real estate

interests, and corruption within the law enforcement

system. To address and rectify these practices is to do social

reform.

Many Christians resist the idea that social systems need

to be dealt with directly. They prefer the idea that “society is

changed one heart at a time,” and so they concentrate on

only evangelism and individual social work. This is naïve.

One of the most poignant examples of this naïveté I know is

a story told by an urban pastor, Robert Linthicum.

As a student ministry intern he had been working among

black teenagers in a government housing project in a U.S.

city. A fourteen-year-old girl named Eva began to attend one

of the Bible studies that he led in the project. At one point

Eva came to him, deeply troubled. “Bob,” she said, “I am

under terrible pressure and I don’t know what to do. There is

a very large gang in this project that recruits girls to be

prostitutes for wealthy white men in the suburbs. They are

trying to force me . . .” He urged her not to give in to their

demands and to stick with her Bible study group. He then

went home for his summer vacation.

“Three months later I returned and Eva was nowhere to be

found. The other youth told me she had stopped coming

about a month after I had left. I went to Eva’s apartment. As

soon as she saw me she burst into tears. ‘They got to me,

Bob,’ she said. ‘How could you give in like that?’ I

unsympathetically responded. ‘Why didn’t you resist?’ She

told me a story of terror. ‘First they told me they would beat

my father . . . and they beat him bad. I had no alternative.

So I gave in.’ ‘But, Eva,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you get some

protection? Why didn’t you go to the police?’ Eva

responded, ‘Who do you think they are?’”114

Linthicum goes on to say that until that moment he had

thought of sin in strictly individualistic terms. He began to

realize that much of the city’s legal and political system was

arrayed to enrich and empower people at the expense of

the poor. There was no way to rescue the “Evas” of the city

without waiting on those systems.115

As terrible as Linthicum’s story is, oppression and injustice

take even more virulent forms in many parts of the world.

The list includes abusive child labor and sex-trafficking,

state-sponsored religious persecution, detention without

trial or charges, seizure of private land without due process

and payment, forced migration, organized violence against

ethnic minorities, state, rebel, or paramilitary terrorism, and

state-sponsored torture.116

One problem with the illustrations I’ve given is that they

are so stark and obvious. Most of the time systemic evil is

simpler and more subtle. Failing schools and inadequate

police protection in poor neighborhoods are far more

common. It is often the result of unjust neglect. Our political

and economic systems do not listen to people without

money and other forms of social power. The residents of

poor communities do not have either the influence or the

skills to attract more private and public resources to come

into their community. They need help, but it can’t come

merely in the form of relief and development. Someone

must resist and change the legal, political, and social

systems.

Putting It All Together

Doing justice in poor communities includes direct relief,

individual development, community development, racial

reconciliation, and social reform.

One of the best examples I know that combines all these

aspects of “doing justice” is the work of New Song Church in

the Sandtown area of Baltimore, Maryland, which I have

referred to several times in this volume. When Mark Gornik,

his friends Allan and Susan Tibbels, and the Tibbels’ two

young daughters moved into the very poor African-American

inner-city community, LaVerne Stokes, a lifelong resident of

Sandtown, wrote,

It was the first time we had ever seen white people

move in. I wondered what it was they wanted. They

rehabbed vacant houses and moved into them, hung

out on the streets and attended community meetings,

and spent time with the children of Sandtown, including

my children. . . .

[W]hen Pastor Mark and the Tibbels began a church

together with families from the neighborhood, my kids

asked me to go visit, which I did. . . . [They] showed a

deep love for the community, my community, and

became my neighbors. Together we began ministries to

love our community and rebuild it, restore it to the

health and vibrancy I had experienced as a little girl.

This effort included creating programs in housing,

education, and health care, as well as programs in job

development, economic development, and development

of the arts.117

Alongside the church was a church-based community

development corporation known as New Song Urban

Ministries, which today employs a staff of over eighty

people, working in the Sandtown-Winchester area of West

Baltimore. They concentrate mainly on a fifteen-block area

in the north-central part of the neighborhood. The ministries

include Sandtown Habitat for Humanity, which has

completed two hundred homes since the mid-1980s, Eden

Jobs, which has placed over a thousand people in jobs, with

plans for one hundred annually, a family health center, a

Community Learning Center including preschool, after-

school programs, a scholarship program, and New Song

Academy, which is a K-8 public school under the New

Schools Initiative. Gornik lays out an overarching scheme

that shows how all of these aspects of justice can be

brought together. He names three basic roles that churches

can play in poor communities.

Churches in poor neighborhoods can serve as healing

communities. He quotes a text that puts this in social-

science terms. He says congregations: “offer . . . narratives

that help individuals navigate economic difficulties,

sickness, and domestic trouble.”118 Put better, “For young

people faced with the dangers of the street, the church is a

place of literal salvation; for women faced with added

burdens of oppression, the church is a shelter from the

storm; for people in recovery, the church is a support

system.” It is a place of healing and grace.

Christians can form organizations that serve as healers of

communities. By this Gornik means what we have called

“development.” He includes “operating credit unions and

neighborhood banks; creating, retaining, and attracting jobs;

developing and managing houses for families and the

elderly; educating children in after-school programs and

religiously based schools; and providing preventative and

primary health care for the uninsured and underserved.”

Finally, churches encourage people to be organizers for

just communities. These are ways that the church can

challenge and change social systems. This includes

especially mobilizing people to create local “schools that

educate children” and “public services that maintain

communities.”119

What about the Rest of Us?

There are hundreds of urban churches that are using

Perkins’s model of Christian community development, and

literally tens of thousands of inner city churches that are

carrying out a dizzying variety of “holistic” ministries. But

many will ask, “But what about the rest of us? Most

Christians don’t live—and most churches aren’t located—in

communities of poverty.” Even if we grant that more

Christians should live with the poor and more churches

should be planted there, that doesn’t answer the question.

What should you do if you and your church are not in

located in areas of poverty or dire need?

You or your church should begin by discovering the needs

in your locale. Are there disadvantaged children (abused

and neglected, physically or mentally disabled, failing in

school) who could use help? Are there elderly, disabled,

single parents, chronically ill, or new immigrants who need

aid? Are there poor families around that are invisible to you?

To learn about these needs, Christians and churches need to

do much more sustained listening to their community’s

leaders than they are used to doing.

When Redeemer Church purchased property in a

neighborhood in Manhattan, we visited both with the

neighborhood’s city councilwoman and the local community

board. Our questions were: What are the needs here that

you and the community feel are both chronic and acute?

What could we do that would make this neighborhood a

better place to live in? Even though, as of this writing, we

are only beginning to hear the answers to these questions,

we were gratified at the response. Everyone we have

approached has been surprised that a church would even

ask. Ordinarily, churches and other religious institutions

assume they know best what the community needs.

Another thing that your church can do is to make a

connection to churches and ministries that are resident and

effective in poorer neighborhoods and poorer countries. Ask

them what they need from you, and likely the answer will be

requests for volunteers, pro bono work from professionals,

funding, and perhaps even some of your church’s best

leaders coming and living and working with them in the

communities of need.120 But let them tell you.

Working with People in Need

Many believe that the job of the church is not to do justice

at all, but to preach the Word, to evangelize and build up

believers. But if it is true that justice and mercy to the poor

are the inevitable signs of justifying faith, it is hard to

believe that the church is not to reflect this duty corporately

in some way. And as soon as you get involved in the lives of

people—in evangelism as well as spiritual nurture—you will

come upon people with practical needs. You can’t love

people in word only (cf. 1 John 3:16-17) and therefore you

can’t love people as you are doing evangelism and

discipleship without meeting practical and material needs

through deeds.

As we have seen, a special class of officers—deacons—

was established to coordinate the church’s ministry of

sharing money and goods with those in need within the

community. 2 Corinthians 8:13-14 and Galatians 2:10 show

actual case studies of corporate diakonia, in which the

church gave offerings and relief to the poor, those offerings

being administered by leaders appointed by the church.

As soon as a church engages in holistic ministry, however,

it will run up against a number of practical policy issues.

Often people with the same basic vision for justice will

disagree on the specific answers to the following questions.

Any church or group of Christians who want to make

progress in this work will have to take the time to come to a

consensus on how to answer each one.

How much should we help? Any church or group of

Christians who are serving people with material needs

will find that the ministry is expensive. Many will ask

just how much of a priority should a church give it in

relationship to other ministries. Should a church wait

until it is big and established before it begins to reach

out to the community? The needs seem to be endless.

What percentage of the church’s energy and money

should go into it?

Whom should we help? Should you help only people who

seek you out? Or should you deliberately approach a

particular class of people in need? And how “needy”

must someone be before the church helps him or her? In

chapter 4 we looked at Jonathan Edwards’s wise counsel

about this issue. He argues that we should not wait until

a person is destitute. Nevertheless, it is difficult to know

“where to draw the line.” Churches and Christian

organizations must not be wooden and mechanical, yet

they will have to come up with some agreed-upon

guidelines, or find themselves endlessly arguing.

Under what conditions does your help proceed or end?

Do you require that the persons you help attend your

church? Should there be other qualifications? Should

your aid give priority to church members but also

extend to others, as Galatians 6:10 and other Biblical

texts seem to indicate? Some point to the standards for

widows that the church supported in 1 Timothy 5:1-10,

and argue that these should be strict requirements for

giving aid.121 But in Acts 4 we saw that the Christians

shared their possessions in such a way that every needy

believer had his or her needs met from the common

funds of the church (Acts 4:34).

In what way do we help? We mentioned that deed

ministry can consist of three levels—relief,

development, and reform. Will your church be sticking

to relief type efforts only, or will it try ministries within

the more ambitious and complex levels? Will your

church work almost exclusively with needy individuals

and their families, or will it seek to reach out to

particular needy classes of people, such as the

homebound elderly, or youth who need tutoring, or

prisoners and ex-offenders?

From where should we help? Should people from your

church move into areas of need or work from where

they already live in partnership with churches,

institutions, and organizations in the neighborhood? Will

“moving in” only lead to gentrification?

As your group of believers works through these questions,

always try to err on the side of being generous, and always

keep your policies flexible and open to cases that don’t fit

your categories.

Doing Justice and Preaching Grace

As Christians do justice, they must face the important

practical issue of how justice relates to their other duties as

believers. In particular, what is the relationship between the

call to help the needy and the Biblical command to

evangelize?

Some have argued that Christians should only do justice

as a means to the end of evangelism. That is, we should do

mercy and justice only because it helps us bring people to

faith in Christ.122 This does not seem to fit in with Jesus’s

Good Samaritan parable and his charge not to give to needy

people in order to get something in return (Luke 6:32-35).

Though Jesus has in view people who can repay us

financially, the basic principle is that we are not to give

expecting gratitude (verse 32). If we only help people who

are responding to the gospel, we will be perceived as only

helping others in order to help ourselves, namely, to

increase our own numbers.

On the other hand, there are many who insist that doing

justice is spreading the gospel, it is evangelism they say.

Doing justice can indeed lead people to give the message of

gospel grace a hearing, but to consider deeds of mercy and

justice to be identical to gospel proclamation is a fatal

confusion. I propose a different way to understand

evangelism and social justice. They should exist in an

asymmetrical, inseparable relationship.

Evangelism is the most basic and radical ministry possible

to a human being. This is true not because the spiritual is

more important than the physical, but because the eternal

is more important than the temporal. In 2 Corinthians 4:16-

18 Paul speaks of the importance of strengthening the

“inner man” even as the outer, physical nature is aging and

decaying. If there is a God, and if life with him for eternity is

based on having a saving relationship with him, then the

most loving thing anyone can do for one’s neighbor is help

him or her to a saving faith in that God.

But, as we have seen, doing justice is inseparably

connected to preaching grace. This is true in two ways. One

way is that the gospel produces a concern for the poor. The

other is that deeds of justice gain credibility for the

preaching of the gospel. In other words, justification by faith

leads to doing justice, and doing justice can make many

seek to be justified by faith.

In the book of Acts we see this dynamic illustrated. In Acts

2 the descent of the Holy Spirit and the disciples’ encounter

with God led to radical sharing with the needy (verse 44-

45). There was no reason that the church “grew in favor

with all the people” (verse 47). The experience of salvation

led to generosity to the poor, which led to more people

becoming open to the message of salvation. In Acts 4 we

read, similarly, that the economic sharing of the people

inside the church lent great power to the preaching of the

resurrection to those outside the church (Acts 4:32- 35).

Finally, in Acts 6, after the ministry of diakonia is more firmly

established, Luke adds: “So the word of God spread. The

number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly” (verse

7). The word “so” indicates a cause-effect relationship. This

sharing of resources across class lines—between the

“needy” and those wealthy enough to have property to sell

—was extremely rare in the Greco-Roman world. The

practical actions of Christians for people in need was

therefore striking to observers and made them open to the

gospel message. The Roman emperor Julian despised the

Christian faith, but he candidly admitted that Christianity

was constantly gaining new converts because believers’

generosity to the poor made it so attractive.

Nothing has contributed to the progress of the

superstition of the Christians as their charity to

strangers . . . the impious Galileans provide not only for

their own poor, but for ours as well.123

I urge my readers to discern the balance I am seeking to

strike. If we confuse evangelism and social justice we lose

what is the single most unique service that Christians can

offer the world. Others, alongside believers, can feed the

hungry. But Christians have the gospel of Jesus by which

men and women can be born again into the certain hope of

eternal life. No one else can make such an invitation.

However, many Christians who care intensely about

evangelism see the work of doing justice as a distraction for

Christians that detracts from the mission of evangelism.

That is also a grave error.

Imagine an eloquent Christian preacher who every Sunday

delivers compelling sermons. But one of his female

parishioners comes to learn that the minister verbally

abuses and browbeats his wife daily. After she discovers

this, she unsurprisingly finds his sermons completely

unpersuasive. Why? His deeds contradict his words, and so

his words have no power. Imagine instead a new minister

whose public oratory is quite mediocre. However, as time

goes on, the parishioners come to see that he is a man of

sterling character, wisdom, humility, and love. Soon,

because of the quality of his life, his members will find that

they are hanging on every word of his preaching.

When a city perceives a church as existing strictly and

only for itself and its own members, the preaching of that

church will not resonate with outsiders. But if neighbors see

church members loving their city through astonishing,

sacrificial deeds of compassion, they will be much more

open to the church’s message. Deeds of mercy and justice

should be done out of love, not simply as a means to the

end of evangelism. And yet there is no better way for

Christians to lay a foundation for evangelism than by doing

justice.124

It is also impossible to separate word and deed ministry

from each other in ministry because human beings are

integrated wholes—body and soul. When some Christians

say, “Caring for physical needs will detract from

evangelism,” they must be thinking only of doing

evangelism among people who are comfortable and well-off.

The London City Mission is a nearly two-hundred-year-old

evangelical mission that seeks to do evangelism among the

urban poor of London. Though evangelism is its central

purpose, this is done through relationship, visitation, and

friendship. Its mission is: the same person, going to the

same people, regularly, to become their friend for Jesus’s

sake. Because of this mission, LCM missionaries run neither

large-scale evangelism nor social programs. Instead “word”

and “deed” are seamlessly integrated in their ministry.

Helping their neighbors with their children’s educational

needs, or with finding jobs or learning English as a second

language, goes hand-in-hand with sharing their faith

verbally. On paper, we may ask, “Should Christians do

evangelism or social justice?” But in real life, these things

go together. 125

Christians who live or work in needy communities in order

to do evangelism must inevitably become involved in

helping their friends and neighbors with their pressing

economic and social needs. To fail to do so is simply a lack

of love. It is also impractical. If you wish to share your faith

with needy people, and you do nothing about the painful

conditions in which they live, you will fail to show them

Christ’s beauty. We must neither confuse evangelism with

doing justice, nor separate them from one another.

Spheres of Justice

There is one more practical issue that believers must face

when considering how to do justice. Should believers act as

individuals out in the world or through their local church?

What exactly is the role of the local church in the work of

justice?

The church should help believers shape every area of their

lives with the gospel. When Jonathan Edwards was teaching

his people about how to live their lives, he continually

referred to “the rules of the gospel.” By that he meant the

logic of God’s salvation in Jesus. He reasoned, “If you are a

sinner saved by grace, how should that influence your civic

life? Your attitude toward the poor?” All churches should do

the same with their members.

But that doesn’t mean that the church as an institution is

itself to do everything it equips its members to do. For

example, while the church should disciple its members who

are filmmakers so that their cinematic art will be profoundly

influenced by the gospel, that does not mean that the

church should establish a company that produces feature

films. No institution or organization can do all things well—

that goes for the Christian church as well.

At this point the concept of Abraham Kuyper’s “sphere

sovereignty” can be of some help. Kuyper was both a

Christian minister and the prime minister of the Netherlands

at the turn of the twentieth century. As both a theologian

and a politician, he was able to reflect on the respective

roles of church, state, and voluntary associations. Kuyper

concluded that the institutional church’s mission is to

evangelize and nurture believers in Christian community. As

it does this work, it produces people who engage in art,

science, education, journalism, filmmaking, business, in

distinctive ways as believers in Christ. The church, in this

view, produces individuals who change society, but the local

congregation should not itself engage in these enterprises.

Kuyper distinguished between the institutional church—the

congregation meeting under its leaders—and the “organic”

church, which consists of all Christians, functioning in the

world as individuals and through various agencies and

voluntary organizations. 126

I believe Kuyper is generally right. We have spoken of

different “levels” of ministry to the poor—relief,

development, and reform. As we have said, churches under

their leaders should definitely carry out ministries of relief

and some development among their own members and in

their neighborhoods and cities, as the natural and crucial

way to show the world God’s character, and to love the

people that they are evangelizing and discipling. But if we

apply Kuyper’s view, then when we get to the more

ambitious work of social reform and the addressing of social

structure, believers should work through associations and

organizations rather than through the local church. While

the institutional church should do relief inside and around its

community, the “organic” church should be doing

development and social reform. 127

This is not just a theological principle, it is also a very

practical issue. Many of the churches who practice John

Perkins’s model of ministry form community development

corporations, distinct from their congregations, to operate

programs in the community. This frees the pastors and

leaders of the local church to build up the church through

evangelism and discipleship, and it enables laypeople who

are skilled in other fields to provide leadership over the

various ministries that major in doing justice. Churches that,

against Kuyper’s advice, try to take on all the levels of doing

justice often find that the work of community renewal and

social justice overwhelms the work of preaching, teaching,

and nurturing the congregation. 128

Doing justice necessitates a striking a series of balances. It

means ministering in both word and deed, through the local

church and as individual agents dispersed throughout the

world. It means engaging in relief, and development, and

reform. We do all this not only because we learn from the

Bible that the causes of poverty are complex, but also

because the gospel of Christ gives us such an arsenal of

different weapons against the forces of injustice and

deprivation in the world. But none of the weapons is a literal

weapon. That is not the kind of warfare we wage. As the

well-known hymn says, “’Tis not with swords loud clashing,

nor roll of stirring drums, but deeds of love and mercy, the

heav’nly kingdom comes.”

CHAPTER 7

DOING JUSTICE IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the

cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.

Isaiah 1:17

When Christians do evangelism, they can only count on the

support and understanding of other believers. But when

believers seek to do justice in the world, they often find it

both necessary and desirable to work with others who do

not share their faith. Christians who are concerned to do

justice in particular neighborhoods—or who want to work for

some social reform such as the betterment of public

schools, or the end of ethnic “cleansing” in another part of

the world, or the elimination of “sweatshops” in urban areas

—will find many allies who are willing to work with them.129

Should Christians work together for justice in society with

members of other religions or no religion? If so, how should

they do it? In order to answer these questions, we must first

take a look at the public square in late modern society,

where discussions about the definition of justice have

almost completely broken down.

“This Is a Justice Issue”

I once heard a debate among several staff members of a

nonprofit organization over who should get the privilege of

representing the agency at an important conference. Some

believed that it should be the female member of the staff

who had the most seniority. Others proposed a younger man

who, though having served for fewer years, was unusually

gifted in public presentation. Those backing the woman

grew more and more agitated during the conversation.

Finally, one said, “I’m sorry, but for me this is a justice

issue.” There was an abrupt, awkward silence. Soon the

group agreed to award the conference trip to the woman,

but it was clear that the backers of the young man felt they

had been steamrollered. Why? It was because in our society

naming something a “justice issue” is a kind of trump card.

If you are arguing against someone who suddenly proclaims

that his position is the one that promotes justice, there is no

defense. To continue to press your argument is to stand on

the side of injustice, and who wants to do that?

There’s a big problem with this move, however. Those

staff members who were backing the young man were not

convinced. They valued ability over seniority, but instead of

discussing these two sets of values on their merits, one

group simply labeled the other group’s position unjust. The

woman’s supporters had won the battle but had created

resentment.

The reason it is not convincing to simply cry “injustice!” is

that our society is deeply divided over the very definition of

justice. Nearly everyone thinks they are on justice’s side.

Both pro-life and pro-choice partisans frame their position

as the one that is on the side of justice. Both opponents and

proponents of affirmative action insist that their way is the

way of equity and the other side is perpetrating unfairness.

But underneath all the name calling are sharp differences of

opinion about what justice actually is. Democrats think of it

more in collective terms. They believe a low tax rate is

unfair because it deprives the poor and minorities of the

help they need to overcome years of discrimination.

Republicans think of justice more individualistically. They

believe that a high tax rate is unjust because it robs people

of their due who have risked much and worked hard to keep

what they earn.

The fact is that the word “justice” does not have a

definition in our culture that we can all agree on. So we just

use it as a bludgeon. We self-righteously imply that those on

the other side know they are simply being unjust. But they

don’t.

Empty Concepts

“Wait,” you may say. “Isn’t justice a matter of common

sense? Isn’t it simply respect for equality and individual

freedom?” But these terms “freedom” and “equality,” as

they are used in our society today, do not help us much in

defining justice.

Michael J. Klarman of Harvard Law School says, “Freedom,

much like equality, is an empty concept. . . . Whether

freedom is good or bad depends entirely on the particular

substantive cause on behalf of which freedom is

invoked.”130 Another law professor, Peter Westen, wrote a

famous essay in the Harvard Law Review entitled “The

Empty Idea of Equality,” making the same argument.131

What are they saying?

When we appeal to the principle of freedom we usually

mean that people should be free to live as they choose, as

long as they don’t harm or diminish the freedom of

others.132 The problem with this seemingly simple idea is

that it assumes we all agree on what harm is. To use a well-

known example, someone might say that it is unjust to have

strict obscenity laws, that they constitute a violation of our

freedom of speech. No one is forcing the use of “adult”

literature and movies on anyone unless they choose to

purchase them and use them. “What I do in private doesn’t

harm anyone” is the justification. In this view, it is unjust to

curtail the freedom to produce and use such material, since

it does no harm.

However, it could be argued that such a position is

sociologically naïve. For one thing, what you do in private

shapes the kind of person you become. The movies and

literature you use affect how you talk and act, and how you

relate to other people. Since you interact with the

community, what you do in private does affect others. And

besides, if you purchase such materials you create a market

for them, and that means they will be available for the

children of people who vehemently prefer that they would

be inaccessible. So your purchase and use of these things

forces some people to live an environment that they do not

want for their families. The same situation that you consider

“free,” others consider an oppressive imposition on them.133

Many other examples could be cited. What if you began a

new business that competes with mine, and because it is far

more efficient and profitable, it will soon drive me into

bankruptcy. Could I not claim that you are harming me

severely, and that you should be shut down? In America we

would say that your new business does not constitute harm,

because free enterprise in the long run is better for human

flourishing.

However, there are many other cultures that believe

otherwise. So freedom is indeed something of an “empty”

concept, as Klarman said, because the causes for which

freedom is invoked are always matters of deeply held

beliefs, rooted in particular views of human nature and

happiness and right and wrong that are matters of faith. We

all agree that freedom should be curtailed if it harms

people, but we can’t agree on what harm is, because we

have different views of what healthy, flourishing human life

looks like.134

So it was not helpful for the supporters of the senior

female staff member to simply cry “injustice.” As Klarman

says, you have to discuss the merits of the underlying

values for which justice is being invoked. But that

conversation never took place among those staffers, and

this story is a picture of our society today.

Competing Visions

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has written a book

entitled Whose Justice? Which Rationality?135 In the volume

MacIntyre lays out the competing visions of justice in our

society, which he traces back to thinkers such as Aristotle,

Aquinas, and Hume. The best book for revealing how these

competing views operate is Harvard law professor Michael

Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?136 Sandel

lays out three current views of justice, which he calls

“maximizing welfare,” “respecting freedom,” and

“promoting virtue.” 137 According to one framework, the

most just action is that which brings the greatest good to

the greatest number of people. According to the second, the

most just action is that which respects the freedom and

rights of each individual to live as he or she chooses.

According to the last view, justice is served when people are

acting as they ought to, in accord with morality and virtue.

These views lead to sharply different conclusions about

what is just in particular cases. 138

Why do we have such gridlock in our society over justice?

Underneath all notions of justice is a set of faith

assumptions that are essentially religious, and these are

often not acknowledged. In an important book, The

Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, law professor Steven

D. Smith reminds us that by the rules of secular discourse

that reign particularly in government, politics, and the

academy, no one is allowed to ever bring religious beliefs

into public argument. We are not supposed to talk about

moral rights and moral evils, because that would get us into

endless disagreements over which religious faith is the true

one. We should only talk about justice in the supposedly

neutral terms of freedom and equality that we can all agree

on. But as we have seen, this does not work because our

ideas of justice are rooted in views of life that are

nonprovable faith assumptions. Smith writes:

The secular vocabulary within which public discourse is

constrained to operate today is insufficient to convey

our full set of normative convictions and commitments.

We manage to debate normative matters anyway—but

only by smuggling in notions that are officially

inadmissible. . . . The fact that we must smuggle in . . .

our real commitments [that we] often cannot articulate .

. . even to ourselves—ensures that our discourse will

often be barren, unsatisfying, and shallow. . . . 139

To use a simple example, it is often argued that corporal

punishment violates the rights and human dignity of a child,

and therefore should be illegal. Smith reminds us, however,

that there is no secular, scientific basis for the idea of

human dignity, or that human beings are valuable and

inviolable. Historian Carl L. Becker famously said that, from

a strictly scientific viewpoint, human beings must be viewed

as “little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the

world, carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the

same forces that rust iron and ripen corn.” Scientist Stephen

Hawking agrees that “the human race is just a chemical

scum on a moderate size planet” and most recently Harvard

psychologist Stephen Pinker wrote an essay entitled “The

Stupidity of Dignity.” The prominent philosopher John Gray,

who teaches at the London School of Economics, writes in

his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other

Animals of the self-deception of those who embrace science

and still hold to the tenets of liberal humanism, such as

belief in human dignity and rights.140

So, concluded Smith, to say that corporal punishment

violates a child’s dignity and rights seems more objective

than to say, “I think corporal punishment of children is

morally offensive,” but the latter statement is a more frank

expression of how you reached your conclusion.141 The rules

of secular discourse lead us to smuggle moral value

judgments into our reasoning about justice without

admitting it to others or even to ourselves. And so the

deeper discussions over the true points of difference never

happen.

Sandel gives us another, far more controversial example

of this. He says that the most familiar liberal argument for

abortion rights “claims to resolve the abortion question on

the basis of neutrality and freedom of choice, without

entering into the moral and religious controversy.”142

Abortion rights supporters charge that their pro-life

opponents are trying to impose a particular set of moral and

religious views on society, but that pro-choice people are

not. They are simply arguing for freedom of choice. Sandel

retorts:

But this argument does not succeed. For if it’s true that

the developing fetus is morally equivalent to a child,

then abortion is morally equivalent to infanticide. And

few would maintain that government should let parents

decide for themselves whether to kill their children. So

the “pro-choice” position on the abortion debate is not

really neutral on the underlying moral and theological

question; it implicitly rests on the assumption that the

Catholic Church’s teaching on the moral status of the

fetus . . . is false.143

Sandel’s point can be further illustrated by reference to

the issue of slavery in America. Why did we not give people

the freedom to own slaves or not? It was because as a

society we made the moral determination that members of

all races were fully human. So if our society gives women

the freedom to have abortions, it is because we also have

made a moral determination. Sandel concludes: “It is not

enough to say that the law should be neutral on moral and

religious questions. The case for permitting abortion is no

more neutral than the case for banning it. Both positions

presuppose some answer to the underlying moral and

religious controversy.”144

Sandel, who is not a religious believer and who is a

supporter of abortion rights, concludes that justice is always

“judgmental.”145 Beneath all accounts of justice are sets of

essentially religious assumptions that we are not allowed to

admit or discuss, and so our society stays in a deadlock over

these issues. We can’t agree on what justice is because we

can’t talk about our underlying beliefs.

Cooperation and Provocation

How should Christians proceed to do justice in this kind of

environment? I propose that Christians’ work for justice

should be characterized by both humble cooperation and

respectful provocation.

Christian believers have many temptations to be neither

humble nor cooperative with others. Believers have many of

the criteria for a righteous and just life laid out in the Bible.

How easy it would be to disdain all non-Christian accounts of

justice as being useless, just as many secular people

dismiss religious belief.

However, Christians’ own theology should lead them to

appreciate the competing views of justice that Sandel

outlines in our society because they know from the Bible

that they are all partly right. The utilitarians are concerned

with the common welfare. And in the book of Proverbs, we

learn that people living justly do not consider their money to

belong to them alone, but also to the community around

them. Liberals are most concerned with individual rights.

And, as we have seen, the Bible gives us the strongest

foundation for the idea of rights that there is. According to

the Bible, your neighbor comes into your presence with

certain claims on you, that you treat him in ways that

enhance his well-being, that you don’t torture, defraud, or

abduct him. Why? Because, as Genesis 9:6 says, he has an

inherent worth, an inviolable dignity because he is made in

the image of God.

Finally, conservatives believe justice is a matter of giving

people what they deserve and of promoting virtue. As

Sandel and others have shown, neither the utilitarians’

“harm” principle, nor the liberal emphasis on equal rights is

sufficient for doing justice. Under the call for freedom and

equality is always a set of moral intuitions and value

judgments. Christians will heartily agree with this. Biblical

guidelines give believers many important insights for

determining the kinds of cases Sandel presents. Sometimes

Christians will side with one school of thought, other times

they will side with another.146 In other words, according to

the Bible, virtue, rights, and the common good are all crucial

aspects of justice.

Why should Christians expect that many who do not share

their Biblical beliefs will nonetheless want to work for the

same goals? The apostle Paul taught that human beings

who have never read or known the Bible, nevertheless

“show that the requirements of [God’s] law are written on

their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness”

(Romans 2:15). Theologians have called this “general

revelation” as contrasted with the “special revelation” of the

Bible. God reveals much of his will to human consciences

through what has been called “the light of nature.”147 For

example, even if someone does not believe the Biblical

teaching that God made man in his own image,

nevertheless the sacredness and dignity of every human

being can be known intuitively, without belief in the Bible.

As a result of this general revelation, Christians believe

that that there is much “common grace” in every culture.

The implication of James 1:17 is that God scatters gifts of

wisdom, goodness, justice, and beauty across all the human

race, regardless of people’s beliefs. 148 Christians see all

skill in science, scholarship, crafts, government, art, and

jurisprudence as being from God.149 This grace is called

common because it is given to all, not just those who have

found salvation in Jesus Christ, yet this grace “provides the

basis for Christians to cooperate with, and learn from, non-

Christians,” as theologian Richard Mouw points out.150 In

short, the Bible warns us not to think that only Bible-

believing people care about justice or are willing to sacrifice

in order to bring it about. As one theologian puts it: “Acts of

kindness and self-sacrifice surface among every race and

class of human beings, not because we are simple mixtures

of good and evil, but because even in the midst of our deep

rebellion, God restrains us and displays his glory and

goodness.”151

Christians should realize then some part of society will

always recognize some of what the Bible calls “justice.”

When we speak publicly, we should do so with

thoughtfulness and grace, in recognition that Christians are

not the only ones who see what needs to be done in the

world. We should not simply be quoting the Bible at people.

As author Ken Myers says, “When Christians articulate

cultural values, they should be values that non-Christians

can embrace as well, not because we have some prior

commitment to ‘pluralism, ’ and thereby seek to be

inoffensive, but because we have expressed values which

[because of common grace] are in fact common values.”152

Christians should identify themselves as believers as they

seek justice, welcoming and treating all who work beside

them as equals. Believers should let their coworkers know of

how the gospel is motivating them, yet also, as Myers says,

they should appeal to common values as much as possible.

What we are laying out here is a balance. On the one hand

there are Christians who want to work for social reforms,

citing only Biblical reasons, and speaking aggressively

against those who do not share their religious beliefs. On

the other hand there are those who counsel Christians to

not seek social justice at all, predicting that such efforts only

make Christians more like the world. Instead, they say,

Christians should concentrate on only bringing individuals to

faith in Christ and building up the church. The former group

is too triumphalist, while the latter group is too pessimistic

about the possibilities of cultural change and social reform.

Theologian Don Carson writes that once we shed utopian

dreams of producing a “redeemed culture,” we can look at

history and acknowledge that it is possible to “improve and

even transform some social structures”:

Sometimes a disease can be knocked out; sometimes

sex traffic can be considerably reduced; sometimes

slavery can be abolished in a region; sometimes more

equitable laws can foster justice and reduce corruption.

. . . In these and countless other ways cultural change is

possible. More importantly, doing good to the city, doing

good to all people (even if we have special responsibility

for the household of faith), is part of our responsibility

as God’s redeemed people. . . .153

We have said that Christians should acknowledge “common

grace,” that non-Christians share with us common intuitions

about the good, the true, and the just. We should appeal to

those common values and work alongside our neighbors in

an effort to improve justice in society. We should agree that,

according to the Bible, all the various views of justice out

there in our society are partly right.

But they are also partly wrong. Each of the theories that

Sandel outlines makes one of these factors—virtue, rights,

or the common good—into a “bottom line” that trumps the

other two. However, the Biblical understanding of justice is

not rooted in any one of these, but in the character and

being of God himself. This means that no current political

framework can fully convey the comprehensive Biblical

vision of justice, and Christians should never identify too

closely with a particular political party or philosophy.

Many churches have uncritically adopted a liberal political

agenda, one that has a very expansive view of government.

Others adopt a politically conservative approach to justice,

one that insists that poverty, at least in America, is not the

result of unjust laws, social structures, and racism, but only

a matter of family breakdown. As we have seen, the Biblical

material is too nuanced and balanced to fit neatly into

either of these schemas. And if we tie the Bible too tightly to

any particular economic system or set of public policies, it

bestows divine authority on that system.

So even as Christians practice humble cooperation with

their allies, they should at the same time be respectfully

provocative with them, arguing that their models of justice

are reductionistic and incomplete.

“Justice Is Inescapably Judgmental”

Why should we do this? Wouldn’t it be best to be pragmatic,

to just work together and not to talk about how our beliefs

are different than those of others who may be interested in

the same basic social goals? In the short run that might be

less bother, but in the long run it won’t be good for our

society.

Our society can’t come to grips with the underlying beliefs

that inform our differing views of justice. Because we insist

that all discussions omit any reference to moral or religious

beliefs, we cannot talk about why we think something is

right and just. Sandel has shown that the ideal of “liberal

neutrality,” which has dominated modern law and

jurisprudence for decades—namely that “we should never

bring moral or religious convictions to bear in public

discourse about justice and rights” 154—is actually an

impossibility. He writes:

Justice is inescapably judgmental. Whether we’re

arguing about financial bailouts . . . surrogate

motherhood or same-sex marriage, affirmative action or

. . . CEO pay . . . questions of justice are bound up with

competing notions of honor and virtue, pride and

recognition. Justice is not only about the right way to

distribute things. It is also about the right way to value

things.155

And “valuing things” is always based on beliefs about the

purposes of life, human nature, right and wrong—all of

which are moral and religious.

The ancient Greek philosophers believed all things and

persons were designed by transcendent forces for a

purpose, a telos, and without reference to that telos it is

impossible to determine how we should live. For example,

imagine I am a person from a very remote part of the world

and I’ve never seen a cell phone (or a phone, for that

matter). You give it to me, and I immediately try to pound a

stake into the ground with it. It breaks, of course, and I

complain, “This thing you gave me is no good.” You will

explain that the cell phone was not designed for driving

stakes into the ground, but for communicating across

distances. Unless you know the telos of something, what it

is for, you can’t make right judgments about whether the

thing is good or bad.

How do we determine what is good or evil human

behavior? Aristotle and his followers answer: Unless you can

determine what human beings are here for, you can’t

answer that.156

One of the best examples of what Aristotle argues is the

very concept of human rights. Many still believe that the

idea of human rights was developed by thinkers of the

secular Enlightenment such as Hobbes and Locke. Brian

Tierney of Cornell University has demonstrated that, on the

contrary, it was within Christian jurisprudence of the twelfth

and thirteenth centuries that human rights thinking began,

rooted particularly in the Christian doctrine that all human

beings are created in the image of God, and therefore have

inherent dignity.157

We heard from Stephen Hawking, Stephen Pinker, and

John Gray that there is no neutral, scientific basis for proving

that every human being, regardless of gender, race, age,

and ability, has inherent worth. Therefore even atheist and

agnostic philosophers acknowledge that the concept of

human rights requires a religious dimension. Raimond Gaita

has written that when secular thinkers speak of “inalienable

rights” they are “trying to make secure to reason what

reason cannot finally underwrite,” because the idea of

human rights has its origin in the concept of “human

sacredness,” which was born in religious traditions.158 Even

the philosopher Jacques Derrida agrees:

Today the cornerstone of international law is the sacred,

what is sacred in humanity. You should not kill. You

should not be responsible for a crime against this

sacredness, the sacredness of man as your neighbor . . .

made by God or by God made man. . . . In that sense,

the concept of crime against humanity is a Christian

concept and I think there would be no such thing in the

law today without the Christian heritage, the Abrahamic

heritage, the biblical heritage.159

Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton also resists the efforts

of atheist writers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher

Hitchens to devalue the contribution of religion to the

maintenance of justice in human society. “The difference

between science and theology,” Eagleton writes, “is one

over whether you see the world as a gift or not.”160 He goes

on in his book Reason, Faith, and Revolution to argue that it

makes an enormous difference to how one lives in the world

if you see human beings as accidental beings rather than a

sacred creation and gift of God.

This in no way means that nonreligious people cannot

believe in human dignity and human rights. Millions of them

can and do.161 But any such belief is, in itself, essentially

religious in nature.

A New Conversation

Sandel, Smith, and many others say that we must begin

again to talk about moral and religious beliefs in public

discourse. The rules of secular public discourse will not allow

us to talk about such matters, since, it is feared, discussions

of religious beliefs will lead to endless public disagreement.

However, we are already locked in endless disagreement,

largely because we live with the illusion that we can achieve

moral and religious neutrality. And because we can’t talk

about our real differences, we simply make power plays to

weaken and marginalize our opponents, not persuade them.

We have to change these rules and this climate of

discourse. Christians can be an important part of changing

this climate from one of yelling “injustice!” to one of talking

and seeking justice together.

Another important figure who seems to agree with all this

is U.S. president Barack Obama, who has said:

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave

their religion at the door before entering into the public

square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William

Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—

indeed, the majority of great reformers in American

history—were not only motivated by faith, but

repeatedly used religious language to argue for their

cause. So to say that men and women should not inject

their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a

practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification

of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian

tradition.162

There will still be plenty of voices urging Christians to be

quiet about their faith in the public square, but these are

voices who continue to believe that it is possible to argue

for justice on the basis of “neutral, secular reason.” That

viewpoint may be on the wane.

The pursuit of justice in society is never morally neutral,

but is always based on understandings of reality that are

essentially religious in nature. Christians should not be

strident and condemning in their language or attitude, but

neither should they be silent about the Biblical roots of their

passion for justice.

EIGHT

PEACE, BEAUTY, AND JUSTICE

Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I

have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it,

because if it prospers, you, too, will prosper.

Jeremiah 29:7

The Biblical idea of justice is comprehensive and practical,

but it is also high and wonderful. It is part and parcel of

what God is doing in history. God is reconciling humanity to

himself—and as a result of this great transaction, he is

reconciling all things to himself. He is bringing all things in

heaven and earth together in Christ (Colossians 1:20;

Ephesians 1:10). What does this mean?

The Artwork of God

The Jewish Scriptures were virtually unique in their view of

how the world began. Most other ancient accounts depict

creation as the result of a battle or of a struggle between

warring cosmic forces.163

A Chinese account describes how the primordial giant

Pangu emerged from the ancient cosmic egg, and when he

died the parts of his body became the world—his eyes the

sun and moon, his body the mountains, his blood the

waters, his muscles the land, his beard the forests. One

African story tells of a giant who got sick and vomited out

the world, first the sun, moon, and stars, and then

vegetation and human beings. The Gnostics taught that the

high God was unknowable, and in contradiction to God’s

will, some lower deity, a “demiurge,” created the profoundly

flawed material world. In Norse mythology the god Odin

killed the giant Ymir and used his body to create the

universe and its inhabitants. The Babylonian account, the

Enuma Elish, tells a similar story of the god Marduk who

defeats the ocean goddess Tiamat and produces the world

out of her members.

In most ancient myths, therefore, the visible universe

resulted from conflict, powers in tension with one another.

The Biblical creation account, however, stands in stark

contrast. Biblical scholar Gerhard von Rad has argued that,

unlike any of its neighbors, Israel could conceive of no

divine powers on a par with those of the Lord.164 Creation

was therefore the work of God without a rival, who made the

world not as a warrior digs a trench but as an artist paints a

picture or shapes a sculpture. God is a craftsman, an

artisan.

A House and a Garment

Sometimes the imagery the Bible uses to describe creation

is architectural. God says to Job: “Where were you when I

laid the earth’s foundation. . . . [and] marked out its

dimensions?” (Job 38:4-6). In the beginning, God built the

world to be not only our home but his royal dwelling (Isaiah

66:1). In the Psalms we learn that when he built the world it

had to have, as does any house, a foundation, and that

foundation was “righteousness and justice.” Jewish scholar

Moshe Weinfeld says, “This refers to the imposition of

equality, order, and harmony upon the cosmos and the

elimination of the forces of destruction and chaos.”165 God

brought order out of chaos, as a builder takes a pile of raw

materials and rightly relates them to one another in order to

form a house.

The Bible describes the making of the world not only as

the building of a house, but also as the weaving of a

garment. God turned a chaos into a cosmos, and also turned

a tangle into a tapestry. Woven garments were long in the

making and valuable in ancient times, and therefore they

were an apt metaphor for the wonder and character of the

material world. The sea (Psalm 104:6), the clouds (Job 38:9),

the lights of the sky (Psalm 104:1), and all the forces of

nature (Psalm 102:26) are called garments that God has

woven and now wears.

As a result, the world is not like a lava cone, the product of

powerful random eruptions, but rather like a fabric. Woven

cloth consists of innumerable threads interlaced with one

another. Even more than the architectural image, the fabric

metaphor conveys the importance of relationship. If you

throw thousands of pieces of thread onto a table, no fabric

results. The threads must be rightly and intimately related

to one another in literally a million ways. Each thread must

go over, under, around, and through the others at

thousands of points. Only then do you get a fabric that is

beautiful and strong, that covers, fits, holds, shelters, and

delights.

God created all things to be in a beautiful, harmonious,

interdependent, knitted, webbed relationship to one

another. Just as rightly related physical elements form a

cosmos or a tapestry, so rightly related human beings form

a community. This interwovenness is what the Bible calls

shalom, or harmonious peace.

Forms of Shalom

“Shalom” is usually translated “peace” in English Bibles, but

it means far more than what our English word conveys. It

means complete reconciliation, a state of the fullest

flourishing in every dimension—physical, emotional, social,

and spiritual—because all relationships are right, perfect,

and filled with joy.166

When your body is healthy, especially when you are

young, you have energy, strength, and beauty, because all

the parts of your body are working in unity. But when you

are injured, parts of your body may be out of alignment with

others. Cancer cells work not with but against the other

systems of the body. When the parts of your body fail to

work interdependently, you experience the loss of physical

shalom or well-being. And when you die, you literally

unravel.

When you experience a season of mental well-being, it is

because the things your emotions want are those of which

your conscience and reason approve. Your inner faculties

are working together. However, you may find yourself

longing intensely for something that your reason tells you is

futile or your conscience tells you is absolutely wrong, but

you can’t stop wanting it or seeking it. Then you experience

an inner unraveling of psychological shalom, commonly

given names like “guilt,” “being conflicted,” or “anxiety.”

Then there is social shalom. In the Frank Capra movie It’s

a Wonderful Life, George Bailey and his family run a savings

and loan company in the small town of Bedford Falls, New

York. Over the years they had helped innumerable families

get mortgages at fair and reasonable rates, and had been

patient and caring when loans couldn’t be repaid. As the

CEO of his company, George’s “bottom line” was not

maximum profits, but the flourishing of his community and

customers. George, of course, did not get rich with this kind

of approach! But at one point in the movie, when he is

suicidal, he is given a vision of what Bedford Falls would

have looked like if, as he wished at the moment, he “had

never been born.” What he sees is a community consisting

of some wealthy families surrounded by an impoverished,

dysfunctional town. Instead of kindly neighbors, there are

brutal and self-interested parties in constant conflict with

one another. Without George Bailey’s efforts the town had

lost its social shalom.

When the society disintegrates, when there is crime,

poverty, and family breakdown, there is no shalom.

However, when people share their resources with each

other, and work together so that shared public services

work, the environment is safe and beautiful, the schools

educate, and the businesses flourish, then that community

is experiencing social shalom. When people with

advantages invest them in those who have fewer, the

community experiences civic prosperity or social shalom.

Losing Shalom

But the world is not, by and large, characterized by shalom.

How did we get into this place? The beginning of the book of

Genesis tells us how in the Garden of Eden, humanity

walked with God and served him. Under his rule and

authority, it was paradise. We know something of this on a

mundane level. Excellent managers can take over

unprofitable businesses or losing sports franchises and,

through their leadership skills, turn everything around.

Under new, competent authority morale builds, the conflicts

end, the team jells, vision is recaptured, and everyone

thrives. This is just a dim hint of what happens under the

absolute reign of the true and living God. All things reach

their potential and flourish in perfect harmony.

All that ended, however, when humanity turned away

from God, rejecting his rule and kingdom. The third chapter

of Genesis spells out the results in comprehensive detail. Sin

entered the world to deface and mar everything that had

been made. Because we became estranged from God, we

also are alienated from our true selves, and from each other.

Our primal self-absorption has led to profound social evil—to

war, crime, family breakdown, oppression, and injustice.

When we lost our relationship with God, the whole world

stopped “working right.” The world is filled with hunger,

sickness, aging, and physical death. Because our

relationship with God has broken down, shalom is gone—

spiritually, psychologically, socially, and physically.

Justice and Shalom

Now we are in a position to see even more clearly what the

Bible means when it speaks of justice. In general, to “do

justice” means to live in a way that generates a strong

community where human beings can flourish. Specifically,

however, to “do justice” means to go to places where the

fabric of shalom has broken down, where the weaker

members of societies are falling through the fabric, and to

repair it.167 This happens when we concentrate on and meet

the needs of the poor.

How can we do that? The only way to reweave and

strengthen the fabric is by weaving yourself into it. Human

beings are like those threads thrown together onto a table.

If we keep our money, time, and power to ourselves, for

ourselves, instead of sending them out into our neighbors’

lives, then we may be literally on top of one another, but we

are not interwoven socially, relationally, financially, and

emotionally. Reweaving shalom means to sacrificially

thread, lace, and press your time, goods, power, and

resources into the lives and needs of others.

An intriguing real life example of an entire community

doing justice and seeking shalom is laid out in Yale professor

Nora Ellen Groce’s book Everyone Here Spoke Sign

Language.168 In the 1980s Croce was researching hereditary

deafness on Martha’s Vineyard. In the seventeenth century

the original European settlers were all from a region in Kent,

England, called “the Weald” where there was a high

incidence of hereditary deafness. Because of their

geographical isolation and intermarriage the percentage of

deaf people increased across the whole island. By the

nineteenth century one out of twenty-five people in the

town of Chilmark was deaf and in another small settlement

almost a quarter of the people could not hear.169 (Today,

because of the mobility of the population and marriage with

off-islanders, hereditary deafness has vanished. The last

deaf person born on the Vineyard died in 1952.)

In most societies, physically handicapped people are

forced to adapt to the life patterns of the nonhandicapped,

but that is not what happened on the Vineyard. One day

Croce was interviewing an older island resident and she

asked him what the hearing people thought of the deaf

people. “We didn’t think anything about them, they were

just like everyone else,” he replied. Croce responded that it

must have been necessary for everyone to write things

down on paper in order to communicate with them. The

man responded in surprise, “No, you see everyone here

spoke sign language.” The interviewer asked if he meant

the deaf people’s families. No, he answered, “Everybody in

town—I used to speak it, my mother did, everybody.”

Another interviewee said, “Those people weren’t

handicapped. They were just deaf.”170 One other

remembered, “They [the deaf] were like anybody else. I

wouldn’t be overly kind because they, they’d be sensitive to

that. I’d just treat them the way I treated anybody.” 171

Indeed, what had happened was that an entire community

had disadvantaged itself en masse for the sake of a

minority. Instead of making the nonhearing minority learn to

read lips, the whole hearing majority learned signing.172 All

the hearing became bilingual, so deaf people were able to

enter into full social participation. As a result of “doing

justice” (disadvantaging themselves) the majority

“experienced shalom”—it included people in the social

fabric who in other places would have fallen through it.

“When they had socials or anything up in Chilmark, why,

everybody would go and they [the deaf] enjoyed it, just as

much as anybody did. They used to have fun—we all did. . .

. They were part of the crowd, they were accepted. They

were fishermen and farmers and everything else. . . .

Sometimes, if there were more deaf people than hearing

there, everyone would speak sign language—just to be

polite, you know.”173 Deafness as a “handicap” largely

disappeared.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Croce’s research

was the revelation of how hearing people had their own

communication abilities enhanced. They found many uses

for signing besides communication with the deaf. Children

signed to one another during sermons in church or behind a

teacher’s back at school. Neighbors could sign to one

another over distances in a field or even through a spyglass

telescope. One woman remembers how her father would be

able to stand on a windy cliff and sign his intentions to

fishermen below. Another remembers how sick people who

could not speak were able to sign to make their needs

known.174

In other words, the “disadvantage” that the hearing

Vineyarders assumed—the effort and trouble to learn

another language—turned out to be for their benefit after

all. Their new abilities made life easier and more productive.

They changed their culture in order to include an otherwise

disadvantaged minority but in the process made themselves

and their society richer.

Martha’s Vineyard was a unique situation. However, in

every time and culture, the principle holds. The strong must

disadvantage themselves for the weak, the majority for the

minority, or the community frays and the fabric breaks.

Justice and Beauty

In 1999 Harvard English professor Elaine Scarry wrote a

book in which she took on the prevailing view of the late

twentieth century academy, namely, that beauty and

attractiveness was the handmaiden of privilege, masking

political power interests. On the contrary, she said in the

book with a title that conveys its main thesis—On Beauty

and Being Just. Beauty, she asserted, can lead us to a more

just life. Her first argument was that the observer of beauty

always receives a passion to share the beauty with others.

This serves as “an introduction (perhaps even our first

introduction) to the state of certainty.”175 Beauty, she says,

gives us the unavoidable conviction, even if we intellectually

have no “metaphysical referent” for it, that life is not

random and meaningless, that there is good and evil. We

want to share that experience with others, to have others

praise and enjoy the beauty with us.176

Her second argument was that beauty radically

“decenters” the self and moves you to distribute attention

away from yourself. She quotes philosopher and author Iris

Murdoch’s famous lecture “The Sovereignty of Good over

Other Concepts,” in which Murdoch describes once having

been absorbed in anxiety and self-pity, but then she looked

out a window to see a bird riding the thermals.

We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are

continually active, fabricating an anxious, self-

preoccupied, falsifying veil which partially conceals the

world. . . . [But] I am looking out of my window in an

anxious and resentful state of mind, brooding on some

damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a

hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The

brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. . . .

And when I return to thinking of the other matter it

seems less important. . . .177

Scarry observed that, in Murdoch’s experience, the new

vision of beauty occupied “all the space formerly in the

service of protecting, guarding, advancing the self ” (or its

prestige). In the presence of beauty you cease to be the

hero in your own story. It is no longer all about you. You

experience a “symmetry of everyone’s relation to one

another.”178

Theologian Jonathan Edwards, in his book The Nature of

True Virtue, argued that human beings will only be drawn

out of themselves into unselfish acts of service to others

when they see God as supremely beautiful.179 Here’s an

example to illustrate what he means. If you listen to the

music of Bach because you want people to think you are

cultured (or because you want to think it of yourself), then

the music is only a means to achieve some other end,

namely the enhancement of your reputation. But if you play

Bach because you find it not just useful but beautiful, then

you are listening to it as satisfying in and of itself.

Edwards taught that if, through an experience of God’s

grace, you come to find him beautiful, then you do not serve

the poor because you want to think well of yourself, or in

order to get a good reputation, or because you think it will

be good for your business, or even because it will pay off for

your family in creating a better city to live in. You do it

because serving the poor honors and pleases God, and

honoring and pleasing God is a delight to you in and of itself.

Scarry and Murdoch are not making anything like

Edwards’s appeal to the beauty of God as the basis for just

living. And yet together they acknowledge that there is an

obstacle to doing justice in human nature that will not be

removed simply through education, argument, and

persuasion. It takes an experience of beauty to knock us out

of our self-centeredness and induce us to become just.

Columbia professor Todd Gitlin reviewed Elaine Scarry’s

book and was not convinced by it. Quoting George Steiner,

he observed that the Nazis slaughtered people by day and

enjoyed Mozart by night.180 Edwards taught that “secondary

beauty,” such as the beauty of art, may have some

humbling, decentering effect, since all beauty is derived

from God. But I’m sure he would have agreed with Gitlin

that such beauty is insufficient to produce justice. There is,

however, one supreme kind of beauty that will.

God in the Face of the Poor

Proverbs 19:7 and 14:31 are texts that sum up a great deal

of Scriptural material. The first text says that if you are kind

to the poor, God takes it as if you are being kind to him. The

second gives us the flip side; namely, that if you show

contempt for the poor it means you are showing contempt

for him.

One of the more notorious practices of local banks is to

“redline” poor and nonwhite neighborhoods. That is, they

refuse mortgage and small business loans to applicants who

live there. Their argument is that they simply look at the

statistics and conclude that residents of those

neighborhoods are more likely not to make good on the

loan. God, however, says we are not to live that way in our

relationships to the poor. He says, in effect, in Proverb 19:7:

“Don’t you dare ‘redline’ people. Don’t look at someone and

say, ‘If I get involved with that person I might be taken

advantage of!’ I see a gift to the poor as a gift to me. I will,

in some way, make the loan good. I will give you value, trust

me.”

This is not a promise to match literal dollars for dollars,

but to enrich your life and meet your needs (Mark 10:29-

31). What a promise that is! In your life you may already

have family members, friends, or neighbors who have

chronic problems and who are difficult to love. And out in

your community there are more. Don’t shrink, says the Lord,

from spending yourself on the broken, the hurting, and the

needy. I’m good for it.

But there’s a deeper principle at work here. If you insult

the poor, you insult God. The principle is that God personally

identifies very closely with the widow, the orphan, and the

immigrant, the most powerless and vulnerable members of

society. When the Old Testament says God identifies with

the poor, that is a strong statement. But it still is basically a

figure of speech. Not until you come to the New Testament

can you fully grasp the degree to which God has done this.

In Proverbs we see God identifying with the poor

symbolically. But in the incarnation and death of Jesus we

see God identifying with the poor and marginal literally.

Jesus was born in a feed trough. When his parents had him

circumcised the offering they made—two pigeons—was that

prescribed for the poorest class of people in the society.181

He lived among the poor and the marginalized, who were

drawn to him even as the respectable were repulsed by him.

We see the kind of life he led when he said, “Foxes have

holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to

lay his head” (Luke 9:58). At the end of his life he rode into

Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey, spent his last evening in a

borrowed room, and when he died he was laid in a borrowed

tomb. They cast lots for his only possession, his robe, for

there on the cross he was stripped of everything. He died

naked and penniless. He had little the world valued and the

little he had was taken. He was discarded—thrown away. But

only because of Him do we have any hope.

In Jesus Christ God identified not only with the poor, but

also with those who are denied justice. Dr. James

Montgomery Boice once preached a sermon entitled “The

Illegalities of Christ’s Trial.”182 Examining the account of

Jesus’s trial before the Sanhedrin in John 18 he listed all the

ways that the trial was a miscarriage of justice: There was

no public notification; it was held in middle of the night;

Jesus was allowed no defense; he was forcibly struck in the

middle of the trial. Later the colonial governor, Pontius Pi-

late knew the case was insufficient but he caved in to

political pressure. Finally, Jesus was tortured cruelly and put

to death. In all these ways, Jesus identifies with the millions

of nameless people who have been wrongfully imprisoned,

robbed of their possessions, tortured, and slaughtered.

Many people say, “I can’t believe in God when I see all the

injustice in the world.” But here is Jesus, the Son of God,

who knows what it’s like to be the victim of injustice, to

stand up to power, to face a corrupt system and be killed for

it. He knows what it is like to be lynched. I’m not sure how

you believe in a God remote from injustice and oppression,

but Christianity doesn’t ask you to believe in that. That is

why the Christian writer John Stott is able to say, “I could

never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross. In

the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who

was immune to it?”183

And what does this mean? Remember Matthew 25. On the

last day Jesus sits on the judgment seat, saying:

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty

and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you

welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was

sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to

me.”

Then the righteous will answer him, saying, “Lord,

when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty

and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger

and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when

did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?”

And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as

you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you

did it to me.”

Matthew 25:35-40

On Judgment Day, don’t say to the Lord, “When did we

see you thirsty, naked, and captive?” Because the answer is

—on the cross! There we see how far God was willing to go

to identify with the oppressed of the world. And he was

doing it all for us! There Jesus, who deserved acquittal and

freedom, got condemnation—so that we who deserve

condemnation for our sins can receive acquittal (Galatians

3:10-14; 2 Corinthians 5:21). This was the ultimate instance

of God’s identification with the poor. He not only became

one of the actually poor and marginalized, he stood in the

place of all those of us in spiritual poverty and bankruptcy

(Matthew 5:3) and paid our debt.

Now that is a thing of beauty. To take that into the center

of your life and heart will make you one of the just.

Some years ago I heard a man relate the experience of a

wealthy older woman that he once knew.184 She had never

married and had no children to serve as heirs. She had only

one close relative, a nephew, who hoped to inherit her

money. He had always been gracious and attentive in her

presence, but she had heard things from others that made

her doubt her impression. The disposal of her wealth was no

small matter. She had to be sure that the person who

received it would use it wisely and generously. So she

decided to take matters into her own hands. One morning

she dressed in tattered clothes, appearing to be a homeless

person, and lay on the steps of his urban town house. When

he came out, he cursed at her and told her to leave or he

would call the police. And so she knew what his heart was

really like. His response to the poor woman revealed his true

nature.

Proverbs 14:31 says, “He who oppresses the poor shows

contempt for their Maker.” The God of the Bible says, as it

were, “I am the poor on your step. Your attitude toward

them reveals what your true attitude is toward me.” A life

poured out in doing justice for the poor is the inevitable sign

of any real, true gospel faith.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION - Why Write This

Book?

1 The Corporation for National and Community Service is an

independent agency of the U.S. government, created to

support community service and volunteerism, and the

publisher of Volunteering in America. The article from which

the quotes in this paragraph are taken is by Mark Hrywna,

“Young Adults Fueled Spike in Volunteers,” in The NonProfit

Times, July 28, 2009, accessed at

http://www.nptimes.com/09Jul/bnews-090728-1.html.

2 Ibid.

3 See Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social

Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1922), chapter 19, “The Social

Gospel and the Atonement,” where Rauschenbusch rejects

the theory of penal substitution and sees Jesus’s death as

revealing the social injustice of this world, as well as the

sacrificial, unselfish generosity that must be our operating

principle if we are to heal the world of its evil.

4 Jonathan Edwards, “Christian Charity: The Duty of Charity

to the Poor, Explained and Enforced,” in vol. II of The Works

of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Sereno Dwight (Carlisle, Pa.:

Banner of Truth Trust, 1998), p. 164.

5 It might be objected that Jonathan Edwards was speaking

here of only charity to the poor, not justice. But for Edwards,

the word “charity” meant more than what we use it to mean

today. See more on Edwards’s views in other chapters.

6 See Amy Sullivan, “Young Evangelicals: Expanding their

Mission” in Time, June 1, 2010. Accessed at

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1992463,00.html

on July 10, 2010. Sullivan writes: “Today’s young

Evangelicals cut an altogether different figure. They are

socially conscious, cause-focused, and controversy-averse.

And they are quickly becoming a growth market for secular

service organizations like Teach for America. Overall

applications to Teach for America have doubled since 2007

as job prospects have dimmed for college graduates. But

applications have tripled from graduates of Christian

colleges and universities. Wheaton is now ranked sixth

among all small schools—above traditionally granola

institutions like Carleton College and Oberlin—in the number

of graduates it sends to Teach for America. The typical

Wheaton student, like many in the newest generation of

Evangelicals, is likely to be on fire about spreading the Good

News and doing good.”

7 An example is Joel B. Green and Mark D. Baker,

Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (Downers Grove, Ill.:

InterVarsity, 2000.)

8 Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion

Poisons Everything (New York: Hatchette, 2007).

9 “Jeffrey” (not his real name) was one of the brightest

students in the school. When he graduated from high

school, all other students with his grades got into private or

Ivy League schools. He could not afford that, and went to a

very inexpensive state school. Nevertheless, he went on to

get a Ph.D. and today teaches in one of the premier

graduate schools in the country.

10 See Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on

Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law 1150-1625

(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997). See chapter 1. See

also chapter 2, “A Contest of Narratives,” in Nicholas

Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2008).

11 David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion

and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 2004). Also, see Richard W. Willis, Martin

Luther King, Jr., and the Image of God (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2009.). This book argues that King and the

African-American church drew heavily on the Biblical

account that all humans are made in “the image of God”

and are therefore equal and must be treated with dignity.

12 Some of the results of this work can be found in my book

Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road (Grand

Rapids: Zondervan, 1986).

13 Harvie M. Conn, Evangelism: Doing Justice and Preaching

Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982).

14 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1999).

ONE - What Is Doing Justice?

15 The Scripture quotations in this book are ordinarily taken

from the New International Version translation. Sometimes I

provide my own translations. The NIV, for example, regularly

renders the word gare as “alien,” whereas I will usually

translate it “immigrant,” which, I think, more accurately

conveys to modern readers the meaning of the word. The

word means “the outsider living in your midst.”

16 Mark Gornik now heads up City Seminary of New York in

New York City. I consider Mark’s ministry to be an excellent,

instructive example of how to do justice in a poor

community. His book, To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the

Changing Inner City (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), is an

important theological reflection on the work of justice,

particularly in a city. We will return to Mark’s work in chapter

2, where we hear his analysis of what makes a

neighborhood poor, and in chapter 6, where I give an

overview of the balanced system of ministries that Mark and

others developed in Baltimore.

17 See Peter Craigie, Twelve Prophets, Volume 2: Micah,

Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and

Malachi (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985). “Although we

may learn deeply from each of the three parts of the

prophet’s message, it is the collective whole which is most

vital” (p. 47). See also Bruce K. Walke, A Commentary on

Micah (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), p. 394.

18 Waltke, Micah, p. 394.

19 This is a term coined, from what I can tell, by

Wolterstorff, p. 75.

20 Howard Peskett and Vinoth Ramachandra, The Message

of Mission: The Glory of Christ in All Time and Space

(Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 113. Also

quoted in Tim Chester, Good News to the Poor: Sharing the

Gospel through Social Involvement (Nottingham, UK:

InterVarsity Press, 2004), p. 19.

21 The main source of this term is Gustavo Gutiérrez, A

Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation

(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1973). It is now available in a

fifteenth anniversary edition from Orbis, publication date

1988.

22 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 79.

23 Ibid.

24 Christopher Wright, Deuteronomy (Exeter, UK:

Paternoster, 1996), p. 13.

25 J. A. Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah: An Introduction and

Commentary (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993),

p. 471.

26 These are Wolterstorff’s terms, and I think they are more

positive and descriptive than the more common labels.

Rectifying justice is usually named “retributive” justice (that

is, punishing wrongdoers and reestablishing rights) and

primary justice is usually called “distributive” justice (that

is, making sure that goods and opportunities are more

equitably distributed in society).

27 Christopher Wright sums it up nicely: “Mishpat is what

needs to be done in a given situation if people and

circumstances are to be restored to conformity with

tzadiqah.” Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

(Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004), p. 237.

28 Francis I. Anderson, Job: Tyndale Old Testament

Commentary (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 1975),

p. 231.

29 The metaphor of a father helping his children is useful in

several aspects. A good father gives his children direct aid—

he feeds them and protects them from danger. But a good

father does not want his children to remain dependent on

him forever. He wants them to grow up and become self-

sufficient. So, too, helping the poor may begin with direct

relief and protection, but the final goal should always be

empowerment and self-sufficiency. To keep the poor

dependent is paternalistic and unloving, and ultimately

unjust.

30 Wright, Old Testament Ethics, p. 257.

31 “[This text] is careful to not define righteousness merely

in negative terms. It is not enough simply not to be a robber.

The righteous person is actively generous. It is not enough

to say, as one often hears in situations of bereavement, ‘He

never did anyone any harm.’ The question one is tempted to

ask is, ‘Yes, but did he ever do anyone any good?’”

Christopher J. H. Wright, The Message of Ezekiel (Downers

Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001), p. 194.

TWO - Justice and the Old Testament

32 Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches: A Biblical

Theology of Possessions (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity

Press, 1999), p. 39.

33 Christopher Wright, Deuteronomy (Carlisle, UK:

Paternoster, 1996), p. 188.

34 A perennial question is, though believers in the Old

Testament were required to tithe their income, are New

Testament Christians so required? The principle we have

been using—that the coming of Christ changes Old

Testament laws, yet they still have some abiding validity—

holds true for tithing. In Luke 11:42 Jesus chastises the

Pharisees for “tithing your garden herbs . . . but neglecting

justice and the love of God.” That is, they were diligent to

tithe their income, but they were exploitative in their

business dealings and unjust in their relationships. Then

Jesus adds, “You should have practiced the latter without

leaving the former undone.” In other words, Jesus affirms

tithing, but says that by itself it is not enough. Put another

way, for a Christian, tithing is a minimum standard for

generosity and doing justice. Christian believers are not less

indebted to and blessed by God than Old Testament

believers were. Therefore we should not imagine that God’s

standards for generosity would be lower for New Testament

Christians than for Old Testament believers. “To whom much

is given, much shall be required”(Luke 12:48).

35 There is some debate about whether this was an

additional tithe in the third year (thus a 20 percent donation

that year!) or whether this meant only that the single third-

year tithe was distributed this way. We know that by the

time of Josephus (a Jewish writer who lived after the time of

Christ) the Jews practiced not only two tithes in the third

year but an additional “third of a tithe” special offering for

the poor, which brought the individual family’s giving that

year to 23.3 percent. See Blomberg, pp. 46ff, and Wright,

pp. 183-186.

36 Modern readers are often offended by the very fact that

the Mosaic Law allowed slavery at all. One friend once said

to me, “It’s nice that God commanded that the slaves be set

free every seven years, but why did he allow slavery in the

first place?” However, an Old Testament Israelite slave was

more like an “indentured servant” than what we would call a

“slave” today. When an Israelite fell into slavery, it was a

temporary condition, because of indebtedness. Slavery

through kidnapping and trafficking in Israel was punishable

by death (Deuteronomy 24:7, cf. 1 Timothy 1:9-11). Also,

you could not mistreat a slave, because if you even knocked

out his tooth he was to be set free (Exodus 21:27).

Most interesting of all is the remarkable passage

Deuteronomy 23:15-16, which directs: “If a slave has taken

refuge with you, do not hand him over to his master. Let him

live wherever he likes. . . . Do not oppress him.” This is a

direct contradiction of all existing slave laws of other

societies in both ancient and modern times. Slave laws

always penalized runaway slaves as well as those who

harbored them. What does this law mean? Bible scholar

Chris Wright proposes two implications. First, if this refers to

all Israelite slaves, it assumes that experience of slavery in

Israel was not so harsh that there would be a great number

of runaways. Indeed, Deuteronomy 15:16ff allows a slave to

voluntarily remain in servitude after the Sabbath year,

which indicates that many opted for this. A runaway slave,

then, could be presumed to be someone who was being

mistreated. “When reading the Old Testament, we need to

put out of our minds pictures of slavery derived from Roman

galley slaves or more recent black slavery because these

are quite inappropriate analogies for what a slave was in

Israel.” Wright, Deuteronomy, p.249.

Even if this law referred to only runaway foreign slaves

(rather than to Israelite slaves), this indicates a major,

“intentional critique of the very nature of the institution

[slavery] itself. That is, the legal rights and expectations

intrinsic to slavery as a social institution are subordinated to

the rights of the slave as a human being with needs. . . . In

this case, the needs of the weaker party (the slave seeking

refuge) are given explicit legal preference over the claims of

the stronger (the master seeking his return)” (p.250). In

other words, the owner’s economic investment in the slave

is relative to the absolute moral obligation to treat the slave

as a human being with dignity. Wright concludes: “This

Deuteronomic law on slavery is pointing in a direction that

ultimately undermines slavery itself” (p.250).

37 Blomberg, p. 45.

38 Blomberg, p. 46.

39 See chapter 4 for some thoughts by Jonathan Edwards on

this condition.

40 A Biblical example is in 2 Kings 4:1-7, where a woman

loses her husband and cannot pay her debts, and stands to

become homeless because of a merciless creditor. The

natural disaster—the loss of her husband—left her

defenseless before powerful economic forces. She was

saved only when God stepped in and, through the prophet

Elisha, miraculously multiplied a single jar of oil into a large

inventory, which she sold to eliminate her debt. Other

Biblical characters who stepped in to defend disaster victims

against the ruthless include Boaz (Ruth 4) and Job himself

(Job 29 and 31).

41 Two New York Times op-ed pieces show that more

thinkers are coming to this nuanced, balanced, complexified

view of poverty. See Orlando Patterson, “A Poverty of Mind,”

in The New York Times, March 25, 2006, and also “Jena, O.J.,

and the Jailing of Black America,” The New York Times,

September 30, 2007. See also Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Forty

Acres and a Gap in Wealth” in The New York Times,

November 18, 2007.

42 Mark R. Gornik, To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the

Changing Inner City (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 40.

43 Ibid., pp. 42-43.

44 See especially William Julius Wilson, When Work

Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York:

Alfred Knopf, 1996).

45 I knew a minister who moved with his family into a poor

neighborhood, and soon afterward his wife applied to get a

new credit card. She was instantly turned down, despite

having a normal middle-class credit history. It was simply

because of her new address.

46 Ibid., pp. 54-57.

47 Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the

Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975).

48 For more on the practical multidimensionality of doing

justice in a neighborhood, see chapter 6.

49 D. Carson, R. T. France, J. Motyer, G. Wenham, eds., New

Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition (Downers Grove,

Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000), p. 129.

THREE - What Did Jesus Say About

Justice?

50 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, translated by Philip S.

Watson (London: SPCK, 1953), p. 70. Quoted by Nicholas

Wolterstorff in Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 100. On pp. 98-108

Wolterstorff summarizes and refutes Nygren’s argument

that in the Bible justice and love are complete

incompatibles.

51 See D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John

(Leicester, UK: InterVarsity Press, 1991), p. 227.

52 John Newton, The Works of John Newton, Volume 1

(Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth edition, 1985), p. 136.

53 In what way did the scribes denounced in Mark 12:40

and Luke 20:47 “devour widows’ houses”? The gospel texts

do not explain. Scholars have proposed several ideas. One

possibility is that temple authorities and clergy were often

entrusted with the management of the property of elderly

widows, and they may have routinely done so in a way that

enriched the managers and impoverished the widows by

charging exorbitant fees. There are references in the Talmud

that speak of this practice. See Darrell L. Bock, Luke, Volume

2:9:51-24:53 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), pp. 1643-1644,

for a full treatment.

54 While the term “neglecting justice” could sometimes

mean to break the law, in the context it clearly means that

they are not showing care or concern for the poor. Every

commentator I was able to consult, of every theological

perspective, agrees that the term “justice” here has to do

with the Old Testament concept of loving and defending the

vulnerable.

55 Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans, 1997), p. 471.

56 There is controversy over whether “my brethren” are

Christians or not. It seems to me that they are, since that

word is never used by Jesus in the gospels to refer to

anyone but those who recognize him as the Christ. So this is

a call to create a believing community in which the well-off

and middle class are sacrificially giving their resources away

and deeply, personally involved in the lives of the many

weak and vulnerable in their midst. Readers who are

disappointed that this does not speak to how Christians are

to relate to the poor of the world, beyond the believing

community, should look at the Good Samaritan parable and

other passages that instruct Christians to not limit their

social concern to only believers (e.g., Galatians 6:10). Some

interpreters have pressed further and said that these

“brethren” to be received are really evangelists, and

therefore Jesus is saying that, though they are poor, people

should listen to their message. This seems to me to be

unlikely. Some of these brethren are in prison and sick—not

likely to be traveling evangelists. And, as we have seen,

Jesus’s language is close to that of Isaiah 58. He is

reasserting the prophetic challenge for Christians to create

a community of justice in which the well-off share what they

have with poorer brethren.

57 See D. A. Carson, The Expositor’s Bible Commentary:

Matthew Chapters 13 through 28 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,

1995). “The reason for admission to the kingdom in this

parable is more evidential than causative. This is suggested

by the surprise of the righteous in verses 37-39” (p. 521).

58 Harvie Conn, Bible Studies in Evangelization and Simple

Lifestyle (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1981), p. 18.

59 In Acts 5, there is an account of two members of the

early church—Ananias and Sapphira—who gave a generous

gift, claiming to have donated the whole proceeds from the

sale of a piece of property. In reality, they held back some of

the income for themselves. As a result of this lie God judged

them and they died. Because of the dramatic results, one

implication of the passage is often overlooked. In the early

church, radical generosity was so important and valued that

people were prepared to fake it.

60 “It cannot be accidental that Luke, in his portrayal of the

beginnings of the . . . community of the Holy Spirit, chose to

describe them in words taken almost directly from the LXX

[the Greek] translation of verse 4, simply changing its future

tense to the past. (“There were no needy persons among

them,” Acts 4:34). C. Wright, Deuteronomy, p. 189.

61 Some people will be surprised that, in my survey of

Jesus’s teaching on justice, I do not treat the important

subject of “the kingdom of God.” Indeed, many consider this

the main theme of Jesus’s ministry, and most writers who

expound the Biblical teaching on justice constantly invoke it.

I have not done so for several reasons. One is that there is

so little consensus among Christian thinkers about the

precise meaning of the term. Most agree that God’s

kingdom is his redemptive reigning power, that it was

inaugurated by Jesus at his first coming into the world and

will be brought to completion at his second coming. But as

to the exact nature of that kingdom and how it manifests

itself today there is much disagreement. Some understand it

more individualistically, that it is a spiritual realm we enter

when we are converted, so that now God is ruling in our

hearts and bringing about changes in our lives. Others

understand it more corporately. They see the kingdom as a

set of new social arrangements, or as the healing of broken

relationships between people of different classes and races.

Those who take this view believe the kingdom of God is a

way that God brings about changes not just in individual

lives, but in the world and society. They believe, for

example, that when Christians help the poor, they are

therefore doing “kingdom work,” but others would disagree

with them, and would insist that only evangelizing and

discipling—building up the Body of Christ—is “kingdom

work.” An overlapping issue is the debate about the

relationship of the present and future worlds. Is this physical

world going to be completely burned up and replaced by a

new heavens and new earth, or will the present world be

renewed, cleansed, and healed? If the former is the case,

then all that matters is saving souls, since everything on

this earth is going to burn up anyway.

As you can see, the issues are complex, and the space I

have in this book is limited, so I have proceeded by showing

that an extremely strong case for doing justice and caring

for the poor can be made without entering into debates over

the nature of the kingdom and other matters of

“eschatology.” As we will discover in chapter five, Jonathan

Edwards was able to make an extremely strong case for

ministry to the poor from the central, traditional doctrines of

penal substitution, redemption, and salvation by grace.

Having said that, I believe the kingdom of God has a

corporate aspect. “Blessed are the poor,” Jesus said (not

merely the “poor in spirit”), “for yours is the kingdom of

God” (Luke 6:20). There in Luke 6:20ff, Jesus taught that,

while the world’s system valued power (“you who are rich”),

material comfort (“you who are well fed”), success (“you

who gloat”), and recognition (“you when all men speak well

of you”), members of his kingdom did not make these things

into life goals or priorities. A community of people who,

instead, lives for service, embrace of the “Other,” and is

characterized by sacrificial giving—will inevitably create a

“counterculture,” a new social arrangement unlike that of

the world. Also, Luke 6:20-35 must mean (at least) that now

the brokenhearted, the unrecognized, and the oppressed

have a central place in the heart and life of the people of

God. I have written more on the relationship of the kingdom

of God to justice and evangelism in “The Gospel in All Its

Forms,” which can be found online at

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2008/spring/9.74.html.

FOUR - Justice and Your Neighbor

62 I should note here that, in general, I believe that the local

church’s “diaconal” funds should be mainly used to help

people with needs who are members or who are involved in

the church’s worship and community life. In order to reach

the poor of the city and the world, it is best—for both

practical and theological reasons—to organize Christian

nonprofits and other institutions to do that. I will discuss this

more in chapter 6.

63 This paragraph is based on the account of Mark Valeri,

Works of Jonathan Edwards: Sermons and Discourses, 1730-

1733, vol. 17 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p.

22.

64 The sermon can be found in Valeri, Works of Jonathan

Edwards, 1730-1733, vol. 17, pp. 369ff. But there are also

some versions of this sermon that are on the Internet in

numerous places.

65 Some might point out that Edwards was speaking here of

only charity to the poor, not justice. However, Edwards in

this sermon was reminding the economically prosperous in

his congregation that their social standing was a gift of

undeserved grace. A lack of generosity to the poor was not,

then, just stinginess, but injustice. Edwards insisted that

public charity to the indigent was not enough, that

Christians should aim for the complete eradication of

poverty in their civic community, and that not to give

generously, far past the minimum survival-only-level of

public welfare, was a sin. See Gerald McDermott, One Holy

and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan

Edwards (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press,

1992), p. 160. Edwards also attacked businessmen who took

advantage of market conditions to gain exorbitant profits at

the expense of the poor. (See Edwards’s sermon

“Dishonesty: or the Sin of Theft and Injustice,” in Works of

Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, E. Hickman, ed. (Carlisle, Pa.:

Banner of Truth edition, 1974), p. 222. From these examples

we see that Edwards had a keen understanding of “primary”

or social justice—of the rights of the poor and the

obligations of others to lift them up. For Edwards, a lack of

“charity” was a sin, and therefore a violation of God’s law

and justice.

66 Edwards in Valeri, p. 395.

67 Ibid., p. 394.

68 Ibid., p. 398.

69 Ibid., p. 397.

70 Ibid, p. 401.

71 Ibid, p. 402.

72 Ibid.

FIVE - Why Should We Do Justice?

73 Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,”

Duke Law Journal, December 1979.

74 Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and

Sentimentality,” in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds.,

On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New

York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 133-134.

75 From a letter to Frederick Pollock, in Richard Posner, ed.,

The Essential Holmes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1992), p. 108.

76 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

(New York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 46.

77 A very important book discerning the different ways the

Bible speaks of God’s love is Don Carson, The Difficult

Doctrine of the Love of God (Leicester, UK: InterVarsity

Press, 1999). Carson shows that neither a very conservative

view (“God loves only those who are saved”) nor a very

liberal view (“God loves all people without distinction”) does

justice to the nuanced Biblical doctrine of the love of God.

78 Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, pp. 357-359.

79 Aristotle, Politics, book I, part V. The quote is taken from

the translation by Benjamin Jowett (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover

Thrift Edition, 2000), p. 12.

80 Preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia,

July 4, 1965. It was accessed online on March 30, 2010, at

http://teachers.marisths.org:81/mhs_oldham/amdream.pdf.

81 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p. 46.

82 Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1-15

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 96. Also see Waltke’s

article “Righteousness in Proverbs,” in Westminster

Theological Journal 70 (2008): 207-24.

83 Christopher Wright, Deuteronomy, p. 261.

84 The importance of this line of reasoning is seen in its

repetition. God says repeatedly that his redemption of his

people is the basis for “doing justice.” The case is repeated

in Deuteronomy 24:17-22: “Do not deprive the alien or the

fatherless of justice. . . . Remember that you were slaves in

Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you from there.”

85 I take a traditional reading of Paul, despite the fact that

over the last twenty-five years there have been many who

have moved away from this classic Protestant interpretation

of him. This move away from Luther and Calvin has been

called the “New Perspective on Paul.” For the simple

summary (and good brief critique) of the NPP see Simon

Gathercole, “What Did Paul Really Mean?” in Christianity

Today, August 2007. Accessed on April 10, 2010 at

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/august/13.22.html.

86 Martin Luther “Preface” in Commentary on Paul’s Epistle

to the Galatians (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 1953), pp.

25-26. I have modernized some of the language.

87 A traditional problem is how to reconcile the fact that

James says, “We are not justified by faith alone,” while Paul

says that we are “justified by faith alone.” The answer is

—“James and Paul use ‘justify’ to refer to different things.

Paul refers to the initial declaration of a sinner’s innocence

before God; James to the ultimate verdict of innocence

pronounced over a person at the last judgment. While a

sinner can get into relationship with God only by faith (Paul),

the ultimate validation [proof] of that relationship takes into

account the works that true faith must inevitably produce

(James).” D. Moo, The Letter of James, pp. 141-142. For

more on James’s teaching on the relationship of grace and

justice, see chapter five.

88 D. A. Carson, The Expositors Bible Commentary: Matthew

Chapters 1 to 12 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), p. 132.

See also R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 164-65. France writes: “‘Poverty in

spirit’ [speaks] of a person’s relationship to God. It is a

positive spiritual orientation, the converse of the arrogant

self-confidence which not only rides roughshod over the

interests of other people but more importantly causes a

person to treat God as irrelevant.” On the parallel passage

“the poor and contrite in spirit” (Isaiah 66:2), Alec Motyer

writes that the term means “a sense of inability in spiritual

matters . . . helplessness to please God.” Motyer, The

Prophecy of Isaiah, p. 534.

89 This essay is a chapter in Miroslav Volf, Against the Tide:

Love in a Time of Petty Dreams and Persisting Enmities

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) pp. 137-139.

90 Ibid., p. 138.

91 Sermons of M’Cheyne (Edinburgh: n.p., 1848). I use this

text and make similar arguments in chapter 3 of an earlier

book, Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road, 2nd

ed. (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing

Co., 1997).

SIX - How Should We Do Justice?

92 See the additional commentary on this text given on it in

chapter 1.

93 See Derek Kidner, Psalms 1-72: An Introduction and

Commentary (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1973),

p. 161.

94 This is simply from the Wikipedia entry for “Business

Ethics.” It is a good example of the typical lines of reasoning

in courses and discussion on corporate ethics. See

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/business_ethics.

95 Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1-15, p.

96.

96 One way that many Christians seek to do justice in their

daily life and work is by paying attention to the sources of

the products they consume. In a 1995 article, reporter Bob

Herbert tells of visiting a factory in El Salvador that made

jackets for Liz Claiborne. While the jackets sold in the U.S.

for $178 each, workers got 77 cents per jacket. A female

worker being interviewed after her twelve-hour shift

revealed that while desperate to keep the job, her low

wages made it impossible for her to even buy milk for her

three-year-old daughter. The U.S. clothing companies are

simply “shopping around the whole world for the cheapest

labor price.”(Bob Herbert, “In Maquiladora Sweatshops: Not

a Living Wage,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 22,

1995.) Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh recounts

Herbert’s article, and then contrasts Liz Claiborne with the

Spanish worker-owned manufacturing company, the

Mondragón Cooperative Corporation. Mondragón, really a

federation of worker cooperatives, is based on the idea that

if labor hires capital, the economic arrangements will be

more just than when capital hires labor. In Mondragón, the

highest-paid employee, on average, can make no more than

five or six times what the lowest-paid make; 10 percent of

surpluses are given directly to community development

projects. Mondragón currently employs over ninety-two

thousand workers, and studies have shown that the

communities in which Mondragón employs many people are

unusually healthy. (William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed:

Economics and Christian Desire [Grand Rapids, Mich.:

Eerdmans, 2008], pp. 16-17). Christians who want to

support justice in the world may wish to patronize some

companies over others. I would add that this whole area is

fraught with difficult questions. Many argue that even the

low wage jobs created by U.S. companies overseas give an

enormous boost to national economies, and that free

enterprise in the long run lifts the interests of both labor and

capital. Some Christian thinkers are far more positive about

the morality of free markets than others.

97 “Mary” is a pseudonym and I also changed details to

preserve her anonymity.

98 Wright, Deuteronomy, p. 261.

99 The stories of these ministries are told vividly by Perkins

in books such as A Quiet Revolution (Waco, Tex.: Word,

1976), Let Justice Roll Down (Ventura, Calif.: Regal, 2006),

Restoring At-Risk Communities (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996),

Beyond Charity: The Call to Christian Community

Development (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993).

100 Charles Marsh and John M. Perkins, Welcoming Justice:

God’s Movement toward Beloved Community (Downers

Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2009), p. 25. See also Marsh’s

The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice,

from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (New York: Perseus

Books, 2005).

101 Marsh and Perkins, p. 30.

102 Some prefer to speak of “reneighboring” rather than

mere “relocation.” Often, more well-off people move into a

poorer neighborhood for two reasons: for cheaper rents or

prices on real estate, and/or because living in gritty inner

city neighborhoods is considered cool and hip. When many

people relocate for these reasons, the result is a spiraling

“gentrification,” which pushes up rents and pushes the

needy out of their community. Reneighboring means to

come in carefully, aware of the impact of one’s presence on

the environment, looking to be a genuine participant and

servant of the community, an influence on the common

good of the community.

103 Ibid., p. 23.

104 John Perkins, With Justice for All (Ventura, Calif.: Regal,

1982), pp. 146-166.

105 Gornik, p. 129. He points out that the very term

“development” has overtones of paternalistic control, but “it

still has value.”

106 Marsh and Perkins, p. 30.

107 Mishnah (Sanhedrin 10.5), quoted in J. Daniel Hays,

From Every People and Nation: A Biblical Theology of Race

(Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 50n.

108 Hays, p. 60.

109 What Peter learns in Acts 10:34 is that God does no

prosopolempsia. That is, he does not discriminate on the

basis of race or class. (See also Ephesians 6:9.)

110 Richard Lovelace, The Dynamics of Spiritual Life,

(Downers Grove IVP, 1979) p. 199.

111 Needless to say, the subject of racial reconciliation is

complicated and filled with many sub-issues. One is the

question of whether white Americans today need to repent

for the sins of ancestors and acknowledge the white

privilege they have today. First, questions about individual

and corporate guilt arise. The Bible does speak of repenting

and taking some responsibility for the sins of ancestors.

(See Daniel 9.) And yet, passages like Ezekiel 18 argue

forcefully that individuals will be judged for their own sins

only, not the sins of their forbears. It is important to keep

both of these truths in balance. Second, your understanding

of the causes of poverty will influence your practice of racial

reconciliation. If you believe that African-American poverty

is mainly the result of systemic racism and exclusion, or if

you think it is almost completely caused by a breakdown in

family and personal responsibility, it will influence your

whole approach to racial unity and reconciliation. For a

balanced, conservative survey of the different approaches

to racial justice and reconciliation, see John Piper’s

forthcoming Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian. For

an account that puts much emphasis on the systemic nature

of racism, see Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice,

Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace,

and Healing (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2008).

112 See www.bostontenpoint.org.

113 In Israel, under the Mosaic legislation, all sacrifices to

God were offered at the central sanctuary—the tabernacle

and later the temple—by the priests. Job was his family’s

priest (Job 1:4-5), and this means that the events in the life

of Job evidently did not occur within the boundaries of the

theocratic nation-state of Israel.

114 Robert Linthicum, City of God, City of Satan: A Biblical

Theology of the Urban Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,

1991), pp. 45-47.

115 Ibid.

116 Many items on this list are taken from a survey done by

the International Justice Mission in 1996 of seventy Christian

ministries serving globally in missions, relief, and

development. See Gary Haugen, Good News About Injustice

(Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002), p. 41.

117 LaVerne S. Stokes, “Preface” to Mark Gornik, To Live in

Peace, p. xiii.

118 Gornik quoting from Christianity, Social Change, and

Globalization in the Americas (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers

University Press, 2001), in Gornik, p. 13.

119 All quotes on this page are taken from Gornik, pp. 12-

13.

120 There is far more to do to prepare and mobilize a

church for doing justice. Years ago I wrote a more practical

manual for this, and it contains many more details than are

laid out here. See Timothy J. Keller, Ministries of Mercy: The

Call of the Jericho Road, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, N.J.:

Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1997), chapters 8

through 14. See also Amy Sherman, “Getting Going: Ten

Steps to Building a Community Ministry,” in Restorers of

Hope (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1997). Another book that is

helpful for people asking, “Where can I start with doing

justice?” is Mae Elise Cannon, Social Justice Handbook:

Small Steps for a Better World (Downers Grove, Ill.:

InterVarsity Press, 2009). This book gives numerous modest

“small first steps” for beginning to do justice. Two books on

Christian community development and community

organizing are Robert Linthicum’s Empowering the Poor

(Federal Way, Wash.: World Vision International, 1991) and

Transforming Power: Biblical Strategies for Making a

Difference in Your Community (Downers Grove, Ill.:

InterVarsity Press, 2003). Also see Shane Claiborne, The

Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (Grand

Rapids: Zondervan, 2006). All these books will give you a

host of practical ideas for doing justice in your community.

However, I must attach a note to them. The divergent

theories of justice in our society are very powerful, and

Christian authors are usually influenced by one of them or

the other. Some of these books will assume a more

conservative, individualistic theory of justice and others the

view that poverty is almost completely the result of unjust

social systems. And you, the reader, will also be influenced

by these theories. So, for example, if you are a political

conservative you will find little objectionable in Amy

Sherman’s book but you will have much to object to in

Linthicum’s books. I propose that readers remember that

the Biblical concept of justice is very comprehensive and

therefore it should be possible to glean great ideas from all

kinds of sources.

121 Also see 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “If a man will not work,

he shall not eat.” A text like this must be balanced with a

text like Acts 4:32 where it is said that “anyone” who had a

need was helped. We must help anyone in the church in

need, but if we love them, and they are acting irresponsibly,

we must keep their feet to the fire in some way so that they

begin to change their ways. See Jonathan Edwards’s

thoughts on how to help “the undeserving poor” in chapter

4.

122 An example of this point of view is C. P. Wagner, in his

book Church Growth and the Whole Gospel (New York:

Harper and Row, 1981), pp. 101-104.

123 Quoted in James I. McCord, ed., Service in Christ (Grand

Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966).

124 For an excellent account of how generosity and care for

the poor were crucial to the evangelism of the early church,

see Alan Kreider, “They Alone Know the Right Way to Live”

in Mark Husbands and Jeffrey P. Greenman’s Ancient Faith

for the Church’s Future (Downers Grove, Ill.; InterVarsity

Press, 2008). Kreider notes that early Christianity grew

explosively—40 percent per decade for nearly three

centuries—at a time when “early Christians did not engage

in public preaching; it was too dangerous. There were

practically no evangelists or missionaries whose name we

know. . . . The early Christians had no mission boards. They

did not write treatises on evangelism. . . . The worship

services of the early Christians . . . after Nero’s persecution

in the mid-first century . . . closed their worship services to

visitors. Deacons stood at the churches’ doors, serving as

bouncers, checking to see that no unbaptized person, no

“lying informer,” could come in. . . . And yet the church was

growing. Officially it was a superstition. Prominent people

scorned it. Neighbors discriminated against the Christians in

countless petty ways. Periodically the church was subjected

to pogroms. . . . It was hard to be a Christian. . . . And still

the church grew. Why?” (pp. 169-170). This striking way of

laying out the early church’s social situation forces us to

realize that the church must have grown only because “it

was attractive. People were fascinated by it, drawn to it as

to a magnet” (p. 170). Kreider goes on to make a strong

historical case that what attracted nonbelievers was the

Christians’ concern for the weak and the poor, their

economic sharing, and their sacrificial love even for their

enemies.

125 See Irene Howat and John Nicholls, Streets Paved with

Gold: The Story of London City Mission (Fearn, Scotland:

Christian Focus, 2003).

126 For a sympathetic overview of Kupyer’s view, see Daniel

Strange, “Evangelical Public Theology: What on Earth? Why

on Earth? How on Earth?,” pp. 58-61, in Chris Green, ed., A

Higher Throne: Evangelical Public Theology (Nottingham,

UK: InterVarsity Press, 2008).

127 See Daniel Strange, pp. 52-57. The issue of how the

church relates to culture is a crucial and vast subject, well

beyond the scope of this book. Strange outlines two

alternative views. First, he discusses the “Two Kingdoms”

view, which insists neither the church as an institution nor

individual Christians should seek directly to reform society

according to the Biblical vision for justice. Second, he

discusses the “Transformationist” view, often associated

with Abraham Kuyper, which calls Christians to work in the

world “from a distinct Christian worldview” and so to

transform culture. Strange points out the dangers of both

but in the end chooses a moderate version of the

Transformationist model. See also note 149.

128 Here we come to two important theological debates:

The first is the debate about the nature of the church’s

“mission,” namely, is the mission of the church only to

preach the Word—evangelizing and making disciples—or is

it also (or mainly) to do justice? Increasingly, evangelicals

are talking about the church’s “justice mission.” See Amy L.

Sherman, “The Church on a Justice Mission” in Books and

Culture, July/August 2010. In this article examples are given

of local evangelical congregations that have added the

combating of sex/human trafficking to their churches’

mission work. Indeed, sex trafficking is an important justice

issue and an easy one for most evangelical churches to get

a handle on. Nevertheless, I am of the opinion that Kuyper is

right: It is best to speak of the “mission of the church,”

strictly conceived, as being the proclamation of the Word.

More broadly conceived, it is the work of Christians in the

world to minister in word and deed and to gather together

to do justice.

SEVEN - Doing Justice in the Public

Square

129 In some cases, a more appropriate term than “allies” is

the term “cobelligerents.” This refers to groups who are

sharply opposed on most other issues but who agree to

work in tandem on one particular issue where they agree.

An example might be radical feminists working with

fundamentalists to oppose pornography.

130 Michael J. Klarman, “Rethinking the History of American

Freedom,” William and Mary Law Review, vol. 42 (Fall 2000),

pp. 265, 270.

131 Peter Westen, “The Empty Idea of Equality,” Harvard

Law Review, vol. 95, no. 3 (1982), p. 537.

132 This extremely influential principle was originally

proposed by John Stuart Mill in his essay “On Liberty,” where

he wrote, “The sole end for which mankind are warranted,

individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of

action of any of their number, is . . . to prevent harm to

others.” Quoted in Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of

Secular Discourse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

2010), p. 70.

133 This example is taken from Smith, Disenchantment, pp.

84-86.

134 See chapter 3, “Trafficking in Harm,” in Smith,

Disenchantment , pp. 70ff.

135 Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

(Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1988).

136 Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?

(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

137 Sandel, Justice, p. 6.

138 Here are two cases that Sandel uses to show how

different accounts of justice lead to different verdicts on

cases. One case has to do with price gouging after

Hurricane Charley in 2004, when many businesses in Florida

raised their prices enormously on basic housing repair

materials. There was an outcry and Florida enforced laws

against price gouging. But this touched off a debate about

whether price gouging laws were just. On the one side

people insisted that, even if people were willing to pay the

prices, it was greedy and wrong of retailers to charge those

amounts. On the other side were many who argued that the

gouging laws violated the freedom of producers to set prices

at whatever level they could. To prevent this denied a

fundamental right in a democratic society. And further, they

argued, only if prices were allowed to rise could

manufacturers afford to produce the much greater

quantities of their products that the homeowners of Florida

needed. Sandel points out that the case “. . . divides ancient

and modern political thought. . . . Aristotle teaches that

justice means giving people what they deserve. . . . By

contrast, modern political philosophers—from Immanuel

Kant in the eighteenth century to John Rawls in the

twentieth century—argue that the principles of justice that

define our rights should not rest on any particular

conception of virtue, or of the best way to live. Instead, a

just society respects each person’s freedom to choose his or

her own conception of the good life” (Sandel, Justice, p. 8).

A more sensational case was that of the English ship the

Mignonette, which sank during a storm in 1884. Four sailors

escaped to a life-boat, but three survived their weeks at sea

only by killing and eating one of their number—a young

cabin boy with no parents, spouse, or children, who seemed

to be dying anyway. When they returned home to go to trial,

the majority of the British public was opposed to their

conviction. The young sailor’s death had been imminent

anyway, they reasoned, and if he had not died others would

have been widowed and orphaned. It was better for one to

die than that many die and be bereft. If you believe that the

justice is primarily the greatest good for the greatest

number, then what the sailors did was just. If, however, you

believe justice is primarily about individual freedom, then

the sailors certainly did an injustice to the young man,

because they killed him without his consent. Sandel skillfully

shows how these cases divided people because our Western

society does not have a consensus definition of justice.

Different groups come to different conclusions because each

theory has a different “bottom line” for justice.

139 Smith, Disenchantment, p. 39.

140 All these are quoted by Smith, Disenchantment, on p.

179.

141 Smith, Disenchantment, p. 181.

142 Sandel, Justice, p. 251.

143 Ibid.

144 Sandel, Justice, p. 252.

145 Sandel, Justice, p. 281.

146 Christians have a lot of resources in the Bible to help

them make hard decisions about how to live justly in the

cases like those cited by Sandel and recounted in Endnote

137. 1. Price gouging after the hurricane. In Leviticus 25:35ff

it is forbidden to charge interest on loans to people or even

to sell food for profit to those who have fallen into poverty

through some disaster. The Mosaic law says that when

disaster strikes, we should lower our usual prices for the

sake of the victims. We should not make money off of their

misfortune. In Florida, a balance would have to have been

struck. For most people, prices should go up somewhat so

that manufacturers are able produce more needed

materials. In a truly just society, the less hard-hit

homeowners would be gladly willing to pay higher prices for

the sake of the more hard-hit who would pay lower ones.

The fact that this is unlikely tells us much about the human

heart and why justice is often so scarce. Rather than price

gouging laws, which depressed the supply of housing

materials, far more special provisions should have been

made for low-income people or those hit hardest by the

hurricane. Those provisions could have been set in place by

both government and private agencies. 2. What about the

incident of the Mignonette? The reason so many people in

Britain thought the sailors had done the right thing is

because in the “maximizing welfare” approach to justice,

the cabin boy’s life was assessed as ultimately less valuable

to the human community. It would have been wrong, in this

reasoning, to kill a man with children or a spouse. But the

Bible sees all human beings made in the “image of God” to

be of equal value. In the Biblical view, gradations of worth

based on economic and social factors are not sufficient to

measure human value or dignity. The sailors should have

done what they could to preserve his life and not treated

him as a less valuable commodity. They should have

guarded his life and taken their chances, rather than putting

themselves in the place of God.

147 Psalm 19 tells us that nature wordlessly “speaks” to us

of God. The early parts of the psalm are considered as

teaching about general revelation, while the latter half of

the psalm praises the Scripture, or “special revelation.” In

Romans 1:20 Paul reconfirms what Psalm 19 says, but adds

the implication that therefore, all human beings are “without

excuse” when they disobey what they know of God and his

will.

148 For support for reading James 1:17-18 this way, see

Ralph P. Martin, Word Biblical Commentary: James

(Nashville: Word, 1988), pp. 37-42, and Douglas J. Moo, The

Letter of James (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 78. Moo

writes: “James, therefore, cites God’s creation of the

heavenly bodies as evidence of his power and continuing

care for the world.”

149 A striking example is Isaiah 28:23-29: “When a farmer

plows for planting . . . when he has leveled the surface . . .

does he not plant wheat in its place, barley in its plot, and

spelt in its field? His God instructs him and teaches him the

right way. . . . Grain must be ground to make bread . . . all

this also comes from the Lord Almighty, wonderful in

counsel and magnificent in wisdom.” This is remarkable.

Isaiah tells us that anyone who becomes a skillful farmer, or

who brings an advancement in farming “science” is being

taught by God. One writes about this text: “What appears as

a discovery (the proper season and conditions for sowing,

farm management, rotation of crops, etc.) is actually the

Creator opening his book of creation and revealing his

truth.” Alec Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah (Downers Grove,

Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), p. 235. This is a Biblical

example of common grace.

150 Richard Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and

Common Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), p. 14.

151 D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand

Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), p. 49.

152 Ken Myers, “Christianity, Culture, and Common Grace,”

p. 43, accessed May 31, 2010, at

www.marshillaudio.org/resources/pdf/ComGrace.pdf. This

essay should be read beside Richard Mouw’s He Shines in

All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace. The two works

give extensive Biblical documentation of the doctrine of

common grace, and use it to strongly urge Christians not

only to build up the church through evangelism and

discipleship, but also to be deeply involved in cultural

activity, as philosophers, art critics, filmmakers, journalists,

social theorists. They both argue that, without a strong

understanding of common grace, Christians break into two

extreme camps. First, there are those who become

triumphalistic and reestablish “Christendom,” seeking to

reform culture according to a Biblical blueprint. The other

extreme is withdrawal from culture. Both assume that God is

not giving nonbelievers any wisdom, insight, or knowledge

of truth. In the end, Mouw and Myers draw somewhat

different practical conclusions from the doctrine. But even

the differences are helpful and instructive.

153 Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited, p. 218. Carson

points out that Christians who withdraw from any concern

for social justice in the world can fall into an unbalanced

version of Luther’s “Two Kingdoms” model of how Christians

relate to the culture. This approach insists not only that the

institutional church should not seek any social reform in the

name of Christ, but that even Christians do not engage in

the world—in politics, civil society, academics, or

community development—in a distinctively Christian

manner. Their work in the world strictly appeals to common

values that are understood by all because of common grace.

This “Two Kingdoms” approach certainly does eliminate the

utopian triumphalism of some elements of the Christian

Right, but it leads to an opposite error, a form of “quietism.”

Carson quotes Lutheran Robert Benne: “Were this version of

Lutheran theology taken to its logical conclusion it would

deprive the gospel of any intellectual content and the [civil]

law of any moral content. The biblical narrative and

theological reflection on it would not be given any

epistemological status to engage secular learning. It would

champion a form of Lutheran quietism in the realm of

education. Much as German Lutherans in the 1930s

separated the two kingdoms (government under law

separated from Christianity under the gospel) and allowed

the Nazi movement to go unchecked by appeal to the

intellectual and moral content of the Christian vision, so this

approach would allow modern secular learning to go

unchallenged by that vision.” (Quoted on p. 212 of Carson.)

Carson critiques both the triumphalism that can come from

Kuyper’s model of relating Christ to culture and the quietism

that can come from Luther’s model, as does Dan Strange

(see note 126). While Strange leans more toward Kuyper,

Carson comes down in the very middle, asking for a

balance, though also arguing that both these models have

strengths such that, at different times and places, Christians

might draw more on one model than the other. For another

very balanced view, written not by a theologian or a Biblical

scholar but a Christian sociologist, see James Hunter, To

Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of

Christianity in Late Modernity (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2010). Hunter critiques both opposing views at some

length, plus a third, assimilationist model, and proceeds to

put forth what he calls “faithful presence.” In the end,

Strange, Carson, and Hunter all recommend a chastened

approach that engages culture but without the triumphalism

of transformation-ism. All of them also insist that the priority

of the institutional church must be to preach the Word,

rather than to “change culture.”

154 Michael Sandel, Justice, p. 248.

155 Ibid., p. 261.

156 For a good summary of the Aristotelian understanding

of justice, see Sandel’s accessible chapter 8—“Who

Deserves What? / Aristotle”—in Justice.

157 The main book is Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural

Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church

Law 1150-1625 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). Also see

Brian Tierney, “The Idea of Natural Rights—Origins and

Persistence,” Northwestern Journal of International Human

Rights, Volume 2 (Spring 2004).

158 Quoted in Michael J. Perry, Toward a Theory of Human

Rights: Religion, Law, Courts (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2006), p. 18.

159 Jacques Derrida, “On Forgiveness: A Roundtable

Discussion with Jacques Derrida,” moderated by Richard

Kearny, in Questioning God (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 2001), p. 70.

160 Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution:

Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 2009), p. 37.

161 Nevertheless, while it is obvious that plenty of

nonbelievers in God can believe in human rights and work

very passionately for justice, it is another thing to hold that

their belief in rights is intellectually warranted. It can be

argued that belief in human rights makes far more sense if

there is a God than if there is not. Nicholas Wolterstorff

makes this case in “Is a Secular Grounding of Human Rights

Possible?” and “A Theistic Grounding of Human Rights,”

chapters 15-16, in his book Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Also

see Christian Smith, “Does Naturalism Warrant a Moral

Belief in Universal Benevolence and Human Rights?” in J.

Schloss and M. Murray, eds., The Believing Primate:

Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the

Origin of Religion (New York, Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2009), pp. 252ff.

162 Barack Obama, “Call to Renewal Keynote Address,”

Washington, D.C., June 28, 2006,

www.barackobama.com/2006/06/28/call_to_renewal_keynot

e_address.php, quoted in Sandel, p. 246.

EIGHT - Peace, Beauty, and Justice

163 A good brief compilation of ancient creation myths can

be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica Online at

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/142144/creation

-myth.

164 Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel (London: SCM Press,

1970), p. 304.

165 Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in

the Ancient Near East (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), p. 20.

Quoted in Christopher J. H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for

the People of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press,

2004), p. 265, n. 16. Old Testament scholar Bruce K. Waltke

also confirms this link between justice and the orderedness

of the physical world. He writes that justice is living in

accordance with “a universal world order that existed from

the creation, [that] manifests itself in the realms of law,

wisdom . . . and is guaranteed by God” (quoting H. H.

Schmid). He also writes that justice is “to bring about right

and harmony for all, for individuals, related in the

community and to the physical and spiritual realms. It finds

its basis in God’s rule of the world” (quoting J. W. Olley). The

Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1-15, p. 96.

166 See article on “Peace” in The Dictionary of Biblical

Imagery , L. Ryken, T. Longman, eds. (Downers Grove, Ill.:

InterVarsity Press, 1995), p. 632. Or see virtually any other

dictionary on Biblical Hebrew terms. For example: “Shalom

describes a comprehensive kind of fulfillment or completion,

indeed of a perfection in life and spirit which quite

transcends any success which man alone, even under the

best of circumstances, is able to attain.” “Shalom and the

Presence of God,” in Proclamation and Presence, J. I.

Durham and J. R. Porter, eds. (Richmond: John Knox, 1970),

p. 280.

167 The standard Hebrew lexicon by Koehler and

Baumgartner traces the lexical range of the term mishpat as

“ruling> legal decision, judgment> case> law, right, claim.

What is due someone. . . .” (L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, et

al., The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament,

tr. M. E. J. Richardson, et al. [Leiden: Brill, 1994-99], 2:615).

In other words, mishpat can mean a legal ruling in a case,

or, more basically to the condition that the complainant

ought to be in, the treatment that he or she is “due.”

Further, G. Liedke says that in an act of mishpat “two

people, or groups of people, whose inter-relationship is not

intact, are restored to the state of shalom. . . . [Mishpat ] is

a constant preservation of the shalom.” (In Theological

Lexicon of the Old Testament, 3 vols., E. Jenni and C.

Westerman, eds., tr. M. E. Biddle [Peabody, Mass:

Hendrickson, 1997], 3:1394.) In short, mishpat upholds and

preserves shalom, the state of complete human flourishing

and well-being in every dimension. We will take up this

subject again in chapter 2.

168 Nora Ellen Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language:

Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard (Harvard, 1985).

169 In the nineteenth century, 1 American in every 5,728

was born deaf, but on the Vineyard the figure was 1 in every

155 (Groce, p. 3). In Chilmark, the most isolated of the

Vineyard towns, the incidence was 1 in 25. About 15 of the

350 people in town were deaf. Most of them lived in a small

neighborhood outside Chilmark, where a quarter of the

inhabitants were deaf (Groce, p. 42).

170 Groce, pp. 2-3.

171 Groce, p. 51. A woman who married into the Chilmark

community in the 1930s said, “I learned it from . . . Abigail

[who was deaf], who lived next door to us. . . . As soon as I

moved to Chilmark, I started learning the language. I had to,

certainly, because everybody did speak it in town” (p.56).

172 “All communication was in sign language, for it seems

that none of the deaf Vineyarders read lips” (Groce, p. 57).

173 Groce, pp. 59, 60.

174 See Groce’s chapter 5, “The Island Adaptation to

Deafness.”

175 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 31.

176 “Beauty is lifesaving . . . as in Rilke’s imperative ‘You

must change your life.’ And Homer was right: Beauty incites

deliberation, the search for precedents. But what about the

immortal, about which Homer may or may not have been

right? . . . [D]oes the plenitude and aspiration for truth stay

stable, even if the metaphysical referent is in doubt?”

(Scarry, pp. 32-33).

177 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good over Other

Concepts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,

1967), pp. 86-87.

178 These terms are Scarry’s from p. 113 (“all the space . .

.” and “ceased to be the hero . . .”) and p. 93 (“a symmetry

of everyone’s relation to another”). In this latter phrase

Scarry is quoting John Rawls.

179 The Nature of True Virtue is not easy reading. See

Gerald McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society (State

College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992),

especially chapters three and five, for the implications of

Edwards’s spirituality on his social ethic.

180 Todd Gitlin, “Elaine Scarry on Beauty and Being Just,”

The American Prospect, November 30, 2002.

181 There are debates about whether Jesus’s family and

Jesus himself were truly members of the poorest social

class. Many argue that, if Jesus and his father were

carpenters, they were artisans and not members of the

lowest, peasant class. Certainly, Jesus was literate, and no

son of a peasant-class family would have been taught to

read. On the other hand, nothing like our “middle class”

really existed in Galilee of Jesus time. “Not even artisans,

such as carpenters or stonemasons, formed anything

comparable to our middle class.” (Ben Witheringon, The

Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth

[Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1999], p. 29.) Also,

Jesus would have lived his life under the opprobrium of

illegitimacy. People in small towns could not have missed

the fact that Mary was pregnant before she was married,

and Mark 6:2-3, in which Jesus is called “the son of Mary”

rather than Joseph, is at least an insult and maybe a

reference to his being born out of wedlock. So, while we

cannot make the case that his family lived in dire poverty,

we can’t make the case that Jesus and his family were well-

off and respectable. While Jesus could speak and relate to

the rich and literate, he identified throughout his life and,

particularly in his death, with the poor and the marginalized.

182 James M. Boice, “Illegalities of Christ’s Trial,” The Gospel

of John: An Expositional Commentary, Volume 5 (Grand

Rapids: Zondervan, 1979), pp. 63ff.

183 Quoted in David Van Biema, “Why Did Jesus Have to

Die?” in Time, April 12, 2004, p. 61. JoAnne Terrell was an

African-American writer who rediscovered the power of the

Christian story when she realized that, just like her own

mother, Jesus was killed as a victim of injustice. She wrote

that she always knew he suffered for us, but suddenly she

realized he also suffered with us, he identified with the

oppressed. Terrell’s story is recounted on the same page of

the Time story and I also cite it in my The Reason for God

(New York: Dutton, 2008), p. 195.

184 This story was related in a sermon that I heard

preached by another minister. I have not been able to verify

if it was a real historical incident or a composed illustration.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I dedicated this book to the deacons and deaconesses of

Redeemer Presbyterian Church over the years, as well as

the leaders of Hope for New York, a ministry that grew out of

Redeemer and still works closely with our church (and

others) to serve the poor of the city. I am also so grateful for

the lifetime work and ministries of my friends and

colleagues Jeff White and Mark Gornik of the New Song

Churches in Harlem and Baltimore. With regard to doing

justice, we have been interdependent learners for years. I

sometimes taught them, and they have in turn taught me,

and together we have discovered the principles and

practices presented in this book.

The first church that taught me about care for the needy,

however, was my congregation in Hopewell, Virginia. There,

Christians knew instinctively that if love is genuine, it is

expressed not simply in words but in deeds.

As usual, this book would not have been written without

the editorial guidance and personal support of my agent,

David McCormick, and my editor at Penguin, Brian Tart.

Many thanks again to Lynn Land and Janice Worth, who year

in and year out make my summer writing time possible.

Janice merits special kudos for this present volume,

however, because it was her idea that I turn a talk on justice

and generosity into a book. Finally I thank my wife, Kathy.

This volume is just one more joint effort to make good on

our wedding pledge, that, through our life together, “the

afflicted may hear, and be glad” (Psalm 34:2).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TIMOTHY KELLER was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and

educated at Bucknell University, Gordon-Conwell

Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological

Seminary. He was first a pastor in Hopewell, Virginia. In

1989 he started Redeemer Presbyterian Church in

Manhattan, with his wife, Kathy, and their three sons. Today,

Redeemer has more than five thousand regular Sunday

attendees. Also the author of Counterfeit Gods, The Prodigal

God, and the New York Times bestseller The Reason for God,

he lives in New York with his family.