How Should Christians Define Social Justice?
In Church as It Is in Heaven Video Curriculum: Session 2: Lament: Grieving What Stands in the Way of Multiethnic Kingdom Culture
InterVarsity Press has partnered with Jamaal Williams and me to provide your church with a free video curriculum to facilitate a six-week study of apologetics and multiethnic kingdom culture, as well as a free discussion guide for group leaders. At the end of this post, I have included the video for Session 2: Lament: Grieving What Stands in the Way of Multiethnic Kingdom Culture as well as the group discussion guide.
A Christian Definition of Social Justice
One of the key dilemmas that I address in this particular video session has to do with how to define “social justice.” If you or people in your church are curious about how to consider racism from the perspective of a distinctly Christian vision of social justice, this video should provide you with a useful resource.
In keeping with a long and rich Christian tradition, I define the phrase social justice by grounding justice in the covenantal character of God and in the order that God wove into nature in the beginning. These commitments lead me to identify two aspects of social justice:
Treating Every Human Being with Dignity: Grounded in the covenantal character of God, social justice is treating one another in genuinely human ways, as articulated in God’s covenant by which God reveals how to live in right relationship with him, how to engage with one another as fellow bearers of God’s image, and how to be good stewards of the earth’s resources. This aspect of social justice as human dignity and right use of resources has been ably articulated by Old Testament scholar Peter Gentry in his lecture “Social Justice in Isaiah.”
Willing to Give Every Human Being What They Are Due: Grounded in natural law and in the creation of every human being in God’s image, social justice is also the constant and perpetual will to render to each person what he or she is due. Although this aspect of social justice has deep roots in a tradition that stretches back to the ancient and medieval eras, it has been articulated in more modern times through the work of Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio.
Because I ground social justice in the covenantal character of God and in the order that God wove into nature, I do not follow John Rawls’ definition of “justice” in A Theory of Justice or any of the many definitions of “social justice” that have their basis in Rawls. Centuries of Christian social thought have bequeathed to us a deeper, richer, and more resilient understanding of social justice than Rawls’ contractualist perspective is able to provide.
When social justice is defined in keeping with natural law and the covenantal character of God, we can declare with Carl F.H. Henry that
social justice is not … simply an appendage to the evangelical message; it is an intrinsic part of the whole, without which the preaching of the gospel itself is truncated. Theology devoid of social justice is a deforming weakness of much present-day evangelical witness.…
Marxists make a hurried leap from the economic needs of the poor to the forced redistribution of the property of the rich. However indefensible this revolutionary alternative may be, it can hardly be challenged and stayed if evangelicals are indifferent to the necessities of the poor as well as the neglected responsibilities of the rich.…
The evangelical community has a mandate to challenge social injustice wherever it is found, and to call and strive for social justice as part of what it means to love God with one’s whole being and one’s neighbor as one’s self.