Just Church (18)

For the last two weeks, we've been working on a direct contrast between the church as Christ intended it to be and the church as Social Justice ideology aims to make it. And we've seen that they're not even close to the same thing. This week, let's complete that line of thought.

Chapter 5: A Higher Vision (continued)

What is the Church?

The church is a community of peace.

It’s where every person understands that his or her unique circumstances in life are given by God. It’s a grateful community.

The Church and Activism

But it’s also an active community. The disparities and injustices that persist in this world are not to be left alone. As much as we can, we are to lift up one another, and the lofty are to lower themselves, so that every person achieves the maximum that he or she can, in terms of conquering the challenges and fulfilling the opportunities God has given to him or her. We are to help one another, not live as monads, individuals uninterested in each other’s welfare. It’s a sharing community, a compassionate community, a merciful community.

Even to the outside world the church shows its kindness. The blessings of having Christians among them tends toward justice and peace there as well. The world benefits by the church. But the church expects nothing from the world. That is why it is not a political body, and never looks to the world and its systems to solve the deep problems the world itself has created.

You might say that like the great ‘theologian’ Sting, the church knows that …

“There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitutions
There is no bloody revolution
We are spirits in the material world.”

“No bloody revolution” is something neo-Marxism can never accept. Even worse, the thought that there is “no political solution” to where we are is intolerable to Social Justice advocates. Yet it is quite true. There will be no peace, no justice and no equality on this earth until the Prince of Peace comes to us again. The church knows that, for sure.

The Church and Community

Even so, it is not a resentful community. It’s not a collection of warring sub-communities. It is devoid of spite, free from all guilt, and liberated by not caring about all those things the world takes to be important, but rather about the goal of being the best for Christ it can be.

It’s a community of acceptance, but never a community of the indulgence of evil. It understands that to become all that they can be, a man or woman must be freed from the bonds of sin. People who are in slavery to wickedness are not free, and they cannot be made free by being “normalized” or “accepted”. They have to be delivered. The Christian community loves people too much to leave them in sin, and then to pretend their sinfulness is okay.

It’s a holy community, a community of the redeemed, not a community with its sins being “affirmed”. So its rejection of sinfulness is categorical and uncompromising. Anybody may come into the church; but if they do, they are not going to be left in their sin. That cannot be allowed — not because we forget we are sinners ourselves, but because we realize how utterly damaging, destructive and enslaving sin is, and we would never allow another human being to harm himself or herself that way, or to so destroy their own chances for relationship with God.

The Church and the Poor

As for the poor, the church has been commanded never to forget them. Charity is to mark the church in its attitude to the underprivileged. But resentment of the rich — of that, the church is to know nothing. The wealthy have their own burden and responsibility from God, and they answer for what they do. It is no role of the church to strip privileges from one person in order to favor another.

In this connection, a most interesting verse is Leviticus 19:15. It reads, “You shall not do injustice in judgment; you shall not show partiality to the poor nor give preference to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly.”

That’s a surprising commandment. The shocking bit is not that we are called to do justice, and it’s not the command not to favor the rich; in fact, with both of those, the Social Justice set would fully agree, at least in theory. But to say, “You shall not show partiality to the poor” is truly shocking.

The Church and Partiality

Social Justice thinking absolutely insists we must show partiality to the poor, and all kinds of special treatment, affirmative action and reparations to those who are financially on the downside of life. At the same time, it makes resentment and covetousness against the wealthy positively virtuous … one can freely hate the successful as “oppressors”, simply because Social Justice theory holds that the only reason for success in a “systematically oppressive” system is that one has colluded with that system, and hence is automatically evil or racist. So hating the rich is a positive moral duty if one is a Social Justice advocate. But ordinary common sense also can suggest to us the same: we can easily suppose that because the rich or successful have an advantage over the poor and failing, then we are righteous to despise the former and favor the latter. It just seems right.

But it’s not. God says it’s not. God’s standard is perfect fairness, perfect justice. Justice doesn’t just mean we cannot hate the wealthy, but we also cannot favor somebody over them because he is poor. Instead, it is the obligation of the wealthy man to obey God by taking personal responsibility to be generous and share; but there is no right of the poor, or of others, to make claims against him or to tip the scales of justice to one side, whether he does or not. Justice is not to regard status.(1)

The Church and Privilege

The whole basis of Social Justice’s claim to special privilege for certain “races” and other such things is that they are “marginalized” or “oppressed”. They are, in its reckoning, the poor and underprivileged in the existing system, and hence regarded as instantly morally superior and worthy of advocacy. The visible “whites” and other minorities that do well in the status quo, like Asians, are automatically regarded as “privileged” and hence deserving of having their privileges reduced or stripped. The church, it believes, should reorganize in all the ways that benefit the “underprivileged”, without any regard for how that may impact the “privileged” at all: their “privilege” being enough evidence that they deserve some abuse and neglect.

God says no. There is to be one standard and one measure for all, applied without regard for such things. A person from an allegedly “oppressed” or “marginalized” group is to be regarded as no less but no more than anyone else.

In Conclusion

Let’s pause our summary here.

We now have a better pattern for the church, a more positive direction in which to go. But already you can see that it’s very different from the kind of things Social Justice advocates. In fact, it’s a completely different perspective from the “critical consciousness” Social Justice tries to reproduce in people.

This reveals something very important: the whole plan of God for the kinds of people he aims to make us by his Spirit is radically different from that created by Social Justice’s plan. Even if, in some superficial ways, such as the appeal to “justice” and “fairness”, it looks to us for a moment as if Christians can walk some distance in companionship with secular Social Justice, we cannot. We are not their kinds of people, and the kinds of people they want to create have absolutely no eternal perspective and absolutely no intention to become the people God wants us to be.

In truth, Social Justice is not just a different gospel from ours, but a completely contrary vision for humankind … worldly, resentful, bitter, hostile, accusatory, abusive, racially-motivated, indulgent of wickedness, focused on money and power, devoid of the Spirit of God and indifferent to his word. To partner with it is to invite these unsavory and unchristian qualities into our congregations and destroy the fellowship.

In our next chapter, we’ll sharpen the contrast even further.

The Chart

But before we do, I’d like to do something else. I want to take all the major points you’re going to find made in both this chapter and chapter six, which is still to come, and put them in one place. I want to give you a tidy chart that pins down all the reasons that Social Justice and Christianity simply cannot be reconciled. When you see them all in one place, the point is really clear.

A chart like this can be useful many ways. It’s great to be able to see everything in one place, for one thing. For another, it highlights essential differences. It’s also useful as a launch-point for discussion and debate, or as a structure for organizing thought. It’s much more portable as well; it can be shared and used much more readily than an entire book can. Even somebody who hasn’t got the time to read a whole book can look at a chart, consider what it says, and come to some conclusions of his own.

Of course, something like this has one chief liability, as well: and that is that in order to keep the chart useful and readable, the points have got to be short and sharp, and the contrasts appropriately bold. This means there’s no space for long and windy explanations, complicated reasons or for inserted evidences in a list like this. The risk of that is always that people will think you’re bluffing, and that you haven’t thought through what you’re saying, or don’t have the proof to back it.

But all of that is what this book is about. The proofs and explanations in their longer form are readily available in chapters five and six, or elsewhere, scattered throughout. Anybody who has questions or concerns is advised to consult those two chapters especially, before concluding I’m saying anything that isn’t quite true. I believe you’ll find it’s all there.

Anyway, here’s the chart:

Christianity …	Social Justice …
Justice is God’s	Justice is ours
Justice is in Eternity	Justice is now
Our hope is in heaven	Our hope is political
The church as the body of Christ	The church belongs to man
The world is a gift from God	The world is injustice and conflict
Authority is ordained by God	Authority is tyranny
Leadership is by the spiritually mature and proven	Leadership is by the immature advocates of the “oppressed”
Motivated by love	Driven by power
Individual identity	Group identity
Common humanity	Division by race, sex, sexuality, age, body type, ability, etc
Personal accountability	Systemic injustice
Individual responsibility	Historical and collective guilt
Obeying the Lord	Mobilizing the masses
Forgiveness	Accusations and shaming
Repentance and restitution	Vengeance and reparations
Fairness and impartiality	Privilege for the “oppressed”
Conformity to Christ	Compliance to the Social Justice elite
Unity of all	Factions and strife
Resolving conflicts	Fighting for causes
Merit and quality	Inequality is proof of bigotry
Stewardships	Forced equalization
Reconciliation	Division
Sharing	Covetousness
Gratitude	Ungratefulness
Healing	Suspicion
Forgetting what lies behind	Obsessing about the past
Harmony	Bitterness
Mercy and charity	Demands and entitlement
Obedience to the Word	Rebellion is good, obedience is evil
Judging sin	Expanding inclusion of sin
Trusting God	Mobilizing men
Peace	Unrelenting unhappiness

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(1) This is, of course, the reason the famous statue of Justice represents her as blindfolded. She is not to “see” who she is judging, one way or other.