On Justice: Social, Legal, Divine

There was a thread on someone's FB post, about how the power to protect 'our way of life' drives so many Christian voters with little thought of what our neighbours need from us in practical terms before they'll even think of listening to our proselytising.

I feel that a lot.

Reading the people who are all "but what about the millions unborn who die every year", I think "but do you care about the people who are living now? or just those who haven't yet been born? Could you prove it by your defence of them?" Reading the people who talk about "the right to teach Scripture in schools", I think, "Paul himself listed qualities like love and gentleness, faithfulness, kindness, self-control, and said against these things there is no such law; do these people know that you love them any other way apart from your insistence that they should be told the gospel"? Listening to my church friends talk about "people who haven't heard the gospel"...too often the people I know have listened to the gospel, heard it, but they don't want it for themselves, and logic and the witness of Christians provides no reason that they should.

We argue theoreticals of slippery slopes without ever noticing that those around us are shivering with cold while we have a pile of blankets at our feet. And yes, those blankets are formed from the threads of the good news of the love of Christ, but a hunk of thread isn't going to warm someone. Better to use that thread to make a blanket to warm our neighbour and, yes, cover their nakedness.

Maybe it's just that my family came out of China to the west - some Christians when they came, but some converted over here. We've always mourned for China's restrictions on practice of religion: yet their churches were never stronger than while under actual governmental persecution.

Maybe it's b/c I have no children to protect in a 'Christian way of life'. My friends worry about the world their kids will grow up in - that they might be disadvantaged because of their faith.

I'm more worried about the things let slide b/c they're not 'central' to our faith. Things like care for the poor, for the left behind, for the dismissed and derided and mocked. Protection for the abused and the betrayed and the shamed. Concern for and defence of the environment which the Lord our God left to us to manage shrewdly, and which we have squandered.

The early church had no power, no politics; but they humbled empires by caring for the ones empire wouldn't touch.

State-operated healthcare/support systems? Were instigated by Christians in the Roman empire, because the Roman authorities were worried that the Christians' love and devotion to the care of the unwanted was converting people to this bizarre monotheistic cult.

Every youth group I've ever known talks about hills to die on, but I feel that what Jesus's love calls us to do is flatten out the hills that our fellow human beings stumble upon: unfair work practices, bigotry and prejudice, inequality of opportunity.

In short: act justly & love mercy.

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Ravi Zacharias died last week.

He did great things from all accounts; I'm sure that my teachers and people I respect have benefited from his work. But I'm also absolutely sure that he's hurt people along the way, perhaps even sinned in very deliberate and considered ways.

It raises a lot of questions in my head.

Including the question is how you deal with sin, repentance, and forgiveness in a culture where behaviour can be very performative. What does repentance actually involve? And 'cancel culture' is absolutely a thing within the church as well as without. Can someone who's fucked up ever do anything right again? And if not, what about redemptive grace? What about leaders who head up ministries: is the entire ministry to be 'cancelled' when the leader turns out to have been a sinner?

Do we have space to hold truths in conflict with each other: that someone did good works helping people and also did bad works hurting people? And if we don't, is there hope for any of us? Can you swear to me that you've never hurt another human being, intentionally or unintentionally? Can you say with a straight face that you don't benefit from stolen ground, stolen lives, stolen work, when we live in countries that were colonised in blood and bullets, built on the backs of slaves and criminals, and wear the clothing made piecemeal by those paid considerably less for making it than you paid to purchase it? There is no-one righteous, not even one.

And this is the problem with cancel culture; if we are true to the idea that hurt must be repaid or else all good be cancelled, we must also cancel ourselves and all that we have done or shall ever do. Because nothing can repay what has been taken from others by those who built the society that we now live in, and even benefit from.

No, it's not a nice, neat thought. But humanity and living is not nice and neat. Compromises have to be made, and I'm not sure that many people are capable of making those compromises anymore - at least, not making them for other people...just for ourselves.

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I guess what both these thoughts tie into is the concept of justice. Social justice. Worldly justice. Divine justice.

There is no divine justice that Christ takes the consequences of my sins and I go free. Only divine grace.

There is no worldly justice that can make things right - most particularly not when my life is lived at the cost of others and I have no way to stop this without disenfranchising my opportunity to help others.

There is no social justice that can heal the ills of our society, but we can make a change for the betterment of situation for all people, instead of hoarding the good things for ourselves and people like us. Yes, wealthy societies are more likely to reject God, but wealth inequality in societies with freedom of religion only highlights the hypocrisy of the church and the people in it.

why we can and should try to change the world

I believe we live in a world that is presently at once already redeemed and in the process of being redeemed - that we are at once beloved of God and in the process of becoming 'beloved of God'. Maybe like a marriage (although I have no experience of such): where you love the person that you marry, but neither of you stay at that point if your marriage is going to survive. You continue to love each other, every day, every hour, every action-word-thought.

As such, I think that while Adam tilled the ground and it produced thistles and thorns and rocks, in this time of redemption, we have the tools and the knowledge to make that work easier, simpler, less consuming. It still needs to be done, it still takes effort, and there's plenty of failure along the way. But in the same way that freedom for slaves and voices for women and the idea that all people are equal only started being a thing after Christians rolled up their sleeves and started working for change at the ground level, learning easier ways to do things, tools that could be used for the benefit of many, even things like democracy and so forth - all that had to come once God had set the world to rights. Once God made it possible for us to help Him set the world to rights.

I think that we had to know redemption from Christ before we could start redeeming the world.

And no, it won't be done before Christ comes again; but that's no reason to sit back and say the world is doomed.

I guess it's a variant of social justice Christianity (and man, the number of times I've heard Christians talk about social justice like it's a dirty thing to want a better, fairer society in this world) - the idea that we can make things better for the vulnerable and fragile, and that we also should.