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This year we want to have a strong focus on missional justice. Over 5 weeks, we are reposting a helpful article from Tim Keller (Gospel in Life Q4 2020) looking at how the Bible critiques secular visions of justice. Over the last two posts, he has critiqued the 4 most common views: “freedom”, “fairness” “happiness” and “power”. In this last piece, he sums up his conclusions by comparing them to biblical justice.
Comparing Biblical Justice to the Alternatives
First, only biblical justice addresses all the concerns of justice found across the fragmented alternate views.[28] Each secular theory of justice addresses one or some of the five facets of biblical justice mentioned above, but none addresses them all.
Second, biblical justice contradicts each of the alternate views neither by dismissing them nor by compromising with them. (a) Biblical justice is significantly more well-grounded. It is based on God’s character—a moral absolute—while the other theories are based on the changing winds of human culture. (b) Biblical justice is more penetrating in its analysis of the human condition, seeing injustice stemming from a more complex set of causes—social, individual, environmental, spiritual—than any other theory addresses. (c) Biblical justice provides a unique understanding of the character of wealth and ownership that does not fit into either modern categories of capitalism or socialism.
Third, biblical justice has built-in safeguards against domination. As we have seen, to have a coherent theory of justice, there must be the affirmation of moral absolutes that are universal and true for all, in all cultures. Without appealing to some kind of non-socially constructed truth and morality, there is no way to further justice.[29] Yet the French postmodernists were right—in the hands of human beings, truth-claims tend toward totalitarianism or at least the forces of domination readily use them. But Christianity offers truth-claims that can subvert domination. How?[30]
(a) Christianity does not claim to explain all reality. There is an enormous amount of mystery – things we are simply not told (Deuteronomy 29:29). We are not given any ‘theory of everything’ that can explain things in terms of evolutionary biology or social forces. Reality and people are complex and at bottom mysterious.
(b) Christianity does not claim that if our agenda is followed most of our problems will be fixed. Meta-narratives have a “we are the Saviors” complex. Christians believe that we can fight for justice in the knowledge that eventually God will put all things right, but until then we can never expect to fully fix the world. Christianity is not utopian.
(c) Finally, the storyline of the whole Bible is God’s repeated identification with the wretched, powerless, and marginalized. The central story of the Old Testament is liberation of slaves from captivity. Over and over in the Bible, God’s deliverers are usually racial and social outsiders, people seen to be weak and rejected in the eyes of the power elites of the world.
Fourth, only biblical justice offers a radically subversive understanding of power. The Postmodern view rightly critiques the Liberal and other secular views as being blind to the operations of power and oppression at work in human life and society. Liberals rightly criticize the Postmodern for being prone (and blind) to its own forms of domination. Biblical justice, in contrast with the Liberal, gives us a profound account of power and its corruptions, but in contrast to the Postmodern, gives us a model for changing how it is used in the world.
When God came to earth in Jesus Christ he came as a poor man, to a family at the bottom of the social order. He experienced torture and death at the hands of religious and government elites using their power unjustly to oppress. So in Jesus we see God laying aside his privilege and power—his “glory”—in order to identify with the weak and helpless (Philippians 2:5-8). And yet, through the endurance of violence and human injustice he paid the rightful penalty of humanity’s sin to divine justice (Isaiah 53:5). Then he was raised to even greater honor and also authority to rule (Philippians 2:5:9-11). Jesus takes authority, but only after losing it in service to the weak and helpless.
So the Bible does not presume an end to the “binary” of power. Rule and authority are not intrinsically wrong. Indeed, they are necessary in any society. But while not ending the binary, neither does Christianity simply reverse it. It does not merely fill the top rungs of authority with new parties who will use power in the same oppressive way that is the way of the world.
Because it is rooted in the death and resurrection of Jesus, Christianity neither eliminates nor merely reverses the ruler/ruled binary—rather, it subverts it. When Jesus saves us through his use of power only for service, he changes our attitude toward and our use of power.[31]
There is nothing in the world like biblical justice! Christians must not sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. But they must take up their birthright and do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God (Micah 6:8).
Article Footnotes
[1] See Alasdair MacIntyre, “Justice as Virtue: Changing Conceptions” Chapter 17 in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd edition, University of Notre Dame Press, 2012 and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.
[2] The history of the Enlightenment is complex, and most historians speak of “Enlightenments” in the plural. All Enlightenment thinkers sought to establish moral values on the basis of reason alone, without recourse to religion, as a way to help people live in peace in a country despite different religious beliefs. John Locke was a professing Christian who believed in God and in ‘natural law’–moral truths embedded in the universe. But he was part of the Enlightenment project, namely, to show that all those moral truths of God could be deduced by reason alone. So while John Locke can be said to be one of the main authors of our modern western individualism, he can’t directly be charged with our secularism. For more on the corrosiveness of the individualism Locke bequeathed to us, see Robert Bellah, et al, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (With a New Preface), University of California Press, 2008.
[3] Hume was not himself a moral relativist. He did not say “you have your truth and morality and I have mine.” He believed moral truths, while not objectively true independent of our feelings and intuitions, still end up having a kind of stability because he thought that people’s feelings about right and wrong almost completely agreed. And because we so widely agree, for example, that murder is wrong—then we can say it is wrong even if a particular individual might feel otherwise. But the problems with Hume’s view are enormous. First, if the only basis for morality is that our shared moral feelings and intuitions align—what happens when they do not? After Hume there is now no going back to “reasoning together”—either via the principle of self-interest or by deduction from natural law. Secondly, if the only basis for morality is the majority of human sensibilities, then how do you ever call out a majority for injustice to a minority? If slavery was acceptable to most people’s moral intuitions (and it was for thousands of years), then there could not have been anything objectively wrong with it. And on what basis could anyone say to the majority—“This is wrong and should stop”? If Hume is right, there is no basis for a movement of justice like that. In the end, on Hume’s premises, morality does indeed become relative.
[4] For more on the Enlightenment and morality: In our time there has been an effort by many secular people to find a basis for morality that is not rooted in religion but nevertheless does not end in a relativism based just on our feelings. The project has been to find a scientific, empirical basis for morality. But this effort has not succeeded at all. See James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality, Yale, 2018. See also Christian Smith, Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can’t Deliver, Oxford, 2018. Finally, for a brief overview, see Philip Gorski, “Where Do Morals Come From?” Public Books, February 15, 2016.
[5] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 57-59.
[6] As said, this is only a brief outline. We may be able to post an article giving a much fuller biblical-theological account of justice soon.
[7] Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1-15, Eerdmans, 2004, 97. The earlier quote is by Waltke citing J.W. Olley.
[8]The Jubilee year (Leviticus 25), the gleaning laws, and the very definition of saddiq (“righteousness”) “suggest a sharp critique of [both] 1) the statism that disregards the precious treasure of personal rootage, and 2) the untrammeled individualism which secures individuals at the expense of community.” Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches, Apollos, 1999, 46
[9] See how the harmful favoritism Abraham showed between his sons was reproduced both in Isaac and in Jacob, to terrible effect. (Genesis 12-50)
[10] Proverbs 13:23- “The unplowed field of poor people yields plenty of food but their existence is swept away through injustice” Waltke, 549-550. “The unplowed field…yields” refers to land so productive that it produces fruit even when not plowed. “…plenty of food” means that the poor are working hard to harvest it. So then why are they poor? “…their existence is swept away through injustice [Heb lo mishpat]”. Here then are three possible causes of poverty—environmental, personal, and social. According to Proverbs, sometimes poverty is caused by poor resources, sometimes by personal irresponsibility. But here we see that poverty can be caused by sheer injustice, without any blame on the poor at all.
[11] John B. Taylor, Ezekiel: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale, 1969, 147.
[12] For centuries biblical scholars have recognized the balance between corporate and individual responsibility in the Bible. For several decades there was a view that God only dealt with Israel on a corporate basis, never individually, and that therefore Ezekiel 18:1-32 was an innovation. See Gordon Matties, Ezekiel 18 and the Rhetoric of Moral Discourse, Society of Biblical Literature, 1990, for more on this debate. That view is largely abandoned now as too simplistic. See Daniel Isaac Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 1–24, Eerdmans, 1997, p. 556. To begin with, earlier texts such as Deuteronomy 24:16 demanded that judges not hold people responsible for their parents or children’s sins. Today, therefore, most scholars understand that there is both corporate and individual responsibility for sin in the Bible. Despite this long history of interpretation, there are many today who continue to insist that any Bible teacher talking about corporate sin and responsibility at all is reading modern liberal or Marxist ideas back into the Bible. Sometimes they concede that Israel was often judged corporately, but they argue that God does not do that with the rest of us. This ignores the fact that God does hold other nations responsible for the sins of their ancestors as well (Deuteronomy 23:3-4; Amos 1:1-2:5). So we cannot conclude that any Bible teacher talking about systemic injustice or corporate sin must be imposing secular ideas on the text.
[13] And we must keep in mind that justice theories are not necessarily political categories. Both political conservatives and political liberals can inhabit any of the first three, for example.
[14] I am basically following Michael Sandel, who in Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009, lists four theories of justice – Libertarianism (Robert Nozick), Utilitarianism (John Stuart Mill), Liberalism (Kant/John Rawls), and Virtue ethics (Aristotle/MacIntyre). I’ve not treated Virtue ethics and this school’s theory of justice because, while it has traction among some intellectuals, it is not presently culturally influential. In its place I put Identity Politics, based on postmodern critical theory. This is a very influential new player on the field that was not so prominent when Sandel wrote. So my four are – Libertarian, Liberal, Utilitarian, and Postmodern. I explain in a footnote below why I think it is fair to call the last view Postmodern.
[15] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard, 2007.
[16] “Lockean” natural rights are the right to life, liberty, and private property. In John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, he argued that people have a right to have their physical lives protected and preserved, to be free to choose how they want to live if they don’t impede the freedom of others, and the right to property. This included not only private property but, Locke argued, every person owns himself. Some argue that these are “negative rights” because, as formulated, they are mainly the right to not have certain things happen to us (e.g. murder, prison without trial, theft, over-regulation of behavior).
[17] Sandel sees Rawls’ view as being built on the concept rights argued by Immanuel Kant, who has a far more robust understanding than Locke did. (Sandel, Justice, 140) Kant’s “Categorical Imperative,” that insisted every individual by virtue of being rational creatures, had to be treated “not as a means to an end but as an end in itself.” Many have pointed out that this is basically a version of Christianity’s doctrine of the image of God, yet it falls short of that. Any concept of rights grounded in identified capacities (like rationality or ability to make choices) opens one to the claim that some people (senile people, infants, disabled people) who lack the identified capacity has no rights. See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Chapter 15- “Is a Secular Grounding of Human Rights Possible?” in Justice: Rights and Wrongs, Princeton, 2010, 223-241.
[18]For an example of the clash over “economic and social rights” see the recent controversy over Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. The commission prioritized “Lockean” rights–freedom of speech, religion, and the rights of private property over social and economic rights. The mainstream press reacted with shock. But the controversy is nothing but the latest version of the old debate between Robert Nozick and John Rawls over what counts as “rights”. Without understanding the ideological and historical background the journalists could not make sense of what was happening. See New York Times, July 16, 2020 “Pompeo Says Human Rights Policy must Prioritize Property Rights and Religion”. Found at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/us/politics/pompeo-human-rights-policy.html
[19] See Taylor, A Secular Age and Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Harvard, 2014 as just two examples. In the last few years these scholars plus Philip Gorski of Yale, Eric Nelson of Harvard, and many others, have argued that Christian beliefs are the sources of western liberalism’s values of human rights and care for the poor. More recently Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Basic Books, 2019 has summarized much of this scholarship in a long but popularly written book. Of course it was Friedrich Nietzsche who originally argued that, without belief in the Christian God there is no basis for belief in equal human rights and dignity, and that all liberals who maintain such values are really still being Christian (at least in this part of their thinking) without acknowledging it.
[20]The classic case for this idea is made by Robert Bellah, et al, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life; With a New Preface, University of California, 2008.
[21] Sandel, 103.
[22] The history behind this theory of justice finds the fusing of several important streams or schools of thought. It begins with the teachings of Karl Marx that all reality is determined by social forces, and therefore not only our behavior but our beliefs about truth and morality are determined by our class consciousness. But Marx used this basic radical idea almost wholly to critique economics, class, and economic systems. In the 20th century architects of “modern critical theory” such as Adorno and Marcuse began applying this Marxist analysis to a critique of culture in all its forms. Their goal was to make visible the hidden operations of power that the bourgeois used to keep the proletariat oppressed—not through force of law as much as through the power of culture, art, story. Later, French postmodernists such as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard became even more radical, reflecting extensively on the instability of language and concluding that any truth-claim at all was a move of power. That meant that now there was nothing left of reality but power. These original French postmodernists, however, were highly skeptical about social reform and assumed that any theory of justice would itself become a tool of oppression. (They rejected classical Marxism for that very reason.) One of the reasons for their deep skepticism was a consistency of thought. If all truth claims and grand visions are ways of oppressing people, then no one making claims about right and wrong, justice and injustice, will be able to escape doing this same oppression, no matter how well-intentioned. Who is to say what truth and justice is, anyway? Everything we do and say exerts power over people. So the best thing to do is to just carve out a bit of freedom for yourself and others by deconstructing all grand visions and by being a self-created individual and by staying detached from all movements. Despite this view of the original postmodernists, a number of thinkers especially in the American academy in the late 1980s and 1990s (Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Judith Butler and many others) accepted what the French postmodernists said about power and truth, but did not apply to themselves (as the original postmodernists did). Rather, they brought a more positive view of socialism together with postmodernism into what has been called “Postmodern Critical Theory”. It is a strategy for radical social change that not only seeks to overturn traditional and religious views but also secular, individualistic liberalism itself.
[23] For more on how contemporary schools of thought develop from older ones: Charles Taylor in A Secular Age shows how modern secularism grew out of the Enlightenment and other older movements not in a direct line but by “zig-zags”, ironies, and unintended consequences. So Marxism is not the same as the neo-Marxist critical theory of the Frankfurt School nor is that the same as the French post-structuralists, nor are they the same as postmodern critical theorists after 1989. Each group was highly critical of the others. Marxists like Terry Eagleton are highly critical of post-structuralists such as Foucault and Derrida (see his The Illusions of Postmodernism, 1996) and Derrida rejects classical Marxism in Specters of Marx, 1993). Yet the links between these movements are also widely acknowledged. Even inside the volume Specters of Marx, Derrida says that “Deconstruction…is also to say in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism” and “one must assume the heritage of Marxism.” So Taylor is right about “zig-zags”. One more example: Taylor shows how post-structuralism, or what he calls “the immanent counter-enlightenment”, is as much if not more the fruit of Nietzsche as Marx, even though Nietzsche despised Marxism. For more on how post-structuralism was taken up—discarded in some ways but adopted in some ways—by later critical theory, see Walter Truett Anderson, The Truth About the Truth, Putnam, 1995, later issued in an abridged form as The Fontana Postmodern Reader, Fontana, 1996.
[24] For an interesting example of the “all inequalities are due to social forces” ideology, read Ibram X. Kendi “Stop Blaming Young Voters for Not Turning Out for Sanders” The Atlantic, March 17, 2020. Kendi addresses a perennial issue, namely, that older people vote in much larger numbers than younger people. This has been the case for many generations, and most observers have attributed this to more inward factors. Younger adults are more mobile and tend to be less rooted and committed to a particular locality, ‘youth culture’ doesn’t put the same emphasis on it—and so on. Kendi refuses to posit any influence to personal or cultural factors at all. All differences in outcomes must have to do with ‘structural’ factors or social policy. He writes: “There are only two causes for the historical and ongoing voting disparities between younger and older Americans. Either there is something wrong with young Americans as a group or there is something wrong with our voting policies. Either other swing voters are unreliable, or our voting system is unreliable. Either there is something wrong with people, or there is something wrong with policy.”
[25] An example: “Although I believe that values are socially constructed rather than God given…I do not believe that gender inequality is any more defensible than racial inequality, despite repeated efforts to pass it off as culture-specific ‘custom’ rather than an instance of injustice.” Mari Ruti, The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living, Columbia, 2014, p.36. In the same paragraph she says all values are socially constructed—but that her views of what constitutes injustice are not. This self-justifying, self-contradictory approach to justice is typical of our time.
[26] For more on the severe difficulties that Marxism, Postmodernism, and various forms of critical theory have with making any moral statements of value or truth, see the important work by Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality, Oxford, 1985 and also see Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2002. Lukes, himself a Marxist from what I can tell, writes about the ‘Paradox’ or contradiction of Marxism: “On the one hand [Marxism claims] that morality is a form of ideology, and thus social in origin, illusory in content, and serving class interests; that any given morality…is relative to a particular mode of production and particular class interests; that there are no objective truths or eternal principles of morality; that the very form of morality and general ideas such as freedom and justice…[are] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” (Lukes is quoting from Marx and Engels here.) “On the other hand” Lukes goes on “no one can fail to notice that Marx’s and marxist writings abound in moral judgments, implicit and explicit.” (Lukes, p.3) Later post-structuralists and critical theorists–when speaking of morality as being “socially constructed” and yet continuing to make implicit moral claims that they do not treat as relative and constructed—participate in the same contradiction. For more on how all forms of modern secularism have “inadequate moral sources to support their high moral ideals” see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard, 2007, chapters 15 “The Immanent Frame”, 16 “Cross Pressures”, 17 “Dilemmas I” and 19 “Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity”, pp. 539-773.
[27] Miroslav Volf, The Spacious Heart: Essays on Identity and Belonging, Trinity Press, 1997, 57.
[28] While I do not want Christians to wholly buy into any one of these secular accounts of justice, readers should not conclude that these four views are equally valid or equally flawed. They are not. I am not arguing for moral equivalence of all these views, although I realize my article could be read this way and that is the reason for this endnote. I certainly have my favorites among these four. I see some closer to biblical justice and others further away. But to answer the question, “With which of these views can Christians work best?” is beyond the scope of this essay.
[29] MacIntyre in his chapter comparing the Libertarian view of justice (Nozick) to the Liberal view (Rawls) shows that, in the end, the arguments come down to saying, “but I deserve this” or “but the poor deserve this”. However, as MacIntyre shows, no secular view can say such a thing. Secular views voluntarily forfeited such language and argument. In a universe in which we just appeared, not for any purpose, through a process that is basically violent, we cannot talk about anything being deserved or right or wrong. The most that secular thinkers can ever argue for is that, on some cost-benefit analysis that murdering people or starving the poor is impractical for some agreed upon end. Yet, as MacIntyre points out none of the adherents of these views can avoid such talk. They unavoidably “smuggle” in language of morality and virtue that their own view of the world cannot support. That should tell them something. See MacIntyre, “Justice as Virtue: Changing Conceptions” Chapter 17 in After Virtue, 249.
[30] For the basic ideas in this paragraph see Richard Bauckham, “Reading Scripture as a Coherent Story,” in Richard B. Hays and Ellen F. Davis, eds. The Art of Reading Scripture, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003, 45-55. I flesh these ideas out in Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World, Penguin Books, 2016, Chapter 10: “A Justice That Does Not Create New Oppressors” 193-211.
[31] For the basic idea in this final section on Christianity and power I am indebted to Christopher Watkin. See his Michel Foucault, Presbyterian and Reformed, 2018.