What About Social Justice?

In answer to my questions about eternity, a friendly, positive young man named Oscar told me he doesn’t think much about heaven, but often finds himself hoping for the existence of hell.

What?!! I was surprised and told him this is unusual, that most people I talk to focus on heaven, and I asked him about it. Oscar told me it has to do with hoping for ultimate justice – that all too often bad people aren’t punished in this life, so he hopes they will be punished in the next.

I thought this was pretty interesting, and wondered if it came from our culture’s current emphasis on “social justice”. Many Christians have jumped on the social justice bandwagon, because, after all, throughout the Bible “justice” is repeatedly and consistently referred to as an important and prominent attribute of God’s character.

I wonder, however, if our culture’s current concern for “social justice” is, indeed, biblical, or is it leading us in an entirely different direction?

The secular definition of the word “justice” itself often involves circular reasoning. Google’s first definition is “just behavior or treatment”. Defining a word with another form of the same word is not helpful. Neither is describing it as “right” or “moral”, because, well, who decides what is right or moral?

So we need a system of laws, and with them, we can describe justice as “the quality of being just, impartial, or fair” according to those laws. This is true with civil laws, and it’s true when it comes to moral laws as well.

At one time moral laws such as the Ten Commandments were considered to be the foundation for civil laws. Lately, however, it seems our civil laws are often abandoning moral laws. Maybe we as a culture are abandoning moral laws because we are abandoning God as the moral lawgiver.

In so doing we are then forced to take the law in our own hands, to determine what is good, right, moral and just for ourselves. We as a society, and many as individuals within it, seem determined to become “god” ourselves, and then we turn in judgment upon God himself and the Bible as God’s Word for acting like, well, God!

So is the current emphasis on “social justice” an attempt to bring ourselves in line with God’s justice in society, or is it an attempt to usurp God’s role?

We know by experience that life is far from fair; that although everyone is born into this life with the same dignity and worth endowed by our Creator, we are, nonetheless, all dealt a different hand of cards, so to speak. We may be born in different neighborhoods and nations, in different social and economic groups, and even within the same family we are given different skills, abilities, experiences, appearances, and so on. Some are given many privileges; some nothing but hardship.

Given the great inequity we see in life, how can God be considered fair, or just? Here’s a few thoughts...

First, the Bible tells us it is God’s right to create as He sees fit: “Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?” (Romans 9:21) The Parable of the (unequally distributed) Talents tells us this is to be expected. God’s justice, then, is not found in an equitable distribution of privilege, but in His wise judgment as to what we do with that privilege - “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48).

Second, while we might rightly long for equal opportunity and equitable outcomes in life, it’s not for us to think we can untangle the complicated mess of inequitable differences in life by our own efforts. Do we really think we can make up for this complex range of differences with our overly simplistic and inaccurate identity politics, and our reliance on government policies and programs?

This is not to say we should give up the struggle for equality and equity in life. When Jesus said “the poor you will have with you always” in reference to a woman’s heartfelt act of worship, he was quoting from a longer passage in Deuteronomy 15 that continued “Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.” Caring for the poor and the needy was expected; Jesus’ point was that we shouldn’t neglect worship of God in the process.

And I wonder if that’s not what many are falling into in their pursuit of social justice – either neglecting to worship and glorify God in the process, or actually attempting to usurp God’s role altogether, to be “good without God”.

For Oscar’s part, with his desire for the wicked to be punished in hell, at least he saw God as the ultimate source of justice in the next life. But, there again, he saw himself as one of the good guys. I’m afraid he was falling for the temptation of our secular pursuit of social justice, to be good without God rather than to give God the glory He deserves.