Distributive Justice and the Book of Job
God expects every truly righteous person to care about the poor and to do what is in his power to help them. But it begs the question to maintain that this concern can only be expressed in an endorsement of coercive and redistributory statism that is so essential to contemporary collectivist approaches to justice.
Much of the confusion present in evangelical attempts to find a theory of distributive justice in the Bible result from inattention to the classical distinction between a universal and particular sense of justice. Because evangelical social liberals are inattentive to important distinctions within the notion of justice, many of their appeals to biblical uses of “justice” are compromised since they simply assume that biblical endorsements of justice are divine commands to support economic redistribution. This kind of error is illustrated in Robert Johnston’s book, Evangelicals at an Impasse. Johnston writes:
Although it is not the Bible’s purpose to give a careful scientific definition of what our “needs” are, Scripture does repeatedly identify justice with assistance to the poor, the sick, and the powerless. Job states, for example:
“I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; my justice was like a robe and a turban. I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the poor, and I searched out the cause of him whom I did not know. I broke the fangs of the unrighteous, and made him drop his prey from his teeth.”
Johnston goes on to cite several other texts where the notion of justice is conjoined with helping the poor. (Jer. 22:15-16; Deut.10:12-22; Ps. 103:6; Ps. 146:7-8). Such verses prove, in Johnston’s judgement, that biblical justice is closely related to an economic redistribution that will meet the needs of the poor and the helpless.
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An Anchor for Our Tongues
Written by A.W. Workman |
Thursday, January 12, 2023
Preachers and authors, let’s make sure we ground our definitions in the only inspired source of eternal meaning we have, God’s word. This could often be as simple as an extra sentence or two. “The definition we just read fits well with how the Bible uses this term, as we see illustrated in this passage in…” or, “I like the Latin roots of this word because they echo so well with how the biblical authors use it, for example…” A small step toward a deeper grounding will help us communicate meaning that is eternal, and not that which is a mere snapshot of an imperfect language tradition. It matters how the English and the Romans defined things. It matters infinitely more how God does.Preachers and authors do it all the time. They quote the English definition of a word or refer to its linguistic roots as a way to ground their argument, to establish the meaning of a term or concept. Then they move on, seemingly convinced that they have offered up enough evidence for their audience to trust that they are indeed communicating the true sense of that term. What is not often realized is that, for the Christian, this kind of appeal to the dictionary or history is actually an inadequate grounding.
Perhaps a sermon is being delivered on Isaiah 40:1, “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.” The preacher focuses on the meaning of comfort in his introduction to his sermon idea. To do this, he quotes Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, which defines the verb comfort as:to give strength or hope to: cheer
to ease the grief or trouble of: consoleThe preacher then takes this meaning of comfort, summarizes what comfort means according to the definitions he’s just read, and then gives his main point: Our God gives strength and hope to his people through his promises of salvation.
Or, perhaps a Christian counselor is writing a book on grief and to establish what comfort means, he appeals to the Latin roots of the word. In Latin, com meant with, and fortis meant strength. So, the author concludes, comfort means “with strength,” to be with someone in a way that gives them strength.
What’s the problem with these very common ways to establish the meaning of a term or concept? The problem is that this method of establishing meaning has only served to give us what one particular language and culture believed about that concept at a given time. But how do I know that Merriam-Webster English is giving me a true and universal meaning for comfort? Or how can I be sure that the meaning the Romans gave to their words is a faithful witness to what comfort actually is? Why should I trust these snapshots of a language at a particular time over my own personal definition for the term, cobbled together by the thousands of contexts where I have heard and seen that term used?
Unfortunately, any given language is an imperfect witness to eternal truth. A language is limited in its perspective on reality. It “thinks” in a certain way, and this affects how it describes things. This gives each language a unique perspective and voice, but that uniqueness also implies it’s missing a bunch of things that other languages notice. In English I am my age, in Spanish I have my age. If I only speak English, I only think about age in a certain way. But I am missing out on the reality that age is not just something I can be, it is also something I can possess.
Each language is also limited by the kind of vocabulary and grammar it has.
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The Weakness of God
Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, January 1, 2022
Nietzsche understood the faith, and hated it: Christianity does not idolise strength. There is something disturbing to the modern mind in the idea that God, supposedly the strongest being in the universe, could ever be weak. There is something disturbing to the modern mind in the idea that weakness could ever be good, it’s seen as something to fight and overcome. We fear old age because we will weaken and one day experience the cold embrace of the grave.For Nietzsche the way of Jesus propagated what he called ‘slave morality’ and stopped humanity rising to reach our potential. A God that was not strong, a God who would allow himself to be ridiculed and killed by his creation was no God to Nietzsche.
Our culture thinks like this at times. It idolises strength. Perhaps not to the lengths that Nietzsche himself proposed, but nonetheless weakness is not a virtue. It is, as our very language indicates, a weakness. In amidst all his vitriol, Nietzsche understood the faith, and hated it: Christianity does not idolise strength.
There is something disturbing to the modern mind in the idea that God, supposedly the strongest being in the universe, could ever be weak. There is something disturbing to the modern mind in the idea that weakness could ever be good, it’s seen as something to fight and overcome. We fear old age because we will weaken and one day experience the cold embrace of the grave.
I mean, we don’t say that out loud, but I think it’s true. Despite all our love of safety we don’t want to weak or seen as being weak. Even our newfound embrace of mental health issues, “it’s ok to not be ok,” is so often a rhetoric of strength. It’s not pitched as a cry for help but as self-actualisation.
Here’s thing friends, the Bible says we’re weak. It’s good if we notice that. Then, strangely we’re told to exult in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12) because when we recognise that we are weak we can see and experience that God is strong.
Then there’s a deeper truth, the one the Nietzsche saw and hated. The Bible tells us of a God who has ultimate strength, the unmoved mover, the God who is pure act and can do whatever he wants. So far so ubermench. And then the story takes the strangest turn. God gives up strength for weakness. He descends. God comes down.
God Comes Down
There are many things that set Christianity apart from the other world religions, but the incarnation has to be among the starkest of differences. God is born as a man, Jesus. Let’s just stop there for a second, we become used to this sort of language in church circles. Sit with the absurdity of it for a few minutes.
God—the infinite incomprehensible one in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17). That God. God is born. The God with no beginning and end, is born. And not as a superhero, as a Jewish peasant.
That’s nuts.
And it happened. God is born as a man, the second person of the Trinity exposed to the distress of a world that has rejected his rule, a diamond in the human dust.
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Don’t Pervert the Truth by Misusing It
In an increasingly relativistic culture, it is imperative that we remain committed to God’s truth. It is an indispensable asset and a precious commodity—one that transforms our minds, increases our wisdom, affects our speech, guides our steps, anchors our emotions, equips our ministry, and informs our worship.
Speaking the Truth in Love
Among the characters in Disney’s 1989 animated film The Little Mermaid is a seagull named Scuttle, whom Ariel mistakenly considers an expert on humans. Scuttle explains the functions of various manmade trinkets; for example, he identifies a fork as a “dinglehopper,” which he says humans use to straighten their hair. Demonstrating how he thinks the fork is supposed to work, he says, “Just a little twirl here and a yank there and voila: you got an aesthetically pleasing configuration of hair that humans go nuts over.”
On occasion, I may or may not have been reminded of this scene when forced to tell one of my growing daughters, “Stop putting that fork in your hair.” In response, none of my daughters has ever asked, “Should I not comb my hair?” or “Should I never use a fork?” And with good reason. They instinctively know I have nothing against fork usage or combing hair.
The point of my command is not that hair combing is unimportant, or that forks are useless. The point is that forks should be used properly. As useful as they are, forks don’t lend themselves to creating an “aesthetically pleasing configuration of hair,” no matter what Scuttle says. That’s not what they were designed for.
Similarly, those of us in the body of Christ can use truth improperly. We can mischaracterize, minimize, or overemphasize its role. And in so doing, we wield truth contrary to how it was designed to function. The result is, shall we say, a “morally unpleasant configuration of haziness that makes humans act like nuts.”
There are, unfortunately, many ways we can do this. Let us look at three examples.
1. Equating Truth with Love
The command to speak the truth to our neighbor (Ephesians 4:25) is different from the command to love our neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). The two are not synonymous, just as combing hair and using a fork are not synonymous. Obedience to one command does not equate to obedience to the other.
And yet, there are those who have conflated truth and love, imagining that it is inherently loving to speak truth to someone. Thus, the more you speak the truth, the more loving you are. However, love knows there are times when it is better to listen rather than to share truth, and even to overlook a wrong rather than confront it with the truth (Proverbs 19:11). There are occasions where we just need to pray and let God do the talking to the other person. It takes wisdom to know when and how to speak, and when to remain silent (Proverbs 15:23, 25:11; Ecclesiastes 3:7b; Amos 5:13).
One functional effect of the “truth equals love” paradigm is the devaluing of love, as if it were an automatic appendage of the truth, achieved effortlessly as long as truth is spoken. If that were the case, one might expect Jesus to summarize the law of God as “truth.” Instead, he summarizes the entirety of God’s law as “love” (Matthew 22:40). Paul echoes this sentiment when he says the law is “summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Romans 13:9).
It is important both what we say (the truth) and how we say it (with love). We cannot separate the what and the how and imagine that only the what is of consequence. Motives and methods matter just as much as our message. The wrong methods won’t fly under God’s radar simply because they are attached to “the truth.”
Let there be no mistake: one can speak the truth and be unloving at the same time. That is why the apostle Paul encourages us to always be “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). If we don’t speak the truth in a loving way, we will forsake “building up the body of Christ” (v. 12) and instead act like “children” (v. 14). Love is designed to guide and direct our use of the truth so that we communicate effectively and redemptively.
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