Evangelical American Christians have been hoping on the social justice bandwagon over the last twenty years or so. Roman Catholics have used the phrase for decades but it's struck me as redundant. After all, what sort of justice isn't "social?" Injustice requires a wrongdoer and a wronged; so too justice. There is necessarily a social aspect to justice.
Enough pedantry; let's move on.
Most claims to social justice have struck me as grounded about ten feet in the air. Many such claims seem like good ideas but it's hard to see how, for example, not having a state-mandated paid vacation is a matter of injustice. Yet it is also the case that claims of injustice with respect to the poor pervade the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and it is justice for the poor that occupies most of what passes under the rubric of "social justice." What gives?
Peter Leithart has a good insight in this short piece entitled Torah and Justice. Justice, including justice for the poor of ancient Israel, was firmly grounded in Torah or Israel's law. Prophetic condemnations were not based on free-standing notions of the public good or, heaven help us, academic ideas of public policy untethered to the Law. The prophets were God's prosecuting attorneys bringing charges against his people, charges that were firmly grounded the Law given hundreds of years earlier. Whether idolatry or oppression, Israel's offenses against God were violations of a covenant into which their representative ancestors had entered.
Is there such a thing as social justice? Of course. Does justice include rights of the poor? Indeed. But before we turn to Aristotelian applications of distributive justice or contemporary concepts of public policy, let's at least take a look at what justice according to God's Word looked like.
Enough pedantry; let's move on.
Most claims to social justice have struck me as grounded about ten feet in the air. Many such claims seem like good ideas but it's hard to see how, for example, not having a state-mandated paid vacation is a matter of injustice. Yet it is also the case that claims of injustice with respect to the poor pervade the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and it is justice for the poor that occupies most of what passes under the rubric of "social justice." What gives?
Peter Leithart has a good insight in this short piece entitled Torah and Justice. Justice, including justice for the poor of ancient Israel, was firmly grounded in Torah or Israel's law. Prophetic condemnations were not based on free-standing notions of the public good or, heaven help us, academic ideas of public policy untethered to the Law. The prophets were God's prosecuting attorneys bringing charges against his people, charges that were firmly grounded the Law given hundreds of years earlier. Whether idolatry or oppression, Israel's offenses against God were violations of a covenant into which their representative ancestors had entered.
Is there such a thing as social justice? Of course. Does justice include rights of the poor? Indeed. But before we turn to Aristotelian applications of distributive justice or contemporary concepts of public policy, let's at least take a look at what justice according to God's Word looked like.
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