Sean McDowell and Thaddeus Williams are professors of Christian Apologetics and Theology, respectively, at Biola University. They recently discussed the vital question of how Christians should think about social justice. Below are the opening and closing portions of their conversation. Please join me in prayerfully considering how to apply this guidance in our daily lives.
(Bonus question: What does “Biola” mean? See the end of this post for the answer.)
“SEAN MCDOWELL: There has been significant focus on “social justice” within the Christian world over the past few years. What is the biblical call to justice?
THADDEUS WILLIAMS: If we take the Bible seriously then justice should be a big deal for us. God does not suggest, He commands that we “Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed” (Jer. 22:3). Jesus declared his mission to “proclaim good news to the poor… liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18, quoting Isa. 61:1, 2). “Seek justice” (Isa. 1:17) is a clarion call of Scripture, and those who box their ears to that call are simply not living by the Book.
MCDOWELL: When have you seen that lived out well in church history?
WILLIAMS: There is a long, beautiful history of Christians who lived out the biblical call to justice. The early church proclaimed the Gospel in a way that subverted the mutual racism between 1st century Jews, Samaritans, and Gentiles. They brought reconciliation and real community where there had been hostility and division for centuries.
When Romans tossed their so called “blemished” babies away like garbage—often simply because they were female—our ancient brothers and sisters went to those human dumps, rescued, and raised society’s unwanted as their own cherished sons and daughters. They knew God had rescued and adopted them, so they did the same until the human dumps were no more.
When a plague ravaged the Roman Empire, most people ran for the hills away from the sick and dying. It was counterculture Christians who ran to the bedsides of the plagued (most of them non-Christians who didn’t abide by Christian ethics, sexual or otherwise) to treat them with dignity, getting sick and dying right along with them. (Contrast that with the church’s response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s!) Then there was Wilberforce, John Newton and the Clapham sect in the UK, along with Fredrick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, and others is the US. Their own experiences of redemption from sin inspired them to abolish the dehumanizing slave-trade. Christians like Charles Octavius Boothe and Dietrich Bonhoeffer used good theology to combat white supremacy. You might not know it from today’s headlines, but this long and biblically propelled justice tradition continues today all over the world.”
“MCDOWELL: If we want to carry forward that biblical justice tradition, should we jump aboard the current “social justice” movement?
WILLIAMS: That’s a massively important question. Of course, it all comes down to what we mean by “social justice.” We should all seek a world forever purged of racism, where justice prevails and greed and tyranny are permanently replaced with compassion and love. But we have to be discerning. Not every movement waving the social justice banner promotes the kind of justice and shalom the Bible calls us to seek.
The problem is not with the quest for justice. The problem is what happens when that quest is undertaken from a framework that is not compatible with the Bible. And this is a very real problem, because the extent to which we unwittingly allow unbiblical worldview assumptions to shape our approach to justice is the extent to which we are inadvertently hurting the very people we seek to help.
A “culture war” model has taken over our culture. I see far more hope in the biblical insight that Jesus destroyed the wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile to make for Himself “one man,” uniting people from every tongue tribe, and nation and making them ambassadors of reconciliation. Family and reconciliation, not inter-group warfare, is the Bible’s model for justice. The church needs to step up and live that out in an obvious and compelling way, to show the watching world the beautiful alternative to mutual destruction.
If we really care about justice—which should be all of us who take the Bible seriously—then, no, we shouldn’t go along with ideologies that promise liberation and peace and only bring more bondage and strife. Instead we should love the oppressed (and love the God who loves the oppressed!) by carrying on the beautiful, biblical justice tradition of the Wilberforces and Tubmans and Boothes of history.”
Please read the whole interview here: http://seanmcdowell.org/blog/how-should-christians-think-about-social-justice
Answer: Bible Institute of Los Angeles. See https://www.biola.edu/about/history
© 2018 Michael S. Oswald
“Reasons for the Faith, aka Apologetics” 