Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How Do You Define "Social Justice"? | Questions You're Asking

Episode Date: October 22, 2020

Politics shapes society, so what do we want society to look like? Learn how the Bible defines a just society with https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Pastors Keith Simon) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick Miller). Interested in more content like this? Check out our earlier episode on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/should-we-separate-church-and-state-questions-youre-asking-matthew-4-8-9/ (Should We Separate Church and State?) Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. In our last episode, we were trying to shake ourselves and everybody else out of deep partisan loyalties. And I have no doubt that we have probably offended people. I offend myself all the time. You know, I just look in the mirror. You're very offensive.

I have to share an office with you. Yeah. There's lots of things that happen. So what we were saying at the end is that we need. to not separate our faith, our walk with Jesus from the public sphere. We need to bring Jesus' his vision of what a well-ordered human society looks like. We need to bring that to bear in our own society. But the only way that you can do that is if you actually know what Jesus has to say about these things, if you actually have a biblical conception of what is justice and what does a just

society look like. So I think it's really valuable to spend an entire podcast just answering that question. What is justice according to the Bible? Now, to say the obvious, we can't be comprehensive here, but we want to give a few principles that we've drawn from a great article by Tim Keller, and we'll link to it in our show notes. Honestly, you can probably just press pause right now and go read that and get more out of it, but you can't listen to his, so let's go. It's easy to be for justice. It's really hard to figure out what justice is. There are a number of theories of what makes a just society, and then there's the biblical approach to justice. And so I think we as Christians are trying to sort out what is just, what is right, what is fair, what is good, what is godly in the midst of a world that's really confusing.

So a guy emailed me in our church, good guy, a smart guy, humble guy, teachable guy. He emailed me because he was a bit bothered by some of our prayers and some of our songs that had the words justice and oppression in it. And he just said, hey, I feel like we're getting too political now. Where's all this coming from? Why all of a sudden is the church getting political? And because I knew he was a good dude, I said, hey, do me a favor. Go to BibleGateway.com and put in the word oppress, and you'll find all kinds of forms of that word and the word justice. And then tell me what you find.

And he emailed me back a few hours later and said, wow, those words are everywhere in the Bible. And then he went on to tell me what some of his favorite passages were, those that stood out to him. And I think the point is that we have been disciples so much by the news media, so much by our political beliefs, that we don't hear oppression and justice as being biblical words, words that God cares about, concepts, truths that God cares about. Instead, we hear them inside of the partisan debates that are happening within our culture. But here's a guy who's trying to wrestle with these words and what does oppression and justice look like. In fact, you can tell a lot about yourself how you've been disciples by culture, by the media, by seeing how you respond to different real-life stories that come out of the world and have to do with justice. I'm going to give a little example, and I think we might give a few other ones just to make the point.

But I want you to think, how am I responding to these stories? Why am I responding the way that I am? Is it because, like Keith just said, I've been disciples by X News Group or Y News Group? Is it because I'm in this cultural community or that cultural community? Or is it because I understand what the Bible says about this topic, and I am trying to think about it biblically? As I talk to, again, as I talk to a lot of

Christians, one thing I realize is they might know a lot of wonderful things the Bible says about Jesus and salvation, his divinity, his human, I mean, there's all different kinds of things they might know, but if I were to say, hey, what's the Bible say about justice? Sometimes I get blanked. stairs. I'm not really sure. Or I get someone baptizing their own political perspective as though that's what the Bible says about it. So let me give an example. And the point of this example is to ask a question, what's a just response to how past injustices have present consequences? So if you took a map of

Madison, Wisconsin, and you mapped on that little map, the schools that had the highest free and reduced lunch, the schools that had the lowest reading proficiency rates, if you mapped the neighborhoods with the highest density of people who were incarcerated in Madison, Wisconsin. If you put all those things on a map, you would discover something that might surprise you. They all exist in one group, in one community. If you put it on the map, they look like a little crescent, all of those things in one place. And if you mapped on top of that, the racial population of Madison, Wisconsin, you would discover something else, which is that white people don't typically live in those communities. Those communities are mostly populated by Latino and African American citizens.

So this crescent where you have the most poverty, the lowest levels of education, the highest levels of incarceration, is also the community where you are most likely to find people of color. Now, you might have some thoughts about why that might be the case or why not? And again, I want you to think, why do I have the thoughts that I have about that? But here's what's really important. I could pull out for you another map. This map was not made in 2020. This map was made in the 1930s. Back in the 1930s, during the New Deal era, banks were trying to help people buy houses. And anybody knows anything about wealth that knows that buying houses is a huge step towards developing and growing wealth. But when they were deciding where they would give mortgages, they had to make maps. And on these maps, they would show what they called high-risk areas because the bank wouldn't give mortgages in high-risk areas. Now, high-risk was a euphemism for black neighborhoods. I can take that map of of high-risk neighborhoods, high-risk areas in Madison and Wisconsin. Do you want to guess what it looks

like? It looks like the Crescent. So here's a map from 1930, and I can take that map from 1930, and I can use that map to tell you where the highest levels of poverty, incarceration, lowest education, I can use that map from the 1930s to show you what's happening today. What do we do about that? Is that a problem? Does the Bible have anything to say about this? Do you know what the Bible has to say about this? This is what we're getting at. What's actually disciples you? You can tell a lot by how you're responding to this story. If you're feeling a bit discombobulated, good. That's the goal. Here's another one. Let's keep it going. So the New York Times runs a story about carjacking in Minneapolis. And here's the way it goes down. Is these two African-American kids come up to a guy, his name's Erickson, Mr. Erickson,

and they are going to steal his car and they demand his keys. Well, he's flustered and he accidentally gives them his house keys. Well, they can't get the car started with the house key, and so they run down the street and carjacks somebody else. So in the meantime, Mr. Erickson's called the cops because there was a gun involved, and he was scared to death. And later on, he came to regret that decision. He said he wouldn't help the prosecutors in the case, because if there was anything he

really wanted, it was to now help the boys that he had called the cops on. He said, yeah, okay, I was right to call the cops because there was a gun in the involved after all. But then his thinking evolved even more. So he sent a text message to this reporter, and he said this, been thinking about it more. I regret calling the police. It was my instinct, but I wish it hadn't been. I put those boys in danger of death by calling the cops. Really? Did Mr. Erickson do the right thing by calling the police, or did he do the wrong thing? Were there lives in danger because he called the cops on two people? who are carjacking him at gunpoint? What's going on here? Why the second guessing of himself?

Again, what was the just response? Did he do the right thing? Did he do the wrong thing? How do we think about topics like policing? What's shaping our ideas? We should want the Bible to shape our concepts of justice. And like Keith said, the Bible has a tremendous amount to say about this. That's why a single podcast really can't even do justice on the topic. And we will link in the show notes to three different articles by Tim Keller on justice, on race in America, and a last one that kind of fills out some of those ideas even more. The articles are great. They're a little more in depth than what we're able to do here. And I'll also include a link in the show notes to a new book by Esau McCauley called Reading While Black. And in that book, he has a chapter on a New

Testament theology of policing that I have to say was one of the most challenging and interesting things that I have frankly changed my views and ideas about the topic of policing. And so we're just going to give you links to things that we think are helpful. And then hop in here to talk about justice. Justice is a human concern. Everybody wants justice. People on the right want justice. They're very concerned about it.

They want an ordered society. They want every person to be treated equally. They don't want government meddling in the affairs of their private businesses. They want to protect them. the life of the unborn because that would be the just or the right thing to do. And they're scared to death. People in the right are scared to death that what's happening on the left is causing so many divisions is tearing apart the social order. And they're concerned that now you can't even have a conversation about it. Because of cancel culture, we can't even talk about

difficult issues anymore. College students especially seem to be afraid of hard conversations. They are protecting themselves from ideas that disagree with them. And the people on the right say, not only is this unjust, but we're going to continue to go down a bad road if we can't have free and open debate. And again, people on the left are also would say that they're very concerned about justice. And when they talk about justice, you know, what they would say is America has been deeply and pervasively infected with injustice, particularly in the form of power imbalances. And those can be between men and women, between gay and straight, trans and cis, black and white. The list would go on. And they're concerned because they see these power imbalances institutionalized in law and policy, but also in our public discourse, just the normal way that we talk about things. And so because they're concerned about justice, they want to overturn these laws. They want to deal with the language and the discourses. They want to set things right.

So if people on the political right and left care about justice, what about Christians? We care about justice, right? But again, what is the biblical definition of justice? Lots of people reading their Bibles have no idea. They sincerely read their Bible, but for some reason, the issue of justice goes right by them, and they don't get it. So on a 10-minute Bible Talk Facebook page, there was a woman. I don't know her, but I'm sure she's a sharp person who said, this. She said, the New Testament says nothing about race. I think she was frustrated because we had said that the Bible talks about racial injustice, and that's one of the topics that are being debated today. And she was saying, look, you're bringing social issues into this. The New Testament doesn't say anything

about race. And Patrick and I looked at each other and we're like, well, I don't even know what you say to that. Because if there's a social issue that is primary in the New Testament, it is the issue of race, whether it's Paul and Ephesians 2 talking about tearing down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile or Galatians, talking about the division that had separated Jew and Gentile in that community, or if it's Paul writing the letter of Romans to address house churches in Rome that were splitting over racial divisions. The New Testament talks about race. It's Jesus embracing the Samaritan. Race is everywhere, but for some reason, genuine Jesus-loving. Christians read their Bibles and don't see that that's a major topic that Jesus cares about.

And if this is new to you and you're like, I've read Paul's letters, how did I miss this? Go read at Acts 15. It's a great place to start. It's the first church council, first time a group of people get together to talk about what do we believe theologically. And would you believe it, the first issue on the docket is how do we deal with race in the church? Okay, but it's not just on one side that we see Christians confused. We see it on the other side as well. I saw a post-rease, where someone claimed that, quote, white people killed Jesus. And again, I thought you have baptized a political perspective into the Bible. First, I thought that because it's historically false. It is just, as a matter of fact, it's historically false. Ancient Romans were not white people. White people are

Germanic people. They lived to the north of Rome, and Rome was actually invading their lands at the time. But ancient Romans were not white people. Secondly, the people who crucified Jesus were both Roman and Jewish, and I'm sure there were other people involved, but again, none of them were white. But the other big issue here is that the categories of black and white, those are modern categories. Our racial terminology is really a modern development. So if you went back into the ancient world and asked someone to point out a white person and a black person, they'd give you a blank stare. They wouldn't know what you were talking about.

Now, of course, I understood the idea of ethnicities and race, but to go back and to frame the killers of Jesus as white people, that's just trying to take your politics and put it into the Bible. All right, so let's jump into a biblical perspective on justice. And I think what we're going to find is that the Bible is concerned about right relationships. In other words, a just world is one in which we as individuals who are in right relationship with God, ourselves, our community, and the world that we live in. And biblical justice is both retributive, in other words, God punishes wrongdoing and restorative. In fact, the vast majority of the Bible's language around justice is restorative. In other words, one of the goals of justice is to make things right, to make society function well, to restore where there are injustices.

So the first facet of biblical justice is that it redresses and heals. In other words, it redresses wrongs, and it heals that which is broken. It does that within the sense of the community. So people in the community have a claim on my wealth. And therefore, I want to be a person who is voluntarily generous. But they have a claim on my wealth. Am I my brother's keeper? It turns out that the Bible's answer is yes. In Deuteronomy 24, it gives us this picture of a farmer harvesting the field. And it specifically tells them to not harvest all the grain of the field, to not get every olive, every little thing they can get out of it. but instead to leave it for the fatherless, the foreigner, and the widow. Leave it to those people who are hurting, those people who don't have things, because that is theirs.

They actually have a claim on it, that you're supposed to voluntarily give up your advantage on behalf of other people. So there's this great quote by Bruce Walkey. He's an Old Testament scholar, and he says, the righteous are willing to disadvantage themselves to advantage the community. The wicked are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves. So justice in the biblical perspective for a Christian means that I don't see all that I have is mine, but I see my wealth as something that God has given me to care for people in need. You just hit the nail on the head when it comes to this idea of shared communal goods. It's gods. Everything is gods. We are stewards of his stuff.

And this stands in stark contrast, both to libertarianism and socialism. To the libertarian, he says, I have a right to my capital. This is my money. I may do with it whatever I want. That is not a biblical perspective. That is God's stuff. That is God's money, and you are to do with it, as he says. But to the socialist who wants to say, actually, your money is the state's money and the state has the right to do with it. Again, it's not the state's money. That's God's stuff. That's God's money. And so we start to realize that almost all modern conceptions of how we deal with our wealth don't fit into this biblical idea.

And the biblical idea, like Keith just said, is that God has called us to be generous with our wealth and to realize that because it's not mine, the community actually does have a claim on it. Those gleaning laws were insane because people went hungry 60 days a year. Can you imagine? I can't feed my kid, and yet I know there's still some wheat back in the farm. I know there's a few more grapes left. And you say, but I'm not going to go get it because God's called me to leave it for other people in the community. Yeah, the people who went hungry 60 days out of the year were the people who are well off. That's not the poor people.

The poor people went hungry many, many more days. So you were asked to give, told to give, out of, of your poverty out of just kind of making it, not your wealth. Yeah, this is really, really hard for Westerners. We taught this idea in a class, and we got a lot of emails from people who were pushing back, but in a good way of this is really challenging me. Another thing that the Bible says, so the first facet of justice is community. The second one would be equity, that everybody needs to be treated with equal dignity.

Now, this idea is much less controversial to us, so I don't want to spend a boatload of time on it. But again and again, the Bible is clear that you should, example, in Leviticus 24, that you should treat the foreigner the same as the native born. That's a principle. Or in Isaiah 33, that you should never accept a bribe because that will give preferential treatment of the wealthy over the poor. So we should have equality. We should have equality in our laws. We should have equality in our policing. We should have equality in everything. That's a very clear principle. Yeah, here's a harder one for us to get, and that is corporate responsibility. Because the typical American way of thinking is that I

responsible for myself. I am responsible for what goes well, and I'm responsible for what goes wrong. But to think I'm responsible for other people's choices, it just seems foreign to us. And yet that is a lot of what we see in the Bible. We see story after story in which people are held responsible, not just for their actions, but for other's actions. So think of Joshua 7 and Aiken's sin. Aiken commits this big sin, and the whole community is held responsible. responsible and suffers as a result of it. Or think of Daniel 9 or Ezra 9, where both those chapters include prayers in which Daniel and Ezra are confessing the sins of their ancestors. They are taking ownership of sins that they did not commit. Now, we kind of resist that.

And we say, well, why in the world do I need to feel responsible for the sins of my great, great, great, great, grandfather, or somebody else's great, great, great grandfather. That's an American Western way of thinking. It is not a biblical way of thinking. The Bible says, no, confess those sins. Own it. I was having a conversation with someone who was getting a little bit frustrated. And finally, she lit that me and she goes, I never owned any slaves. This is not my responsibility. And that's a very American individualist way of thinking. Her statement isn't false. She never did own any slaves. That is a true statement. And her responsibility in some sense is less high than someone who had held slaves. And yet, what we're trying to get at here is we need to own the sins of our ancestors. We are called even to confess those sins. We are called if justice is restorative to do what we can to make those things right. That's going to be costly. That's going to be difficult. It's going

to be hard. But if your excuse for why I don't do X, Y, Z is because I never. had a slave or I've never bought into a racist idea, whatever it is, just know if that's in your ancestry, there's a challenge there to take it on. On the flip side, though, the Bible's also clear that individuals should be held responsible for their own actions. Again, this is much less controversial today. Most Western people agree that individuals should be held responsible for what they do. So, for example, Deuteronomy 24 says that a child shouldn't be put to death for the sins of their parent. Now, that can sound like it's in tension with what we just said, but here's what you need to understand. If you think about culpability, responsibility, you can think about it in layers. The person

who's most responsible for anything is the person who did it, right? So you should not legally punish a child for what a parent did. And yet, there is a wider layer of responsibility. So I'll give a different example. I'm a leader. I manage people. When someone on my team does something wrong that hurt someone else on a different team. Well, the person who did that thing, they're the most responsible person in the room. But me, as the leader, I have to share in the responsibility because I'm the person who manages them. I'm the person who leads them. And so I will often take the blame. I will often share in the blame with the person who did the wrong thing. And that's the right thing to do. You see there the dimensions of both corporate and individual responsibility.

So the next facet of biblical justice is advocacy. This is the sense in which we must advocate for those who are in need, for those who are marginalized, for those who are oppressed or overlooked, that we can't just say we're going to take care of ourselves and the political system or someone else or they can take care of themselves. So listen to Isaiah 1. Learn to do right. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow. So do you hear that what the biblical community does is they advocate for those who are in need or who don't have a voice. In Proverbs 31, it says, speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly. Defend the

rights of the poor and the needy. So what does advocacy look like practically? I think there's a number of things we could say. First, sometimes it means direct relief to take care of material needs. This was one of the first things that actually happened in the early church. There was a famine in Jerusalem. and Paul saw it as part of his calling and duty to go to these Gentile churches and gather a collection so that he could take it back to Jerusalem and provide for the famished believers there. So one way you advocate is just by directly relieving the needs of people financially and relationship. Another form of advocacy is to try to take on the social structures that do disadvantage certain groups. Job is an example for us in this. When he's describing his own righteousness, he says, look, I'm an upright person.

Listen to what he says. He says, I broke the fangs of the wicket, and I made them drop their victims. Job saw it as part of his job to deal with policies, to deal with leaders, to deal with systems that were unfairly treating people, and to break the fangs. He sees them as almost wild animals, wolves, lions that are praying on people, and he's coming in with his fang breakers ready to roll. So I think this gets messy, because the Bible tells us truths that we must follow. advocate for the poor, defend the weak. But it doesn't tell us how to do it. And when we try to get involved in the politics, then the church gets labeled as partisan. And of course, that turns off the other half of the people. And so the Bible doesn't tell us how. There's a conservative and maybe a progressive or a liberal way to help poor people. It doesn't tell us which one is right,

but it does tell us that we must care for the poor. So how do we reconcile all this, Patrick? How do we reconcile that the Bible calls us into this arena, and yet when we get into the arena, it comes with so much baggage. I think we just accept the baggage. We expect the messiness. Paul, I mean, you want to talk about someone confronting unjust social structures. He forbids Christians in First Timothy from what he calls man stealing, which is enslaving people. Now, there is no law against that, and slavery was practiced widely in ancient Rome.

And while Paul never came outright and told a slave master to release a slave. he did send a slave back to a slave master with a very clear message, which seems, if you took it seriously, to only lead in one direction, which is that the slave master would have to let his slave go. Is that messy? Is it messy to be in relationships with slaves and slave masters? Is it messy to figure out how do I help these Christians who are brothers and sisters in Christ and yet have these terribly unjust social and economic relationships? Well, of course that's terribly messy, but he wasn't afraid of waiting into it. Jesus wasn't afraid. He called Herod a fox. Yeah, I don't know if I agree. I mean, I agree with all the verses you're reading. Who wants to disagree with those? I get that. Sure. But I guess I'm not positive that the church, so a local church, should wade into the political fray. I just don't know if that's going to lead to a good outcome. Okay, I don't think I answered the question you were actually asking now that I'm hearing you say this. And I think what you're saying is helpful. It is easy to get fixated on national politics. That's what's in our news. media, that's what everybody's talking about. And unless you are yourself a politician, the only thing that you have in your playbook to actually affect national politics, for the most part, if you're going to be a realist, is probably who you vote for. I mean, maybe you could participate in some protests or something like that, but whether or not that moves the dial is really difficult to tell.

I would say that we are far better served to focus locally, to say, where do I actually have influence, where do I actually have the opportunity to shape policy, to shape how people think, and how can I use whatever power and influence I have for the sake of those who are in need, which is exactly what Jesus did on the cross. He used his power, and he set it down, and he put it to the advantage of people, you and I, who are in need. I couldn't agree more, and I think what we're finding, what I'm finding is that I am consumed by this national story that I really can't do anything about. Meanwhile, I'm ignoring local stories, little small local stories that I really could make a difference in.

And I think part of that, we could do a whole episode on this. I think part of that is because I get sucked up into the drama and the soap opera aspect of it, and I don't actually have to do anything. I don't have to spend my time, my money, my effort, my emotions. I just get to watch it all happen. But when you start talking locally, well, now you're starting to ask me for a personal sacrifice. But that's where real change happens.

If you want to see this played out, biblical justice played out, mentor a disadvantaged kid, volunteer in a domestic abuse center. I would say just take assessment of what do you have. So maybe you're a police officer in a local community listening to this. Don't get bent out of shape about what people are saying about the police and national media. Just ask yourself the question, what would it look like for me and my fellow police officers in my community to begin or to continue to build healthy bridges? and relationships in our community.

Who could I partner with? What can we do to bring more love and mercy and peace where we're at? Or the other way around. If you're someone who's experienced a negative end of policing, again, you can ask yourself the question, where I'm at right now, how can I help build bridges between communities and police officers? How can I help actually shape how my community does policing?

Because you're going to have a way higher chance of facing that particular issue down than you are of ever changing things on a national scale. You ever see those bumper stickers that say think globally act, act locally. They used to be around a lot. I haven't seen them a long time. And I used to hate them, but I think they were right. Think globally, but act locally. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or family

member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.