Tag Archives: Jesus and Social Justice

Christian Ethics is for Christians!

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In this essay we continue our study of Christian ethics in which we attempt to reclaim Christian moral teaching from political opportunists. In the previous essay I listed five ethical principles that do double duty as conclusions and guiding principles of this series. Today we will address the first two:

  • Jesus and the apostles address their moral teaching to individual persons; not a single line is addressed to an institution.
  • The only entity capable of moral dispositions and actions is the individual human person.

I assume that most of my readers are familiar with the full range of the New Testament. Given this assumption, I will not take the space to document every instance of moral teaching in the NT. Nevertheless, in preparation for this essay I reread the four gospels and the letters of Paul just to make sure that my memory served me correctly.

Jesus

Jesus teaches his disciples about many things: the character of God and providence, the coming kingdom of God, and sincere religious practice. Included in his teaching are what I am calling moral teachings, that is, how we ought to act. The Sermon on the Mount serves as a convenient summary of Jesus’s moral teaching. Among the moral imperatives in that section of Matthew are:

  • Don’t get angry or insult your neighbor.
  • Don’t harbor lust.
  • Don’t divorce.
  • Don’t swear an oath.
  • Don’t take revenge.
  • Love your enemies.
  • Don’t worry. Trust God.
  • Don’t love money.
  • Don’t judge others.

Elsewhere in the gospels Jesus teaches his disciples to:

  • Forgive others.
  • Love their neighbors.
  • Purify their hearts from all hypocrisy.
  • Be humble and serve others.
  • Don’t seek honor from others.

Perhaps no other statement expresses the heart of Jesus’s moral teaching better than Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” This command comes at the end of the section wherein Jesus insists, against the universal human inclination, that we ought to love our enemies. The moral actions Jesus commands can arise only out of a character assimilated to the character of God.

Paul

Paul’s writings deal centrally with the necessity in the first decades of the church of clarifying how trust in Jesus as the crucified and risen Messiah and Lord relate to the Law and how Jewish and Gentile believers can be united in one body. But Paul unmistakably continues to teach his converts—especially gentile converts—the moral vision embodied in the Law and the prophets as interpreted by Jesus. We can see this fusion clearly in Romans 13-15, Galatians 5, Ephesians 4 and 5, Philippians 2, and Colossians 3. But I am especially struck, however, by 1 Corinthians 13 where Paul, like Jesus, connects outward actions to the most intimate depths of the heart. God wants our souls! If we fail here, we “gain nothing” (v. 3).

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

This description reminds me of Jesus’s statement in Matthew 5:48 “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” In 13:10, Paul even uses the same word “perfect” or teleios to describe the state in which everything is as it should be.

The Individual Christian

In my rereading of the NT, I could not find a single moral imperative addressed to the state as it existed in that day (the Roman Empire) or any hypothetical state. There are no moral instructions about justice or love or mercy directed to public or private institutions composed of nonbelievers or a mixture of believers and nonbelievers. The NT does not read like Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics or Grotius or Hobbes or Locke or Rousseau or Hegel or Rawls. Nothing resembling public policy advocacy can be found. When the NT speaks to the world, it says “Repent and believe the gospel.” And even then, it speaks only to individuals, for only individuals can repent or believe. Moral instruction follows conversion.

Indeed, the NT speaks about the church as an institution but only in descriptive terms. When Jesus or Paul or John presents moral instruction to the church it is always addressed to the community not as an abstract institution but as individuals of one mind and heart.

When you consider Jesus’s and Paul’s inextricable linkage of moral action with the depths of the inner person, it becomes clear why the NT addresses its moral teaching to individual persons only. Institutions don’t have hearts. They can’t believe. They can’t love.

Why, then, do so many clergy, politicians, intellectuals, and others, quote Jesus and the apostles as if their moral teaching could be applied directly to the political order or organizations composed of atheists, adherents of other religions, and nominal Christians? Can this practice be justified?

Next Time we will examine three ways people apply Jesus’s and the apostles’ teaching to public institutions and attempt to justify particular public policies.

Is Liberation Theology Christian?

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I am taking a break from my essays on higher education to ask, “Is Liberation Theology Christian?” A few years ago, I would have answered this question, “It depends.” Perhaps that was because I knew it only from books. But now my first impulse is to say “No!” because I find myself surrounded by “liberation” theologians, and I know firsthand where they are coming from. It does not matter what they focused on in graduate school—biblical studies, church history, systematic theology or practical theology—everything is about liberating the oppressed. They’ve multiplied like rabbits. It seems that within the past 10 years, every theology graduate program in America decided that the only subject worth studying is oppression and liberation. Everybody is a social ethicist and a political activist. And you advance your academic career by discovering new classes of oppressed people and ever more subtle ways oppressors oppress their victims.

Before I go further into my complaint, I should probably define liberation theology. Liberation theology is a general term for any system of theological thought that privileges “liberation” as the lens through which it views all the topics usually studied in Christian theology. It evaluates every theological utterance by its tendency to oppress or liberate some group of people. There are no neutral theological statements! Everything is political, and everyone has an agenda. The purpose of liberation theology is to critique theologies that justify oppression and construct theologies that justify the efforts of designated oppressed groups to liberate themselves. It is not to listen to the word of God, repeat it to the church, and obey it.

What kind of oppression does liberation theology have in mind? Not sin, death, and the Devil! These three are the classic oppressors of humankind from which traditional Christianity sought liberation through the gracious saving action of the Father, Son, and Spirit. In liberation theology, the oppressors are human beings and the social structures they create. Liberation theologians work to expose and critique the capitalism, patriarchy, white racism, homophobia, colonialism, transphobia, etc., that they see permeating American society. Liberation theology focuses on political liberation. And it draws on the socio-political analysis of Karl Marx and his contemporary followers often called neo-Marxists. They divide the world into the oppressor classes and the oppressed classes. It’s a very simple analysis of a very complicated world. And from this simple analysis liberation theologians derive a simple theology that divides people into good and bad, guilty and innocent based on group identity. The oppressors can make no defense and the oppressed can give no offense.

What gives these liberation theologies the appearance of being Christian? The simple answer to this question is that they argue that the God of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ always took the side of the oppressed. Liberation theologians select such prooftexts as the Exodus story, some of Jesus’s statements, some of his interactions with the poor and rich, and a few other isolated statements in the Old and New Testaments. They sprinkle these quotes within an already complete system of social and political thought derived from Karl Marx and lead the reader to leap to the conclusion that the whole system springs from the essence of Christianity. But Christianity is completely superfluous to the doctrine. It is added to tickle Christian ears and, frankly, to deceive them.

Why do I say that liberation theology is not Christian? (1) Read any liberation theology you please—feminist, Black, womanist, gay, queer, and Latin American—and you will always find that the subjective experience of these groups is considered a divine revelation as authoritative, if not more so, than Scripture. No reading of Scripture, no matter how obvious to the ordinary reader, will be allow to subvert the “truth” of the subjective experience of oppression. But in any theology worthy of the designation “Christian,” Scripture must be acknowledged as the norm of all theological doctrine and ethics, and to reject this norm is to cease to be Christian. To continue posing as Christian is to lie and deceive. (2) Liberation theology selects one theme within Scripture—liberation—and subordinates everything else to it. Liberation theology does not therefore present the fulness of the gospel or the apostolic teaching; and this distortion through omission is a textbook definition of heresy.

The Real Jesus—A Progressive Humanist?

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In the previous three essays I have been addressing the problem of people who claim to be Christians but wittingly or unwittingly use Christian words primarily to celebrate the progressive agenda of liberation of the self from all oppressive structures, political, religious, social, moral, and natural. They give the impression that Jesus would fit right into progressive culture. And if one carefully selects sayings and stories from the Bible and places them in the progressive narrative, such a view seems plausible to people ignorant of the whole story. But things look very different if we reverse the procedure and think about ethics and salvation from within a full biblical picture of Jesus Christ and the nature and destiny of humanity. Context is everything.

The Real Jesus of the New Testament

According to the New Testament, Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead, is Lord, Messiah, and Savior. He is the definitive answer to the questions, “Who is the true God?” (John 1:18, 14:9, 1 John 5:20; 2 Cor 4:6) and “What is the nature and destiny of human beings?” (1 John 3:1-3; Phil 3:21; 1 Cor 15:49). He is the Word of God who is God, who was with God in the beginning, and through whom God created all things (John 1:1-5; Heb 1:1-3; 1 Cor 8:6). He is the Savior, who through his death and resurrection saved us from sin, death, and the devil. In him God reconciled the world to himself “not counting people’s sins against them” (2 Cor 5:18-19). In the end, everything in heaven and on earth will be unified in Christ (Eph 1:10). In sum, Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead, is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), the purpose of creation and providence, the means of salvation, and the consummation of all things in which God will be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).

Unless they are ignorant or are being disingenuous, anyone who claims to be a Christian should be willing to confess the New Testament teaching summarized in the previous paragraph. Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead, is the measure of all our knowledge of God and of every dimension of our relation to him. To be a Christian is to be one under authority, to submit one’s mind and heart to the true teacher of what is right and good. Jesus made this clear many times: whoever claims Jesus as their guide must “deny themselves and take up their cross” and follow him (Mark 8:34). They must obey everything he taught (Matt 28:20; Heb 5:9). Already with this step, however, we stand in complete contradiction to progressive humanism, which will admit no other will or external order to which we must conform.

Jesus and the Law

Jesus’s teaching cannot be reduced to a few platitudes about love, tolerance, acceptance and belonging. Jesus showed the typical Old Testament prophetic ethics of care for the poor and the oppressed. But he did not exempt the poor and oppressed from the commandments. Following in the wake of John the Baptist, Jesus also preached “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt 4:17). The one whom Jesus called “your father in heaven” is the God of Israel. Jesus fully and without hesitation acknowledged that the Old Testament law embodied God’s will and human righteousness:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:17-20).

In the following chapters, known as the Sermon on the Mount, far from liberalizing the law, Jesus intensified it and demanded internal as well external obedience. The law against adultery was expanded to include lust and divorce. The command not to murder was extended to hatred and harsh speech. Jesus ends with a warning to his audience to build their lives on his teaching or risk calamity in the day of testing (Matt 7:26-27).

Jesus criticized the Pharisees for focusing on externals and extra biblical traditions not because they oppressed our autonomy or made us feel uncomfortable but because they voided the original divine commands. When he spoke of genuine evils he made a very traditional list:

“For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person” (Mark 7:21-23).

Jesus the Obedient Son

Jesus set an example of obedience to his father in heaven and demanded obedience from his disciples. He prayed in the garden for exemption from suffering and death but submitted his will to that of the father (Matt 26:39). Paul holds up Jesus’s attitude toward the will of God as a stance all believers should follow (Phil 2:5-8; cf. Heb 5:8):

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!

Jesus: Not a Progressive Humanist

I could continue indefinitely with this line of thought showing that Jesus does not fit the image of a modern progressive. Only with great distortion and huge omissions can his teaching and his example be used to support this view. Jesus was a faithful Jew. He affirmed the biblical framework for understanding our duties to God: God, creation, moral law, providence, righteousness, judgment, and salvation. Within this framework, human beings are God’s creatures made in his image. They depend on the Creator for their existence and sustenance. They owe God thanks and worship. God’s wisdom and will are displayed in the created order. Hence human beings should trust, obey, and love God. God is the designer of human nature and therefore the author of the moral law, known in creation by reason, in the law and the prophets, and in the teaching, action, and example of Jesus Christ.

Within the progressive humanist framework, attitudes of worship, faith, humility, trust, confession, obedience, repentance, conformity, and submission are rejected as self-loathing born of internalized oppression. Within the Christian story, however, they are pathways to freedom and wisdom and salvation. They are characteristics of a good person. From a biblical perspective, attitudes of rebellion, defiance, self-indulgence, transgression, and self-assertion are judged to be ungrateful, self-destructive, foolish, and sinful. But within the progressive value system they are celebrated as heroic, virtuous, enlightened, and right. They are evidence of self-respect and authenticity.

Conclusion

These two frameworks are irreconcilable. Jesus’s observation concerning the love of money applies equally to the choice between the biblical and the progressive narratives:

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Matt 6:24)

Hence it is completely illegitimate to quote Jesus in an argument designed to deny the moral law, efface the order of creation, or nullify the commandments. To reject the biblical framework within which Jesus lived and taught while quoting him in support of the progressive agenda is to reject the real Jesus and invent another.