The Aquila Report

Your independent source for news and commentary from and about conservative, orthodox evangelicals in the Reformed and Presbyterian family of churches

Corem Deo Pastor's Conference 2024
  • Biblical
    and Theological
  • Churches
    and Ministries
  • People
    in the News
  • World
    and Life News
  • Lifestyle
    and Reviews
    • Books
    • Movies
    • Music
  • Opinion
    and Commentary
  • General Assembly
    and Synod Reports
    • ARP General Synod
    • EPC General Assembly
    • OPC General Assembly
    • PCA General Assembly
    • PCUSA General Assembly
    • RPCNA Synod
    • URCNA Synod
  • Subscribe
    to Weekly Email
  • Biblical
    and Theological
  • Churches
    and Ministries
  • People
    in the News
  • World
    and Life News
  • Lifestyle
    and Reviews
    • Books
    • Movies
    • Music
  • Opinion
    and Commentary
  • General Assembly
    and Synod Reports
    • ARP General Synod
    • EPC General Assembly
    • OPC General Assembly
    • PCA General Assembly
    • PCUSA General Assembly
    • RPCNA Synod
    • URCNA Synod
  • Subscribe
    to Weekly Email
  • Search
Home/Featured/Social Justice

Social Justice

But social justice is not justice. It is injustice.

Written by Kevin T. Bauder | Monday, October 12, 2020

What is particularly alarming is the number of evangelicals who jabber about social justice. Most often these people fit into two categories. Some are using the phrase without understanding what it really means. Others believe that they can redefine the term in ways that allow them to keep using it. But why use it at all? The reason is that “social justice” is more than a label. It is an incantation of power. Its utterance conveys one to the moral high ground. Some evangelicals want to be able to speak this Word of Power even if they don’t mean what it means.

 

All people everywhere want justice. Even a hardcore logical positivist feels a sense of injustice if you step ahead of him after hours of waiting at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The universal yearning for justice has been expressed in documents from the Code of Hammurabi and the book of Job to the American Pledge of Allegiance, which promises loyalty to the flag of a nation that provides “liberty and justice for all.”

The classical and Christian understanding of justice has been summarized in the phrase, “To each his due.” On this understanding, justice can be directed only toward persons. These persons are entitled to some things simply by virtue of their existence as persons. These things are called rights. To withhold what is due—i.e., to violate these rights—is to become unjust. Consequently, a right represents a claim that must be recognized by all others.

Justice is tied to a certain kind of equality. A just God is no respecter of persons, and neither is a just law or a just judge. In this sense, justice is blind: it is concerned with formal questions, not substantive ones. A just footrace is one in which all athletes must cover the same distance, not one in which they have the same stamina.

Recently, however, the word justice is increasingly paired with the modifier social. In fact, this combination—social justice—has become one of the incantations of the present age. One need only utter it with approbation to position one’s self in a stance of moral superiority. But what is social justice, and how does it differ from ordinary justice as the West has understood it for millennia?

The main difference is that social justice is not formal, it is substantive. Social justice is sometimes called distributive justice because it measures justice according to distribution. It demands equality, not of standing, but of condition and outcome. Consequently, advocates of social justice assume that wherever some imbalance exists, whether of wealth, power, education, or prestige, injustice is at work.

The first figures to advocate social justice in this sense were concerned primarily with economic imbalance, particular the imbalance between capital and labor. Because they saw this imbalance as unjust, they wanted governments to use their coercive power to remove wealth from those who had it and to increase the wealth of those who did not. In their scheme the state would become an agent of planned economic redistribution, at gunpoint if necessary. This scheme was called socialism in its milder forms and communism in those forms that advocated violent revolution.

This kind of redistribution was not justice at all. Property rights are among the rights that must be recognized and protected by true justice. For states to use the threat of violence while trampling property rights cannot be sanctioned as any kind of genuine justice.

Socialism has not been tried in all places. Where free markets and capital enterprise are allowed, virtually all classes have grown in wealth. Consequently, socialists have found it difficult to motivate the “working class” to comply with schemes of wholesale economic redistribution.

Read More

Related Posts:

  • No One Believes in Social Injustice
  • The Theological Problem With Tim Keller’s So-Called Social…
  • Social Justice or Scriptural Justice?
  • Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden: Disappointed, Used,…
  • Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice: A Timely Book on a…

Subscribe, Follow, Listen

  • email-alt
  • facebook
  • twitter
  • apple-podcasts
  • anchor
Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service
Belhaven University

Archives

Books

Special

God is Holy
  • About
  • Advertise Here
  • Contact Us
  • Donations
  • Email Alerts
  • Leadership
  • Letters to the Editor
  • Principles and Practices
  • Privacy Policy

Important:

Free Subscription

Aquila Report Email Alerts

Special

Letter of Jude
  • About
  • Advertise Here
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Principles and Practices
  • RSS Feed
  • Subscribe to Weekly Email Alerts
Providence Christian College - visit

DISCLAIMER: The Aquila Report is a news and information resource. We welcome commentary from readers; for more information visit our Letters to the Editor link. All our content, including commentary and opinion, is intended to be information for our readers and does not necessarily indicate an endorsement by The Aquila Report or its governing board. In order to provide this website free of charge to our readers,  Aquila Report uses a combination of donations, advertisements and affiliate marketing links to  pay its operating costs.

Return to top of page

Website design by Five More Talents · Copyright © 2023 The Aquila Report · Log in