A Christian View of Justice
In my grad school days at Vanderbilt, I became friends with another doctoral student, Stan Gaede, who was at work in the sociology department. We had different denominational backgrounds, his Mennonite, mine Baptist, but we and our spouses quickly found strong fellowship and support in each other in what was an academic environment which was not particularly “warmly evangelical.” We talked about all sorts of things, including the 1972 presidential election, pitting George McGovern and Richard Nixon. At one point, Stan said he appreciated McGovern’s support of justice, and it hit me that I didn’t have a clear notion of what justice was, and this perplexity dogged me. So when, as an incoming faculty member at Wheaton College in 1975, I was required to take a summer course on the integration of faith and learning and write a paper in that connection, I jumped at the chance to address this issue. What emerged was a matrix, with biblical categories of deserved harm (offenders and fools), undeserved harm (victims), deserved benefit (servants and stewards), and undeserved benefit (beneficiaries). The alumni association picked up on the notion and granted me a quarter’s study leave to flesh it out. (For a few weeks of that quarter, we spent time with the Gaedes in the Boston area, where Stan was now a prof at Gordon College.) When the book finally appeared, thanks to the SBC’s BSSB imprint, Broadman (now LifeWay and B&H), I was at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. (The campus book store was kind enough to give me a book signing desk for the occasion.) It’s been nearly forty years since that day, and I’m working on a new book in this vein, one that draws on what I wrote back in the 1980s but which also engages with subsequent developments and cultural conceits, including the notions of “social justice” and “equity,” which amount to “equality of outcomes,” which, to my way of thinking, is not a feature of biblical justice.