Sermon on the Mount

"Easter has been sidelined because this message doesn't fit our prevailing world view. For at least 200 years the West has lived on the dream that we can bring justice and beauty to the world all by ourselves. . .we still want to do things our own way, even though we laugh at politicians who claim to be saving the world, and artists who claim “inspiration” when they put cows in formaldehyde."
--NT Wright, Easter Sermon.

I'm not a fan of "social justice" or at least how I perceive that term to be used. To me it seems like the antithesis of grace--grace being the one unique value or virtue of the Christian faith according to St Clive-Staples. So today, when a good friend sent a note about being three-days behind on a column for Sojourners Magazine, I kind of moaned internally. Sojourners is all about helping others get theirs, about redistributing wealth and making Christianity a socialist religion--that's my bias.

So, I recommended re-reading Jimmy Carter's 1975 Playboy Interview, which was ground breaking at the time and in which he talks about his devout Baptist theology and international relations. Significantly, he discusses some of the problems of being too weak with the USSR in Helsinki and our problems with identifying the problems of creeping elegance of the Vietnam War--of seeing the need to support an ally, but not being able to retract once we engaged and the cause was lost. While I do not want to get into a debate about how Vietnam or Helsinki were managed, I thought it interesting that both Russia and protracted land wars were the same topics today in the international relations community. It seemed that there might be some nuggets in his interview that Sojourners readers would value.

Another college friend suggested a longer extract from the NT Wright sermon above. It seemed much more interesting to me than my own suggestion, not because mine was bad but because the NT Wright sermon, if understood correctly, would seem to fly in the face of Sojourner's Christian-works-justice=the-Kingdom-of-God theology.

Grace to me is kind of like an eternal mulligan, it's this concept that there is nothing we can do to earn resurrection, life-eternal, heaven, salvation, or however you define the finish line. It's a free gift that it's not even clear we have to accept. Many feel pursued, engaged, broken down and consumed by God (not to be confused with just being hassled by over-zealous religious types). My point is that, we do literally nothing to earn this.

Given that we do not earn the gift, that we are literally all the worst sinners until we are covered in the blood of the lamb, the idea of fighting for justice is kind of like the idea of fighting a Holy Land crusade. It just doesn't jive for me that justice or getting what's owed you is a Christian virtue. There may be other reasons to do it--civil, moral, or ethical--but I don't see a Christian justification.

Intent seems critical. I think that Christians who believe in grace help other pilgrims along the road out of gratitude for what they've been given, not because anyone is owed anything. When it becomes a self-righteous belief and a demand, it seems to lose its Christian appeal.

I don't recall Christ motivating crowds to have peaceful strikes against Roman civil injustices, he basically said to give them what they ask for, in fact, give them more. When he fed the 5,000, he didn't say that he was feeding them because they had the right to food and wine, he gave it as a gift. He was apparently capable of making sure that people on earth at the time didn't starve, but he didn't do that, many people still went to bed hungry outside Galilee that night of the Beatitudes. In fact, if social justice theories are correct, the biggest crook is God, for letting injustice go on, if not now, at least when he walked the Earth.


hot afternoon wind
persecuted are blessed
make some food and wine