You rule!

               I’m finishing up a two-week intensive course on the book of Daniel. One of the key goals of the course was to focus on the text of Daniel to understand the primary message that the original author intended to communicate to the original audience. There’s a lot of discussion about the book, but a close reading of the text surfaces one clear idea: God establishes and removes kings. You can substitute the idea of ‘political sovereignty’ for the idea of kingship. God determines who will rule a country and the people of God should look to Him even when under an unreasonable monarch. 

               The most important difference between the political situation in the book of Daniel and the modern political situation here in the United States is that of sovereignty. Who rules the country? While our political masters might exercise a lot of authority, they are ultimately accountable to the people. Every four years, the people express their will by voting for the politicians who best represent their desires. Ben Franklin has been attributed with this saying: “In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.” So in the American system, political sovereignty comes from the people, who then elect representatives to carry out their desires and set the direction for the country. 

               The connection to the book of Daniel provides a warning to believers who are apathetic and uninvolved in the political system. You see, just as God gave sovereignty to the kings of Babylon, He also removed their kingdom and handed it over to the Medo-Persian empire, and then the Greek empire and then the Roman empire. And now political sovereignty in our country has been handed to us: the people. If we fail to exercise wisdom in ruling our country, we face the very real possibility of losing the right to govern ourselves. This isn’t an endorsement of any political candidate, but a reminder of two things: God gives and removes political sovereignty and that responsibility has been given to the people. We need to very carefully exercise that sovereignty by involvement in the political process, lest God remove our right to govern.

BS and Social Justice

In recent discussions at seminary, we have broached the topic of ‘social justice,’ which seems to me a loaded and very elastic term. It’s elastic because different people mean different things when they say it, and it’s loaded because it opens the door to broader economic and political discussions. The very term ‘social justice’ strongly implies that if you are opposed to it, you are, in fact, promoting ‘injustice.’ The definition of ‘social justice’ becomes an important part of the discussion, what, exactly, are we talking about?

This is the basic problem in any discussion of anything, and particularly social justice: it isn’t very clearly and concisely defined, and there is no broad agreement among theologians of a biblical understanding of just exactly what social justice is. Without a clear definition, anyone interested in the problems of human society and how to resolve those problems (all of us?) ought to enter the discussion with their BS detector turned on and tuned in.

Social justice seeks a foundation in the biblical understanding of man as created in God’s image, and as a result of that creation, humankind should interact with mutual respect and honor. There’s no problem here. The problem comes when mutual respect and honor are violated, either through abuse of power or by indolence. It is wrong for the rich to use their position to marginalize the poor, but it is also wrong for the poor to expect their support from others at no cost to themselves. The same Bible that admonishes the rich to use their wealth properly (1 Tim. 6:18) also implements a no-work, no-food tough love ethic (2 Thes. 3:10).

One of my favorite books begins like this: “One of the most salient features or our culture is that there is so much bulls**t. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.” Any discussion of social justice must be rigidly defined and carefully compared to what the whole Bible says about human interactions. What I’ve examined recently reads Scripture selectively to affirm its narrow vision of ‘social justice’ and conveniently ignores important contrary evidence.