Editor’s Note: Building unity within the body of Christ requires listening to and learning from fellow Christian brothers and sisters, especially on complex topics like race and racial reconciliation.
So the SOLA Network is excited to present a conversation between Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile of Anacostia Bible Church and SOLA Council Member Michael Lee in two parts.
In this first part of their conversation, we learn about how we can better define “biblical justice” and how Christians can navigate and be faithful witnesses in the public square. We hope this conversation will be encouraging and challenging to our audience. Look for part two tomorrow.
You can watch the video here:
Below is an edited and condensed version of the conversation.
Michael Lee: To get us started, would you just help us with a framework for biblical justice? There are so many trigger words on social media now, so the moment you say “justice” or “biblical justice,” people can already just be a little confused and not understand. How is that distinct from secular justice?
Thabiti Anyabwile: We really do have to get over our trigger words if we’re going to enter into this conversation because the term “justice” and its counterparts are all over the Bible.
If we’re going to hear the Bible when it speaks to us, without the sort of hearing impairment or aversion to secular things or political things, then we’re going to have to be mature enough to say, “Okay, I heard a word. Let me make sure I know what it means and let me show you that I’m communicating well — not just be afraid of the language.”
The definition that I use with the church is meant to be a sort of everyday, garden-variety definition. I frame it this way: Justice is doing the right thing for the right people, at the right time, with the right process, to the right extent.
What I’m trying to get at is that there’s a lot to get right in a biblical conception of justice — not just the outcomes but also the procedure. We ought to be concerned about procedural justice just as we are concerned about distributive justice or retributive justice.
So there are outcomes that we ought to be concerned about. We’ve got to reach the right decisions, we’ve got to reach the right verdict, and we’ve got to reach the right distribution of things. But we’ve got to get there the right way.
The Bible is full of warnings, for example, against bribery because it perverts justice. We can’t get there by unequal weights and measures. We’ve got to have the right process. We’ve got to have a sound, fair, and equitable process. And that means we’ve got to have a good sense of proportionality. Too much or too little is actually an injustice in itself. And we’ve got to have the right people in view.
The Bible is often talking about the quadrant, which are the four groups of vulnerable people as symbolic of justice concerns: the widows, the orphans, the poor, the immigrant or the sojourner. We’ve got to understand when it is that we should be defending the marginalized and the weak and when we should be arguing for a more impartial justice.
We want a view of justice that’s whole, and that’s one of the ways it’s really different from secular forms of justice. If you think about secular theories and approaches to justice, some folks say, “Hey, what we need is to maximize the most happiness or the best outcomes for the most number of people” — that kind of utilitarian view. Well, that has its virtues, but it’s lacking in other ways.
So what you’ll find with secular visions is that they’re partial. And what we find in Scripture, and it takes a lot of work to understand and get there, is that we’re going to need to have a much more robust, well-rounded understanding of what’s just in varying sorts of contexts and situations.
Michael Lee: That’s something that I’ve been trying to lead my church in as well: that there is biblical language that we need to be passionate and educated on and faithful with when it comes to justice, oppression, and restitution. In our secular spaces, the moment you say some of those words, the internet blows up.
Thabiti Anyabwile: What’s interesting to me, at least on my [social media] timeline is that it’s not the secular folks who get upset about that language. It’s professing Christian folks who overattribute that language to secular sources. They say, “Hey, the world is dividing people into oppressed and oppressor, and that’s a part of their worldview.”
Well, wait a minute. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater because, in fact, the Bible talks about oppressors and oppressed people. Those are legitimate categories. It doesn’t mean everybody’s in those categories all the time, but those are legitimate categories.
Or when people get allergic to the term “social justice,” if you flip through your ESV Bible, you’re going to find headers in Exodus that use the header “social justice” or “restitution.” That’s biblical language.
Again, we are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We are in danger of being so afraid of the world that we’re actually willing to surrender our own language. That’s a significant mistake. That’s a significant mistake for people who care about the Bible.
Michael Lee: We don’t live in a theocracy. We live in the United States of America. What does it look like then for a Christian to pursue biblical justice in secular spaces? Because we can say, “I want to live by biblical standards, but that’s a personal thing that I’m going to execute. No political party fully reflects the biblical worldview.” So people might get agnostic towards these things. How would you speak into pursuing biblical justice in the secular world?
Thabiti Anyabwile: Jesus purchased our life with his blood on the cross, so we belong body and soul to him. That’s our great courage and great comfort, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it. What that means then is that we live under his authority. We live according to his rule and how he calls us to behave, think, and feel. We’re not at liberty to set that aside. That’s meant to be our identity, not just our clothing.
So we have to go into secular spaces and public spaces being fully who we are. Now, that’s difficult because the Zeitgeist and the culture is: “Everybody’s welcome, except the religious folks — check that at the door, particularly if you’re Christians.” They feel implicated by some of the values and things that we hold dear, and they pretend that their own values are neutral.
President Obama was famous for this, talking about a sort of public square where everybody comes has access. But in order to do that, you have to leave religion at the door.
No, in the public square, what we are doing is arguing about what the good life is — that’s what justice is about. And what we have in varying sorts of theories of justice, religious or secular, are varying arguments about what the good life entails — that is the public square discussion.
So we need to feel emboldened to come into the public square being fully who we are. We don’t need to be arrogant and brash, but we also don’t need to be apologetic and we don’t need to demure at biblical truth. We don’t need to fall back away from the Bible as a source of knowing. There are other ways of knowing, but we believe the Bible is the infallible way of knowing and the best way of knowing.
We can make appeals to natural law, we can make appeals to other things we have in common with people. Start there; build there. But we want to unashamedly r
epresent Christ and his Word because that’s going to be for people’s flourishing. That means there will be places where we don’t agree with everybody about everything. But guess what? That’s just the nature of the world.
I would just encourage that person who’s in secular spaces to be plugged into their local church; to meet with Jesus daily in His Word and in prayer; to have some closer friendships in their church with people who know how they’re faring in those secular spaces; to have those friends check in on them and give encouragement; and to bring everything that they’re doing beneath the Bible and beneath the lens of Scripture, so that they don’t lose the plot as they’re out there engaging with people who are inhabiting different narratives and different worldviews.
We want to love people more than we want to simply change them; people are not projects. We want that to be the flavor of our public witness in secular spaces — that this Christian guy has been with Jesus because he loves in a way that we just aren’t accustomed to. She tells us the truth as she understands it. She doesn’t mince words, but man, it just feels like a warm hug. That’s what I think we’re aiming for in those secular spaces. And we have to stay tethered to our local churches, into the Bible, into the gospel, so that we don’t lose our way or drift.
Michael Lee: Do you see it more as a witness or as a call to influence? There’s always this mixture of power and dynamics. If we really believe that the Bible promotes the good life and is the pathway to the best human flourishing, shouldn’t we then try to enforce, promote, and get policies? There’s the saying, “If you elect me, you will have power.” What do we do with that as Christians? It’s probably both, but do you lean more towards faithful witness? Or is it influence?
Thabiti Anyabwile: I’m not sure I draw hard lines between those things. But using those terms, let me supply a definition and a response. If I think about influence, that’s a word I’m a little bit allergic to. I’m allergic to it because we seem to be living, even inside the church, in a time where people are sort of enamored with platforms. They want to build platforms and have larger platforms so they can have influence.
Here’s what I want to caution against: The only platform Jesus had was a cross, so if your platform that you’re building isn’t cross-shaped, then it’s probably a guillotine. It’s probably not the platform you want to be standing on.
The trick with influence is that influence is conferred by some other. The moment they decided they don’t want you to have that influence you’re not going to have it. So it has a short shelf life and can be very ethereal. So I would lean toward witness or faithful presence.
That’s important because I think it sets the right objective for us to be salt and light in these spaces, over having a preserving kind of influence (back to the word influence there).
But we aren’t there to win in terms of some sort of exertion of power or control. There are things that we think are right that we should advocate for. But that’s actually not on our report card. Faithfulness is. In 1 Corinthians 4:1-2, Paul says that we are basically stewards of the mysteries of God; it’s required of stewards that they be found faithful. That’s what we’re aiming at: faithfulness in the public square, representing Jesus, and representing the message.
Whatever sort of influence or outcomes result from that, we trust to the Lord. Paul says a remarkable thing in 1 Corinthians 4:3-5. It goes on to say, basically, listen, what is it to me that you judge me, I don’t even judge myself. Christ is going to judge on that day. So there’s a sense in which we have to leave the evaluation to God. But what we are called to do is to be faithful in the spheres, the lanes, and the opportunities the Lord gives us.
Editor’s Note: Check out Part 2 of their conversation tomorrow, October 7.