You Are Not Alone

I have a few thoughts on the recent “Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” from MacArthur & Co., as well as the various rejoinders it has received, namely “An Evangelical Response to the Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel,” recently posted on Mere Orthodoxy.

Those in MacArthur’s camp make the claim that this whole “social justice” movement is, at its base, the product of an insufficient view of Scripture. This is, I claim, decidedly not the issue at hand. The actual point of division is something less foundational, yet nonetheless deeply important to the future of the Church, both evangelical and writ large. This is about the role of the Church, or, if you like, which version of the Two Kingdoms theology we prefer.

The “sufficiency of Scripture” argument contra the ecclesial social justice movement usually goes like this: Scripture contains all things necessary to life and godliness, therefore the only way to effect social change is to bring individuals face-to-face with the truths of God’s Word (through conversion). The social justice movement is built upon the progressivist and Marxist bricks of social utopianism. Therefore, Scripture is not seen as sufficient by its proponents, and the movement is destined to crumble and fail because it is not based on a personal encounter with the Word of God.

This argument skips right over any question of what the proper role of the Church within society is. It assumes that, because social justice-oriented Christians believe that their work necessarily includes the whole of the society they live in, they are obviously drawing their motivations from secular theories about social flourishing, and not the Biblical injunctions to pursue justice. There is the unstated assumption that the Church exists only to evangelize and disciple individuals, and has no part in the affairs of the secular state. It also assumes that in no way can the secular state influence the beliefs or practice of the true, Biblically-focused Church. This attitude towards the relationship between Church and State, namely one of insulation and isolationism, has its American roots largely around the era of the Scopes trial, during which evangelical Christianity was labelled as “fundamentalism” and forced underground, away from social respectability. This separation from larger society apparently ended with the Moral Majority, but, after the failures of that crusade, is still alive and well in various camps, including, but not limited to, MacArthur’s crowd, certain elements of the PCA and the SBC, and certain proponents of “The Benedict Option”.

These swings in and out of engagement with secular culture bely different theologies of engagement. Simply put, is the Church simply responsible for the spiritual well-being of believers, while the State is responsible for the physical well-being of the world, or does the Church represent a different kind of “order” within, for, and against, the larger secular State? If the first relationship is the case, then Christians should eschew political activism (at least in any sense as “the Church”), focusing all of their energies on evangelism and discipleship. If the second relationship is the case, then Christians (both individually and collectively as “the Church”) should play a role in politics and culture, as it all belongs to God, using that engagement as an avenue into evangelism and discipleship. These two positions, I offer, represent the tension at hand. All questions about corporate responsibility, systemic racism, the nature of racism, ethnic conciliation, the sufficiency of Scripture, and biblical injunctions to justice fall within this debate.

My sympathies lie decidedly with the second conception of the Church and the State, or, if you like, the Two Kingdoms. While one might seek to proof-text Paul from 1 Thess. 4 (“aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs”) to argue for a socially quietist Church, this is decidedly not the track that the Scriptural narrative follows regarding the Church’s role in society. While I intend to unpack this at greater length down the line, I will offer this: the Church must aspire to promote shalom in all things, while trusting that the LORD alone will bring this to consummation in the eschaton. As Paul says, we must not grow weary of doing good, but we also must not burn out in believing, as the proponents of the social gospel might, that it is in our power to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Reading Flannery O’Connor’s short stories from beginning to end in a short span is a bracing, even exhilarating, experience. Single stories, that in the typical setting of classroom assignment or anthologized collection seem mysterious, confounding, or just plain odd, become charged with O’Connor’s knife-point insight and wit when placed in the collage of her entire body of work. I remember reading A Good Man is Hard to Find in college and being so nonplussed by the story; nasty things happened to unpleasant people, that seemed to be tone. This time around, I was able to relish the characterization, the humor, and the irony loaded on like banana pudding at a BBQ buffet, or ketchup on stale chocolate cake.

The heart of O’Connor’s artistic project, it seems to me now, was uncovering the undiluted wickedness of people. Her characters, whether rural poor or educated urbanites, all suffer from a lack self-clarity, a tendency to see themselves as the good guys in any given situation. Whether it’s Rayber as the enlightened liberal in The Barber, Mrs. McIntyre as the magnanimous landlady in The Displaced Person, or Pitts as the sharp and scheming patriarch in A View of the Woods, O’Connor’s protagonists view themselves as the heroes of their stories, valiantly battling against ignorance, cowardice, or unchristian morality. Yet each of them are found to be frauds, and each of their charades are revealed, often through a sudden violence or trauma. O’Connor has no true heroes, but its often her antagonists that are revealed as having true clarity of self, most famously the Misfit in A Good Man is Hard to Find, or Rufus Johnson in The Lame Shall Enter First, who repeatedly rejects efforts to rehabilitate him, finally screaming at his would-be savior, “I lie and steal because I’m good at it...When I get ready to be saved, Jesus’ll save me[!]”

This leaves the reader in a strange spot, unsure of how to respond. This is not literature by which to be inspired, but by which to be haunted. O’Connor turns the page on us, and in seeing ourselves in her self-righteous and freakish Southern tableau, we begin to question our own self-narratives, which so easily slide us into the false comfort of our own uprightness and decency. We begin to interrogate what we know about ourselves. We find deceit mixed in with honest appraisal. We’re like Tarwater in You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead, left alone with the corpse of the man who raised him, and a new internal voice, the voice of a stranger, telling him,

I recently finished Ephraim Radner’s book “A Brutal Unity,” a work on ecclesiology and politics that is notable its sheer density, but moreso for the boldness with which Radner lays forth his claims. For those unfamiliar with Radner, an Episcopalian theologian whose primary claim to fame are his mighty attempts to push figural reading back into the spotlight of church life, his work comes recommended from me, with the caveat that his writing is, at points, nigh inaccessible in its convolution. This is arguably because the concepts with which he is dealing have little previously existing vocabulary in modern frameworks, lay or academic, and his writing is a struggle (both for him and his reader) to drag such concepts into the light of understanding. “A Brutal Unity” lays out one such concept, that of ecclesial unity lying not in polity but in Christ, a unity that is both witnessed to and blasphemed by church division. His refrain in the final pages is “the Church is a sinful Church,” evidenced by Christian complicity in the greatest rending violence of the past 2000 years. To give some sense of what Radner is reaching for here, I leave you with a brief excerpt from the end of the book: