Blogging through Generous Justice II
As I told you in my last post, the next subtitle in P.K.’s introduction to Generous Justice is Justice and the Bible. Under this subtitle he says that the book is written for the kind of person who views “doing justice” with suspicion.
Again we run into this difference in defining justice. P. K. apparently defines justice as “community service”, and “helping people in need”. I define “doing justice” as doing all that I agree to do, i.e., “keeping my word”, and “not violating my neighbor’s right to life, liberty, and property”. This is the same way that I “do honesty”. I do honesty by telling the truth.
P.K. portrays the suspicion that many orthodox Christians have about doing justice as being caused by an unfortunate and inaccurate association of the “social gospel” movement with loss of sound doctrine.
He then points out correctly that the person enabled by the Spirit to believe the gospel of Christ will live out justice and compassion for the poor.
P.K. winds up this subtitle with this statement, “the Biblical gospel of Jesus necessarily and powerfully leads to a passion for justice in the world. A concern for justice in all aspects of life is neither an artificial add-on nor a contradiction to the message of the Bible.”
Yet again the above statement is an obvious truth which all Christians should be able to agree on. The problem is that what P.K. calls justice is not justice but rather compassion, or love, or mercy.
What is the problem if P.K. wants to call compassion justice? The problem is that the two words represent different concepts, and if we confuse the two words it is too easy to also confuse the concepts. If we confuse the concepts we will not add anything to each one but diminish them both.
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