Category Archives: Justice

Reading While Black – 4

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Chapter four is subtitled: ‘The Bible and the Pursuit of Justice.’

The burden of this chapter

‘is to outline the ways in which the Gospel of Luke contains a vision for the just society transformed by the advent of God that speaks to the hearts of Black Christians.’

Luke was a Gentile Christian.  As such, his very place in the Christian community would have been a matter of some controversy at first.

Luke’s Gospel reflects the resolution of this early controversy by heralding the fulfilment of God’s age-old plan to create an international, multi-ethnic people for his own glory.…

Reading While Black – 3

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In chapter three, Esau McCaulley discusses ‘the New Testament and the Political Witness of the Church’.

The white Christian consensus in America, writes McCaulley, has reduced its political theology to two things: prayer (as per 1 Timothy 2:1-4) and law and order (as per Romans 13:1-7).  Not, of course, that that there is anything wrong with these two things!  But to limit political theology in this was is to misread those very texts, and also to ignore the wider witness of the New Testament.…

Reading While Black – 2

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Chapter 2 of Esau McCaulley’s book Reading While Black discusses ‘The New Testament and a Theology of Policing.’

McCauley selects two texts for consideration.  The first has implications for the state, and the second for the individual law enforcer.

Romans 13:1-7

13:1 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except by God’s appointment, and the authorities that exist have been instituted by God. 13:2 So the person who resists such authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will incur judgment 13:3 (for rulers cause no fear for good conduct but for bad).…

Transgender 2 – The iworld

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One result of the Enlightenment was that reliance on revelation was replaced with reason as the authoritative source of knowledge.  But our society has now largely lost its confidence in reason, and therefore has abandoned the concept of objective truth as applied to the ‘big questions’ of meaning and morality.

We live, accordingly, in an age of subjectivism, of individualism, of personal freedom.  I am free: free to think and live as I want.  Free to be me.  …

Grow your congregation in ethnic diversity

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If, like me, you’re slightly nervous about today’s social agenda of ‘inclusion and diversity’, then you, and your church, may need an injection of real gospel diversity to set the record straight and (to change the metaphor) adjust the direction in which we are traveling.

Greg Morse has some helpful guidelines, addressed especially to pastors, but useful to us all.  I summarise:-

1. Don’t dismiss social justice as “not a gospel issue.”  True, social justice is not the gospel, but it is just as true to say that it is an essential and inevitable outcome of the gospel.…

Mic 6:1-8 – Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly – sermon notes

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Micah 6:1-8

Courtroom dramas:- Accused, The Brief, The Courtroom, Criminal Justice, Crown Court, Judge John Deed, Kavanagh QC, Rumpole of the Bailey, The Verdict.

Silent witnesses, v1f (Skiddaw watching over Keswick, Matterhorn over Zermatt, Mount of Olives over Jerusalem)

1. Listen, vv1-2

‘Listen to what the Lord says…hear…the Lord’s accusation…listen…for the Lord has a case against his people.’

Jerusalem’s magistrates are crooks, her prophets men-pleasers, her priests money-grabbers, her rich people lovers of violence and her merchants liars and cheats.…

Martin Luther King’s Dream

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Fifty years ago today (28th August, 1963) Martin Luther King, a Christian minister committed to non-discrimination and non-violence, led a march of 250,000 people, three-quarters of whom were African-American, to Washington DC.  There he shared his dream:-

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice and sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

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The Church’s failures

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In any account that we might give of the Christian Church, we must honestly acknowledge its failures.  There have been occasions – too many occasions – when it has accepted the world’s values and priorities, and accommodated itself to the prevailing culture, and rationalised its own unfaithfulness.

Among its most notable failings we must mention:-

  • Its approval and even glamorisation of the medieval Crusades, when European knights rode forth to recover the holy places from Islam by force.
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Quotes on justice

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‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.’ (Thomas Jefferson)

‘Truth is justice’s handmaid; freedom is its child, peace is its companion; safety walks in its steps; victory follows in its train; it is the brightest emanation from the gospel; it is an attribute of God.’ (Sydney Smith)

Injustice, suave, erect, and unconfined, Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples o’er mankind, While prayers to heal her wrongs move slow behind. Homer

‘By largely ignoring the central biblical teaching that God is on the side of the poor, our theology has been profoundly unorthodox.…