Justin Taylor recently mentioned Peter Lillback’s appearance on Glenn Beck, and also in that same post linked to Al Mohler’s discussion of Beck’s dissing of “social justice” a few weeks back.
I read Mohler’s article with interest and appreciation, and I agreed with everything he said about what the Bible says about justice. But I think he missed the fact that Beck was dead on center in his comments about “code words.”
Social is good, and justice is good, and how could social justice be bad? Biblical passages can be heaped in mounds, all testifying to God’s justice, and His concern for justice. But this misses the point about code words. If someone were to preach a positive sermon on “liberty, equality, fraternity,” and we were not to miss the allusion, we would see they are praising a genocidal bloodbath. And it doesn’t stop being praise of a genocidal bloodbath just because it would be possible to say “liberty (2 Cor. 3:17), equality (2 Cor. 8:14), fraternity (1 Pet. 2:17).”
When social justice is one of the buzzword phrases, the rot of theological liberalism is not far away. At least as far as that goes, Beck was right.