We really need a substantive, book-length response to N.T. Wright on these global justice issues. Given his position of influence, because of his significant theological stature, because he grounds his proposals in the glorious basics of the gospel, and because of the real passion he brings to the issue, this matter is now squarely on our agenda. We will have to work through it at some point. Why not now?
As I have argued elsewhere, the issues surrounding global justice are enormously complicated. To the extent that this is said just so that we can put off dealing with it, or evade the tasks that Jesus assigned to us, “too complicated” is obviously just a lame excuse. But at the same time, there are intractable and convoluted problems in the world, and simplistic reformers have had a long history of making things worse. Worse than that, they also have a history of moving along quickly afterwards so that they are rarely forced to confront the damage they have caused.
Whenever Christians open up the subject of how to help the poor, one of the more striking things about the whole process is how quickly they can become acrimonious and hostile to one another. Apparently, just as the millennium is a thousand years of peace that Christians like to fight about, so also the topic of charitable giving is a subject just seething with latent hostilities. But surely this should tell us something?
C.S. Lewis says somewhere that when Jesus told us to feed the poor, He did not give us cooking lessons. And the fact is that someone who is great cook might not be sharing any with the poor. And the fact that someone is sharing like crazy does not mean they know how to cook at all. On this entire subject, we have to put off childish things. We have to think like adults—charitable adults. The point is to help, actually help people.
As we try to get a handle on the subject in microcosm — say, with a panhandler on the street — our common sense readings of the text and common sense readings of the situation often collide. How is it helping a man to buy him his next bottle of whiskey? That seems like a reasonable question. But in countless place in Scripture, the righteous are characterized by their almsgiving. And if these alms were given on the street, as they frequently were, were there no first century layabouts, bums, or addicts back then? Within the church, if a man would not work it was not proper for him to eat (2 Thess. 3:10). And when poverty is coming upon a sluggard like an armed-man (Prov. 24:33-34), is it really the job of the godly to jump in between? When poverty gives him his drubbing, isn’t poverty being kinder to him than we would be with our well-intentioned help? And so we come to cognitive rest . . . until the next time we read “give to every man that ask of thee” (Luke 6:30). Whatever this is, it is not simple. The bleeding heart and the tight fist both tend to leave questions unanswered.
And then we are confronted with the sinking feeling that the bum on the street — hard enough for us to understand — may present an issue simpler than that of Third World poverty by many orders of magnitude. I am fond of saying that if there are twelve clowns in the circus ring cavorting about, you can jump down there and start quoting the St. Crispins’ speech out of Henry V, but to the audience, you are just the thirteenth clown. Now, make that 120 million clowns, and just one of you. Turn this thing around, wouldja?
Let us imagine ourselves a little scenario. You have tribes that have hated each other since the 13th century. You have animism as the basic religion of the majority of the people. In other parts of the country you have Muslim/Christian clashes, up to and including some pitched battles. You have lots and lots diamonds in the ground. You have mining corporations eager to help build an infrastructure, and not exactly out of the goodness of their hearts. You have a sumbitch dictator, one who came from one of the smaller, persecuted tribes, and whose parents were tortured and killed by the majority tribe. You have a commie-dictator right next door, and on his coast is the sea with a deep salt-water port that the Soviets built in a previous chapter. You have a history of paternalistic and racist colonialism, which, in the long story of this small nation, were the best years of its entire existence. Disease is rampant, malaria included, and our sensibilities won’t allow them to use DDT at all. The desert is spreading southward at an alarming rate, in part because a previous generations of philanthropic organizations helped dig thousands of wells that dried up the aquifer. Since the middle of the last century, international banks have been loaning this country bazillions of dollars, and the nation is perpetually teetering on the brink of default, barely making the interest payments. If the debts were cancelled, the resultant maneuvering room would enable the dictator (who is only forty-five) to rule without challenge for another thirty years. In our little scenario this is your call — you can erase the debt completely. What do you do, yes or no?
If you refuse, you are clearly an merchant from Babylon, trafficking in the souls of men. And you call yourself a Christian. But if you do erase the entire debt, I would advise you to step on the gas. And whatever you do, don’t look in the rear-view mirror, not if you want to get any sleep in the future. Just call it drive-by debt forgiveness, and head on home to North America feeling pretty good.
This kind of thing calls for biblical wisdom. The last thing we need is sloganeering, or deft appeals to the nonbelievers who helped created this mess. But when we line up the non-believers that we need to start ignoring if we want to pursue this in a biblical way, we will not just line up the militarists, the bankers, and the colonizers. We must also line up the philanthropists, the liberators, and the throat-sobbers. The problem with N.T. Wright’s call for action is not that he is urging us to do something. The problem is that he is (in effect) urging us to take sides as Christians in a tangle and conflict created by and for unbelievers. And we must not take sides.
It is very difficult to raise questions that just look like you are getting in the way of action now. “We need to think this through” can easily be taken as plea to simply let sleeping dogs lie. It can be taken as a call to complacency, not a call to discipleship. “I gave at the office” can be a glib way of putting people off, and ignoring the demands that Jesus wove into the very life all faithful disciples. But “I gave at the office” can also be true. Not only can it be true, in some cases it can be “I gave effectively at the office” in contrast to imperious demands to give ineffectively now from someone who wants to be lord of my conscience for some reason.
On top of all this, Jesus commands us to hide from others the fact that we have given at all. We are not to be showboating donors, and our right hand should not know that the left hand has been exceedingly generous lately. Not only that, we are to be a city on a hill, a light not placed under a bushel, because our Father, who saw what we desperately wanted to keep secret, decided to reward us openly. But in the meantime, until He does that, if someone were to accuse us of being a flinty-hearted conservatives, we will probably take it ill and have to talk to the Father about it later.
The topics that really need to be explored here, and which I hope to be able to do, are, like the subject, not that simple. N.T. Wright has been addressing this subject persistently for some years, and so it is important to note what he is actually urging, and why. That done, we need to define our terms. Global justice sounds pretty good, admittedly, but what does it mean exactly? How do we define justice? One of the things that plagues debates on this subject is the fact that our debates are frequently places where different definitions simply collide, rather than being the place where we examine our terms and our definitions. Now once we know what justice is, according to Scripture, we will be in a position to apply that definition to the issues of our day. What does the biblical definition of justice have to say about abortion? About homosexual marriage? About relative poverty? About absolute poverty? About economic systems? In discussing these and other issues, it will become clear that we will have to distinguish between simple justice and complex justice. If we refuse to make that distinction, we will quickly fall prey to the law of unintended consequences. We will tackle a problem, believing it to be a matter of simple justice, but because it was not, our well-intentioned efforts will just create more problems around here for everybody. Studying international economics from a biblical framework should not paralyze us, but rather make us patient, learning how to labor fruitfully while taking the long view. And of course, we don’t want simply to take the long view — we want to be a real help to real people in the meantime. And of course Scripture will provide us with guidance there as well.