The Great Giveaway ~ Chapter 6: Justice

Justice (Our Understanding Of)

Practicing Redeemed Economics:
Christian Community in but Not of Capitalism

For anyone united to Christ, there is a new creation: the old order has gone; a new order has already begun.
2 Corinthians 5:17 REB

We were a small gathering of about forty-five people meeting in an old church on Sunday nights in Chicago. This night, a person stood up during congregational prayers and announced to everyone that she had cancer. She told us that she needed an operation and had no health insurance and did not know how she was going to pay for it. No one knew how to react, so we just prayed for her. To my knowledge, no one did anything else significant that night to help this woman. Prayer is good but empty if we separate it from social justice. Several months later this woman with cancer cautiously asked someone in the church to second mortgage his house and help her pay for her operation. That person responded with the question, “I don’t own my house free and clear, besides have you second mortgaged your house?” This perhaps was a legitimate question but no one, including the woman with cancer, would dare get involved in discerning the answer to this question. It seemed too big of a threat, not only to the homeowner but also to the woman with cancer. As a result, this woman with cancer was basically left alone with her economic problems despite being part of a close community. This same community, however, could get enthusiastic about volunteering aid to the local soup kitchen, offering financial help to the homeless, or walking miles to raise funds for pro-life and anti-poverty campaigns. But we did not know what to do when someone in our own community stood up and announced such a great need. Eighty thousand dollars (the cost of the operation) would surely have bankrupted us all. It seemed that this woman threatened everyone else’s financial survival. She put all of our own individual securities at risk and we were paralyzed. We didn’t have a way to “be the church” in the moment of her need. We didn’t know how to discern justice or mercy, what we should do, or what she needed to do.

I contend this episode is a metaphor for what happens in various and sundry ways in the majority of North American evangelical churches. Larger congregations may have benevolent funds to help out such a woman, but rarely do we take communal financial responsibility for one another. Larger evangelical churches may have committees to meet needs of hurting people in times of emergency, but rarely do we engage in what it means to restore justice and righteousness among us as a body of Christ in terms of economic disorder, conflict, and other issues of injustice. Yet when it comes to ministering social justice outside of the church, evangelicals are more active today than they have ever been before.¹

I contend this disparity is dangerous because it leaves our churches prone to compromising the justice of Jesus Christ in society at large. If we do not practice justice among ourselves as Christians under Christ’s lordship, we will not have the skills to discern it out in society either. Inevitably, we will be influenced by a formula for justice that comes from some place other than the body of Christ. In the case of evangelicals, this place often proves to be America’s own liberal democracy and capitalism. The social politics of democratic capitalism ends up determining the way we do justice more than the politics of Christ. This then renders our justice unrecognizable as Christian justice in the world.² Truly, without the local church as a visible reference point, any justice we practice in society in Christ’s name inevitably will blend in with other forms of contested justice active in the postmodern societal marketplace. And if we do separate our justice from society’s, our justice becomes just another disingenuous argument without a living visible representation of what justice looks like among a people of God. In either case, we end up “giving away” the justice of Christ to forces external to the church.

This chapter argues that the work of social justice in Christ begins with the woman with cancer standing in the middle of the congregation. Only from such a concrete outworking of justice under his lordship can we then locate and do justice in the world. The following seeks to uncover how and why evangelicals do justice and why it fails as a work of Christ’s justice in a society at the end of modernity. It asks how we can return the work of justice to the concrete body of Christ. It then suggests the reinvigoration of an old church practice through which we can receive back Christ’s justice as his church in but not of capitalism and then offer it to the world.

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The Great Giveaway by David Fitch (Ph.D., Northwestern University) ... the author of The Great Giveaway (Nov. 2005) from which this chapter is excerpted. Fitch is the pastor of Life on the Vine Christian Community of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Long Grove, Illinois, and is adjunct professor of ministry, theology, and ethics at Northern Seminary.
Used with permission of Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group copyright (C) 2005. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Publishing Group