Carl Henry on Social Justice and Christian Responsibility to the Social Order
There is a critical error in evangelical thought at present: An uncritical embrace of social justice and a heavy-handed disavowal of social justice. The task for Christians is to approximate the biblical view of social justice without going to extremes. The reality is that biblical justice exists and is the application of God’s moral righteousness to address contemporary social evils and social dilemmas.
No one demonstrated this with more eloquence than Carl F. H. Henry.
Carl F. H. Henry is considered the dean of 20th century evangelical theology. His conservative credentials are impeccable. An inerrantist, a complementation on gender, and Reformed in his theology, Carl Henry was a forerunner on expounding on the responsibility of the Christian to the social order. All throughout Henry’s writings are an insistence that Christian vigilance and attentiveness to the social order are not distractions from the gospel, but entailments of Christians being committed to the full, biblical gospel.
Below is a collection of quotes that beautifully capture Henry’s resounding clarity on why Christians ought to advocate for a biblically-defined concept of social justice and the Christian’s individual and corporate responsibility to bear public witness to God’s moral righteousness within the public square.
Ultimately, in Henry’s view, the hope for a just social order is found in the redemption of sinners who are singularly captivated by God’s Kingdom where holy justice and loving mercy meet.
Evangelicals know that injustice is reprehensible not simply because it is anti-human but because it is anti-God […] Evangelicals must make God’s Word and ways known because it is the divine will and demand that is flouted by social injustice.
Evangelicals stand openly and firmly for racial equality, human freedom, and all forms of social justice throughout the world.
The gospel resounds with good news for the need and oppressed. It conveys assurance that injustice, repression, exploitation, discrimination, and poverty are dated and doomed, that no one is forced to accept the crush of evil powers as finally determinative for his or her existence.
Evangelical Christianity allows the secular world no hopeful program of social solutions that renders merely optional the personal acceptance of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. It holds hope for the social order because it offers the prospect of personal redemption.
Social justice is not simply an appendage to the evangelistic message; it is an intrinsic part of the whole, without which the preaching of the gospel is truncated. Theology devoid of social justice is a deforming weakness of much present-day evangelical witness.
God Himself is the carrier and communicator of [social] concern, and we finite creatures are all under orders in a community that He is insistently addressing. Biblical social concern is God’s active concern, and He intends every member of the human race to share it. Most of all, He expects the evangelical community to be aggressively dedicated to it, in word and deed.
An authentic Christian social ethic begins with the surety of the self-revealing God as creator, redeemer, and judge of all, and of the soul as a sensorium of the eternal supernatural world—in contrast with merely world-affirming secular ethics.
God’s justice is the self-consistency of his acts: he addresses his moral law to all moral creatures, and holds all equally accountable—without special favor, personal preference, or partisanship. This is the very essence of justice, on which rests the whole concept of law and social order.
Because God is holy Creator of all men and all the world, and demands historical righteousness and social justice in all human affairs, the Christian community must proclaim his revealed will to all mankind.
The common core and hub will be the God of justice and justification, the God who demands right and who offers new life and joy for doing it.
The Christian is morally bound to challenge all beliefs and ideologies that trample man’s personal dignity as a bearer of the divine image, all forms of political and economic practice that undercut the worth of human beings, all social structures that discriminate in matters of legal rights.
The issue is not the Christian’s responsibility for social action, because the Bible demands social responsibility, and public involvement is inescapable. The Christian has a cultural mandate as well as a missionary mandate, and he should hold before his contemporaries the vision of the best possible society and work for it.
Who but the Christian ought to mirror to society the emphasis of Isaiah: ‘Cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow’? To the Christian believer, social righteousness is not an evolutionary possibility; it is a divine demand.
We must confront the world now with an ethics to make it tremble, and with a dynamic to give it hope.
Christian holiness issues no license for the ecstatic enjoyment of the vision of God as a merely private option; rather, it insists that love of God reflects itself in love for neighbor, and enlists men of piety as sacrificial servants of their fellows.
The compassionate factor in the Christian social thrust, with its eye on the value of the individual, delivers social service from its impersonal tendency to deal with the people as merely so many cases or illustrations of a given complex of circumstances. Social compassion thus holds status as a prime motive and duty of the Church.
The gospel resounds with good news for the need and oppressed. It conveys assurance that injustice, repression, exploitation, discrimination, and poverty are dated and doomed, that no one is forced to accept the crush of evil powers as finally determinative for his or her existence.
As never before the Church needs to exercise her total witness to the world in the context of the truth of revelation and of the reality of redemption.
The sad fact is that when evangelicals do not engage in force in challenging alien world-life views they soon fall into battling among themselves.
Unless evangelicals repair their multiplying frictions over social and political engagement in an intelligently spiritual meeting of mind and heart, the situation can only result in still further divisions that forfeit whatever impact might have issued otherwise through strategic cooperation.
The biblical view declares both individual conversion and social justice to be alike indispensable. The Bible calls for personal holiness and for sweeping societal changes; it refuses to substitute private religion or social responsibility or social engagement for personal commitment to God.
If the church fails to apply the central truth of Christianity to social problems correctly, someone else will do so incorrectly.
Social action must not be viewed as an independent and detachable concern, nor may the preaching of the gospel be aborted from the whole counsel of God. Fundamental to biblical theology is the revelation of the true and living God as the God both of justice and of justification.
Christianity ought to be in the forefront of social reform by challenging social injustice, political humanism, and evils. We must oppose all moral evils, society and personal, and point a better way.
Christ’s followers are to exemplify the standards of God’s kingdom, and they are to be ‘light’ and ‘salt’ in a dark and rotting society where God intends civil government to promote justice and restrain disorder.