What does it look like to pursue justice in society? Today, R.C. Sproul turns to the book of Amos to illustrate the difference between the world’s ideas and the Bible’s teaching on matters of righteousness, equality, and justice.
Now Amos writes, “But let justice run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Now because of this call to justice and righteousness, and the theme of justice in Amos, often the way in which this message is described is as a call to social justice. Now, I want to just spend a few moments just with this concept because I can’t think of too many concepts that are more misleading in our contemporary culture than this idea of social justice. Social justice in the Prophets, social justice in Israel, had to do with the rule of law and of righteousness in the culture. It had nothing to do with socialism.
And since Marxist understanding of law, there’s been a tremendous influence in our culture today that equates social justice with social equality or economic equality—the idea being that you don’t have social justice unless everybody in the society has equal possessions and equal finances and so on. And equal distribution of wealth is considered, in socialistic countries, as the supreme manifestation of social justice. And the complaint is, if there are inequalities in a culture where there can be a division between the wealthy and the poor, that that would necessarily reveal a structure of social injustice that needs to be rectified.
Now again, that’s the common way in which you’ll read the concept in the newspaper and in the media today. That’s not the classic understanding of social justice. Because classically, both philosophers and theologians distinguished between equality and equity. Equity meant that everybody received what was their due—not that everybody received things, in terms of material possessions, equally.
For example, when I’m teaching in the seminary and the students have an examination, and they have a responsibility to prepare for the examination, when they take that exam, it is my responsibility to grade that exam and give to each student a fair and equitable, or a just, grade. To give them their due. So that if someone performs in an excellent fashion and they are worthy of a high grade, I give to them an A. If somebody didn’t even bother to study the material and went out to a party the night before the exam and showed up and just scribbled a couple of lines on their test paper, then they have earned for themselves an F, or at best a D. And that’s the way we operate in the academic world.
Now, equality would be if I gave the test, and then I said, “Alright, I’m going to make sure everybody gets the same grade. So, I’m going to give you all As.” Not a whole lot of complaints from the students when I say that, because now that’s equality. It’s not equity, but it is equality. And I’ll say, “OK, I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to give you all Ds. So, don’t feel badly about it because everybody gets the same.” Now, those who made an F on the test are happy with that distribution of grades. Those who earned Bs and As are very unhappy because their first complaint will be, that’s not what? Fair.
And in fact, it isn’t fair. If we go back to antiquity, the basic concept of justice is rendering to the person what is their due under the law. Now we also understand the concept of equality under the law, which was what was about in the civil rights debate in our country. Because the law required that everybody was to be treated equally under the law, so that the poor man should not have the law tilted against him or the rich man having the law tilted for him. So social injustice takes place in the first instance when the rule of the land is not just because it shows favoritism to people not on the basis of righteousness, but on the basis of political power or so on.
Now, that’s a very important distinction for us to understand. Because we read in the book of Amos this complaint about the plight of the poor who are being exploited in Israel. And he says, for example, “The poor are sold for a pair of shoes.” What’s he talking about when he says the poor are sold for a pair of shoes? It wasn’t that the rich as such were exploiting the poor, so much as the government was exploiting the poor in behalf of the wealthy. So, what did this mean? That they were sold for a pair of shoes. Here’s what it was. Where they were sold for a pair of shoes was in the gate. And if you’re familiar with the language of the Old Testament, the gate is the place where cases were heard and adjudicated by the judges of the nation, and they were to be adjudicated according to the law of God, according to justice.
And instead, what happened was the judges started taking bribes. And they would find in favor of the person who had enough money to give the bribe. And this is the way the rich were exploiting the poor in terms of the law. They were getting the law to favor their interests rather than the interest of justice and of truth. Now, one of the complaints that Karl Marx raised in his evaluation of capitalism, and capitalist society historically, is his argument that historically the laws of a nation inevitably tend to protect the vested interests of the ruling class. Let me say it again, that the laws of a nation tend to protect the vested interests of the ruling classes. And that was his judgment on nations that did not follow his structure for political economic arrangements for society.
Now in our country, we have an ideal where we say that justice is blind, and we symbolize that with the figure of Lady Justice wearing what? A blindfold. So that when we go before the bar, before the courts, that the law of the land is supposed to be equally favorable to rich and poor, famous, or not famous, and so on, so that there’s no opportunity for Lady Justice to peek. But that’s not always the way it, is it? There are times when the decisions and the verdicts in the courtroom are politically or economically motivated, and when that happens, that’s when real social injustice takes place. When the law is bent to serve the interests of one class or another. And that can happen, by the way, in both directions. You can live in a society where there are only very few wealthy people and a whole lot of poor people. And the poor people in a democracy can tilt the laws in their favor.
I hear people all the time, every time there’s a discussion in our country about tax breaks. That people scream about it: “Well, no, that’s going to help the wealthy. We can’t have that happen.” If a tax break goes across the board where everybody gets the same break dollar wise, it may help the rich more than the poor. And so, the poor resent that. They say let them rich pay more, a higher rate, not just a higher volume but a higher rate, because they can afford it. Which is like saying theft is not a crime as long as you steal from the rich. See. You’re not allowed to steal cars unless you can show that the car that you stole was from the man who makes more than X number of dollars a year. That’s kind of the mentality of our culture.
Whereas in Israel, the Law of God was the same for the wealthy as it was for the poor, and even the tithe was given on an equitable basis. It was a flat tax, if you will. Everybody did not pay the same amount, but they all paid the same percentage. And so, no one had an advantage over their neighbor with respect to the Law of God. Everybody under the Law of God was responsible equally to obey the law.
