A History of Christian Social Action, Social Justice, and Political Power

The Jewish Roots of Christian Social Conscience

Christian social ethics is not Christianity’s correction of Judaism but Christianity’s inheritance from Judaism—from Torah, the prophets, Jewish communal obligation, and the conviction that worship of God requires the repair of human relationships and social institutions.

Every Christian history of social justice that begins with the church has begun too late. Jesus did not appear without a people, a Scripture, or a moral vocabulary. He was a Jew; his Bible was Israel’s Bible; and his teaching about justice, mercy, Sabbath, neighbor-love, liberation, holiness, and the reign of God arose within the world of Torah and the prophets.

This is more than historical background. It guards Christians against supersessionism—the belief that Christianity replaced a morally deficient Judaism. Christian social ethics rests within Israel’s covenantal conviction that the God worshiped in the sanctuary also judges courts, markets, wages, debts, landholding, and the treatment of strangers. The God of Israel is also the defender of the widow, the orphan, the laborer, the poor, and the resident stranger.

Several Hebrew terms help recover this moral world. Tzedek and tzedakah can be translated as justice, righteousness, or charitable giving, but they point beyond voluntary generosity toward right relationship and obligation. Mishpat concerns judgment, law, and the protection of rights; chesed describes steadfast, covenantal love; and shalom includes wholeness, welfare, peace, and rightly ordered life. Together, they describe a covenantal way of life in which persons and institutions are answerable to God.[1]

These convictions are woven into Israel’s law. Landowners could not harvest every corner of their fields, so that poor people and strangers could glean. Workers were to be paid promptly, courts were to judge honestly, and foreigners were not to be mistreated because Israel knew the vulnerability of living as strangers in Egypt. Widows and orphans received particular moral attention.

The Sabbath is not merely a private spiritual practice. On the seventh day, masters and servants, citizens and foreigners, human beings and animals are released from labor. Sabbath limits production and the power to command another person’s time. Human beings are more than workers, and creation is more than material to be exploited.

The sabbatical year and Jubilee extend Sabbath into economic life. Deuteronomy calls for the periodic release of debts, while Leviticus 25 imagines the restoration of ancestral land and the release of people from permanent servitude. These provisions were not a modern........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)