Two Things Called Justice

A response to Another Gospel? The Rise of Social Justice within Adventism (Part 1) at Fulcrum7.

A counterfeit gospel arrives dressed as the genuine one. That is the whole logic of the warning in Galatians, and it is where the argument now circulating about social justice begins. Paul pronounced “a double curse on anyone who preached a counterfeit gospel,” and a recent Fulcrum7 essay takes that curse as its warrant. It argues that social justice is just such a counterfeit: a movement with Marxist rather than scriptural roots, one that divides believers by the color of their skin and judges them by an outward mark, as the circumcision party did in Galatia.

The charge is serious, and it is precisely aimed. But before any church can test a gospel against Paul’s standard, it must name the thing it is testing, and here the argument equivocates on the one word that carries everything. It treats “social justice” as a single thing with a single meaning, when the phrase has named at least two things in this denomination’s life. The essay means to convict one of them. It condemns both under one name.

The Church Used the Phrase for the Prophets Before the Essay Condemned It

In 1995 the Review and Herald put it plainly: “The New Testament is also laden with demands for social justice” (Review and Herald, 1995-09-14, p. 11). Five years later Ministry made the point from the other end of the canon: “Old Testament carries a clarion call for social justice” (Ministry Magazine, 2000-10-01, p. 9). Neither editor was smuggling a Continental philosopher into the sanctuary. Both were saying what this denomination has long said about the prophets and the Beatitudes, that a God who hears the cry of the poor requires something of the people who worship him.

In Adventist usage that requirement has a name, and the name is social justice. This is the detail the argument cannot afford to notice, because it dissolves the clean line the whole case depends on. The phrase is not foreign to the church. It is the church’s own vocabulary for a biblical obligation, printed in its own magazines and applied to Isaiah and to Jesus. An argument that condemns “social justice” whole must first explain why the denomination’s press used those words for the prophets without preaching a counterfeit gospel.

The Quarrel With Socialism Is Real, and Narrower Than the Essay Claims

None of this means the argument has no target. Adventism carries a long and documented quarrel with socialism, and the essay is right to remember it. The Present Truth conceded in 1905: “Socialism and kindred reforms may be good, so far as motives and intentions go, but they have no power to remove the evils of which they complain” (The Present Truth, 1905-10-12, p. 16). Three decades later the Signs of the Times made the charge explicit, against a social gospel seeking union with socialism: “The two are irreconcilable” (Signs of the Times, 1936-08-25, p. 9).

That is a genuine position, and the essay inherits it honestly. The denomination’s case against socialism is not that it cares too much about the poor. It is that socialism promises a material cure for a spiritual disease, and that its remedy arrives without the gospel. What the essay does not inherit, because the denomination’s own press never supplied it, is the intellectual genealogy it asserts, the chain running from Taparelli through Gramsci and Foucault to Crenshaw and Kendi. That genealogy is stipulated, not demonstrated. Adventist publications give the church a documented quarrel with socialism’s material remedy. They do not give it an account of how a word travelled through a century of philosophy into a pew, and the essay offers the second as though it were the first.

A Church That Calls Racism Heresy Cannot Call Concern About Race a Counterfeit

The division thesis is where the argument’s confidence runs ahead of the denomination’s own teaching. It holds that social justice begins from division, oppressor against oppressed, and therefore cannot be the gospel, whose work is to turn enemies into brothers. That is a serious claim about reconciliation, and it is well grounded in what Adventists have said about unity. In 1985 the Review and Herald called racism by its heaviest name: “racism is really a heresy and in essence a form of idolatry” (Review and Herald, 1985-06-30, p. 3). Twelve years later it stated flatly: “The church rejects any system or philosophy that discriminates against anyone on the basis of race, color, or gender” (Review and Herald, 1997-01-09, p. 27).

Here the essay has the unity ideal it wants, and it should say so. But these same sentences cut against its central inference. A church that names racism as heresy and idolatry cannot then treat concern about race as the mark of a counterfeit. The denomination does not regard attention to racial injustice as a rival gospel; it regards racial injustice itself as the idolatry. The essay may hold that a particular theory of race overreaches. It cannot hold that the church treats the whole subject as enemy territory, because the church’s own words say the opposite.

A Vivid Analogy Is Not a Demonstrated One

The boldest move in the argument is its placement of Critical Race Theory inside the New Testament’s own category of false teaching, by analogy to the circumcision party Paul confronted in Galatia. It is a memorable move, and nothing in the denomination’s publications supports it. Circumcision was a mark a convert chose to accept; race is not chosen. The essay notices this difference and does not resolve it, which is the tell that the analogy is the author’s construction rather than a documented equivalence.

The Galatian error is well established in Adventist teaching. The connection between that error and a modern body of legal thought is established nowhere in the denomination’s press. As illustration, the parallel has force. As argument, it substitutes a vivid image for a demonstrated one.

The Gospel Is the Final Cure, Not a Reason to Despise the Bandage

Where the argument is most plainly right is also where it should stop. It quotes Ellen White accurately: “For earth’s sin and misery the gospel is the only antidote” (The Ministry of Healing, 1905, p. 93). The sentence is true, and it has been Adventism’s answer to every rival cure for more than a century. But it establishes the primacy of the gospel; it does not establish the illegitimacy of every social remedy. The argument moves from “the gospel alone finally cures” to “any other effort is snake oil” without supplying the step that connects them, and that missing step is the difference between a doctrine and a slogan. To say the gospel is the only antidote is to say where the cure finally lies. It is not to say that a bandage is a counterfeit.

The argument ends where it began, with a curse reserved for counterfeits. But a counterfeit is known by comparison with the genuine, and no comparison is possible until both have been named. The essay names only one thing, then discovers it everywhere: in the dictionary’s definition of taxation, in a theory of race, in the careful work of Adventist editors who were, as it happens, quoting the prophets. A church that once used the phrase social justice for the Sermon on the Mount cannot now be told, without a single distinction, that the phrase is a rival gospel. The question is not whether the church has a counterfeit to fear. It is whether it can still tell the genuine article from the word it has, in print, used to describe it.

— Dr. Miriam Sorensen, Theology Editor