Two and a half years ago, Saving The Church Part II set off a systematic decoupling of faith and politics. This is my attempt at reintegration.

A lawyer asked Him [Jesus] a question, testing Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”

And He said to him, ” ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:35-40

Jesus here makes a distinction in the things we are commanded to do. The entire law and prophets are summed up in two commandments – not one.

The distinction here is between morality and justice: Morality is rightness before God; justice is rightness before other men. To a certain degree they are not separate: justice is attendant to morality. Loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind entails that we will love our neighbors as ourselves. Yet justice can exist on its own: Romans 2:14-15, when it says the work of the law is written on the hearts of the gentiles, is referring to justice – not to morality. It refers to their treatment of fellow men, not to their position before God – for the implication is that the gentiles do not know God.

Justice is further separated from morality in that it has implications beyond the individual and spiritual level. Whereas morality throughout the Bible is always treated as an individual problem, every time as far as I’m aware that God has threatened physical judgement on a nation, it has been because of injustice. In Amos, where God pronounces judgement on Israel plus seven other nations separately, each condemnation involves societal injustice or war cruelty. Moral condemnation certainly comes along with it, but it appears in each case that injustice was the thing which brought the physical condemnation.

Contrast this to moral condemnation, which often has little to no effect in this world. David often cries out in the Psalms asking why his enemies prosper. Job was morally righteous and yet suffered greatly. The condemnation and reward for morality comes after death (Hebrews 9:27): indeed, morality must be completely agnostic to its material circumstance.

Justice however, unlike morality, has direct physical consequences in the here and now, as well as collective implications for societies. Indeed, though it is at all times inappropriate to codify morality into law, there is a call for Christians to bring justice to our legal systems.

But “Love your neighbor as yourself” is still an individual command. What then can we say about just societal laws? Firstly, there must be equality before the law: all laws must apply equally to all people. Hayek laid it out well in The Constitution of Liberty: laws must be general principles for all – never allowing the rules to be different for one than for another. These would be the “evil statutes” upon the enacters of which will come woe, as per Isaiah 10:1. The prophets very often condemn Israel for turning away the poor at the gate. The gate is where disputes were settled – a court of sorts, where the judges would arbitrate. These judges were condemned for refusing to provide legal protection to the poor (Amos 5:12): essentially, the law only afforded protection to the rich.

So now that we have established the necessary relationship between just law and the individual, what sorts of particular laws are just? Jeremiah expresses a curse on those who use others’ labor without paying them their wage (22:13). This would suggest an injunction against slavery. Indeed, “You shall not steal” suggests that property rights are the very first prerequisite for a just society. Proverbs is full of condemnation for “unbalanced scales” by which men would defraud others in deals (11:1, 20:23) – “The Lord hates” them, and furthermore any society which does not afford property rights or fraud protection to the poor (or anyone, for that matter) is odious in the sight of the Lord.

Moral legislators will try to confuse the issue by conflating justice with morality. They will use William Wilberforce, the man who by faith was able to abolish slavery in England, to justify their support for a constitutional amendment ban on gay marriage – as if all faith-motivated government activism were the same. What is the difference between William Wilberforce and Jerry Falwell? William Wilberforce campaigned for justice in England’s laws – for the equal treatment of Africans – which was the proper domain of justice. These moralizers, on the other hand, far overstep the internal and individual domain of morality. Indeed by doing so they deny the very existence of morality, for in advocating moral laws they assume that people will be morally better off acting under threat as if they were moral – as if the external behavior were all that mattered. It is an undeniable fact that legal pressure cannot change the heart of a man. Morality is not justice.

In addition, welfarists will try to confuse the issue by conflating the existence of the poor with the treatment of the poor. Nowhere in the Bible is the existence of the poor used as an indictment of society – Jesus even says “the poor you will always have with you” (Matthew 26:11) – it is always their treatment. That is not to say we should not care about the poor as such: there is tremendous Biblical impetus for charity. Yet charity is a moral question, not a question of justice. “Trampling on the poor” (Amos 5:11) cannot be made into any sort of Marxist indictment of Capitalism, as if being poor necessitates having been trampled upon: it refers specifically to unequal legal treatment of the poor (Amos 5:12).

As a moral question, care of the poor falls under the same individual domain as the issues of the moralizers. Welfare is indeed unjust, for it throws out equality under the law in favor of some groups over others. By collectivizing charity by taxation and redistribution, through welfare, healthcare, and whatever else – these welfarists commit exactly the same error as the moralists: overstepping the bounds of morality, thus effectively denying its import as if the external were all that mattered. Individuals may indeed be morally indicted for failing to give charitably, but it is a pernicious and unjust society that removes from the individual the responsibility of charity to make it the role of “society” or the government.

The Benefits of Justice: An Argument from History
Many times we as good modernists tend to think of ourselves as living in a different sort of world than that described in the Bible. Since the coming of Christ, it seems God has been silent, letting history take its course. This is completely different from Amos’ vision. He spends nearly half of his book detailing specific condemnations on the various nations surrounding Israel. This was so that, when the calamity did come, no one could say that it was chance – that it was simply the course of history irrespective of God’s design. This seems harshly disconnected from our own day, where it seems that history has simply been running its course for 2000 years.

One might start to wonder at the difference between the two eras, listening to the moralizers. Sodom and Gomorra were destroyed for their condoning of homosexuality they say, yet no brimstone falls on Massachusetts. This idea has even extended into our lexicon in the word “sodomy” – meaning in English anal sex, usually homosexual.

With the realization that immorality only condemns the individual, and that it is societies which are condemned by injustice, the need for this distinction between eras suddenly disappears. What touched off the rapid acceleration of scientific progress and material prosperity in the past few hundred years? The Industrial Revolution. And what sparked the Industrial Revolution? The advent of Enlightenment thought. What Enlightenment thought – specifically representative government plus Capitalism, in this case – brought, with the writings of such luminaries as Adam Smith and John Locke, was the social institutionalization of justice.

The history of the world prior to the enlightenment with regard to justice has been very spotty. If justice ever appeared at any point, it was relatively short-lived. Ironically it took a secular revolution in thought to bring about the Biblical social vision that had been actively inhibited by the Catholic Church. Essentially, people realized that institutions matter – that you can do better than hoping to live under a good ruler and praying they don’t die or turn bad.

This insight is also found in the Bible. When Israel asked for a king, the Lord told Samuel to tell the people that a monarch would lead directly to bad societal consequences: he tells them monarchy is not an institution conducive to justice. It’s not impossible to achieve justice, temporarily – Solomon ruled justly as a monarch and led Israel to great prosperity – but death and replacement always decrease the likelihood of continued justice. Even now, the most impoverished countries are the ones without institutions guaranteeing justice and property rights to the poor (cf. David Guest’s The Shackled Continent, Hernando De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital) – welfare programs and foreign aid have so far been everywhere completely ineffective at relieving poverty without institutional reform.

It has been the advent of limited government, realized through the progress of Capitalism, that has directly led to our modern prosperity. Is this simply the course of history? If one takes a sovereign view of God’s work in history, as Amos (and all the prophets, for that matter) requires us to do, this is no coincidence. Capitalism and representative government are the institutionalizations of Biblical justice: moral freedom, and legal protection for all regardless of position. It takes the idea of justice and removes its administration from the hands of any particular person, so that its permanence is not jeopardized by the death or removal of a leader. It is no coincidence that these have been attendant to our modern prosperity.

This is of course not to say that this prosperity is in any way related to salvation: this is not a gospel of prosperity. Justice on its own is completely ineffective to save from sin – and moral (godly) behavior in many cases may mean the renouncement of personal prosperity, whether through persecution or giving. The material benefits of justice are only given to entire societies, not to individuals who act justly – whereas the salvific benefits of morality are entirely individual. But just as salvation is the proper consummation of morality on the individual level, that is the valuation of God as the highest good, prosperity is the proper consummation of justice on the societal level. It makes sense that prosperity would accompany justice plus freedom: if the human mind and the axioms of human action were designed by God, then it is not a leap to say that the spontaneous order of the market would arise and generate prosperity under the social order ordained by the Creator.