This post is written by Thaddeus J. Williams, author of Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth, and is sponsored by Zondervan Academic.
Combining the word “social” with the word “justice” is a bit like mixing Mentos with soda. It is highly explosive, especially when we don’t bother to define our terms.
Some use “social justice” to describe what our ancient brothers and sisters did to rescue and adopt precious little image-bearers who had been discarded like trash at the literal human dumps outside many Roman cities. The same two words could describe William Wilberforce’s efforts to topple slavery in the UK, along with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and others in the US. Nowadays, the same combination of two words could describe Christian efforts to abolish human trafficking, work with the inner-city poor, invest in microloans to help the destitute in the developing world, build hospitals and orphanages, upend racism, and so much more. When many brothers and sisters hear the words “social” and “justice” put together, that’s the kind of stuff they think about.
But for many, the identical configuration of 13 letters is packed with altogether non-Christian and even anti-Christian meanings. “Social justice” has become a waving
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