Book Review - Timothy Keller's Generous Justice

A basic biblical lesson is that Jesus came to earth to offer forgiveness.  Timothy Keller wrote Generous Justice to give light to another basic biblical lesson that people commonly ignore and overlook: When a person has a true encounter with forgiveness, she or he will “inevitably” long for justice.  The better a person understands grace, the more acute this longing will be.  Generous Justice hopes to make this clear.  Christians can learn that justice for poor and marginalized is at the centre of scripture.  People who are not Christians can see that the Bible, properly understood, directs people to be just rather than oppressive.

Keller begins with a definition for “doing justice”.  To do justice means to make long-term sacrificial decisions that address the needs, concerns, and causes of marginalized people. Doing justice has three components: defending the needs of people without economic or social power, ordering our relationships to reflect equality, and being generous with our own resources.

Generous Justice offers a careful outline of what The Bible teaches about justice, both chronologically and thematically.  It begins with the Old Testament.  The Old Testament demonstrates that the causes of poverty are complex.  The Old Testament notes that poverty comes from oppression, natural disaster, and personal failure.  The Old Testament normally notes structural causes of poverty, however.  Keller argues that Old Testament teaching about justice remains relevant for Christians, although the approach to this teaching changed with Jesus.  Although it is not a civil society, the church should therefore display justice as a community.  

With this in mind, Keller looks to what Jesus taught about justice, both in how he lived and what he said.  Jesus lived a life that was available to everyone who found themselves outside of society, regardless of their finances.  Jesus often interacted with the poor, oppressed, and ignored.  The result was that people who are rarely trusted – including tax collectors, shepherds, and women – were among his first witnesses.  Jesus also said a lot about poverty.  His two primary lessons are, first, loving ministry for the poor is evidence that a person accepted God’s grace, and second, God is the source of wealth, meaning everything is his rather than ours. 

Keller now looks at justice thematically.  First, when Christians do justice, who should we focus on?  In short, we should do justice for our neighbour.  Our neighbour is everyone.  Christians should love everyone sacrificially, even when they do not share our beliefs.  

Second, why should Christians do justice?  There are five reasons.  First, everyone is made in the image of God, meaning Christians should approach everyone with humility.  Second, creator God owns everything, meaning we cannot stake a claim of ownership over our possessions.  Third, Christians are a redeemed people.  Doing justice demonstrates evidence of redemption.  Fourth, the doctrine of justification demonstrates how serious God takes injustice, therefore Christians should take injustice seriously.  Fifth, doing justice illustrates Christianity as an expression of grace rather than condemnation.

Third, how should Christians do justice?  Doing justice does not simply meet an immediate need.  Doing justice is an attempt to prevent injustice.  Preventing injustice has four components: thinking about how to do justice in each aspect of life, recognizing that there is not a single way to help victims of injustice, allowing victims of injustice to participate and lead as we do justice, and seeing that social reform is a way to prevent injustice from happening in the first place.        

Fourth, should Christians do justice with people who are not Christians?  This is a complex issue involving questions about the definition of justice and admitting that justice has inherent religious and moral characteristics.  Despite the complexity, Keller concludes that Christians should work with others to do justice by humbly joining in efforts that fit with a Christian vision of justice and respectfully disagreeing with efforts that do not fit our vision.  To do this, Christians should admit that doing justice is a moral issue and firmly stand on the biblical roots of how Christian teaching defines justice.

Keller’s concluding chapter relates justice to peace and beauty.  Justice cannot exist without peace.  To do justice, go to places where shalom is broken and work to restore it.  Restoring a broken community requires going to where injustice is and using power, resources, and time to serve these communities.  This effort is an illustration of beauty because it imitates God’s response to injustice.  Doing justice happens when Christians recognize the beauty of when God joined with the poor and the corrupt, refused to condemn them, and paid their debt.

Generous Justice is an excellent book and makes a significant contribution as I consider social justice.  It helped to clarify some issues for me, while also raising issues that I hadn’t considered before.  

Keller’s clarity on the biblical definition of injustice is most helpful in how he defines his question.  The Bible seemingly make it obvious that doing justice is expected of Christ-followers.  While Keller does spend some time answering the question, “Should we do justice,” he quickly assumes the affirmative.  This allows him to ask more complicated questions, such as “How”, “Why”, and “Where”.  Despite answering these questions in a readable book, Keller provides thought provoking answers.

It is also useful to consider Keller’s concerns about the definition of justice relative to how we should use the word.  While he provides a definition using The Bible – to make long-term sacrificial decisions that address the needs, concerns, and causes of marginalized people – he concedes that not everyone will agree with this definition, nor will everyone agree with what he uses as his source material for determining the definition.  It is difficult to talk about “justice” because there are so many different definitions.  Defining the word becomes even more problematic because it is a conversational trump card.  Whoever uses the word first is typically the person who gets to set its definition for the conversation.  Disagreeing with the definition is taking the side against justice.  Most people do not want to be seen as unjust.  I’m glad that Keller’s response to this problem is not saying, “My definition is best.”  Instead, he challenges readers to acknowledge that discussing morality is necessary to discussing justice.  This provides a launching point for the conversation, because we can debate about what our morality is, where it comes from, and how it leads to our understanding of justice.

Generous Justice also gave me an entirely new thought to consider.  When planning to do justice, the church needs to understand the difference between long-term, or “permanent” poverty, and a short period of poverty.  While this sounds obvious, the implications are great.  Doing justice in the face of long-term poverty and injustice will be different from doing justice in cases of temporary need.  This helps readers to understand the complexity of poverty and to see that our response must be just as complex.

Keller also provides a warning that I rarely think about.  When discussing justice – particularly poverty – it is very easy to see poor people as always-innocent victims of oppression.  Indeed, scripture often concludes that oppressing the innocent is wrong.  However, by no means does The Bible indicate that poverty and virtue are synonymous.  Nor does it show that a wealthy person is always a villain.  Such caricatures are unhelpful when we do justice. 

This post originally appeared on my former blog ajdickinson.blogspot.ca. The date stamp is for the date of the original posting.