Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice: A Timely Book on a Perennial Topic

In 2018, Dr. E. Calvin Beisner published Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice: How Good Intentions Undermine Justice and Gospel. In his usual scholarly fashion, Beisner analyzes the arguments of the social justice movement that have become especially popular in the last decade.

After Beisner covers what some Christians say is a Biblical principle on wealth redistribution and equalization, with short sections on The Sabbatical Year Law (p. 12), The Jubilee Year Law (14), the sharing of goods at the church in Jerusalem (15), and the Pauline collections for believers who were suffering famine (17), Beisner gives the Biblical definition of justice and the Biblical way it is to be carried out.

Dr. Beisner is especially careful to avoid eisegesis, “making Scripture align with his own thoughts,” and exegetes, “making his own thoughts align with Scripture,” what the Bible says about justice. He shows four Biblical criteria for justice (20-23).

1. Justice requires impartiality and equal application.
2. Justice requires rendering to each his due.
3. Justice requires proportionality between acts and rewards or punishments.
4. Justice requires conformity to the standard God set forth in His law.

These four things imply that a person has rights. Beisner distinguishes negative “rights against harm” from positive “rights to certain benefits” (23). “Properly understood, rights are not guarantees that something will be provided for us but guarantees that what is ours will not be unjustly taken from us. That is, properly speaking, rights are not positive but negative” (24-25). That means, in the case of a positive right, there is no way of knowing what a person has any right to. Different eras and different geographic locations present differing needs. If a person has a right to food and clothing, how much food would a person have a right to? And what kind of clothes? And if a person has such “positive rights,” how can those rights be provided for without violating another person’s “negative rights”? A person’s right not to have their possessions taken from them, whether it be food, clothing, or money to buy things, must be trampled upon if other persons have positive rights. Beisner shows that “positive rights” are not Biblical rights.

In the next section Beisner gives the Biblical prescription for five types of justice: Commercial, vindicative, retributive, punitive, and remedial.

Contemporary ideas of “social justice” present numerous problems. If by social justice a person means that the same rules apply to all people, we should not have a problem with it. But some now use the term to mean that there must be an equality of opportunity or of outcome. As Thomas Sowell once pointed out, we cannot even achieve “equality of outcome” within a family living under the same roof. One child may excel in academics and be terrible in sports and another may excel in sports and be terrible in academics. The world simply does not provide equality of outcome and cannot be expected to.

Another example: how could it be possible to have equality of outcome or opportunity on a basketball team? When it comes to basketball, short people and tall people have differing abilities and the taller person is at a distinct advantage. If an under-achieving short person is put on the team to obtain equity in basketball, the team will be handicapped. Soon, those demanding equity will be saying the handicapped team must start the game with 20 points to their benefit so that things can be “fair” again.

In the name of equity, those practices would do nothing but spread the unfairness around. In the end, the only equity would be an equity of unfairness. Besides that, resentment would develop against under-achieving short people who got on the team for equity. And any short person who achieved equal status with a tall player through hard work and ability, would be suspect as getting on the team for equity, regardless of performance. Many Black scholars illustrate this negative dynamic regarding Affirmative Action in the job market and academic world.

Beisner says, “Yet, ‘equality of outcome’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ are the primary senses in which the Progressive movement has used the term social justice for over a century. This sort of ‘social justice’ necessarily asserts positive rights and leads inexorably to the violation of negative rights. In this sense, ‘social justice’ is really, by Biblical criteria, injustice” (29-30).

It is much easier to bring down an overachiever than to get an underachiever to do better. Because of that reality, seeking equality of outcome can only bring society and culture down and never lift it up.

The Bible speaks a lot about helping the poor who are more vulnerable to exploitation and who are often the targets of unjust people who trample their negative rights. God calls on us, His people, to be there for the poor and provide for them as we are able, whether it be to protect them from injustice or to provide for an unmet need.

Beisner sums up the difference between our job as Christians and the job of the state:

“When God commands justice, we are to do justice, and the state is to enforce it. When He commands grace, we are to exercise grace. But it is precisely because grace is not justice, and because God ordained the state to enforce justice, that the state is never to enforce grace. Indeed, ‘forced grace’ – the real meaning of Progressive ‘social justice’ – is a contradiction in terms” (37).

The booklet wraps up with “The Statement on Social Justice & the Gospel” which covers many relevant topics in contemporary culture from Scripture, with affirmations and denials. In this booklet, Dr. Beisner does not start with ideas from the Social Justice Movement and move from there to God and His Word. Instead, he first understands Scripture as sufficient and authoritative, and uses it to evaluate the Social Justice Movement. In that way, he accurately shows what God and His Word say about the Social Justice Movement, avoiding what the Social Justice Movement says about God and His Word.