Our Daily Bread And Our Neighbor's Daily Bread

Art Simon is the author of Bread for the World and co-author of Grace at the Table: Ending Hunger in God’s World.  He's also a retired Lutheran minister and considered a voice for the cause of "social justice".

In researching this series about the Christian message being thrown off course by what I consider to be the false concept of "social justice" I have found a large trend.  It seems that this false concept has come to be identified so heavily with real parts of the Christian mission that it's hard to tell them apart.  Case in point this quote from Art Simon.

“If praying for daily bread means to pray for enough, then surely the implication is that when we have more than enough we will share the ‘more’ so that others may also have enough. Such sharing is an indication that our hope in Christ is deep and true.”  ~ Art Simon

If this is social justice than what Christian can argue against it?  But that's just the thing.  This isn't social justice.  This is powerful loving third person individualism.  At least until that last sentence anyway.

Up to that last sentence it is the greatest commandment, loving your neighbor as you love yourself.  You have more than you need and you see your neighbor doesn't so you see yourself in your neighbor's position and act accordingly.

Perhaps one could say that last sentence is the earlier part of the greatest commandment, that we are to love God with all of our being, but I think it is more like what it says in much of John's Epistle or what Jesus says in his parable about fruits, that our faith will be evident in our actions.

Once again this is not "social justice", so why I am addressing it here?  Because it is listed as a "faith and justice" quote by the Ignatian Solidarity Network.

Here allow me to quote their own description of themselves.

"The Ignatian Solidarity Network (ISN) is a national social justice network inspired by the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola. ISN was founded in 2004 and is a lay-led 501(c)3 organization working in partnership with Jesuit universities, high schools, and parishes, along with many other Catholic institutions and social justice partners."

They clearly believe this quote from Art Simon is about "faith and justice".  And the use of the word "justice" in Christian circles has unfortunately become a short-hand for "social justice".  Considering this organization's own self description I have little doubt that is how they're using it when they say this list is about "faith and justice".

Okay so people do good things in the name of "social justice".  One may ask what I think the big deal is.  Jesus did say "he that is for us cannot be against us" right?  Well yes He did, but it was about a supposed non-believer doing good things in Jesus's name, not believers doing good things in something else's name.

Social justice is about groups of people, the rich, the poor, the groups with advantages and the groups with disadvantages.  Everything about it is about groups and group action and the problem with group action is that individuals in the groups involved are either drug along or run over.

What would happen if you could drag someone against their will to the gates of Heaven?  Would they enter?  Would they be willing to?  Would they be allowed to?  It's like pulling someone out of line to buy a movie ticket and attempting to bring them into the theater with you without them having a ticket.  They wont be allowed in and you'll be the reason why.  Is that what we as Christians should want?  Should we use group actions to pull people to places they're not individually ready to go?

And that's just the "drug along" side of the problem.  What about the "run over" side.  Those people who by no fault of their own are in a group deemed as having committed some injustice upon another group.  They were born into it and no reasonable opportunity for choice was involved.  They are innocent.  Social justice would demand that everyone in the "bad" group be held back, taxed extra, or in some way diminished or punished so the "victim" group can get "justice".

What does this have to do with, "when we have more than enough we will share the ‘more’ so that others may also have enough"?  Nothing, that's what.  But that's the big problem here.  Too many Christians call helping those less fortunate than us "justice" or even worse, "social justice".

It would be like inventing a false god that turns groups of people against each other and giving her credit for every act of kindness and mercy, and then trying to justify the idolatry by saying she's a Christian.

As Jesus said, "by their fruits you will know them", and what fruits has this false god produced?  Do the poor love the rich more and resent them less?  Are more and more African-Americans coming to forgive their former oppressors?  Are the political activities of the champions of "social justice" empowering politicians who respect God?

Injustice seems to follow in the wake of this thing called "social justice".  People are forced to surrender both property and well earned opportunity.  Some even suffer imposed poverty and in extreme cases death because it is claimed to be justice that some be forced to give up what is there's to others who have less.

This is not true justice and it certainly isn't Christian.

Now what Art Simon's words say, they are powerful loving third person individualism.  In other words they are part of the greatest commandment.  That's not "social justice".  If the Ignatian Solidarity Network understood this they would remove Simon's words from their page of "faith and justice" quotes.

The tough part of my position is telling so many of my fellow brothers and sister's in Christ how far they have allowed their minds to wander from the course.  How do you tell someone who has founded an entire ministry on a false concept like social justice that that is precisely what they've done?

As Jesus once told his disciples, much prayer is needed.

Love And Self Interest

Pedro Arrupe was an amazingly dedicated and compassionate representative of Jesus Christ in the world.  As a Jesuit in Japan before, during, and after World War II, he offered help and comfort to believers and unbelievers alike.  He was imprisoned at the start of the war but his behavior was so admirable that the Japanese released him after only six months (perhaps there's a miracle to be found in that somewhere).  

He was within the blast radius of  the atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima and he and his fellow Jesuits converted their novitiate into a makeshift hospital.  There they treated many of the survivors through great agony and grief.

I will not question his commitment to Christ, but as with Pope Francis last week I have an example of the false concept that is "social justice" clouding his perception and potentially distorting the message he presented.

Here is the quote from Pedro Arrupe I have chosen to address in my series about how "social justice" can separate us from our mission.

”To be just, is not enough to refrain from injustice. One must go further and refuse to play its game, substituting love for self interest as the driving force of society.” – Pedro Arrupe, S.J.

I cannot disagree with the idea that we must "refuse to play" the game of injustice.  Cooperating with a system that mistreats individuals in any way that enables the system to continue doing so is wrong.

Arrupe encountered many dictatorships in Latin America that intentionally persecuted some of the people in their nations without just cause.  He also encountered wealthy classes that as matter of policy prevented upward economic mobility.

He saw how his own Church seemed to encourage the imposition of a permanent underclass.  The abuse of such scriptures out of context such as "blessed are the poor" and "it will be as difficult for the rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle" come to mind.  

Rich and poor alike are thus encouraged to believe that to lift anyone out of poverty is to make them less blessed.  And as for the rich, they have a curse they must endure by being rich as they are, and if they should do anything that may make a poor person no longer poor, then they have only made things worse for themselves.  Their only penance for their wealthy condition is to give generously to the Church which then in turn mainly only comforts the poor rather than doing anything that may improve their economics.

One example of the problem can be seen in Mexico today.  Decades after Arrupe's death things are little if any better.  The North American Free Trade Agreement was supposed to improve economic opportunity in Mexico, a democratic nation, but the oppressive attitudes of rich and poor alike have worked to prevent the social change the also late Jack Kemp envisioned when he championed NAFTA.  The poor remain poor and any thought of allowing them an opportunity to become middle class seems to be seen as anathema, by both the rich and the poor.  So Mexico's social problems as regards economic mobility remain intact thanks to an over-use and misuse of "blessed are the poor".  It's a perverse irony.

In light of this it's easy to see why Arrupe might have become involved in liberation theology, but there's a problem with liberation theology and its doctrine of "social justice".  It's right there in the quote.  I'll emphasize the part for you.

”To be just, is not enough to refrain from injustice. One must go further and refuse to play its game, substituting love for self interest as the driving force of society.”

Like a good bridge player with the ace, king, queen in trump, I'll start with the high card, "the driving force of society".  What is the driving force of society?  When Jesus walked the Earth did He address any "driving force of society?"  He no doubt saw Himself as a driving force, but of what, society?  Like so many of these "social justice" distortions it all falls apart when considered in the light of the greatest commandment  where it says "love your neighbor as yourself".  Especially in the larger context of the part of loving God with all of our being, our individual beings.

He didn't come to save The United States of America or the United Mexican States or any other political entity or society.  He came to save individuals.  He commanded us to spread the message to all nations, but by that he didn't mean the Roman Empire, he meant the people of Rome, the people of Italy, the people of Greece, etc.  I know for some this may seem like a fine distinction but it isn't.  

Who wants to be loved as a tiny subset of a larger set defined by politics?  Who wants to hear someone say, "I love you because you're a citizen of the United States"?  That wouldn't be very personal, would it?  We want to be loved by people who actually know us as individuals, know our faults, and still love us.

The biggest problem with what Arrupe said in this quote is that we as Christians take our "eyes off the prize" when we start to see our ministry in terms of being a driving force for society, rather than a transforming influence on individuals.  We're simply not here for society beyond the most temporal requirements to participate in it.  We should be a source of conscience and guidance to society but not a driving force of it.  The individuals we encounter, no matter what arbitrary set they are grouped into, they are our calling.

To reinforce my point I will quote a very renowned non-Christian.


“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.” –  Mahatma Gandhi

The distorted ministry of "social justice" makes too much of money and too little of power, when power is the true root temptation.  When Timothy 6:10 says, "the love of money is the root of all evil" it spoke in a historical context where what we call money today didn't exist.  Money in Timothy's time was a store of value that a very few had and it could not be devalued.  To possess it was to possess power in whatever form it could buy for you.  It was power in its purest form.  Today's money is common and little more than a means of exchange, and is devalued almost every single day.  This devaluing is done along with many other things in part to prevent it from becoming power.  A paraphrase of Timothy 6:10 replacing "money" with "power" could very arguably be a translation much closer to the author's intent.

But even if we stick to the literal here, logic still directs us inevitably to the love of power being at least part of the problem.  Why would someone love money, if not to use it to obtain things including favors over others.  Why would they love money and not in turn love what it gets them?  Perhaps the reason it doesn't literally say "the love of power" is because money is potential power and not just actualized power.  So thus the love of potential power and not just power achieved is the root of all evil.

And that lands squarely on one of the major pitfalls of "social justice".  It leads to a pursuit of power over individuals instead of actually reaching individuals as individuals.  This pursuit of power not only tempts us away from the message but directly into the evils of political oppression.  We need to make sure in our hearts that "the power of love overrules the love of power".  To do that we need to abandon the false doctrine called "social justice".

And now I'll end on the part that says, "substituting love for self-interest".  If what Jesus said about loving others as ourselves is true then we shouldn't separate love and self-interest in any way that would make substitution of one for the other possible.  It is only out of an understanding of how we love ourselves that we even know what love for others looks like.

Perhaps he meant to sub out self-interest as in being self-sacrificing, which is noble if done for the right reasons (love would be a right reason, but lack of self-worth would be a wrong one).  If so, then I offer up no argument, but if by that he meant to attack the philosophical underpinnings of pro-free-market policies, then of course I must object.  But I suspect he didn't entirely mean either, or at least many of those fond of this quote don't interpret it so.  I suspect many of them actually believe Jesus Christ died on the cross so that we would work to bridge the economic gap between the "the rich" and "the poor" and do so through the pursuit of political power.

In other words, thanks to this monstrosity called "social justice" many Christians believe they can justify entertaining the love of power and allow the power of love to become an after-thought.  And an after-thought is something love must become within "social justice" because you cannot love others as yourself and treat them as subsets of politically defined groups.

I'd say it seems like I'm beating a dead horse, but unfortunately this evil pony isn't dead yet (There's an ancient Greek pun in there somewhere).

Justice, Fairness, And Respect For Every Human Being

For the next few weeks I'm going to look at examples of "social justice" in what is called the "faith community" with the intent to demonstrate how, while well intended those who preach social justice are being mislead, and thus ultimately distracted from what should be our true calling as Christians.

Week One:  We start with a big one, a quote from Pope Francis.

“A way has to be found to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth, and not simply to close the gap between the affluent and those who must be satisfied with the crumbs falling from the table, but above all to satisfy the demands of justice, fairness, and respect for every human being.” – Pope Francis

I truly love the part about "respect for every human being".  He'll get no argument from me to suggest that isn't extremely important and clearly part of our calling as Christians.

But taking his statement in its entirety I see what should be an obvious problem except that this false concept called "social justice" is clouding so many minds and dare I say hearts.

His first six words pretty much strike right to my point.  "A way has to be found."  For the Pope to say about the world's sufferings, "a way has to be found", is like a doctor in the midst of a medical emergency saying, "if only someone here had some medical knowledge."  I'm pretty sure Pope Francis knows quite well that a way has been found and that way is Jesus Christ.  I'm also as confident as I can be in a fellow human being that he intends to reach as many people as possible with that message that Jesus Christ is the way.

To be fair to Pope Francis I will grant him that Christ works through people and we as Christians are not called to just be fans in the stands of God's mercy.  We are called to be the instruments of His mercy in this fallen world.

But here is where "social justice" separates us from Christ.  Christ uses us, His followers and by the fact the church universal is a set defined as all of His followers, He uses the church.  But no government is the church, no geographical community is the church, no group other than the church is the church.  The church is a set that intersects with but never encompasses any other group except for those specifically defined as such like congregations and Bible-study groups.  One can no more expect governments and communities to do something because it is what a good Christian would do than one can expect a car to be a train.  And to demand it through a political process is to make a joke of our calling.

Now to get down to some of the details in this quote.

"... to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth, and not simply to close the gap between the affluent and those who must be satisfied with the crumbs falling from the table"

There are places in the world where the rich and powerful own everything and consciously work to keep the poor destitute.  This is clearly wrong.  Forbidding or working against economic mobility is something no Christian should participate in.  And in a secular context I believe Christians should favor governmental reforms that allow for greater mobility.  But such reforms should not be made at the expense of, as Pope Francis said, "respect for every human being."  Forced redistribution isn't Christian.  It is just one step away from unjust execution.  It demeans the individual to treat private property as something under the control of some larger community.  Voluntarily giving of one's surplus to assist those in need and potentially better their lives is Christian, but governmental policies of wealth redistribution are anti-Christian.

"...above all to satisfy the demands of justice, fairness, and respect for every human being.”

As long as that word justice is not perverted to apply to groups instead of individuals I can say amen to this much.  Unfortunately "social justice" does just that.  Once we start to seek justice for groups not defined by having a common individual victimizer but instead another group we make victims of members of the other group who did nothing wrong in this case.

This false concept called "social justice" should rub all Christians the wrong way since it perverts and distorts so much.  Most distastefully it distorts our relationship with Jesus Christ.  I pray more of us will come to this realization.

And I Cannot Say It Enough Until It's Gone

I've written this before but it needs more effort from me.  The concept of "social justice" is a poison both to Christianity and to anyone who is truly interested in human compassion.

This is no easy subject.  The "social justice" throng will attempt to claim that anyone who doesn't accept their corporate goals is some how against individual justice and individual compassion.  Rather than be distracted by that faulty generalization I will start with a story.

One time before the dawn of cell phones there was a college student. He was making a fourteen hour drive from his parents house to his college when he saw something on the other side of the highway he couldn't believe. There was a car stopped on the far shoulder and a muscular young man walked up to it and opened the driver's side door. He then started to assail a woman inside the car with a rapid and fierce barrage of punches.

The scene was beyond belief for this young college student.  So much so that he was almost a full mile down the road when he finally convinced himself he actually saw it happen. In his fantasy life he had always thought of himself as a hero, and at that moment he was asking himself why he hadn't rescued the maiden in distress.  He could have veered his car across the median and over the opposing lane, right? The answer was reasonable enough, though not enough to keep him from feeling ashamed. The student was relatively scrawny, especially compared to the muscular attacker. It probably would have been foolish for him to have intervened, especially while trying to cross highway medians in a sedan poorly designed for any road hazard, let alone a full highway median, and highways medians in the state this took place in are especially treacherous.

The student passed an exit and the thought occurred to him he could have stopped at a pay phone to report the attack to the police. Unfortunately he had passed the exit before he thought of it.

“Okay, the next exit then”, he said to himself, “I'll report it then”. 

The thought of what horrible things may have yet transpired back there on that highway shoulder made him wince. He didn't even want to think about the woman possibly being killed.

He had convinced himself of the urgency of informing the police as soon as possible, but then he thought what it might mean to his school work. He was in a different state, almost five hundred miles from his college, and his classes were way too intense for him to be able to take time out to assist a police investigation.

“How amazingly selfish of me”, he scolded himself for even considering putting his schoolwork ahead of protecting someone's life. He was definitely in his mind going to inform the police at the next exit, but then another thought came to him, one much more potent.

'The police patrol the highways. There will be one along sooner or later. Probably one has already gotten there considering all the time I've wasted struggling over the issue. Anyways, we have police precisely for that sort of thing. What do we pay them for right? College students returning to school on fourteen hour drives ought to be able to do just that.  College is all about the future after all. Let the police handle this.'

And so the young student returned to his college to attend his classes, making no report. The future was supposedly served and who knows what happened to the woman on the side of the highway, it wasn't his concern considering we have public servants to take care of such things.

As awful as it is, that's the end of that story.

Awful story and awful ending, right? Of course. This is the legacy of a culture that has decided to delegate individual responsibility to the employees of the collective, not to mention puts too much emphasis on the higher education and potential of its young people. While to be fair one could argue the young student in this story shirked even his corporate responsibilities to the collective, it was precisely the collective that enabled his ultimate excuse. If he had been centered in himself as an individual he would have had no one and no thing to hide behind. He would have either done something to help the poor woman or he would not have, and his own self-assessment would have no other two choices but that he was good or bad in it.

I used this story to encourage thought. Those who already agree with me may see new reasons why we're right, and those who don't agree with me are at this very moment thinking of ways they think this story doesn't support my point or that some other point is missed. Either way the pump on the well of thought has been primed. Now's a good time for some strait logic and reasoning.

The term “social justice” was coined by a Catholic priest named Luigi Taparelli in 1840. What he did was take the compassion of Thomism, a religious philosophy derived from the great saint Thomas Aquinas and try to apply it to groups of people as if these groups were individuals. e.g. The Bible teaches us to be compassionate to those less fortunate than ourselves, therefore, according to Taparelli, communities and societies as a whole should enact practices and policies to help the less fortunate. The persuasive power of this reasoning is apparent as we now see “social justice” preached, taught, and practiced throughout modern Catholic and Protestant churches, not to mention much of secular culture.

The problem with this, I argue is twofold. First off there is no such thing as social justice. Justice cannot be achieved by addressing people as groups instead of as individuals. Secondly, taking Biblical teachings and instructions meant to apply to individuals and applying them to collectives distorts the very message Jesus Christ tought. I will support this with reason, logic, and the some of the very scriptures the social justice believers try to justify their belief with below.

Point number one is that there is no such thing as social justice.

It is almost damning to academia that this flaw is so reflexively brushed aside even though the logic is unavoidable. Any attempt to achieve justice that demands something of one group of people in order to give it to another cannot in any way be just, since the individual members of the group effectively being punished are being punished for no fault of their own. They didn't decide to be born into a privileged ethnicity or gender, and in the case of those who are rich, all of them didn't get there by making morally bad decisions. While some may welcome the collective's efforts to help the less fortunate by taking things from them, some may not and for good reasons, demanding respect for individual human dignity not being the least. Put simply social justice policies of forcing people to share, especially through governmental actions, inevitably commit injustices on some individuals at least and since justice cannot be injustice, there is no such thing as “social justice”.

The common argument from academia against this clear logic is that people in privileged groups benefit from injustices and thus are in fact culpable. This is also the argument terrorists use to justify blowing up civilians. Most civil societies do not however consider the merchant who sold food to a criminal an accessory to whatever crimes he committed. They usually don't even consider the criminal's dependent children to be accessories. So how is the rich oriental man culpable for the poor black woman's misfortune? Simple, he's not, and to tax him more or to make it harder for his kids to get into a college is plainly the opposite of justice. There is no such thing as “social justice” since it is in fact inevitably unjust.

Point number two is that social justice distorts the Christian message of compassion it claims to be part of.

For this point I will lean heavily on the Christian message itself, as I should, and I'll begin with what I call the key to it all. Our Lord referred to it as the greatest two commandments.

Mark 12:30-31 ~Jesus
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”

These two commandments are about three things, God, ourselves, and others. They pretty effectively show the emphasis of Christ's message and ministry. First we are told to love God with our all, and what is entailed and detailed out as that tells us something, "your heart", "your soul", "your mind", "your strength". None of those things are properties or responsibilities of any collective. Of the four, three are only aspects of individuals. Only strength could also be something beyond our immediate self. The other three are so clearly individual that they are often seen as synonymous with singularity.

The second commandment then ties our love for others inseparably with our love for ourselves. The absence of the collective in this becomes almost obvious if one asks one of the most obvious questions. That is, 'how do I love myself?'. Do I give control of my resources to someone else so they can look after me when I'm fully capable of doing it myself? No. I want my dignity. Therefore if I am to love others as myself I must do it whenever possible with the utmost respect for them and myself. I should whenever possible and/or practical do it personally, directly, as one individual to another. And when I can't do it directly and instead make use of some in-between service, I should do it of my own volition, not through force of law or even in response to some community born sense of oughtness. It should always be my choice, a moral obligation perhaps, but never a legal or in any way a coerced one.

Now the implications I draw here from just two verses, as important and key as they may be to the entirety of the Christian message, may be countered by the throngs of Christian leaders and teachers who insist that “social justice” can be found all over the scriptures. So much so that some have claimed if we cut out all support for “social justice” from the Bible we wouldn't have very much left. But not to worry. I can brush this throng aside, not with a premature reflex but with reason. I don't even have to use the trump card I established earlier, that there logically is no such thing as “social justice”. I can use the very scriptures they claim support it.

One of the favorites of these areas of scriptures they claim support “social justice” is the Beatitudes, found in Matthew 5:3-10. They are as follows (NIV translation). There are eight of them so I numbered them accordingly.

(1) “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
(2) Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
(3) Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.
(4) Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.
(5) Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.
(6) Blessed are the pure of heart,
for they shall see God.
(7) Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.
(8) Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

There is little if any serious scholarly claim that “the poor in spirit”mentioned in the first beatitude are anything other than the humble. Humility, I should add, is an extremely important goal set in Christian teaching and should always be pursued by Christians, as difficult as that may be. “Humility, like a rose, once grasped ...” I was taught while getting my masters. So in my humble yet educated opinion (oops there goes the rose) the only beatitude here that could have anything directly to do with what the throng would call “social justice” is the third one.

This however is very problematic for them because that part about “they shall inherit the earth” seems a bit more grand than receiving unemployment compensation. I suppose they could argue I'm just being difficult in interpreting it as quite so grand, but look at it in the context of the first and second beatitudes. " The kingdom of heaven"? And those who mourn "will be comforted"? What will comfort those who mourn short of God fixing the problem of death itself? All of the remedies seem pretty clearly to be of a divine source, not a human one and certainly not a collective or social source.  So why would a task for the human collective be thrown into the middle of list of things only the divine can achieve?

As for the other verses the throng may point to, I have read them and I could fill a book explaining each away, but I would just be wasting space and time re-hashing the same few effective refutations of their interpretations. They all come down to this.

All of these verses that they say refer to groups and communities either refer to God, as in the beatitudes, or to individual moral obligations to other individuals as they encounter them, not the actions or policies of communities or governments.  The strongest support the “social justice” throng has is from the prophets where God chastises Israel for its treatment of the poor and needy, but if one reads on in each case God blesses individuals who made the right choices. If the principle of “social justice” were applied, no one would have been spared His wrath. Instead in each case it is individual responsibility and God's power and intent to bless that comes out as the true theme, not something called “social justice”.

As a Christian I believe God deserves our all and we are instructed to give Him that. In all that He has done and tells us through the scriptures He will do, He is ultimately and primarily concerned with individual relationships with him and others. Yes, He did work out part of His plan through a nation, Israel, but Israel failed because of the inability of humanity to obey the law even through a national effort and ultimately, both as evidenced in the prophets and in the New Testament, God holds individuals responsible for their decisions. In all of His punishments towards Israel He always either spared certain individuals or spared larger groups for the sake of individuals, and it was because of the choices they made, not the groups they were a member of.

Jesus came to make it possible for individuals to have personal relationships with God and this good god commands us to love others as we love ourselves. We are therefore called to empower others as individuals to be able to choose what the nature of their relationships with God will be. There can be no coercion of any kind, no legal or social pressure in this. Only persuasion in an atmosphere of respect for individual dignity and free will. If at any point we drop the element of individual choice from this we become disobedient to His commandment to love others as ourselves and in turn to love God with our entire being.

This is not just true in bringing people to Christ. The Church universal is not one thing on the outside and the opposite on the inside. Christian character continues to be a matter of individual and not corporate decisions. It is individual Christians' relationships with God and other individuals that are most important, not their commitments to communities.

For the Christian community social justice is worse than heresy, for unlike heresies that distort our perception of the nature of God, social justice diminishes our roles as individuals both in helping and receiving help, and worst of all causes us to be disobedient to God's commandments, most notably the two Jesus told us were the greatest. Our brothers and sisters in Christ who teach social justice need interventions where we take them aside in a loving manner and show them the errors of their ways. If they reject our correction and insist on continuing to teach social justice we should send them on their way without us. Tough medicine, I know, but in these critical days where the church universal is so infected, it's high time we took it.