Did Jesus Preach Social Justice?

Nope. 
{Editors’ Note: We have informed David that his post must be longer than one word. What follows is his reluctant compliance with our request that he explain himself.}
 
Alright, I guess I can elaborate. The key to understanding my point is to see the distinction between justice and love (I know: if distinctions were cholesterol, all of us academic types would die young).
 

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‘Justice’ means (in this post and conventionally) something like the administration of what is just: the impartial settling of conflicts between people, the granting of merited rewards, and the meting out of deserved punishment. It is giving folks their just deserts. I get that some people often want the word to have a more positive sense, something like ‘healing,’ ‘restoration,’ or ‘communion.’ I think it is best to avoid this.
 
For one thing, even if we would want to talk about something more positive and holistic, we still need a word that means the more limited thing that has traditionally been called ‘justice.’ I think ‘justice’ is the best choice to be that word. As someone who studies moral theory, I find it important to be able to mean one thing by ‘justice’ and something more with other words. It matters to me that there is something like justice we can require from government, the police, etc. and it gets sloppy to include too much into this requirement. Justice as I mean it can be a legislative goal in a way that ‘healing’ or ‘communion’ cannot be (though the government can clear the way for these things).
 
‘Love’ has even more meanings, from a warm feeling in your gut to a tennis score. I use it here to mean something like selfless or self-sacrificing benevolence and care for others.
 
So, what’s ‘social justice’? Just as in the case of generic justice above, people often mean something holistic and positive when they say ‘social justice,’ something like “care for poor people” or “racial reconciliation.” However, I think the best way for us to understand the term is simply as the extension of justice to relations between groups and classes. This is important for the same reasons I listed above: we need a term that means justice between social groups and we need to be able to talk about it as a legislative aim. ‘Social justice,’ then, is when group relations are just and fair, with groups giving and receiving what they deserve. For example, U.S. federal housing policies in the 1930s to the 1960s were socially unjust because they prevented African Americans from getting homes as a social class. Inequitable funding of public schools today is another good example of something socially unjust. Collusion among employers to keep wages low in a community is another. Any time one group of people uses its power to take advantage of another group, it is a social injustice. Thus, 'social justice' as a political goal is best understood, in my mind, as the pursuit of legislative solutions to these types of injustices.  It is not love, self-sacrifice, or altruism between groups. Those other things may motivate some of us to pursue social justice, but it gets confusing if we use the term 'social justice' to mean something more than justice.   
 
So, did Jesus teach us to pursue social justice, as I’ve just defined it? No. I’m convinced that the commands of Jesus go far beyond mere justice.
 
Jesus teaches us not to assert our rights, but to sacrifice our claims to justice. When someone asks you for your coat, justice is getting to keep your coat, but Jesus tells us to give away our shirt as well. We are to turn the other cheek, to give sacrificially, and to think of others rather than ourselves. We are to give others far more than what justice requires of us. If we extrapolate this to a society, Christians are to form an ideal community governed by love between groups. A nation where everyone lived out Jesus’s commands perfectly and from the internal motivation of selfless love—impossible in our world of sin—would soar high above simple social justice. It would not need to worry about justice in terms of class, race, and sex because there would be no conflicts along those lines. In short, Jesus preaches love, not mere justice, and a community governed by Christ's teaching would not need political solutions to social injustices.
 
We must remember, of course, that Jesus does not teach us to expect love to find success as a principle of government amid the powers and principalities of this world. He says that we’ll know we are following his commands well, not when the conflicts of this world fade away into a kingdom of peace, but when we are hated and persecuted. The church is to expect more and more resistance and violence from the world the closer it comes to living out Christ’s words. While his love commands represent a political—and not just interpersonal—ideal, his is not a legislative vision we are taught to expect to work as a way to govern nation states in the here and now.
 
We can see that this is true if we try to imagine what it would look like for the government to enforce laws mandating we live the way Jesus tells us to. Imagine it passed laws requiring selfless, sacrificial love of enemies. How would that actually work? What if you sued someone for taking your jacket and the law required you give your shirt as well? This is not a plausible way for government to function. When we come together to form governments, we hope, at best, for the enforcement of justice, not love. Love cannot be coerced. Dr. King recognized this when he wrote that, “the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.”  Governments cannot bring love, but we rely on them for justice.
 
‘Social justice,’ then, is a goal suited for governments, and falls short of the goals of the Kingdom of God. When conservative critics say that a political platform of social justice is not what Jesus taught, they are exactly right. Jesus certainly never said, “Go forth into the world and use the power of the government to tax certain groups to fund programs to help others.”
 
But what does this really mean?
 
We have to remember that Jesus not only does not tell us to tax the rich to help the poor; he never tells us to vote for any sort of taxes, low or high, on the rich or on the poor, whether to pay for infrastructure, national defense, schools, or police. Yes, it is true that he does not tell us to use social welfare programs to help the poor, but he does not tell us to use trickle-down economics or tax breaks for “job creators” to help them either. Jesus does not give any explicit instructions for how to wield the power of the government as voting citizens in a modern democracy.
 
The thick, red line to cross when translating Jesus’s words into something that you can vote for is the decision that you can vote at all, even though Jesus never tells us to use the government for our ends. Once you’ve decided that your Christian convictions allow you to try to shape the power of government in favor of your views, even to shrink it, you are already doing something Jesus does not mention; the “Jesus does not teach social justice” argument no longer works. That he doesn’t mention voting does not mean we can’t do it, of course; he never tells us to eat cheese or go for walks on the beach, either. Not telling us to do something is not the same as telling us not to do it.
 
You might say, “yes, but Jesus commands a different strategy to help the poor. He says it is the church’s job to help them. He never says the government should do it.” That is a true statement. Of course, Jesus also says we are to be peacemakers. You could just as easily (and with just as much scriptural basis) say “it is the church’s job to make peace, not the government’s” and oppose the public funding of police. It is hard to say how you could oppose government social programs because the church is supposed to do the social work, and still support the existence of police or a military.

Thus, while Jesus does not give us instructions for legislating social justice, there is also nothing special about social justice as a political aim that would prevent Christians from pursuing it. 

That is what I meant with my “nope” at the beginning: Christians on the left should make sure they never reduce Jesus’s ethics to mere justice, social or otherwise. Jesus requires service and sacrifice from us that goes beyond justice. On the other hand, Christians from the right should not use this as a reason to think Christians should not support government efforts for social justice. That argument, as I've argued, would undermine all political participation by Christians equally. If you think we can participate in politics, then you should think we at least can do so for social justice ends (though you may have some other reason to think we shouldn’t).
 
All I’ve argued in this post that social justice does not equal or exhaust Jesus’s ethical teachings, but that it is still a permissible political goal for Christians. My next post will make the case that there is, in fact, good reason for Christians to pursue social justice as a political aim.