Excerpts from Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth

"The first commandment, to have no other gods before God, is where any authentically Christian vision of justice begins."

In his recent book Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth, Thaddeus Williams explains that “[j]ustice has been defined for millennia as giving others what is due them.” Williams then makes a startling claim: “Social injustice is first and foremost a matter of misplaced worship.” How is this so? Williams examines Paul’s words in Romans 1 and reaches the following conclusion:

“Refusing to give the Creator the honor and gratitude He is due, we turn and bow to the cosmos. We endow created things with an ultimate value that they are not due. This is a double injustice. We fail to give both the Creator and the creation what they are properly due. In Paul’s language, we ‘exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.’”

Williams then lists countless historical examples of how our misplaced worship results in all manner of tragic evils. Here are just a few:

“The Aztec rulers brutalized and murdered the vulnerable. The conquistadors coveted their neighbors’ gold. They lied to the natives. They raped their wives and daughters. They took them for slaves. They broke a long list of commandments. In breaking those commandments, they broke the first commandment. They had gods before God. They worshiped creation rather than the Creator. The Aztecs bowed to the gods of sun and rain. The conquistadors exalted gold and power. That turn from Creator to creation worship was the first injustice of the Aztecs and conquistadors, the broken command that formed the essential premise and toxic fountainhead of all their other injustices.”

“This tragedy [also] plays out in gruesome detail throughout the Old Testament. Slavery, murder, rape, child abuse, and theft happen when people worship idols instead of God. The first commandment, to have no other gods before God, is where any authentically Christian vision of justice begins. Devalue the original by putting something else in His place and it’s easier to treat the images like garbage.”

“Consider white supremacy. . . . [T]he injustice of white supremacy has a transcendent dimension, something almost no one talks about that keeps us swatting at the bad fruits rather than chopping at the sick roots of racism. It makes race, not God, supreme. It worships and serves created things rather than the Creator. Racism, therefore, is not merely horizontally unjust, depriving other creatures what they are due; it is also vertically unjust, failing to give the Creator His due by making race an ultimate object of devotion.”

Williams then shows why the many human efforts to cure the evils of racism and countless other injustices have failed:

“Paul does not look at the bad fruit of the human tree and the suggest replanting it in the different soil of some new political ideology. Paul knows that the human tree is so hopelessly sick that whatever soil you plant it in, toxic fruit will form. No amount of political revolution, social engineering, or policy tweaking will stop envy, strife, deceit, and maliciousness from sprouting out of our sick hearts. . . .

Why were all the utopias of the modern era doomed to fail? Because the evil did not originate in politics, society, or the economy. It is expressed there, but evil originates in human hearts that ‘exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things’ and the sun and water and gold and sex and power.”

This is why starting with a biblical worldview and a God-centered understanding of justice is so important if we hope to bring about real and lasting justice in our communities, nation, and world. May we take to heart these convicting words from the end of chapter 1:

“Look deep enough underneath any horizontal human-against-human injustice and you will always find a vertical human-against-God injustice, a refusal to give the Creator the worship only the Creator is due. All injustice is a violation of the first commandment.”

Quotes from Thaddeus J. Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth, 13-14, 17-18 (emphasis added throughout).

UPDATE:

I’m four chapters in, and thus far it is one of the best works I have ever read on how to “truly execute justice” (cf. Jeremiah 7:5). Consider these words from the introduction:

“The problem is not with the quest for social justice. The problem is what happens when that quest is undertaken from a framework that is not compatible with the Bible. Today many Christians accept conclusions . . . that are wired with very different presuppositions about reality than those we find in Scripture. *We shirk God’s commands and hurt his image-bearers when we unwittingly allow unbiblical worldview assumptions to shape our approach to justice.* Now is the time to show the watching world just how true, good, and beautiful justice becomes when we are driven by the Creator and His Word” (emphasis added).

Amen. Father, grant me courage to stand on the truth of your Word and wisdom to fight injustice from a truly biblical worldview.