Full Disclosure: Justice and Evangelism Together – by George R. Hunsberger

Evangelism and justice—strange bedfellows, many would assume. Or perhaps, estranged lovers in a war for the loyalties of their children (i.e., all of us who bear the name of the Christ). In any case, a vision that sees them as symbiotic is hard to come by. Somehow, the forces that would pry them apart have worked only too well. Each is damaged as a result.

If it matters to the church that we are defined by our calling to follow in the way of Jesus, fulfilling the mission of God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, then we must pick up the broken pieces and find their wholeness once again. I suggest that a seriously biblical approach to either of these agendas leads directly and inevitably to the other. In fact, each one is the other.

Just Evangelism

Consider evangelism, for example. If, as the word implies, it has to do with communicating the good news announced in the Gospels, then it can only be by some selective blindness that it can be conceived to have nothing to do with justice. In recent decades, evangelism has gotten for itself a bad name precisely because of the reductionism that sees the gospel’s good news in highly individualized terms. What is emphasized is one’s personal relationship with God, one’s assurance of forgiveness in Christ, and one’s hope for the future, before but especially beyond death. That form of gospel struggles even to reckon with the New Testament’s sense that salvation is about the formation of the church, the people of God, to be the token of the new humanity God is making. Farther from its grasp is the recognition that the good news in the Gospels is fundamentally, and from beginning to end, an announcement about the life of the whole world and its destiny. And that touches directly on justice in the social fabric of the world.

To do justice (yes, double meaning intended) to the proclamation of the New Testament, then, we have to go back to the four Gospels. In them, we find our best clues in the way Jesus himself announced what he called the ‘good news.’ His public life and presence were oriented to this one theme: “The reign of God is at hand. Turn around and believe this good news.”  That central message was intended then and is intended still today to call to mind all that the Jews of Jesus’ day remembered of the promises of God to Israel and through Israel to all the nations. The words of Israel’s prophets echo over and over in the Gospels: there comes a time when justice, peace and joy comes in full shalom. Whether from the lips of Mary and Zachariah, the anticipations of John the Baptizer, the obedient echoes of Jesus’ message as pairs of disciples moved among the villages, the news was that in the person of Jesus the reign of God was coming upon the world. And when it comes, destructive powers are overturned, the plight of the poor and oppressed is avenged, and inequities are righted.

The Gospel writers themselves noted that the news was being announced in a world in which Augustus was Caesar, Herod was King, and Jesus was a political threat needing to be eliminated. Precisely there, the reign of God was coming. In the end, the resurrection of Jesus acclaims that this one who was crucified by power is in fact the one in whom all divine authority resides, forever claiming the trust and loyalty of all the warring peoples of the earth. The world is being made new by the Spirit of God.

For evangelism, then, it is this gospel of the vision and plans of God that begs to be announced.  The gospel Jesus preached about in his hometown synagogue was this: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). Even when it comes down to a conversation with an individual person, it is necessary to make clear that there is good news for that person because there is good news here for the life and future of the whole world.

Honest Justice

By the same token, any faithful Christian act in the pursuit of justice and peace among the peoples of the earth must be acknowledged to be an ‘evangelic’ act. For anyone, Christian or otherwise, visions of what justice requires and what fosters peace do not come from nowhere. They are always located visions. That is to say, they have arisen in some particular linguistic-cultural territory and they therefore are framed by particular sets of assumptions conditioned by that place and time. Call it my postmodern sensibility, or simply the implications of the church’s missionary encounters with the plurality of human cultures, there is no neutral place to stand. Much as one might hold some belief that there is genuinely some universal notion of justice, it has to be acknowledged in the end that such a belief itself is conditioned by some tradition of human perception. In conversations about justice, whether within any one of the human traditions or between and among them, the plurality of particular mooring points is at play. It is best acknowledged to be so, instead of ignoring the fact. Presumptions, coercions, or hopes to the contrary, it is the nature of humanity’s shared life that we navigate our major concerns in a dialogue of particularities.

What does this say about the nature of Christian participation in public conversation about how best to envision and pursue justice and peace in our world? First, we do so with the full recognition that like all others, we—whichever portion of the global church we happen to be—are located within the “webs of significance” (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures) our own culture provides. We know that shapes how we tend to think about justice or peace. Knowing it, we freely acknowledge it is so in our public discourse.

But in addition, we acknowledge that something else is also true.  We are among those in our own place and time that have been grasped by the good news we’ve come to know about Jesus Christ, and that news has been at work in us to reframe how we see things. The scriptural narrative that “renders accessible to us the character, actions, and purposes of God” (Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks) is the particular grounding for anything we may commend on matters touching the life of the world. This is, in a sense, a gospeled particularity within a cultural one—a particularity within a particularity. As much as our cultural location must be acknowledged, this particularity also demands to be acknowledged. We might be tempted to conduct ourselves otherwise, as though this were not the case, as though we are simply being objective with respect to a notion of justice we presume everybody shares. But that will not erase the effects of the particularities involved. Better to own them and acknowledge them in as particular a way as possible.

In that way, whether we offer a critique of injustices inherent within the present regimes of the world (formal or otherwise), or make proposals toward a more just social order, it comes in the form of full disclosure and honesty. We do this in an effort to convey as faithfully as we can the implications of this evangel, this good news, the news that the just and peace-filled reign of God promised for the world’s future has broken in already in Jesus Christ. We claim no other ground than that. We humbly invite others to consider what this biblical vision suggests, even if they do not embrace this Christian faith, suggesting (and hoping) that they may find ground in their own religious or cultural frame to see things similarly. So there is room for, and in fact the necessity of, the practice of dialogue in our concern for justice and peace. Honest dialogue means acknowledging as fully as we know how the framing vision that guides our proposals. In other words, in our action toward justice, we identify the gospel out of which it grows.

Mark Labberton, in his book The Dangerous Act of Worship, puts evangelism and justice together in a particularly vivid way. It is his fundamental assertion that worship and justice are inseparably linked. In worship, we come to know more and more that this God whom we worship and praise is a God whose greatest passion is for justice. Worshipping such a God cannot but affect us. It plays us out into the world’s life as those who, having worshipped such a God as this, have become more and more mirror images of what this God is like. We move with God’s passions, making God-like responses in the face of injustices, and we gladly honor this God in the midst of it. The patterns of worship and justice in the church’s life are not alien to each other, but embedded in each other.