★★★★★ 5
It argues for the reasons for helping the poor and provides ways to do so with helpful examples.
Format: Kindle
In Chapter 1 “What is Doing Justice?” Keller says just as tithe is the right or due of the priests, the poor and needy have rights to have their needs met. Any neglect shown to their needs is not called merely a lack of mercy or charity but a violation of justice. The Bible introduces God as a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows (Psalm 68:4-5). Giving justice and defending to the poor and weak is one of the main things he does in the world. He identifies with the powerless and takes up their cause. Because most of the oppressed are those who are poor and powerless, God gives them particular attention and has a special place in his heart for them. Justice is more than merely giving the poor small, perfunctory gifts, but turning the their life to a life of delight. Justice includes generosity.
In Chapter 2 “Justice and the Old Testament” Keller says Jesus has fulfilled the ceremonial laws of Moses, including clean laws of touching, diet, dress; sacrificial system and temple worship ordinances. However, the basic principles in the Old Testament remain the same. Christ only changed the way in which Christians exhibit their holiness and offer their sacrifices. Today, people are required to offer God their entire lives as sacrifices (Romans 12:1-2), as well as the sacrifices of worship to God and the sharing of their resources with others (Hebrews 13:5). Although the Bible does not guarantee that no one will ever fall into poverty, God promises that He will richly bless His people so that if they are kind and good to the needy around them by being openhanded and freely lending everything he needs, there would not be a poor man among them, that no one will suffer from permanent, long-term poverty. The money we have is as much a gift of God as the manna was a gift to the Israelites in the desert. The Biblical laws for the use of land criticize the statism that disregards the precious treasure of personal rootage as well as the untrammeled individualism which secures individuals at the expense of community. The three causes of poverty, according to the Bible are oppression, calamity, and personal moral failure. Taken in isolation no one factor – government programs, public policy, calls to personal responsibility, or private charity – is sufficient to address the problem.
In Chapter 3 “What did Jesus Say About Justice?” Keller says Jesus wants his followers to be profoundly generous to the poor, spending more money on them than on the rich and the friends. Genuine concern for the poor is not a means of getting salvation but rather the sign that you already have salvation. Whatever a person does to the poor is done to Jesus. The Bible sees sexual immorality and material selfishness as both flowing from self-centeredness rather than God-centeredness. Gospel preaching that targets some sins but not the sins of oppression cannot work among most people in the world, people who are poor peasants and workers. Our first responsibility is to our own families and relations (1 Timothy 5:8), and our second responsibility is to other members of the community of faith (Galatians 6:10). However, our responsibility also includes doing good to all people, including strangers such as foreigners.
In Chapter 4 “Justice and Your Neighbor” Keller says Jesus said that loving God and neighbor is the way to get eternal life. To this, the expert in the law asked who his neighbor is. Using the story of good Samaritan, Jesus says that anyone in need is our neighbor. We should not refuse to help others by saying that they are not yet in extreme poverty because we would not wait until we are in extreme poverty before doing something to alleviate our suffering. We should not say I cannot help anyone because we mean I cannot help anyone without burdening myself, cutting in to how I live my life. We should not refuse to help others because they are ungrateful and wicked because Jesus saved us not even though we are ungrateful and evil people. We should not refuse to help the poor who fell into poverty because of their own selfish, indolent, or violent behavior unless they continue in those evils. Even if they do persist in the same evil, we should still help the family members of those evil people. Jesus is the great Samaritan who came down and saved us out of his compassion on us, the spiritually dead.
In Chapter 5 “Why Should We Do Justice?” Keller says two basic motivations for doing justice that the Bible gives are first joyful awe before the goodness of God’s creation and second the experience of God’s grace in redemption. The fact that humans are created in the image of God shows that every human being deserves respect. God gave to humans management and authority over the earth but not the ownership. God gave the poor the right to receive favor and good will from the rich as the rich have received favor and good will from God. A person who experienced of God’s grace can no longer have pride and haughtiness and aloofness toward the poor.
In Chapter 6 “How should we do justice?” Keller says doing justice requires constant, sustained reflection and circumspection, thinking through how to do justice in every area of life.Vulnerable people need multiple levels of help. Keller call these layers relief, development, and social reform. Relief is direct aid to meet immediate physical, material, and economic needs. Development is giving an individual, family, or entire community what they need to move beyond dependency on relief into a condition of economic self-sufficiency. When John Perkins explained his philosophy of ministry, he always named three basic factors. One he called “relocation,” though others have called it “reneighboring a community.” This means the helper should live within the community and thus have firsthand knowledge of the needs of the neighborhood and real accountability to the residents. Perkins also spoke of “redistribution,” something others have called “reweaving a community.” This means that financial capital, social capital, and spiritual capital that are invested into the community should stay within the community for the benefit of the community. By “financial capital,” we of course mean the ability to attract businesses that not only provide goods for customers, but also keep wealth and financial capital in the community itself. By “social capital,” Perkins meant the training and retaining of local leadership. “Spiritual capital” refers to the spiritual and moral influence of the churches in the neighborhood. There is a third important factor in John Perkins’s strategy for rebuilding poor communities. He names it “racial reconciliation.” This includes empowering the resident of poor communities to control their own destiny as well as inviting professional helpers from outside to play a role. The new bonds with others in Christ are stronger than our relationship to other members of our own racial and national groups. The gospel gives believers critical distance from their own culture, enabling them to critique their own cultural idols. When these new insights are established in the consciousness of a Christian, a church, and a community, the resulting unity of relationships becomes both a means to reneighboring and reweaving and a direct witness to the world of the reality of the gospel. Besides relief and development (both individual and corporate) there is social reform. Social reform moves beyond the relief of immediate needs and dependency and seeks to change the conditions and social structures that aggravate or cause that dependency. Doing justice and generosity should not be the means to evangelism nor be considered the same thing as evangelism nor be considered something detracts from evangelism. Instead, they should exist in an asymmetrical, inseparable relationship. Doing justice and generosity is inseparably connected to preaching the gospel because the gospel produces love and concern for the poor and the deeds of justice and generosity give credibility to the preaching of the gospel. In other words, justification by faith leads to doing justice and generosity, and doing justice and generosity make many seek to be justified by faith. The most loving thing anyone can do for one’s neighbor is to help him or her to have a saving faith in God, to have a saving relationship with Him that will result in eternal life with Him. Christian church, like any other institution or organization, cannot do all things well, and thus should do the work of relief and some development inside and around its community for their own members, neighborhoods and cities and let its members to do the work of development and social reform through appropriate organizations and institutions.
In Chapter 7 “Doing Justice In the Public Square” Keller says there is no consensus on what justice is. People assume the other side know they are simply being unjust, but the reality is nearly everyone thinks they are on justice’s side. Justice is not a matter of common sense because people have differing opinions about what freedom and equality, what things that define justice, are. The causes for which justice is invoked are always matters of deeply held beliefs, rooted in particular view on matters of faith such as human nature, happiness, right, and wrong. There are competing visions of justice in our society which can fall into three categories: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue. Attempt to talk about justice in the supposedly neutral terms of freedom and equality that we can all agree on did not work because our ideas of justice are rooted in views of life that are nonprovable faith assumptions. The forbiddance to bring religious beliefs into public argument has made debate or discourse over normative matters barren, unsatisfying, and shallow. We can’t agree on what justice is because we are not allowed to talk about our underlying beliefs publicly. We are locked in endless disagreement, largely because we live with the illusion that we can achieve moral and religious neutrality. Many great political and influential figures in the past used religious language to argue for their cause. Prohibition of bringing personal morality into public policy is thus absurd. Our law is itself a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Although Christians should not be strident and condemning in their language or attitude, Christians should not be silent about the Biblical roots of their passion for justice. Christians’ work for justice should be characterized by both humble cooperation and respectful provocation. Common grace of God gives skills in science, scholarship, crafts, government, art, and jurisprudence to nonbelievers as well. Christians and non-Christians have common values that can form a connection between them. Believers should let their coworkers know of how the gospel is motivating them, yet also they should appeal to common values as much as possible. At the same time, they should be respectfully provocative with them, arguing that their models of justice are reductionistic and incomplete. Christians should talk about how their beliefs are different than those of non-Christians even if they have the same basic social goals. Valuing things is always based on beliefs about the purposes of life, human nature, right and wrong, all of which are moral and religious. As Aristotle and other Greek philosophers reasoned, unless we can determine what human beings are here for, it is impossible to determine how we should live. Many prominent thinkers and scientists say that human being does not have inherent worth. Therefore, even atheist and agnostic philosophers acknowledge that the concept of human rights requires a religious dimension. Many nonreligious people believe in human dignity and human rights. However, it is just that any such belief is religious in nature.
In Chapter 8 “Peace, Beauty, and Justice” Keller says the Jewish description of the creation is unique in that God created the world as a craftsman or an artisan with much care and planning. God created all things in an interdependent, harmonious relationship to one another. Just as rightly related physical elements form a cosmos, so rightly related human beings form a community, and this interwovenness is what the Bible calls shalom, or harmonious peace. Shalom means peace resulting from right, perfect, and joyful relationship in all dimensions – physical, emotional, social, and spiritual. When there is crime, poverty, and family breakdown, there is no shalom in the society. However, when people share with others, work together for good and functional public services, school, and flouring businesses, the community experiences shalom. Broken relationship with God resulted in war, crime, family breakdown, oppression, injustice, hunger, sickness, aging and physical death. Doing justice means bringing shalom to the community, especially for the poor and the weaker members of the society. Perceiving the goodness of God in His sacrificial love makes doing justice and other things that honor and please God a delight to people. God identifies with the poor not only symbolically but also literally in the incarnation and death of Jesus. He had little the world valued and the little he had was taken. Though He was rich, for the sake of us He became poor, so that we through His poverty might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9).
In section titled “Justice Includes Generosity” in chapter 1, “What is doing Justice?”, the author seems to say that generous giving to the poor is a requirement from God. Mercy, compassion, or charity are not a requirement, but justice is. Therefore, generous giving must be justice, and justice unconditionally includes generous giving. Thus, the author equates justice with generosity or generous giving of time and resources. The author went further by saying that those who do not actively and generously share their resources with the poor are robbers.
I must disagree with what the author said above. When generous giving to the poor or generosity becomes justice, it means the rich have the legal obligation to give to the poor, and the poor have legal right to demand goods from the rich or even take goods from the rich without their knowledge. When the rich accuse the poor of stealing from them, the poor would be able to say “It is justice for us to receive generosity from you. Therefore, it is not stealing but merely exercise of justice and practice of our rights.”
Instead of calling generous giving to the poor justice, I believe generous giving to the poor is a righteousness. It is a righteousness that God demands from the rich. However, God did not give the poor the right to demand or steal from the rich. God merely gave the poor the right to ask for what they need from the rich, and the right to receive from the rich whatever the rich give them. If mercy, compassion, and charity to the poor by the rich are a requirement, an obligation on the part of the rich, some people may argue that generous giving to the poor can no longer be called mercy, compassion, or charity by the rich. I think they have a solid ground to argue that case, but indisputable truth that remains unchanged is that the generous giving to the poor through the rich is mercy, compassion, and charity by God.
The author said, “We do justice when we give all human beings their due as creations of God.” It is equally true to say, “God does justice when He gives all human beings their due as creations of God.” Then when the poor receive goods, or rather when human beings receive life, health, wealth, and peace from God, are they receiving their due from God? If so, human beings do not have to give thanks to God because they are only receiving their due from God and God merely doing what His Justice requires Him to do.
I agree with what Keller said regarding what Christians should do to help the poor. I could feel the enthusiasm he has for helping the poor while reading the book. I also give due respect to the efforts he has made. It seems to me he has done appropriate research for writing on this subject. He has proposed well-thought-out ways to help the poor. His mention of inputs from many other people, particularly those from Abraham Kuyper and John Perkins, were especially helpful. These various inputs helped considering the task of helping the poor in a more balanced and multifaceted way. Most importantly, he has a first-hand experience of helping the poor which gives him invaluable knowledge and know-off from which he can draw and helps him critically assess the benefits and shortcomings of inputs from others. I believe more improvements can be made upon the helping ministry that he and others have built upon. However, due to lack of first-hand experience, it is difficult for me to propose any valuable improvements.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2021
