Social Justice, The Traditional Anti-Pelagian Praxis Of The Church

The natural law, when whittled down to its most basic form, is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The way this is presented must not be seen as an excuse to disconnect the love of God from the love of humanity, so that we can say we love God and neglect our neighbor. Rather, it must be understood that they interconnect and join together to present the one and only law, the law of love. This is why the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, wrote, “The way that we relate to God (in heaven) cannot be separated either form the way we treat other human beings or from our treatment of the natural environment (the earth). To disconnect the two would amount to nothing less than hypocrisy.”[2]

Those who repudiate social justice remove an intricate element of the church’s moral teaching, that of the proper treatment and respect to be shown to other persons, and so can be said to deny the whole of the law. This is why St. Basil, commenting upon Jesus’ conversation with a rich young man,  was able to say that those who do not truly love their neighbor as themselves have forsaken the whole law, and unless they allow themselves to be corrected, they will not be able to enter the kingdom of God, for the kingdom of God follows the truth in love and so makes all love one seamless love for all. “Although you say you have not murdered, or committed adultery, or stolen, or borne false witness against another, you make all this diligence of no account by not adding what follows, which is the only way you will be able to enter the Kingdom of God.”[3]

Social justice follows from and serves the common good which flows out of the teachings of Christ, the teachings which find themselves to be condensed into two ways we are meant to engage love. Scholastic writers saw a reflection of this in the way the so-called Ten Commandments were written out on two tablets, one which focused on God and our relationship with God, and the other on community, and the basic forms of justice which are expected to form the social bonds which are the foundation for any civic institution. We form one humanity, which is then divided into many different communities, nations, and states, but all those divisions should not be meant to create absolute division and remove anyone from the good which should be shown to all humanity, but rather, they are to be relative or conventional divisions which help us map out the ways we can interact with each other; we must not absolutize the divisions, for when we do, then we divide humanity and destroy it from within, following then the path of sin instead of love, for sin whittles away and destroys being while love opens it up and allows it to transcend itself into something greater.

If the way some treated social justice were examined within the domain of grace, it would be easy to show how Pelagian the ideology is and why it is insufficient for society. For we are expected to cooperate with grace, but we are not to think ourselves of capable of doing all things ourselves. What we do is important, but we are more than what we do thanks to grace, and without grace, we would be spiritually impoverished indeed. All those who demean the impoverished and say they should earn their way up the social ladder must see that their judgment against the poor will be rendered back to them in their spiritual poverty. They will be able to work their way up the spiritual ladder without “hand-outs,” and so if they realize how they are able to get out of spiritual poverty is through a “hand up,” then they must realize the practical ramification of this in the material sphere. Those who are impoverished will never be able to work their way out of poverty without society working for them, giving them economic grace, because the debt they find themselves it will undermine all their accomplishment and destroy them as they try to rise up entirely on their own. Social justice, therefore, is merely the continuation of the way of grace and how it works, bringing the spiritual grace into action into the social sphere, and to deny it is to deny the reality of the human condition itself, a reality which is we cannot do all things ourselves.

The Church, therefore, rightfully proclaims: “Christian love leads to denunciation, proposals and a commitment to cultural and social projects; it prompts positive activity that inspires all who sincerely have the good of man at heart to make their contribution. Humanity is coming to understand ever more clearly that it is linked by one sole destiny that requires joint acceptance of responsibility, a responsibility inspired by an integral and shared humanism.”[4] This is what social justice is about. It is about love, and since God is a God of love, social justice must forever be a core teaching of the Christian faith.

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[1] St. Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah in Jerome: Commentary on Isaiah; Origen: Homilies 1-9 on Isaiah. trans. Thomas P. Check (New York: The Newman Press, 2015), 707.

[2] Patriarch Bartholomew, Encountering the Mystery (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 147.

[3] St. Basil, “To the Rich” in On Social Justice. trans. C. Paul Schroeder (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009), 42.

[4] Pontifical Council For Justice and Peace, Compendium of The Social Doctrine of the Church (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2005), 2.

 

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