The Church and Race: Ron Highfield

Background

Two open letters addressing racial injustice were recently published in the Christian Chronicle:

• An open letter to members of the Churches of Christ -ministers, scholars and thought leaders within the fellowship
• Speaking Up on the Issue of Race in America – from Harold Shank and Robert Solomon

These were accompanied by an article including interviews with some of the authors.

The letters were, of course, inspired by the current controversy regarding the Black Lives Matter movement.

Ron Highfield

Ron Highfield is a professor of religion at Pepperdine University. He’s working on a book about Christianity and social justice. Today, he posted an article making a couple of points that fit well with the current theme, although not specifically about race: “Is Social Justice Ministry a Substitute Gospel?”

Highfield is no rightwing, legalist opposed to social justice. In fact, he has quite a strong history in social justice. And he’s quite the thinker. Some of his work has been extensively reviewed by Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed. Smart theologians read Highfield.

Regarding social justice, Highfield suggests that there are three ways we might do it.

First, we might seek justice for ourselves. This is hardly wrong but neither is it particularly Christian. The pagans also seek justice for themselves.

Second, we may seek justice for others, but this path is fraught with danger.

To engage in this mode of justice you must possess some qualities the oppressed do not possess. You cannot be powerless and oppressed yourself. You have to possess power or you cannot help those without it. And you cannot be a member of the oppressed group or you would not be seeking justice for others but for yourself. You cannot seek justice for the poor if you are poor or the vulnerable fatherless if you are vulnerable and fatherless. This distinction between those who have status to seek justice for others and those for whom they seek it makes the activity of seeking justice morally ambiguous. … We must distinguish ourselves from those we aim to help. We have power, wealth, and status, and they don’t. Hence our compassion for the victim can easily transform into relief that we are not victims, not poor, not powerless. A root of disdain springs to life.

Additionally, it is easy to forget the people we are trying to help and get caught up in the noble, heroic cause of justice and the feelings of self-importance it engenders. … Seeking justice makes plenty of room for a condescending attitude on the part of the justice seeker. It would be ironic indeed if in seeking justice we grow to despise the very ones for whom we seek it.

One more irony: justice seekers often attempt to awaken and mobilize the oppressed to resent and hate their oppressors. We make seeking justice for oneself a holy task, a moral obligation, and a virtuous act. In so doing, justice seekers remake the oppressed in the image of their oppressors. It is an infallible rule that we become like what we hate.

These are very unfamiliar thoughts. I mean, I thought that by seeking justice for others, that God would surely be good with my actions, that my parents would be proud, that my college application or job resume would look stronger, and my congregation would affirm my value.

And yet Highfield says that by using my own privilege to serve others, I risk so segregating myself from the others that I can’t stand them and they can’t stand me. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is very easy for “the poor” to become an abstraction. I love the poor, but not John, the poor person who begs for money outside my office.

A third approach is to “do justice.”

You can seek justice for others for less than noble reasons and you can remain deeply self-centered while doing it. But doing justice is an altogether different matter. I do justice when I submit all my actions in relation to God and others to the test of the right. Doing justice requires that I renounce all self-judgment and reject all actions that privilege my desires, my supposed rights, over others. We do justice when we do the right thing whether it is in harmony with our interests or not. The foundation for doing justice is loving justice more than you love yourself; and the foundation for loving justice more than yourself is loving your neighbor as you love yourself. How can we claim to seek justice for others when we don’t act justly in all our relationships? And how can we seek true justice for ourselves when we turn a blind eye to the injustice we do to others? Perhaps, if we will concentrate our hearts on doing justice in all our acts, we will be better able to seek justice for others. And if we focus on doing justice we might not be so insistent on seeking justice for ourselves.

(bold is mine).

So, to me, a white church in a racially mixed community does not act justly in all its relationships — or else it would be a racially mixed church. Something about that church communicates to the Christians in the area that only white Christians are welcome. And this is a form of injustice. How does a predominantly white church communicate that it wishes to be a more just church?

Highfield summarizes his conclusions in terms that sound much like Hauerwas, Yoder, Nugent, Thompson, etc. —

[T]he shift to social justice as the church’s primary outreach to the world also distorts the mission of the church. I see three obvious ways this distortion takes place.

(1) The social justice model possesses a strong tendency to play down the need for individual repentance, faith, and conversion. The evil it aims to address is socially systemic injustice rather than personal sin. It views the human problem as rooted in its racist, sexist, colonialist, homophobic, environmentally exploitative, plutocratic, etc., social structures rather than in each person’s idolatry, ignorance, and rebellion against God. Or, it engages in relieving poverty, homelessness, human trafficking, etc. without engaging in evangelism and establishing churches.

(2) It tends to blur the line between the kingdom of God and the world. It allows the church to become an adjunct to the world, functioning as a social agency devoted to ameliorating the world’s ills. Christianity, originally understood as the present, supernatural manifestation of the future reign of God, is transformed into an ideology whose value is based on its usefulness in support of social activism. Christians working for social justice are tempted to root their identity more in a cause held in common with nonbelievers than with a cause exclusive to believers.

(3) It tends to utopianism, that is, the naive view that we can bring about the kingdom of God on earth by dent of human effort. It seeks to cure human sin by reorganizing social structures or meeting bodily needs.

(paragraphing modified)

Amen.

It’s not that we shouldn’t care about the oppression and suffering of the poor outside the Kingdom. Rather, Highfield’s point is that we need to view such things in terms of the Christian worldview — in terms of sin and the reign of God through his Kingdom and atonement through the cross of Christ and the transformative work of the Spirit. It’s too easy to think in worldly terms when social justice is discussed. A clear sign of worldliness is when we propose a solution that doesn’t involve God, Jesus, or the Spirit. We then become humanists.

Now, apply this principle to the Black Lives Matter controversy. How does the work of God, Jesus, and the Spirit speak to the injustice being suffered in the black community? (And sometimes it really is injustice.) The church has only one solution to offer — and yet we have no confidence in that solution. We just don’t see how Jesus is the answer.

In fact, we seem to seriously doubt whether Jesus is powerful enough even to heal the racial divide within the Churches of Christ! No wonder we turn to other solutions for the racial divide in our communities.