The eCrozier

By and large, Christians understand brokenness in our culture from two different vantage points. More liberal Christians tend to see brokenness as primarily caused by social justice failures prevalent throughout our culture. More conservative Christians usually focus on individual brokenness (sinfulness) as the problem arguing we need to call people to repent of their personal character flaws so we can get things right in the culture. Both are correct, although neither side rarely acknowledges the truth the other side holds. The social and personal are so intertwined that trying to separate them is more confusing than helpful. Does social injustice lead to personal brokenness? I think history bears that out. Does personal sinfulness set in motion social injustices? Again, I think history proves it does. We create a false dilemma when we try to disconnect these rather than see them both as woven together in a complex whole.

As an example, let’s consider the issue of (dis)honesty. Laws help make dishonest folk behave better than their personal characters. Even crooks don’t want to be robbed by other crooks. So within limits, honesty can be enforced by having crooks watch each other. But as we learned from Prohibition, laws alone do little good unless they reflect community standards. For laws against corruption to work, most individuals must have an honest character. So how do we get honest persons unless we have an honest society to produce them? Likewise, how do we get an honest society unless we have honest persons to produce it? Which comes first the chicken or the egg? Society produces corrupt individuals. But it’s also true that corrupt individuals produce a corrupt society.

Jesus saw the personal and the social as a seamless whole. Some people might say to Jesus about the current president: “Jesus, tell him to repent of his lying.” Jesus, I believe, would reply as he did in Luke 12 where a man comes to him and says: “Teacher, bid my brother to divide our inheritance with me.” But Jesus replies: “Who made me a divider or judge over you? Life does not consist in the abundance of money and power; repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Jesus went way beyond our focus on the personal or the social, about souls or laws. He called people into something later called “the church” so they could daily repent and thus become just, compassionate, and merciful people. Jesus called people into community for repentance and discipleship.

It’s odd how different Jesus’s approach is from how we seem to go about it. We want to change society for the better (and we should), but we try to do it almost entirely through voting, lobbying, or a rant on social media. Thus, we’ve given up on changing people and we’ve settled for trying to change the government. How odd? We want to convert the government instead of the people. We’re probably the first people ever who hope to have virtues like mercy, compassion, and justice expressed in our government without having virtuous people who embody them. How could anyone imagine that corrupt people could produce honest government? No, the reality is that corrupt people produce corrupt governments, just as corrupt governments produce corrupt people. Our present circumstance bears out that truth. It’s time to follow Jesus and call ourselves and others to repentance and discipleship.

+Scott