A Theology of Social Action and Justice — Part II

Christian social action did not begin with the modern phrase social justice, the Social Gospel movement, liberation theology, or twentieth-century civil rights activism. From its beginnings, Christianity has wrestled with the social consequences of believing that every person belongs to God, that wealth and power are morally accountable, that the neighbor’s welfare places claims upon the believer, and that allegiance to Christ may require resistance to prevailing institutions.

Yet the history is neither linear nor uniformly admirable. Christians have challenged slavery and defended it, sheltered the poor and accumulated extraordinary wealth, resisted rulers and blessed them, opposed war and sanctified it.

Christian history therefore raises a difficult question: Why has Christian faith formed some believers to resist domination while enabling others to accommodate, defend, or even sanctify it?

That question makes the history of Christian social action more than a procession of admirable reformers. It requires examining competing understandings of discipleship, power, justice, neighbor-love, political authority, and the church’s responsibility within society.

The early church inherited from Israel a theology in which wealth, work, debt, land, political authority, and protection of vulnerable people already belonged within covenant faithfulness. Acts describes communities sharing possessions so that need would not determine a person’s place within the body. By the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom preached sharply about wealth and responsibility to the poor. Their language cannot simply be translated into modern political programs, but neither can it be reduced to private charity. Possession itself carried obligations toward neighbors.[1]

Christianity’s social tradition therefore began long before capitalism, socialism, liberalism, conservatism, or the modern political category of social justice.

Augustine added a realism that remains indispensable. He understood political life within a fallen world shaped by disordered loves and the human libido dominandi—the lust for domination. The earthly city could never become the kingdom of God because no political arrangement could eliminate pride, self-interest, or humanity’s need for grace.

Yet Augustine did not conclude that earthly institutions were morally irrelevant. Political communities could still pursue relative peace, order, and justice. His contribution is therefore both chastening and liberating: Christians should seek justice without imagining that politics can accomplish salvation.[2] No party, nation, economic system, or political movement can simply be identified with the kingdom of God.

Thomas Aquinas developed the tradition further through his account of justice and the common good. He distinguished forms of justice governing exchanges between persons from justice involving distribution, while placing political community within humanity’s fundamentally social nature. Communities, laws, institutions, and rulers had obligations directed toward a common good in which human beings could flourish together.[3]

Aquinas thus provided Christian social ethics with a vocabulary for asking not only whether one person behaved morally toward another, but whether social arrangements themselves were ordered justly.

The Reformation generated new experiments in Christian social existence. The Anabaptists challenged the assumption that church and political order should be joined through coercive power. The 1527 Schleitheim Confession emphasized voluntary discipleship and rejected the sword as an instrument of the church, while communities influenced by Menno Simons developed traditions of nonresistance and conscientious objection.[4]

Their challenge raised an enduring question: Can followers of the crucified Christ transform the world through forms of power that contradict the way of Christ?

George Fox belonged to a different stream. He was a Quaker, not an Anabaptist. Yet the Society of Friends developed a parallel challenge to coercive Christianity through convictions concerning spiritual equality, conscience, and peace.

Those convictions did not immediately eliminate Quaker participation in injustice. That fact itself is instructive. Religious convictions can contain moral possibilities that communities fail, sometimes for generations, to apply consistently.

In the eighteenth century, John Woolman confronted fellow Quakers over slaveholding, economic exploitation, war, and the moral consequences of consumption. Prayer, inward examination, travel among slaveholding Friends, and scrutiny of his own economic practices gradually became institutional witness against slavery.[5]

Woolman therefore represents one side of a central tension in Christian history. The same Christianity existed within a society in which other Christians owned human beings and reconciled slaveholding with Scripture.

The difference cannot be explained merely by the presence or absence of religion. The harder question is what Christians allowed their religion to challenge—including their economic interests, inherited assumptions, social position, and relationship to power.

John Wesley similarly refused a Christianity confined to inward experience. His description of Christianity as essentially a “social religion” did not mean modern political activism. Wesley meant that holiness necessarily becomes visible in relationships with others. Yet his ministry among poor communities, concern for prisoners, practices of mercy, and opposition to slavery demonstrated the social consequences of that conviction. His Thoughts upon Slavery condemned the slave trade and slaveholding in uncompromising moral terms.[6]

Wesley’s example makes an important theological point: personal holiness and social responsibility need not compete. Social action can emerge precisely because sanctification changes what Christians do with money, relationships, institutions, and power.

Slavery exposed the terrible opposite possibility.

American Christians became some of slavery’s most determined defenders even as other Christians became abolitionists. Black Christians supplied one of the tradition’s most important theological correctives because they experienced the contradiction from within.

Frederick Douglass famously distinguished between the Christianity of Christ and the slaveholding Christianity of America, exposing how Scripture and ecclesiastical authority could be recruited to legitimate domination.[7]

The abolition struggle established something essential for any theology of social action: biblical language, religious sincerity, and institutional Christianity do not themselves guarantee justice.

Scripture can be interpreted through the interests of those possessing power. Churches can normalize arrangements from which their members benefit. Religious communities can confuse inherited social order with divine order.

Christianity must therefore be judged not simply by the sincerity of those invoking it but by whether its interpretation of Scripture and exercise of power conform to the character and way of Christ.

Industrialization created another crisis. Workers confronted dangerous factories, low wages, crowded cities, and enormous concentrations of economic power. Christian ethics increasingly had to ask whether charity toward individuals was sufficient when suffering was produced or intensified by economic arrangements themselves.

In Catholicism, Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum defended private property while insisting upon the dignity of workers, moral obligations of employers, legitimacy of worker associations, and a role for public authority when economic arrangements became degrading or exploitative.[8]

The later Catholic social tradition would develop principles including human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, participation, preferential concern for vulnerable people, and the common good. It resisted the assumption that Christians had to choose simply between laissez-faire individualism and state collectivism.

Within Protestantism, Walter Rauschenbusch sought a theology adequate to industrial society. The Social Gospel argued that sin could become socialized—embedded in economic systems, political institutions, militarism, and structures extending beyond the conscious intentions of particular individuals.[9]

Rauschenbusch enlarged the Christian moral imagination beyond sins committed by individuals to include sins institutionalized among them.

His weaknesses also mattered. The Social Gospel could become overly optimistic about human progress, underestimate the depth of sin, and move too easily toward identifying social improvement with the kingdom of God.

That tension would set the stage for the twentieth century.

The question would no longer be merely whether Christians should care about poverty, workers, slavery, or public life. Christians would increasingly have to confront something harder: How should followers of Christ respond when injustice is embedded in institutions, backed by political power, protected by national identity, and sometimes defended by Christians themselves?

That is where the next chapter of Christian social action begins.

Endnotes

1. Acts 2:42–47; 4:32–35; Basil of Caesarea, On Social Justice, trans. C. Paul Schroeder (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009); John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984).
2. Augustine, The City of God, especially books XIV and XIX.
3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, qq. 90–97; II–II, qq. 57–61 and q. 66.
4. “The Schleitheim Confession” (1527); Menno Simons, The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, trans. Leonard Verduin, ed. John C. Wenger (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1956).
5. John Woolman, The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, ed. Phillips P. Moulton (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1989); Katharine Gerbner, “George Fox’s Ambiguous Anti-slavery Legacy,” Quaker Studies 26, no. 1 (2021): 5–24.
6. John Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (1774); John Wesley, “Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Discourse IV,” in The Works of John Wesley.
7. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), appendix.
8. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891); Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004).
9. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1907); Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1917)