One morning at seven, the time when I usually pass the White House on the way to my office, I saw a picket already keeping lonely vigil on Pennsylvania Avenue, bearing the message: “All I Want: JUSTICE.”
One mark of our theologically schizoid age is its readiness to hoist aloft one-word slogans for settling all the world’s ills.
The new morality unfurls its banner of Agape and considers all else dispensable. Love is, of course, an indispensable element of Christian ethics. But the specious notion that not divinely revealed principles and patterns of conduct but the immediate situation alone is to be definitive for one’s needs swiftly deteriorates Agape to Eros.
Others bear the banner of Justice alone; for them, Law dissolves Gospel, Justice conceals Agape.
Few today seem to hold together Romans 13 and First Corinthians 13, or Romans 3 and John 3.
But the God of the Bible is the God of justice and of justification.
For that reason, in opening the World Congress on Evangelism, I stressed: “The Christian evangelist has a message doubly relevant to the modern scene: he knows that justice is due to all because a just God created mankind in his holy image, and he knows that all men need justification because the Holy Creator sees us as rebellious sinners.”
