"As Christians, we can live on one of three levels. We can return evil for good, which is the satanic level. We can return good for good and evil for evil, which is the human level. Or, we can return good for evil, which is the divine level.”
Warren Weirsbe
"Have you been reading your Bibles for so long and not yet learned that God loves to take His children to the brink? God takes the Israelites down to the edge of the water before He divides the sea. God takes Abraham to the point of an upraised sacrificial knife so that we might all learn to say on the mount of the Lord it will be provided. God takes the disciples to the point where their boat was foundering before Christ acted on their behalf.
We would like for God to deliver us while we are all still in bed. We would like to avoid the long trek to Moriah. We would like to meditate on what Christ could do if He wanted, and have our meditations take place while tied up to the dock. But that, alas for our comforts, is not the lesson that God in engaged in teaching us."
- Doug Wilson
"As I matured, I realised that not everything in the depths of my heart and mind should be expressed in the presence of the the Almighty."
- Leslie Hardin. The Spirituality of Jesus
Traditional justice assumes a fallen, and permanently imperfect world where law is needed in order to encourage virtue and limit vice. For this reason, traditional justice relies on moral structures: family, civil force, church, constitution—in order to maintain just order. Since man is fallen, it recognizes that mere abstractions and ideals cannot govern man; but personal relationships, social duties, and civil authority, informed by Scripture and the Holy Spirit, must restrain his evil. Traditional justice is an unending process and is profoundly anti-Utopian. There will never be a point on this side of eternity when law will not be needed. The best world that the traditional justice view can create is a world where human beings are safe and free to conduct themselves together in an orderly fashion, pursuing their God-given gifts, and restraining their sinful tendencies. It is not a perfect world—it is a world with warts. But it is a world where one can be happy, productive, free, and content. Even if it is a world where one must inevitably suffer and die.
The social justice view is a new and radical view of the nature of justice. It is the common view of all left-of-center ideological positions. It is “end centered”—what Sobran, and others, call teleocratic. What matters in such a justice worldview is the end; the ideal, the vision of the future world. It is in this emerging world order where the social justice advocate sees true justice. Our task, he believes, is to bring about a new order of things. We are to judge all current systems by the end desired. Our duty is not to “revealed law” or even “natural” laws, but to revolutionary goals and to the vehicles that bring those goals about. The vehicles are usually a party, or a bureaucracy, or an army—but always statist. The old definitions of order and justice are made obsolete by the new vision: property rights give ground to “just
“I have met no people who fully disbelieved in hell and also had a living and life-giving belief in Heaven”
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer).
