Civil World?

Jesus came to be King, inaugerating his own kingdom. He did not restore, revitalize, or redeem any earthly one.

Though his people infiltrate the earthly ones.

There is no earthly nation that will endure when he comes.

The earth will be purified by fire.

We can make the world more civil... but we cannot make it more eternal and eduring.

Written in 1988. James Sauer.

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