I taught on justice in Bethlehem College and Seminary chapel last week: “Justice: Divine, Imputed, Imparted, Public, and Ultimate.”
Here’s the pocket definition of justice I work with in the talk:
Justice is (1) getting what you deserve and (2) giving others what they deserve.
Here’s the talk’s outline:
Related:
In summer 2021 I prepared a talk for the young adults in my church on resources that have helped me make sense of our pagan culture. I recently updated that for the Spring 2022 issue of CBMW’s journal Eikon:
Andrew David Naselli. “Ten Resources That Have Helped Me Make Sense of Our Current Culture and How Christians Are Responding to It.” Eikon: A Journal for Biblical Anthropology 4.1 (2022): 116–41.
These are the ten resources I commend and annotate (the first five are by non-Christians):
1. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin, 2018).
My family loves The Lord of the Rings.
See “Ten Resources for Enjoying Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.” For Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (resource 7), I write,
This is one of the few cases where Jenni and I think that the films are better than the books. We probably just lost all of our literary credibility (not that I had much of it). We find Tolkien’s writing style often tedious.
I recently read a book that has helped me more critically view films:
Paul Munson and Joshua Farris Drake. Art and Music: A Student’s Guide. Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition. Wheaton: Crossway, 2014.
Munson and Drake take a little over four pages to critically analyze the scene from Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring in which Arwen and Frodo flee on horseback to the ford.
Here’s what Munson and Drake think (pp. 77–81): [Read more…] about The Flight to the Ford in Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring Movie
Grant Horner, “Glorifying God in Literary and Artistic Culture,” in Think Biblically! Recovering a Christian Worldview (ed. John MacArthur; Wheaton: Crossway, 2003):
If Christians attempt to approach culture—literature, film, the arts and philosophies of humanity—from a human, cultural standpoint, they will be acting in disobedience to God. (p. 315)
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Some Useful Questions
There are several core areas that must be considered when attempting to approach cultural artifacts from a biblical perspective:
- What is the apparent moral stance of the work in question? Is good represented as good, and evil as evil? Are these categories blurred or even reversed? Is there a sense of justice involved at any level? Is man represented as good, evil, or neither? [Read more…] about Useful Questions When Approaching Literature, Films, Etc.
Christopher Catherwood, Church History: A Crash Course for the Curious (2nd ed.; Wheaton: Crossway, 2007), 196:
I think it fair to say that the main difference between Fundamentalism and what we would now call historic Evangelicalism is as much cultural as anything else and is particularly an American phenomenon.
(It’s valuable to hear the perspectives of others—in this case a British evangelical historian who is the grandson of David Martyn Lloyd-Jones.)
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” –L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between
Carl Trueman’s Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History 
(Wheaton: Crossway, 2010) devotes chapter 3 to the problem of anachronism (pp. 109–40) and concludes the book with this useful insight:
One notable thing about immigrating to a foreign country is that the very difference of the culture to which one moves allows one to see both the idiosyncrasies of one’s new culture and of that from which one has departed. When one only ever lives in one culture, the assumption is that everything one sees and experiences is nature, the norm, and that everybody else, to the extent that they do not conform, is deviant, subnormal, etc. Cross-cultural experience is excellent for disabusing one of such instincts.
History can be like that . . . .
I have already mentioned my childhood antipathy to the Welsh rugby team, but many other things in my life, from taste in music to personal political convictions, are all more comprehensible in the light of wider historical factors. (pp. 172–74)
Don Carson, who doesn’t sharply distinguish between popular and high culture, opens his book Love in Hard Places (2002) by summarizing some points from The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (2000):
First, popular culture saunters between a sentimental view and an erotic view of love. The erotic view is fed by television, movies, and certain popular books and articles; the sentimental view is nurtured by many streams, some of which we shall think about as we press on, but the result is a form of reductionism whose hold on the culture is outstripped only by its absurdity.
- Applied to God, the sentimental view generates a deity with all the awesome holiness of a cuddly toy, all the moral integrity of a marshmallow. In the previous lectures, I briefly documented this point with examples from films and books.
- Applied to Christians, the sentimental view breeds expectations of transcendental niceness. Whatever else Christians should be, they should be nice, where “niceness” means smiling a lot and never ever hinting that anyone may be wrong about anything (because that isn’t nice).
- In the local church, it means abandoning church discipline (it isn’t nice), and in many contexts it means restoring adulterers (for instance) to pastoral office at the mere hint of broken repentance. After all, isn’t the church about forgiveness? Aren’t we supposed to love one another? And doesn’t that mean that above all we must be, well, nice?
- Similarly with respect to doctrine: the letter kills, while the Spirit gives life, and everyone knows the Spirit is nice. So let us love one another and refrain from becoming upright and uptight about this divisive thing called “doctrine.” (pp. 11–12; numbering added)
D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 470 (emphasis in original):
Churches that are faithful to the apostolic gospel are sometimes also the ones that are loyal to a culture becoming increasingly passé. In such a situation cultural conservatism can easily be mistaken for theological conservatism, for theological orthodoxy. In an age of confusing empirical pluralism and frankly frightening philosophical pluralism, in an age that seems to be stealing from us the Judeo-Christian worldview that prevailed for so long, it is easy to suppose that retrenchment and conservative responses on every conceivable axis are the only responsible courses for those who want to remain faithful to the gospel.
In various ways I have tried to show in this volume that such a course is neither wise nor prophetic. Sometimes it is not even faithful. The church may slip back into a defensive, conservative modernism that is fundamentally ill-equipped to address postmodernism.
