“But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!”
(Amos 5:24)

Righteousness and justice are inextricably linked – to each other, to the Lord, to his faithfulness and love. Revel in it.

The Lord loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love. (Ps. 33:5)

Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. Your righteousness is like the highest mountains, your justice like the great deep. (Ps. 36:5-6)

Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; love and faithfulness go before you. (Ps. 89:14)

[The Lord says:] I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. (Hosea 2:19)

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever. Blessed are those who act justly, who always do what is right. (Ps. 106:1, 3)

And thus the Old Testament reveals righteousness and justice to be complementary qualities of God’s nature, and of his people who walk in his ways. And thus Scripture affirms: We cannot simultaneously choose for one and against the other.

The New Testament makes this even more clear, for it includes both concepts in the same Greek word. Made righteous in Christ, we recognize what is right and just by the Holy Spirit. Cooperating with the Spirit, we live right and just lives.

Why, then, do so many in the church try to split righteousness from justice, and from faithfulness and love? And what can any one of us do, when our church culture looks so little like the Bride our Lord describes?

For years, I’ve explored, and grieved, the history of the church in the Deep South. In startling ways, the righteousness-justice divide in today’s US church reflects this unresolved past.¹

Then and there

Two events profoundly impacted the settling of the Deep South: the creation of the cotton gin, and the Second Great Awakening.

Invented in 1793, the cotton gin enticed throngs of white settlers, for decades, into a region whose soil and climate seemed ideal for cultivating “white gold.” Over time, Southerners came to view their corporate identity and personal status in terms of cotton and its “necessary” companions, land and slaves.

In their eyes: Acquiring land meant removing the peoples on it. Growing cotton meant buying people and forcing them to do it. Ever seeking more cotton, land and slaves meant constantly moving, disregarding the pleas of lonely wives, many of whom knew their husbands were sexually abusing the female slaves.

The Second Great Awakening started in New England in the 1790s, hit Kentucky in 1801 and swept through the Deep South for the next three decades. In churches that sprang up across the cotton kingdom, people who had confessed Jesus as Lord met weekly to worship. In their hearts, they heard the Holy Spirit teaching right from wrong.

When the Spirit (and some of the preachers) began to denounce slavery, huge inner battles raged.

Ultimately, collectively, the white Southern church quenched the Spirit’s voice in order to embrace the society’s values. The church began to preach – and to try to live – a righteousness unencumbered with justice.

The results?

Injustice was hidden in plain sight. After closing their hearts to the Spirit for a generation, Christians could no longer even see the wrongs of a cruel slavery system, much less the injustice in brutally removing Native Americans and systematically devaluing women.

Righteousness was distorted. Scripture-quoting preachers called slavery “biblical” and labeled those who disagreed, “heretical.”

Unrighteousness began to be associated primarily with outward actions, such as dancing, cursing and drinking. The mistreatment of whole groups of people went unacknowledged, as did the attitudes that spawned injustice – attitudes such as greed, pride, fear and a determination to control.

Agreeing together to redefine righteousness, my ancestors began to count theirs a superior righteousness.

With white dissenters silenced – and the oppressed given no voice – the cry to end slavery moved North. Fervently, abolitionists pled with their fellow Christians to stand together against the slave system.²

Their mailings were burned, rather than read. Subsequently, the abolition movement veered toward legally forcing change.

It’s crucial to seek, to make, to uphold, just laws. It’s also important to see what resulted when concerned Christians sought justice by means of the law, but the church as a whole did not cooperate with the Spirit to act justly and do what is right.

Justice was distorted. For half a century, every legal inch gained toward freeing the slaves was counteracted by those determined to maintain slavery. Only a bloody civil war, with huge loss of life, changed the laws. Even then, Southerners found ways to subvert and overrule the new laws and so to maintain a system of racial injustice very akin to the slavery system.

The white evangelical church culture in the South stood in the midst of this injustice, championing it with Scripture, in Jesus’ name.

Righteousness was dismissed as unattainable. When antebellum white Southerners cried, “Work conditions in Northern factories are as bad as slavery!” white Northerners said, “There’s no comparison!” When Southerners said, “We can’t get rid of slavery. Our entire economic system is built on it,” Northerners shrugged, “That’s your problem.”

When national denominations decided, “We won’t send practicing slave owners as missionaries,” Southern pastors protested, “You’re calling us sinners! You’re denying our rights! We’ll just secede and form Southern denominations!” Northern leaders responded, “Okay.”³

Neither group urged, “Let’s get on our faces together and truly humble ourselves before God. By his grace, for his name’s sake, let’s really listen to each other and help each other see where we’re missing the mark. Let’s help each other find ways to walk in right paths.”

If someone had urged it, my Southern forebears would have collectively rejected it. Willful blindness had hardened their hearts. What’s more, it would never have crossed their minds to ask black and Native American Christians for their uncoerced perspective, much less to heed what was said.

The choice of Christians to separate, in order to continue to abuse whole groups of people – rather than to humble themselves, receive correction and search together for righteous solutions – seemed to work well. So, 15 years later, when Southern state governments began threatening to secede, Southern pastors were among the loudest voices calling for the break.

Here and now

Our wrongdoings pile up before you, God, our sins stand up and accuse us. Our wrongdoings stare us down; we know in detail what we’ve done:

* Mocking and denying God, not following our God,
* Spreading false rumors, inciting sedition, pregnant with lies, muttering malice.

Justice is beaten back, Righteousness is banished to the sidelines, Truth staggers down the street, Honesty is nowhere to be found, Good is missing in action. Anyone renouncing evil is beaten and robbed. (Isa. 59:12-15 MSG)

But. God.

God looked and saw evil looming on the horizon – so much evil and no sign of Justice. He couldn’t believe what he saw: not a soul around to correct this awful situation. So he did it himself, took on the work of Salvation, fueled by his own Righteousness. (Isa. 59:15-16 MSG)

It matters, dear one, when even one person cooperates with the Lord, when any one of us faces up to evil we don’t want to see, and resists in God’s strength.

Be strong – not in yourselves but in the Lord, in the power of his boundless resource.

Put on God’s complete armour so that you can successfully resist all the devil’s methods of attack. For our fight is not against any physical enemy: it is against organisations and powers that are spiritual.

Therefore you must wear the whole armour of God, that you may be able to resist evil in its day of power, and that even when you have fought to a standstill you may still stand. (Eph. 6:10-13 Phillips)

About a decade ago, the Lord began to show me one way this resisting can look. I faced an awful situation. Though I had pressed in to take each next step that God had showed me, the situation had not changed one whit. I had reached an impasse, where I could do nothing more.

I did not want to lose my health and myself, trying to make right what people with power were determined to block. But also, I did not want to make peace with injustice.

So I laid the matter before the Lord, and he taught me what to pray every time I recalled the wrongs still unaddressed:

Lord, righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne. Anything that masquerades as the one, and rejects the other, is not from you. What is happening here is not from you. People who say they belong to you are completely misrepresenting you. My eyes are on you, Lord. And I do not agree with this evil.

By the Spirit of God, I prayed sincerely in truth. Having fought to a standstill, I still resisted, still stood. And in time, I watched with awe, and moved in concert with the Lord, as he raised up unlikely allies, and acted for the sake of his name.

Today, our Lord, who is righteous and just, cries to us collectively:⁴

Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!

And he calls to us, each one:⁵

Act justly and do what is righteous,
because my salvation is coming soon,
and my righteousness will be revealed.

---

This is an edited and expanded version of a post Natasha Robinson invited me to write, and published on her blog, A Sista’s Journey. The original post was also published on this website February 10, 2014.

Photo by Mike Munchel from FreeImages

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Footnotes

1. What follows is summarized from We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church, published 2013, Kindle ebook updated 2020. ↩︎
2. See, for example, Sarah Grimke’s courageous “Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States.” Sarah and her sister Angelina were daughters of a South Carolina judge and slaveholder. The sisters renounced slavery, moved north, became Quakers and found themselves at the forefront of the abolition movement. ↩︎
3. See Readings in Baptist History: Four Centuries of Selected Documents, pp. 109-115, Joseph Early Jr., ed. ↩︎
4. Amos 5:23-24. ↩︎
5. Isaiah 56:1 CEB. ↩︎