Chapter 5: The Social Justice Tradition: Discovering the Compassionate Life

Chapter 5

The Social Justice Tradition: Discovering the Compassionate Life

Let justice roll down like waters,

   and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

— Amos 5:24

True godliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.

— William Penn

5

THE POWER TO BE the kind of people we were created to be and the power to do the works of God upon the earth places us on solid ground to engage the demands of the social arena. And no place is in greater need of people full of the Holy Spirit and divine love. The Social Justice Stream of Christian life and faith focuses upon justice and shalom in all human relationships and social structures. This compassionate way of living addresses the gospel imperative for equity and magnanimity among all peoples.

SEEKING A HISTORICAL PARADIGM

I am eager to introduce John to you. Three reasons cause me to see him as a powerful example of the Social Justice Tradition. First, of all the social prophets — those men and women throughout history who have been advocates for the powerless — he was among the most contemporary, for he dealt substantively with issues such as racism, consumerism, and militarism. Second, he brought the power of “Divine Love” directly into the fray of one of the most volatile social issues in human history. And third, he labored smack in the midst of raw humanity, demonstrating a well-nigh amazing humility, compassion, and sensitivity to what he called “Divine Breathings.”

Born 19 October 1720 in a modest New Jersey village, John was destined to stand at the head of a groundswell of antislavery conviction that would assail and eventually conquer slaveholding, first in his own denomination, the Quakers, and ultimately throughout the Western world.

“The Operations of Divine Love”

Even as a youth John was deeply sensitive toward matters of the Spirit. An early journal entry reads, “Before I was seven years old, I began to be acquainted with the operations of Divine Love.”¹ At twenty-one John left the family farm and was apprenticed to a shop owner in nearby Mount Holly. Here he learned the trade of a tailor as well as becoming qualified to draft legal documents. As a young employee he was soon confronted with the institution of slavery: his employer instructed him to write a bill of sale for his slave. Even at this young age John was so struck by the inherent inconsistency of writing an “Instrument of Slavery” for one of his “fellow creatures” that he told his employer that he “believed Slavekeeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian Religion.”² This was the beginning — the loosened rock before the avalanche.

John soon took over his employer’s dry-goods business, added an orchard business of his own, and became moderately prosperous. Soon, however, he became concerned that his business was taking an inordinate amount of his time and energy. “A way of life,” he writes, “free from much Entanglements, appeared best for me.”³ As a result, he voluntarily and deliberately pared down his business enterprises in order to give ample time to an itinerant ministry — a ministry he indulged in lavishly.

On one early ministry trip to the South he saw slavery firsthand. He described it as “a dark gloominess hanging over the Land,” and more than a hundred years before the Civil War he prophetically saw that in the “future the Consequence will be grievous to posterity.”⁴

The focus of John’s itinerant labors soon became the abolition of the institution of slavery. He had unusual success with slaveholders because his tough nature was wedded to a gentle spirit. It would be hard to overestimate the power of this combination. His toughness is seen in his refusal to use the products of slave labor, eventually including sugar and dye for clothing. His gentleness is seen in the “inward suffering” he experienced at knowing that his decisions would distress and anger those who opposed him. Often, when entertained in a slaveholder’s home, he insisted upon paying the slaves for their services. You can imagine the offense this seemed to his host!

John’s tender yet tough concern can be seen in a situation with a Quaker Friend who had had a bad accident. Fearful that he might not live, this man sent for John to write his will. John wrote, “I took notes and amongst other things he told me to which of his children he gave his young Negro woman. I considered the pain and distress he was in, and knew not how it would end, so I wrote his Will save only that part concerning his Slave, and, carrying it to his bed-side read it to him, and then told him in a friendly way, that I could not write any Instruments by which my fellow creatures were made slaves without bringing trouble on my own mind. I let him know that I charged nothing for what I had done, and desired to be Excused from doing the other part in the way he propos’d. We then had a serious conference on the Subject, and at length, he agreeing to set her free I finished his will.”⁵

Often John spoke as powerfully through his actions as through his words. A revealing example occurred on 18 November 1758. John, after preaching powerfully against slavery at the Quaker meeting, was taken to the home of Thomas Woodward for dinner. Upon entering the house, he saw servants and inquired as to their status. When he was told that they were slaves, he quietly got up and left the home without a word. The effect of this silent testimony upon Thomas Woodward was enormous. The next morning he freed all of his slaves, in spite of his wife’s vigorous objections.⁶

“Some Considerations”

These incidents, however, were at best successful personal encounters. While important, they were not sufficient in themselves, and John knew it. But events were looming on the horizon that would afford John a unique opportunity to attack slavery, at least among Quakers. In 1754 fierce fighting — part of the French and Indian War — broke out on the Pennsylvania frontier. As a result Friends withdrew from Pennsylvania’s General Assembly en masse rather than support a vote for troops and war taxes. Denied an effective political platform, Quakers began searching for new ways to express their moral concern.

John seized this opportunity in sermon after sermon, pamphlet after pamphlet. In 1754, with Yearly Meeting^* approval, he published “Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes: Recommended to the Professors of Christianity of Every Denomination.” No anti-slavery document had received such extensive circulation as this little volume, nor had any had as profound an effect. It paved the way for the later vigorous pamphleteering by John Wesley and his Methodists in England.

John’s message was devastatingly clear — complete abolition of slavery — but it was communicated in such a modest spirit that it seemed to disarm even the most adamant slaveholder. He argued persuasively that to give freedom to the slave is our Christian duty; even more, it is to our benefit!

Our Duty and Interest are inseparably united; and when we neglect or misuse our Talents, we necessarily depart from the heavenly Fellowship, and are in the Way to the greatest Evils.

Therefore to examine and prove ourselves, to find what Harmony the Power presiding in us bears with the Divine Nature, is a Duty not more incumbent and necessary, than it would be beneficial.⁷

At this same time Philadelphia Yearly Meeting devoted its annual Epistle to the subject of slavery. John actually wrote this Epistle for the Yearly Meeting, and it was circulated to all other Friends bodies:

We entreat you to examine whether the purchasing of a Negro, either born here or imported, doth not contribute to a further importation, and consequently to the upholding all the evils above mentioned, and promoting manstealing, the only theft which by the Mosaic law was punished with death. … We entreat you in the bowels of gospel love, seriously to weigh the cause of detaining them in bondage. If it be for your own private gain, or any other motive than their good, it is much to be feared that the love of God and the influence of the Holy Spirit is not the prevailing principle in you, and that your hearts are not sufficiently redeemed from the world.⁸

For the next six years John undertook vigorous writing and speaking campaigns. London Quakers added their authority to the cause with an uncompromising stand against slavery. Various Friends of rank voluntarily released their slaves. The groundswell was gaining momentum!

The Great Watershed

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Sessions of 1758 became the great watershed for Friends on the slavery question. John Greenleaf Whittier declared that these Sessions “must ever be regarded as one of the most important religious convocations in the history of the Christian Church.”⁹ Certainly it was a significant gathering, and perhaps it could serve as an instructive model for us today as we seek to grapple with the many social questions plaguing modern society.

The preliminary debates over the slavery issue had been intense and emotional, and John went to the Yearly Meeting Sessions of 1758 resolved to see the issue through to the end. At the Sessions various compromises were proposed to avoid conflict and division. Some Friends proposed that restrictions should be placed on future slavebuying, thus avoiding the volatile subject of present slaveowning. Others said that, due to the weightiness of the matter, a decision should be delayed.

John sat through all these Sessions in total silence, head bowed and eyes brimming with tears. Finally he rose and spoke:

My mind is led to consider the purity of the Divine Being and the justice of His judgment, and herein my soul is covered with awfulness. … Many slaves on this continent are oppressed and their cries have entered into the ears of the Most High. Such are the purity and certainty of His judgments that He cannot be partial in our favour. In infinite love and goodness He hath opened our understandings from one time to another concerning our duty towards this people; and it is not a time for delay. Should we now be sensible of what He requires of us, and through a respect to the private interests of some persons, or through a regard to some friendships which do not stand upon an immutable foundation, neglect to do our duty in firmness and constancy, still waiting for some extraordinary means to bring about their deliverance, God may by terrible things in righteousness answer us in this matter.¹⁰

The effect of this timely, prophetic word was profound and total. To John’s compassionate appeal the Yearly Meeting responded, without a single dissent, to remove slavery from its midst.

This was the decisive step. No other religious body — indeed, no other body of any kind — had taken such dramatic and universal action against the institution of slavery. To be sure, years of hard work remained. Many slaveholders needed to be helped to follow the Yearly Meeting’s decision. Other Yearly Meetings had to be convinced to follow the lead of Philadelphia. And much more.

John was deeply involved in these efforts. At times he struggled long and hard with Friends who were “entangled with the spirit of this world.” At other times he was in great distress over the horrors of the slave trade; “My Belly trembled, my lips quivered, [my appetite failed and I grew outwardly weak,] and I trembled in myself that I might rest in the day of trouble.”¹¹ But always he pressed on. Justice demanded no less; “Divine Love” demanded no less.

As difficult as it was for the northern Yearly Meetings to rid themselves of slavery, that challenge could not be compared to the obstacles that had to be overcome in the South. North Carolina Quakers especially had to struggle under the burden of oppressive state laws. A thousand-dollar bond had to be posted for every slave, and each one had to be escorted out of the state. To this injustice Friends appealed in vain to the courts of law. Not only were the petitioners turned down, but sometimes, in apparent defiance, the legislatures and courts passed new laws “to amend, strengthen, and confirm” the previous acts against emancipation.¹²

As a result of this constant harassment, North Carolina Friends took a step unparalleled by any other Quaker body. After consultation with some of the best legal talent in the state, the Yearly Meeting itself became a slaveholder in order to release her individual members from the evil. Friends accomplished this by employing an interesting legal technicality. They used a law that allowed a religious society to become the trustees of donated real estate or personal property; and since the law stated that slaves were merely property, they could be legally donated to the society. This gave virtual freedom when actual freedom was not recognized by the state.¹³

Institutional Righteousness

As a result of the energetic activity of John and others following the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting decision of 1758, Quakerism-except in rare cases — had freed itself from the institution of slavery by the time the American colonies had declared their independence from English domination! Not one of the antislavery Revolutionary leaders — Washington, Jefferson, or Patrick Henry — was willing to take this step of freeing their slaves, a step that Quakers undertook voluntarily. In light of the difficulty of bringing religious bodies to unity on controversial social issues, it is astonishing that Friends were able to uniformly liquidate human bondage from their ranks. On the other hand, in light of the contradiction between slavery and the spirit of the gospel, it is heartbreaking that Friends ever involved themselves in such oppression in the first place.

Their action was not only bold but costly. Quakers were the only body that asked slaveholders to reimburse their slaves for their time in bondage. England paid West Indian planters for their losses when slavery was abolished there. Lincoln proposed the same for southern plantation owners. Friends alone believed that justice demanded exactly the opposite. No hard figures are available on how much was actually paid out or how many Friends complied with the request of their Yearly Meeting. For those who did pay their slaves, it was common to use the yearly wage of the day. We do know that one Mr. F. Buxton, in an appeal before the British House of Commons to abolish slavery, said that it had cost North Carolina Friends fifty thousand pounds to release their slaves.¹⁴ For some southern Friends emancipation of their slaves meant financial bankruptcy; for many, if not most, it meant eventual migration to the North.

Perhaps by now you have recognized that the “John” of my story is John Woolman. I have been quoting from his Journal, which has received high praise indeed. The British literary figure Charles Lamb said, “The only American book I ever read twice was the Journal of Woolman. … Get the writings of John Woolman by heart.”¹⁵ Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, “I find more wisdom in these pages than in any other book written since the days of the apostles.”¹⁶ In 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge commented, “I should almost despair of that man who could peruse the life of John Woolman without an amelioration of heart.”¹⁷ To these eminent authors may I add a personal witness, for no book outside of the Bible has influenced me more than The Journal of John Woolman. I am endlessly moved by how Woolman wrestled with the knotty issues of war and peace, race and equality, wealth and simplicity, with a striking blending of compassion with courage, tenderness with firmness. And he did this not in some detached, academic way, but right in the midst of the vicissitudes of life. John Woolman was a prophet for his day, a prophet who took the Quaker testimonies for equality, simplicity, and peace and forged them into instruments of social revolution, ever tempering them in the stream of “Divine Love.” D. Elton True-blood has rightly observed that “all who read Woolman have a chance to realize that the best thing in the world is a really good person.”¹⁸

SEEKING A BIBLICAL PARADIGM

The story of Amos is a deeply challenging depiction of the Social Justice Tradition, the compassionate life. The first in a great line of pre-Exilic prophets, Amos declared in no uncertain terms that sacrifices, ceremonies, propitiations, and other externalities of religion were insufficient for a life with God. He insisted that social righteousness — that is, justice in the social realm — was absolutely central to a life that is pleasing to God.¹⁹

Amos’s human credentials for this prophetic work were all on the negative side of the ledger. He had never been to the school of the prophets, yet his prophetic message is among the most incisive ever recorded. He was a southerner from Tekoa in Judah, yet he was sent to Israel in the north. He was a country worker — “a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees” — yet he exercised his prophetic ministry in the most sophisticated of cities: Samaria and Bethel and Gilgal. From a human point of view nothing qualified him for this most unusual prophetic ministry of social righteousness.

But of course Amos’s work did not depend upon human credentials or human resources. The debar Yahweh, the word of the Lord, had come and he had no option but to proclaim the message given to him. “The lion has roared; / who will not fear? / The Lord GOD has spoken; / who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:8).

Blatant Injustices

The trumpet call of Amos was a single note: justice, justice, justice. He was scandalized by the blatant injustices that had become so commonplace that no one seemed to notice. And what were these injustices? Listen:

They sell the innocent²⁰for silver,

   and the needy for a pair of sandals —

   they … trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,

   and push the afflicted out of the way;

   father and son go in to the same girl,

   so that my holy name is profaned;

   they lay themselves down beside every altar

   on garments taken in pledge;

and in the house of their God they drink

   wine bought with fines they imposed. (Amos 2:6-8)

Ferocious injustices these: selling the poor into slavery, perverting the justice of the oppressed, engaging in illicit sexual intercourse, taking financial advantage of the helpless. All these acts of injustice exhibit a single common denominator: the abuse of power.²¹ Power here was being used to manipulate, to control, to destroy.

“They sell the needy for a pair of sandals” — creditors selling the weak and vulnerable into slavery even when the debt owed was as trivial as a pair of sandals.

“They trample the poor into the dust” — the powerbrokers of the day using brutal, callous oppression over those who were without power and influence.

“Father and son go in to the same girl” — fathers taking advantage of the cultural inability of women to stand up for their rights and forcing their daughters-in-law into sexual intercourse.

“They lay themselves down on garments taken in pledge” — the wealthy exploiting the destitute by refusing to return a coat that was given in pledge, even though the coat was desperately needed for warmth against the cold night.

“They drink wine bought with fines” — kangaroo courts assessing exorbitant fines and then carousing with the money instead of using it for restitution.

So Amos repudiated and condemned these abuses of power — abuses that allowed the elite of society to “oppress the poor,” to “crush the needy” (Amos 4:1).

There is more. Amos also takes the merchants and business leaders of the day to task for theft, graft, and so much more. Listen:

Hear this, you that trample on the needy,

   and bring to ruin the poor of the land,

saying, “When will the new moon be over

   so that we may sell grain;

and the sabbath,

   so that we may offer wheat for sale?

We will make the ephah small and the shekel great,

   and practice deceit with false balances,

buying the poor for silver

   and the needy for a pair of sandals,

   and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” (Amos 8:4-6)

It is important for us to hear these stern words of Amos, because it is important for us to know how much God cares about justice in the business arena. Israel at this period was in a golden age. It was mid-eighth century B.C., Jeroboam II was on the throne, and Israel had extended its borders nearly to where they had been in Solomon’s day. Political security and economic prosperity abounded, and the people believed that all this abundance was a sign of God’s favor.

But Amos came with a different perspective: all their wealth and affluence were the result of the sacrilegious oppression of the poor. To be sure, Israel was a religious people in every way. But their impatience with the religious holidays of sabbath and new moon when commerce had to be suspended revealed their heart. And when they could legitimately engage in the business of commerce, they used crooked weights and measurements. The ephah — a dry measure slightly larger than a half-bushel — was reduced by lining the basket. The shekel — a metal weight of about eleven grams — was enlarged so that it took more gold or silver to balance it on the scales. Beyond all this, the balance itself was bent out of kilter in favor of the seller, so that the poor buyers, impoverished to begin with, ended up paying more to get less. And finally, to add insult to injury, the wheat they sold in shrunken quantities and at inflated prices had “filler” in it, “the sweepings” from the threshing floor. These crooked market practices, these injustices to the weak and the poor, were an offense to God.

But there is still more. Amos aimed his verbal accusations at Israel’s elite, who were trying to corrupt the legal system and use it to their own advantage. The very system designed to provide justice for all equally was being perverted. Listen:

They hate the one who reproves in the gate,

   and they abhor the one who speaks the truth.

Therefore because you trample on the poor

   and take from them levies of grain,

you have built houses of hewn stone,

   but you shall not live in them;

   you have planted pleasant vineyards,

   but you shall not drink their wine.

   For I know how many are your transgressions,

   and how great are your sins —

   you who afflict the innocent,²² who take a bribe,

   and push aside the needy in the gate. (Amos 5:10-12)

“The gate” of the city was the center of judicial decision making, the place where the elders gathered to hear witnesses, arbitrate disputes, decide controversies, and dispense justice. Alcoves in the gate area were used as courtrooms. Amos’s condemnation of those who hate the person who “reproves in the gate” and abhor the person who “speaks the truth” evidenced a total disdain for Hebrew judicial process. In another passage Amos was even more pointed,

Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood,

   and bring righteousness to the ground! (Amos 5:7)

The reference to taking “levies of grain” from the poor spoke of the crime of overcharging tenant farmers for the use of the land. Likely the land had been stolen from the tenant farmers by fraud in the first place, and now harsh practices of taxation were being added to their already overburdened lives.

“The gate” was supposed to be the place where every member of society could expect to receive a fair hearing. But now, declared Amos, illegal actions were being used to intimidate the “innocent” and reject the valid claims of the poor. Specifically, regular bribery was denying the poor their legitimate rights — and not just now and again, but repeatedly.²³

Justice and Liturgical Worship

On numerous occasions Amos took aim at the liturgical life of Israel, but no outburst was more scathing than this first-person diatribe against their vain worship:

I hate, I despise your festivals,

   and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

   Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain

   offerings,

   I will not accept them;

   and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals

   I will not look upon.

   Take away from me the noise of your songs;

    I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

   But let justice roll down like waters,

   and righteousness like an everflowing stream. (Amos 5:21-24).

The intensity and passion of this passage is breathtaking! God is the speaker now, and in powerful parallelisms he scorns the empty worship of the people and demands that they give a ceaseless exhibition of justice. All three elements of Israel’s liturgical worship come under review here, and all three are soundly rejected.

Israel gloried in her joyous festivals and solemn assemblies. (Actually, the word solemn is not the best translation of the adjective here; ceremonial would catch the sense better.) These events were exuberant, noisy celebrations filled with color and pageantry. But God’s rejection of these festive events is stated in the strongest language possible: “I hate, I despise … I take no delight.” Why would God so utterly repudiate these great festival events in his honor?

The religious rituals of the sacrifices and the offerings are likewise rejected. The burnt offering, in which the animal sacrifice was completely consumed on the altar, represented a total giving of the person to God. The grain offering, in which tribute from the harvest was paid to God, represented the giving of life and resources to God. The peace offering, in which part of the animal sacrifice was burnt and part was shared as a meal between the priests and the worshipers, represented devotion to God and communion with each other. But God will not accept them, will not even look upon them, declares Amos. Why would God so completely reject these offerings made in his name?

Finally, God declares his displeasure with the community’s songs of worship. What a contrast that denunciation of song is to the call to worship issued by the Psalmist:

Praise the LORD with the lyre;

   make melody to him with the harp of ten strings.

Sing to him a new song;

   play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts. (Ps. 33:2-3)

Why would God turn a deaf ear to the worship music of his people?

The circle has been completed. Each major area of Israel’s liturgical worship — festivals, sacrifices, music — has been evaluated and soundly condemned. But why? Why would these acts of devotion be so utterly spurned? Was it because of ritual impurity? Was it because of compromise with Canaanite religious practices? Was it because of a lack of zeal in religious exercises? No, no, and no. One reason, and one reason alone, accounted for God’s forthright rejection of their religious devotion: all of the festivals, all of the sacrifices, all of the instruments and music of worship failed because they were not accompanied by acts of justice and righteousness. And so the word of the Lord thunders forth:

Let justice roll down like waters,

   and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

For Israelites this was graphic imagery. Living in the desert, they knew well the characteristics of the wadi, the streambed. Much of the year the wadi is bone-dry and of no benefit to anyone, but when the rains come, the first rushing wall of water flows with such force that anyone caught in the wadi will surely be swept away and drowned. And so Amos calls for justice (mishpat) to roll down like the raging torrent in a freshly fed wadi. Yet unlike that water in the wadi, which often dwindles to nothing, this righteousness is to be an everflowing stream, flowing day after day, year in and year out, under good circumstances and bad:

Let justice roll down like waters,

   and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

God, you see, demands something more revolutionary than festivals and sacrifices and worship songs. And that “something more” is social righteousness: impartiality in judicial decisions, equity in business dealings, justice for the poor and the oppressed. Because social righteousness is a divine mandate, liturgical life can never be divorced from it.

This is the message of Amos. It is not a popular message today. It was not a popular message then. Amaziah, the presiding priest of Bethel’s sanctuary, appeared on the scene and tried to put a stop to Amos’s damming prophecies against Israel, saying, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom” (Amos 7:12-13). No doubt this threat simply brought to the surface the smoldering antipathy between Amos and the religious and political bureaucracies of Israel. It was not, however, an idle threat: it was, in fact, a death threat if Amos refused to comply.

But refuse he did, and we see prophetic conviction and courage in his words: “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel’” (Amos 7:14-15). Amos first made it clear to Amaziah that he was not a professional prophet whose livelihood depended upon his ministry; he earned his living another way. Then he pointed out that his prophetic call and the assigned audience were of one piece.

Following this exchange, we have the only judgment speech in the book aimed at a single individual. In so doing, Amos was following in the prophetic tradition of Nathan, Elijah, and Elisha. Amaziah had sinned in two ways when he commanded Amos to stop prophesying to Israel: challenging God’s authority by stifling the prophetic word, and failing in his priestly duties by becoming the king’s puppet. The punishment, though severe, fit the crime: the total destruction of Amaziah’s priestly line and his own death in an “unclean land” — that is, in a ceremonially defiled land, a horrifying rebuke to all Amaziah’s priestly instincts (Amos 7:16-17).

Visions of Judgment and Hope

Having mentioned the judgment against Amaziah, I want to make a few comments about the judgment oracles in the book of Amos.

The first thing that needs to be said is that these were judgments against Israel, and we cannot universalize them. We must not try to apply these exact judgments to other settings — say, the United States or Russia or South Africa or Argentina.

But the second thing we must say is that these dreadful judgments show God’s deep passion for justice in society, and we must not presume upon divine patience. If we fail to provide justice and equity, do we think that God will turn a deaf ear to the cries of the poor and dispossessed?

My third comment is in defense of Amos. Because he was called to deliver judgment oracles, it is easy for us to caricaturize him as a sign-carrying, doom-loving prophet. But such was not the case. Amos himself wished that the matter could be otherwise, and he pleaded with his hearers:

Hate evil and love good,

   and establish justice in the gate;

it may be that the LORD, the God of hosts,

   will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph. (Amos 5:15)

In fact, Amos struggled against his own judgment oracles. In the midst of his prophetic work God gave Amos a vision of judgment, depicted by locusts destroying the “latter growth” — that is, coming at a time when Israel’s crops were the most vulnerable. Amos cried out against the vision:

O Lord GOD, forgive, I beg you!

   How can Jacob stand?

   He is so small! (Amos 7:2)

And divine judgment was restrained in response to Amos’s pleas.

Then God showed Amos a second vision, this one a “shower of fire” that consumed not only everything on the arable land but the “great deep” as well — that is, the underground water supply used to replenish crops following a fire. Again, Amos pleaded for the hand of judgment to be held back:

O Lord GOD, cease, 1 beg you!

   How can Jacob stand?

   He is so small! (Amos 7:5)

And a second time God relented.

But in the third vision the focus shifted from the fact of judgment to the basis for judgment. Amos was shown a plumb line, the covenant standard of obedience to God’s call for justice and righteousness. And Israel failed to measure up; her life was too crooked to warrant either pardon or relief. This time Amos was the one who had to relent. Judgment had to come. But it was only the overwhelming, divinely given conviction that justice cannot be separated from liturgical life that allowed Amos to carry out the judgment pronouncements that he did.

One more comment. Judgment was not the last word for Amos, nor is it the last word for us. How surprising that a book dominated by doom should end with such hope. As David Allan Hubbard has written, “The sword of judgment gives way to the trowel of reconstruction. The day of darkness … is replaced by a day of light.”²⁴ Listen to Amos’s final oracle, an oracle of hope and promise:

The time is surely coming, says the LORD,

   when the one who plows shall overtake the one who

   reaps,

   and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed;

   the mountains shall drip sweet wine,

   and all the hills shall flow with it. (Amos 9:13)

If the book of Amos is the story of the complete reversal of Israel’s fate from covenant people to humiliated outcasts, then the ending Amos speaks of is “the healing reversal of tragic reversal.”²⁵ God’s covenant commitment, which made Israel’s crimes so unspeakable and divine judgment so necessary, is ultimately expressed in hesed, God’s everlasting covenant love. And it is that covenant love which closes the book of Amos in words of brilliant hope: “I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel” (Amos 9:14).

Amos walks across the prophetic scene as a shadowy figure. We know virtually nothing about him, unlike many of the other prophets. But perhaps this anonymity has worked to our advantage, for it has forced us to focus all of our attention upon the message he brings: the message of justice and social righteousness. It is a message we do well to heed.

SEEKING A CONTEMPORARY PARADIGM

The people I have been writing about move me endlessly. Often I have to brush away tears so that I can see to write. Dorothy Day, and the story of her life among the poor, is no exception.

Dorothy Day has been called a saint, a prophet, a legend in her own time. She was most certainly all of these things, though she herself would have fought the labels; they make it too easy to dismiss her, she would say. I would like to suggest another title, one that might make it more difficult to dismiss her as irrelevant to our lives: Dorothy Day was, and is, “a living reproach” to a Church that has become self-satisfied with its affluence and privileged position.²⁶ She was, and is, a living reproach to us who care more about the number of shopping days until Christmas than we care about the poor. She was, and is, a living reproach to us who love status more than we love justice and shalom. She was, and is, a living reproach to us who set aside the concerns of social justice in favor of evangelism. She was, and is — quite simply — a living reproach.

Growing

The third child of John and Grace Day, Dorothy was born 8 November 1897 in New York City. The city of her birth is important. While she lived in other places — San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Mexico City — New York was where she always returned, and New York was where her most enduring work occurred. New York City was in her blood.

Her most vivid childhood memory, however, came from the San Francisco Bay Area (Oakland) rather than New York. She was only seven years old when her family moved to the Bay Area in 1904 — two years before the famous 1906 earthquake. The devastation from that earthquake forced the family to move almost immediately, first to Chicago’s South Side and later, when Dorothy’s father took a newspaper job, to the North Side.

These were the tender years for Dorothy, years filled with sensitivities toward beauty and thoughts of a God whose strength and grace could fill her with joy and make her “Christlike.” At fifteen she wrote of long walks through the multicultural streets of Chicago, enraptured by its sights and sounds and smells. And lovely walks in the park, drinking in its solitude and beauty: “How I love the park in winter! So solitary and awful in the truest meaning of the word. God is there. Of course, He is everywhere but under the trees and looking over the wide expanse of lake He communicates Himself to me and fills me with a deep quiet peace.”²⁷

Seeking

The innocence of childhood, however, must always give way to the ambiguity of adulthood, and for Dorothy this occurred in 1913 with her entrance at sixteen into the University of Illinois in Urbana. Thoughts of God now faded into the background as her dream of becoming a journalist and writer came to the fore — a dream that would be fulfilled many times over throughout her prodigious life. It was also a time of vigorous political ferment as Dorothy interacted with the popular socialist ideologies of that era. The passionate discussions she heard and participated in struck a responsive chord in this young student tender to issues of justice and poverty.

By 1916 Dorothy was back in the city of her birth, New York, working as a reporter for The Call, a socialist newspaper. Quickly she immersed herself into the radical Greenwich Village scene and soon was working for The Masses, a monthly magazine whose editors and contributors were the intellectual aristocracy of America’s left. Here she was thrust into the brilliant New York intellectual scene with writers such as Mike Gold, Max Eastman, and Floyd Dell. It was a heady time: a time of socialist and communist and anarchist sympathies, a time of interviewing Trotsky and reporting on child labor and investigating munitions makers, a time of picket lines and labor strikes and anticonscription rallies.

Dorothy’s later assessment of herself during this period was brutally honest: “I was not a good radical; I was not worthy of respect like those great figures in the movement who were fighting the issues of the day.”²⁸ Perhaps. But to say the least, she was deeply immersed in the sufferings of the poor and passionately involved in causes of justice. To be sure, Dorothy was by no means a Christian yet, but her young, energetic heart-cry against injustice expressed Christian concern.

Work as a reporter was so intently focused upon things immediate and temporal that it squeezed out any space for reflection on things immutable and eternal. “Life on a newspaper,” she observed, “whether radical or conservative, makes one lose all sense of perspective at the time. You are carried along in a world of events, writing, reporting, with no time at all for thought or reflection.”²⁹

In 1917, as an idealistic twenty-year-old, she experienced her first arrest and imprisonment (far from her last), having marched with the suffragettes in Washington, D.C. It was a horrifying thirty days, and the ugliness of that event never left her: “I would never be free again, never free when I knew that behind bars all over the world there were women and men, young girls and boys, suffering constraint, punishment, isolation and hardship for crimes of which all of us are guilty. … I would be utterly crushed by misery before I was released. Never would I recover from this wound, this ugly knowledge I had gained of what men were capable in their treatment of each other.”³⁰

This was also a promiscuous period in her life — she called it her “Bohemian life.” She had a sad love affair with an ex-newspaperman, Lionel Moise, got pregnant, and endured a heart-wrenching abortion.³¹ (Ever after she was a staunch foe of abortion.) On the rebound she married Barkeley Tobey, a founder of the Literary Guild. It was a bad marriage from the start, and after a year together in Europe it ended.

But even through this period of emotional upheaval and shifting political loyalties, nascent spiritual yearnings continued to mingle with her deep commitment to social justice. Since adolescence she had had an enduring love for The Imitation of Christ, calling it the book that “followed me through my days.”³² Pascal’s Pensées stirred her, and the Russian writers Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy awoke in her enduring passions for suffering humanity and social righteousness. She was particularly taken with the compassionate Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, who “spoke glowingly of that love for God which resulted in a love for one’s brother. The story of his conversion to love is moving, and that book, with its picture of religion, had a lot to do with my later life.”³³ After sitting all night in taverns, she would sometimes slip into an early-morning Mass at St. Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue and kneel at the back, “not knowing what was going on at the altar, but warmed and comforted by the lights and silence, the kneeling people and the atmosphere of worship.”³⁴

Dorothy became friends with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, who introduced her to Francis Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven.” Eugene knew the poem by heart, and in a back room of a saloon nicknamed “Hell Hole,” amid drink and smoke, he “would sit there, black and dour,” recounting the soul’s flight from divine love and God’s unrelenting pursuit.”³⁵

I fled Him, down the night and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

   Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, …³⁶

Of those recitations Dorothy said, “The idea of this pursuit by the Hound of Heaven fascinated me. The recurrence of it, the inevitableness of the outcome made me feel that sooner or later I would have to pause in the mad rush of living and remember my first beginning and my last end.”³⁷

Finding

Dorothy Day did indeed come to remember that “first beginning” and “last end.” It happened in this way.³⁸ With money — five thousand dollars — from the movie rights to her first novel, The Eleventh Virgin, she purchased a small house on a Staten Island beach, intending to settle down and write. Here in 1926 she met and fell in love with Forster Batterham, a biologist, anarchist, and committed atheist. The love was mutual, and they entered “a common-law marriage,” Forster’s hostility toward “all man-made institutions” making any other marriage arrangement out of the question.³⁹ Forster’s work took him into New York through the week, but he returned to be with Dorothy on the weekends. That made the Staten Island cottage a perfect writer’s hermitage. It was a happy time for the two of them.

Forster teased Dorothy away from her books and her causes and into his love of nature: slow hours of fishing and long walks on the beach and endless gathering of driftwood for the fireplace. She said that Forster “used to insist on walks no matter how cold or rainy the day, and this dragging me away from my books, from my lethargy, into the open, into the country, made me begin to breathe … a new experience entirely for me, one which brought me to life, and filled me with joy.”⁴⁰

This love of all things natural awakened in Dorothy yearnings for all things eternal. She was happy, blissful. And out of sheer joy she began praying once again — praying her gratitude and thanksgiving, praying the Te Deum as she walked the beach. Ironically, though, the very events that were breathing life into Dorothy’s soul were also erecting a wall between her and Forster: “The very love of nature, and the study of her secrets which was bringing me to faith, cut Forster off from religion.”⁴¹

And then Dorothy became pregnant. For her the news was a “blissful joy.” She was enraptured with the awareness of how utterly good God is and how filled with everlasting love. The pregnancy was truly a converting experience for Dorothy: “I read the Imitation of Christ a great deal during those months. I knew that I was going to have my child baptized, cost what it may. … For myself, I prayed for the gift of faith. I was sure, yet not sure.”⁴²

She was coming to faith — institutional Catholic faith at that! And that journey was erecting an insurmountable barrier between her and Forster: “Becoming a Catholic would mean facing life alone and I clung to family life. It was hard to contemplate giving up a mate in order that my child and I could become members of the Church. Forster would have nothing to do with religion or with me if I embraced it. So I waited.”⁴³

The decision was agonizing for both of them: “He stayed out late on the pier fishing, and came in smelling of seaweed and salt air; getting into bed, cold with the chill November air, he held me close to him in silence. I loved him in every way … I loved him for the odds and ends I had to fish out of his sweater pockets and for the sand and shells he brought in with his fishing. I loved his lean cold body as he got into bed smelling of the sea, and I loved his integrity and stubborn pride.”⁴⁴ In the end, however, baby Tamar Teresa was baptized into Christ’s church. Dorothy too. And Forster left. It was late December 1927.

Serving

Dorothy Day was now thirty years of age: fending for herself, caring for her daughter, maturing in her newfound faith. She moved into an apartment on New York’s West Fourteenth Street “in order to be near Our Lady of Guadalupe Church,”⁴⁵ took a job with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and eked out a living, as did most people during those early years of the Great Depression. It was during this time that she heard the lament of Pope Pius XI: “The workers of the world are lost to the Church.”⁴⁶ Those words put fire in her bones, and she determined that she would devote the rest of her life to working against the assumptions of that utterance. But how?

On 8 December 1932, at the height of the Depression, Dorothy was in Washington, D.C., reporting on a “hunger strike” being staged by a small army of desperately impoverished demonstrators who were pleading for food and the chance to work. Saddened and angered at the brutal treatment of these demonstrators and at the conditions that made them so vulnerable, Dorothy went to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception at Catholic University to pray. The upper church was still under construction, so she went into the crypt beneath, with its low vaulted ceilings and dark chapels lit by the flickering of vigil candles. “There,” she wrote, “I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.”⁴⁷

Returning to her New York apartment, she found a stranger waiting to meet her. “I am Peter Maurin,” he said in a thick French accent. “George Shuster, editor of The Commonweal, told me to look you up. Also, a red-headed Irish Communist in Union Square told me to see you. He says we think alike.”⁴⁸ It was the beginning of a lifelong collaboration that proved to be the vivid answer to Dorothy’s desperate prayer. Dr. Robert Coles, who knew Dorothy well, wrote, “On many occasions Dorothy made it quite clear that for her Peter’s ‘spirit and ideas’ were utterly essential to the rest of her life. She was inspired by his struggle to make the principles of Jesus incarnate in the kind of life he lived, to rescue them from those who had turned Him into an icon of Sunday convenience. The Catholic Worker Movement would become their shared initiative.”⁴⁹ As they talked for days that became weeks and then months, Dorothy realized that “Peter’s spirit and ideas” paralleled her own heart and vision.

“Peter’s spirit” spoke of a radical embodiment of the gospel call to love God and neighbor. It meant embracing voluntary poverty through living with the poor and suffering with the poor; it meant engaging in a radical pacifism as a witness to loving all people, especially enemies; it meant doing the “corporal works of mercy” by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and housing the homeless; it meant doing the “spiritual works of mercy” by consoling the afflicted, bearing wrongs patiently, and, as Dorothy wrote, “we have always classed picket lines … among these works.”⁵⁰ And more.⁵¹

“Peter’s ideas” were strategies of action aimed at social reconstruction. Idealistic, visionary strategies: like a radical newspaper to publicize Catholic social teaching; like hospitality houses where the affluent could personally serve the poor and afflicted; like communal farms where manual labor, prayer, and the “green revolution” could flourish; like roundtable discussions where people of all occupations, backgrounds, and social situations could come together to seek out a common future; like “agronomic universities” where the worker could become a scholar and the scholar a worker; like spiritual retreats where solitude, silence, and faith could deepen and grow. And more. Throughout, Peter aimed at producing, as he put it, “a society where it is easier for men to be good.”⁵²

Dorothy’s whole life had revolved around journalism, so the newspaper came first. They called it The Catholic Worker, the very name showing Dorothy’s determination to overcome the pope’s lament about workers being “lost to the Church.”⁵³ “Workers” were defined in a broad sense, to be sure, but the focus from the beginning was upon “the poor, the dispossessed, the exploited.”⁵⁴ From their own resources and what was offered them from two priests and a nun, they scraped together fifty-seven dollars — just enough to print up 2,500 copies of the first edition. On May Day 1933, walking from New York’s Lower East Side to Union Square, they peddled their paper for “a penny a copy.” By 1936 it had a circulation of over 150,000. To this day it still sells for “a penny a copy.”

From the beginning it was a newspaper with a sting. In her first editorial Dorothy declared that this paper was

For those who are huddling in shelters trying to escape the rain,

   For those who are walking the streets in the all but futile

search for work,

   For those who think that there is no hope for the future, no recognition of their plight …⁵⁵

Peter’s unique blend of radical manifesto and “prose poetry” also found its way into the first issue:

Christ drove the money lenders

out of the Temple.

But today nobody dares

to drive the money lenders

out of the Temple …

because the money lenders

have taken a mortgage

on the Temple.⁵⁶

The Catholic Worker reflected in unambiguous terms Dorothy’s conviction that following Jesus required the renunciation of hatred and killing. Many Catholics found this line of teaching shocking, perhaps even heretical. The Spanish Civil War of 1936 brought the issue to a head. Nearly every bishop and Catholic publication rallied behind Franco and his fascist party, who presented themselves as defenders of the Catholic faith. The Catholic Worker refused to toe the line and even came out with articles warning readers of the anti-Semitism that was characteristic of fascism. Furious letters poured into The Catholic Worker. Dorothy’s editorial reply: “We all know that there is a frightful persecution of religion in Spain. … [Even so,] we are opposed to the use of force as a means of settling personal, national, or international disputes.”⁵⁷

The issue became even more volatile for Americans following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ declaration of war. The next issue of the newspaper carried this headline: WE CONTINUE OUR CHRISTIAN PACIFIST STAND. Inside, Dorothy’s editorial was as uncompromising as ever: “We will print the words of Christ, who is with us always even to the end of the world. ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.’ … Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers. Speaking for many of our conscientious objectors, we will not participate in armed warfare or in making munitions, or by buying government bonds to prosecute the war, or in urging others to these efforts.”⁵⁸

You can imagine the wave of subscription cancellations that followed. But Dorothy would not budge. For her it was an issue of love: she was fond of quoting St. John of the Cross: “Love is the measure by which we shall be judged.” All through the Second World War and all through the Korean War she was a lonely voice crying in the wilderness, crying for the ways of peace. Only with the Vietnam War did other voices join with her.

The houses of hospitality were Peter and Dorothy’s central strategy for engaging in the “works of mercy.” They began these houses in the simplest way possible: renting a place, buying bread and butter, making coffee, preparing soup, and inviting the poor to eat. Whenever possible they provided the homeless with a place to sleep; and most important, they sat with the poor, talking with them and offering friendship and affection. In time there were over thirty “houses of hospitality” throughout the nation. Some floundered; others flourished; all gave love and tangible aid.⁵⁹

The farming communes were Utopian efforts at radical Christian community. Dorothy articulated the dream: “There could be, I believe, groups of families on the land, surrounding a chapel, disciplined by family life and daily attendance at Mass, all subject to one another, with a division of skills and labor and accepting too the authority of one coordinator.”⁶⁰ But like many Utopian dreams these farm communities struggled against the hard realities of human selfishness and individualism. They did give a toehold on the land and allowed for energetic experiments in “the green revolution,” however. They were also places where Catholic Workers could forge a Christian philosophy of work: “God is our creator. God made us in His image and likeness. Therefore we are creators. He gave us a garden to till and cultivate. We become co-creators by our responsible acts, whether in bringing forth children, or producing food, furniture or clothing. The joy of creativeness should be ours.”⁶¹ In the end the majority of these farming experiments failed. “We aimed high, too high,” said Dorothy. “But at least we were able, as Peter said, ‘to arouse the conscience.’”⁶²

The Maryfarm Retreat House in upstate New York was probably the most successful of these community farms, in part because it became tied to another of The Catholic Worker visions: retreat.

Daily life in The Catholic Worker communities involved constant and inescapable crises: fights on the picket lines, life-threatening encounters with structures of injustice, the heartbreaking human needs of malnutrition and sickness and mental breakdown and drunkenness and hysterical, despairing individuals. Something was needed to strengthen and sustain those working in such desperate circumstances. That “something” was The Catholic Worker involvement in the Lacouture Retreat Movement. “The Retreat,” as it came to be called, was an adaptation of the classical Ignatian Retreat.

Dorothy’s first introduction to this experience came through Father Pacifique Roy, a priest who, like Dorothy, believed that the Gospels called people to a way of life that was profoundly revolutionary. Of that first experience Dorothy wrote, “We were sitting in the dining room having our morning coffee when Father Roy started to talk to us about the love of God and what it should mean in our lives. He began with the Sermon on the Mount, holding us spellbound, so glowing was his talk, so heartfelt. People came and went, we were called to the telephone again and again, but still Father Roy went on talking to all who would listen. The men came in from the soup kettles in the kitchen which were being prepared for the soup line and stayed to listen, tables were set around us and the people came in and were fed and went out again, and still Father talked… He … filled us with the spirit of joy while he talked.”⁶³

In time these retreats became a regular feature of Catholic Worker life. They had retreats of “silence and recollection,” study retreats, prayer retreats. In 1937 they had a “retreat for the unemployed” led by Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen.⁶⁴ The retreats were a wonder and a strength to Dorothy: “Those were beautiful days. It was as though we were listening to the gospel for the first time. We saw all things new. There was a freshness about everything as though we were in love, as indeed we were.”⁶⁵

The life and work of Dorothy Day speak to us on many levels. Her radical identification with the poor, her vigorous championing of the cause of the worker, her works of mercy to the homeless, her willingness to be spent in the cause of Christ — all stand as a living reproach to we who are “at ease in Zion.”

Not long before Dorothy’s death Dr. Robert Coles visited her for one last time. “It will soon be over,” she told him, then added, “I try to think back; I try to remember this life that the Lord gave me; the other day I wrote down the words ‘a life remembered,’ and I was going to try to make a summary for myself, write what mattered most — but I couldn’t do it. I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!”⁶⁶

For nearly fifty years Dorothy had written a column in The Catholic Worker entitled “On Pilgrimage.” Well, on 29 November 1980, at 5:30 P.M., that pilgrimage ended. “It was a death,” wrote her colleague Jim Forest, “as quiet as the turning of a page.”⁶⁷

A huge checkerboard of humanity gathered for the funeral Mass: well-known writers and editors and the homeless from the streets, believers and atheists, left and right. Some had traveled thousands of miles. Among the sea of mourners on that sad day stood Forster Batterham, the man whom, in spite of over a half-century’s separation, Dorothy still called “husband.”⁶⁸

DEFINING THE SOCIAL JUSTICE TRADITION

Social justice is where the central issue in the Holiness Tradition — love — meets the road. Dag Hammarskjöld wrote, “The road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.”⁶⁹ And so the supernatural resources to live appropriately — to live the virtuous life — now extend out into our relationships with people and with social structures and even with the earth itself.

Two Sweeping Movements

The fulcrum for the Social Justice Tradition is Matthew 22:37-40: ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”⁷⁰

In Jesus’ day there were 613 commandments of Jewish law — 365 negative and 248 positive. And Jesus gathers them all together into two sweeping movements of the heart. Love of God is the vertical movement and love of neighbor the horizontal. They are separate commandments, to be sure, but inseparable really. White-hot love of God compels us into compassionate love of neighbor.

In Luke’s rendering of this teaching a lawyer asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29b). That is a good question. The common view of that day was that “neighbor” meant “cultural equivalent”: the person who looks like me, dresses like me, thinks like me. To explode that common view of neighbor, Jesus tells the now-famous story of a Samaritan — someone who is definitely not the Jew’s cultural equivalent — who showed compassion on a beaten and broken Jew, the avowed enemy of the Samaritan. That’s it! Neighbor, says Jesus, is “nigh-bor,” the person near us, the person in need. Jesus refuses to put walls around the word neighbor. No national heritage, no racial origin, no ethnic background, no barriers of class or culture can separate us from our neighbor.

Paul gives this same issue memorable expression when he says, “There is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” (Col. 3:11). I especially like this listing because Paul includes the Scythian in it. The Scythians were the barbarian’s barbarians — Josephus called them “wild beasts.” But in Jesus even the Scythian is my neighbor, whom I am to love as myself.

In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus pushes the horizontal movement of love of neighbor to the nth degree. In this teaching he reminds us that loving our “cultural equivalent” is nothing new; the unrighteous do as much. Instead, he says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44). Here we come to an understanding of neighbor that few can handle: our enemy is our neighbor.

Now, loving our enemies is simply not in us in natural human strength. Most of us cannot view it as a good thing, much less carry it out. Even to want to love our enemies demands a power outside of us, which is precisely why the vertical movement of love is so essential to the horizontal movement of love. Love of God makes love of neighbor possible.

Three Great Themes

The Social Justice Tradition embraces three great themes — themes that are wonderfully summed up in three Hebrew words: (mishpat), (hesed), and (shalom).⁷¹

Technically mishpat means “justice,” but it is an expansive word rich in meaning, carrying social, ethical, and religious connotations. It involves a morality over and above strict legal justice; it includes observance of good custom or established practice, especially the practice of an equitable distribution of the land. It is used so constantly in conjunction with the Hebrew word for righteousness () that the biblical scholar Volkmar Herntrich believes the two concepts should be viewed as virtually synonymous.⁷²

We are told that God “executes justice [mishpat] for the orphan and the widow, and … loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing” (Deut. 10:18). And again the Psalmist declared, “The LORD works vindication and justice [mishpat] for all who are oppressed” (Ps. 103:6).

This justice involved the wisdom to bring equitable, harmonious relationships between people. When Solomon prayed for the wisdom to govern the people justly, God responded, “You … have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right [mishpat]” (1 Kings 3:11).

Political leaders were expected to exercise this quality of ethical compassion, of justice, on behalf of all the people. Micah accused the rulers of Israel of economic cannibalism for their brutal injustice:

Should you not know justice? —

   you who …

eat the flesh of my people,

   flay their skin off them,

break their bones in pieces,

   and chop them up like meat in a kettle,

   like flesh in a caldron. (Micah 3:1b-3)

Jeremiah was brokenhearted that justice could not be found anywhere in all Jerusalem, though a person would “run to and fro” through every street (Jer. 5:1).

God had institutionalized a system of compassionate justice through such things as the law of gleaning and the Year of Jubilee, but political leaders in Israel had institutionalized a system of hardened injustice, “Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees,” lamented Isaiah, “and the writers who keep writing oppression” (Isa. 10:1, RSV). God, we are told, abhors all Judah’s pious rituals because they lack social relevance. The fast God desires is for people to “loose the bonds of injustice” and to “let the oppressed go free.” God’s justice, God’s mishpat, is for the people to “share your bread with the hungry, / and bring the homeless poor into your house” (Isa. 58:5-7, RSV). This is social justice.

Hesed holds before us the great theme of compassion. It is a word so laden with meaning that translators struggle to find an English equivalent, often rendering it “loving kindness” or “steadfast love.” It is a word most frequently used in reference to God’s unwavering compassion for his people. God’s wonderful hesed love is “from everlasting to everlasting,” declared the Psalmist (Ps. 103:17). It is a “steadfast love” that “endures forever” (Ps. 106:1).

But the great challenge for us is that this covenant love, this durable mercy that is so central to the character of God, is to be reflected in us as well. Through Hosea the prophet, God declares, “I desire steadfast love [hesed] and not sacrifice, / the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hos. 6:6).

Sprinkled throughout the Hebrew Scriptures are grace-filled laws of compassion, of hesed. The law of gleaning, mentioned earlier, is a prime example. Farmers were to leave some of the crop along the borders and the grain that fell on the ground during harvest so that the poor could gather it (Lev. 19:9-20). Likewise the vineyards and the olive groves were not to be stripped bare, in order to make provision for the needy. There seemed in this law to be an almost holy indifference as to whether the poor deserved their poverty; the simple fact of need was sufficient reason to provide for them.

Think of the tender compassion in the old Hebrew laws of giving and taking a pledge. If someone borrowed your oxcart and left his coat in pledge, you had to be sure to give the coat back before sunset even if he hadn’t finished with the oxcart. Why? Because the night air was cold, and he would need his coat for warmth. The rule was doubly binding if the person who made the pledge was poor, for in all likelihood he had no other coat with which to keep warm (Deut. 24:12). A widow’s coat could not be taken as a pledge, because she was helpless enough as it was (Deut. 24:17). A millstone was never to be taken in pledge; after all, it was a person’s livelihood (Deut. 24:6). No one was ever to barge into a neighbor’s house to retrieve what had been loaned; rather, the lender was to wait at the front door for it to be brought out (Deut. 24:10-11). Graciousness, courtesy, compassion — this is hesed.

Hesed is a quality that extends even to the animals and the land. The sabbath rest principle of Hebrew law included the needs of the livestock (Exod. 23:12). After seven years of planting and harvesting, the land itself needed “a year of complete rest” (Lev. 25:5). Even the soil of the vineyards was not to be overtaxed by planting other crops between the rows (Deut. 22:9). The oxen that trod out the grain were not to be muzzled so that they could eat while they worked (Deut. 25:4). And so on. The whole point of this instruction was that our dominion over the earth and the little creatures that creep upon it is to be filled with compassion. We should not rape the earth but manage and care for it — kindly, lovingly, tenderly. This too is social justice.

Most amazing of all is the way the biblical writers wove together the justice of mishpat with the compassion of hesed. To give people justice — what is due them — that is one thing; but the spirit out of which we give and the way we relate to people in our giving, well, that is another thing altogether. In what must be considered one of the most powerful summations of our task in all Hebrew Scripture, we see the blending of the demands of justice with the spirit of compassion.

He has showed you, O people, what is good.

   And what does the LORD require of you?

To act justly [mishpat] and to love mercy [hesed]

   and to walk humbly with your God. (Mic. 6:8, NIVI)

If mishpat and hesed are spotlights illuminating various dimensions of the Social Justice Tradition, then shalom is a great beacon. A full-bodied concept that gathers in but is much broader than peace, shalom means wholeness, unity, balance. Shalom embodies the vision of a harmonious, all-inclusive community of loving persons. The great vision of shalom begins and ends our Bible. In the creation narrative, God brings order and harmony out of chaos; in the Apocalypse of John people from all the nations form a loving community in “the holy city, the new Jerusalem,” which has no temple, “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Gen. 1, Rev. 21).

The messianic child to be born is the “Prince of Peace,” and justice and righteousness and peace are to characterize his unending kingdom (Isa. 9:6-7). Central to the dream of shalom is the magnificent vision of all nations streaming to the mountain of the temple of God to be taught his ways and walk in his paths:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares,

   and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

   neither shall they learn war any more. (Isa. 2:2-4)

Shalom conveys the idea of a harmonious unity in the natural order as well: the wolf and the calf become friends, the lion and the lamb lie down together, “and a little child shall lead them” (Isa. 11:1-9). We are in harmony with God; faithfulness and loyalty prevail. We are in harmony with our neighbor; justice and mercy abound. We are in harmony with nature; peace and unity reign. This is the vision of shalom.

Economically and socially, the vision of shalom means a caring and a consideration for all peoples. The greed of the rich is tempered by the need of the poor. Justice, harmony, and equipoise prevail. Under the reign of God’s shalom the poor are no longer oppressed, because ravaging greed no longer rules.

In a particularly tender scene, Jeremiah lamented the fraud and greed of his day, saying, “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14). In essence, Jeremiah had filed a malpractice suit against self-styled religious quacks. They had put a Band-Aid over a gaping social wound and said, “Shalom, shalom — all is well.” But Jeremiah thundered back, “En shalom — all is not well. Justice is spurned, the poor are oppressed, the orphan is ignored. There is no wholeness, no healing here!”

But the healing shalom of God will not be spurned forever, for Jeremiah could see a day when God would make a new covenant with his people: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more” (Jer. 31:33b-34).

Mishpat, hesed, shalom — these are perspectives that inform our vision of the Social Justice Tradition. May the day soon come when “steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other” (Ps. 85:10).

Three Great Arenas

We work for social justice within three great arenas, and we are given weapons of the Spirit specifically designed for effective use in the context of each of these arenas.

The first arena in the struggle for social justice is the personal arena. This is critical, for we cannot work for justice and live injustice; we cannot work for peace and live war; we cannot work for racial reconciliation and live bigotry. So we stand against all forms of pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust within ourselves, for these destroy the good we would do in the world. We take the issues of sexual purity and rectitude with utter seriousness, for sexual distortion dehumanizes ourselves and others. We repudiate and crucify the self-sins within: self-promotion, self-pity, self-sufficiency, self-righteousness, self-worship. We attack the inner citadels of arrogance and independence.

Then too we pursue and embrace the cardinal virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice, along with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. We commit ourselves to honesty in all business dealings, integrity in all words and deeds, purity in all matters of morality, generosity of spirit in all things, and divine love toward all peoples.

Many weapons of the Spirit are employed in this work, but the one most specifically useful in the personal arena is prayer. In prayer we wait in the power of God for the evil to dissipate and the good to rise up. By prayer we receive spiritual enabling to overpower the egoism that drives us so relentlessly. Through prayer we develop the longing, the yearning to sink down deep into the things of God. From prayer we discern the actions we are to take to overcome evil with good. All this we will need to sustain us in the struggle for social righteousness.

The second arena is the social arena. This begins on the level of interpersonal relationships: marriages and families and friends and neighbors and work associates and all those who curse us and spitefully use us. As much as it lies within us, we live in peace with all people. This is the work of healing and reconciliation, of compassion and shalom.

You may remember that the first internal controversy the early church faced after Pentecost was an issue of social justice. The widows of the Greek-speaking Jews were being discriminated against in the daily food distribution. This was at its heart a spiritual problem, and the apostles used an organizational means to solve it. Deacons who were “full of the Spirit and of wisdom” were appointed to oversee the food distribution (Acts 6:3). And just look at the grace and compassion of the community in solving this problem of discrimination: all those chosen had Greek names, meaning that they were from the aggrieved group. May we have the same grace and compassion in dealing with justice in our churches.

This work of social justice extends on out to the larger social context of our culture: school boards and community clubs and civic organizations and city commissions, and much more. Into all these social networks we bring love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and generosity and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23).

We feed the hungry. We help the helpless. We reach out to the orphan, the widow, the weak, the shoved aside. We take the struggle for justice into the American slums and the Brazilian barrios and the Indian sweathouses and the Cambodian houses of prostitution.

As before, we engage in the work of reconciliation and healing, but we do more too. We look for those who are excluded or neglected because of their social status, or their race, or their background, or their gender, or their age, or any number of other things. And we lobby for their acceptance and welcome and embrace into the social network. We also look to see if there are social networks that are destructive to human life — networks that manipulate and control, networks that exclude and reject. These are not difficult to identify if we have eyes to see. Then, depending upon the situation, our task is either to work for their transformation or their defeat.

In addition, we look for any relationships or networks that need to be established for the health and welfare of the community — a new group to foster healthy families, perhaps, or to counter child abuse or to combat racism. Whatever, wherever, whoever.

Our major weapon in this work is Christian community. Now, when I speak of “Christian community,” I am referring not just to the work of churches, and certainly not churches as they are often manifest today. I am speaking of an alternative way of living that shows forth social life as it is meant to be lived. Communities of love and acceptance. Fellowships of freedom and liberation. Centers of hope and vision. Societies of nurture and accountability. Little pockets of life and light so stunning that a watching world will declare, “See how they love one another!”

The third arena in our work for social justice is the arena of institutional structures. Demonic powers can be incarnated in the structures of any society, becoming part of the public policy and laws of the land. When Jesus cleansed the temple in Jerusalem, he was defeating an institutional structure that had become destructive.

Justice and goodness too can be built into institutional structures, within limits. I say “within limits” because just laws, while right and necessary, can never guarantee the spirit out of which those laws will be administered.

In the institutional arena we engage in “the cultural mandate.” Our task is to envision and work to realize a society where it is easier to do good and harder to do evil; a society with institutions and laws and public policies that provide justice for all and enhanced life for all.

Where structures perpetuate poverty, we work to change them. Where structures dehumanize, we work to make them more responsive to human need. In addition, we welcome and work for all institutions that enhance art and beauty. It is instructive that all through Dorothy Day’s intense ministry among the poor, she never lost her love of beauty or her love of the theater and the arts.

Now, the battlefronts in the institutional arena are myriad, and some of them are terribly complicated, for they become all tangled up in historical allegiances and cultural traditions and political interests. But face them we must. The plight of the unborn. Problems of poverty and housing. Issues of nationalism and militarism. Of war and peace. Of racism. Of sexism. Of ageism. Of consumerism. Of environmentalism.

I warned you that some of these matters would get complicated. I certainly have here neither the space nor the wisdom to stake out a position on all the areas I have just listed (not to mention the areas I have not listed). But I would encourage us all to struggle with these issues in the light of the principle of a consistent life ethic, whereby we seek to discern what position and what approach will be the most life-giving to all people. We look for ways to break the horns of cruel dilemmas. We seek out the ways most expressive of love of God and love of neighbor, the touchstone of the Social Justice Tradition.

Prophetic witness is the weapon most useful in the institutional arena. We are the conscience to the various expressions of institutional life, most particularly the state. We commend the state when it provides justice for all, and we bring prophetic critique when it fails. This is done in many ways. John Woolman wrote and spoke and petitioned against the institution of slavery. He also refused to wear dyed clothing that was the product of slave labor. Later many Quakers engaged in civil disobedience against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, which made it illegal to help runaway slaves. They felt that a higher law compelled them to disobey the unjust laws of human government. Some people have been drawn into similar protests today. When we are so drawn, we must act in a manner consistent with the commandments to love God and love neighbor: we must conduct peaceful, nonviolent, prophetic protest. This too is the work of social justice.

Obviously the nature and kind of prophetic witness varies greatly depending on whether the state is participatory or totalitarian. William Wilberforce labored in a participatory state, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in a totalitarian state.⁷³ Both gave effective prophetic witness. Both understood by experience the penetrating words of Donald Bloesch: “The Gospel is a stick of dynamite in the social structure.”⁷⁴

DISCOVERING THE MAJOR STRENGTHS

It is of genuine importance that we stress the strengths of the Social Justice Tradition so that we may have hope for the task.

First, the Social Justice Tradition is constantly calling us to a right ordering of society — right relationships and right living. It envisions the social order as it was meant to be. What an important value this is! Many people, you understand, have the uneasy feeling that the concerns of social justice succeed only in making their lives rather dull and uncomfortable. If only they could dispense with these concerns — so the thinking goes — they would finally be able to relax and enjoy life. But the call of social justice is to a life that, because it functions well, makes peaceful social evolution possible. How important this is, for if we make peaceful social evolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.

Second, a focus on social justice enhances our ecclesiology, our doctrine of the Church. It helps make our faith real, not merely theoretical. It puts names and faces on the work of justice. No longer are we people separated by nationality and social class and race and gender; “no longer Jew or Greek … no longer slave or free … no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

Social justice promotes harmony in relationships between peoples so that we can learn to live together not just with civility but with genuine appreciation. Human beings are infinitely precious beings because we are created in the image of God, but also because of the way we can enrich one another. If we are a people rich in social relationships, we are rich indeed. Whenever we develop significant friendships with those who are not like us culturally, we become broader, wiser persons. Social justice teaches us that we can be infinitely diverse culturally and still live as one people.

At the great Jerusalem council described in Acts 15, it was decided once and for all that faith in Christ demands no cultural presuppositions. We can receive one another in our own cultural “vessel.” Gentiles do not need to become cultural Jews to be disciples of Jesus, nor do Jews need to become cultural Gentiles. Eskimos can remain Eskimo and Samoans can remain Samoan. Norwegians can worship and serve Christ in Norwegian ways and Zambians in Zambian ways.

Each culture, of course, has elements in it that are discontinuous with the gospel message and life, and these we repudiate. But seldom are these the things we imagine at first. Besides, much within every culture is either continuous with the gospel or not offensive to it, and these cultural ways we accept and receive as rich expressions of the human family. We are the body of Christ together, and individually members of it.

Third, social justice concerns provide a bridge between personal ethics and social ethics. Too many of us separate the two — with disastrous results. When, for example, we faithfully read our Bible and at the same time develop racist public policy, we are a scandal to the gospel. This must not be.

God cares about whether we individually lie or speak the truth, but he cares equally about companies that run advertising campaigns claiming more than is actually the case. We cannot speak of love and at the same time be part of institutional structures that perpetuate injustice. It is not enough for us to care for individual cases of hunger if we are part of multinational corporations whose policies continually impoverish Two-Thirds World^* countries.

Fourth, social justice gives relevance and bite to the language of Christian love. Too often our talk about love is sentimental and soft. It needs to be toughened by the hard realities of absentee landlords and prostitute rings and drug smugglers and industrial spies and political pettifoggers. We cannot speak with integrity of loving our neighbor until we are prepared to face the structural violence that is built into many of our policies and institutions.

Fifth, a theology of social justice gives us a foundation for ecological concerns. The shalom we seek extends to the earth itself, as Paul reminds us: “The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now” (Rom. 8:22). We have been given stewardship over the environment, and may God help us to exercise it wisely. We are still struggling to know what it means to have a just and sustainable world. David Orr of Oberlin College writes, “Many things on which our future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.”⁷⁵

Sixth, and finally, Christian social witness continuously holds before us the relevance of the impossible ideal. It points us to the new heaven and the new earth. It reminds us that “God can make a way where there is no way.” It keeps alive the prophetic imagination. It never lets us forget the redemptive power of the active, self-sacrificial love that is imaged in the cross. Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur. Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow him.

UNDERSTANDING THE POTENTIAL PERILS

By now you have a well-rehearsed sensibility to the fact that all the Traditions can be distorted and used in destructive ways. Social justice is no exception. Let’s consider some of its most prominent perils.

Perhaps the greatest danger is the tendency for the Social Justice Tradition to become an end in itself. Though regrettable, this tendency is understandable. The needs of poverty are so immediate and the demands of justice are so great that they can consume all our energies. Besides, spiritual realities are often less pressing and less visible, and thus we tend to set them aside. The value systems of the world in which we live do not help. They may be able to appreciate our works of mercy and compassion, even to give them recognition and praise. But modern sensibilities consider spiritual realities to be irrelevant, even suspect.

It is, of course, a genuine danger for the Holiness Tradition to operate on a pietistic level that never engages the social dimensions of its work, or for the Evangelical Tradition to preach a gospel that fails to understand the larger context of its message. But these dangers pale when compared to the pitfall in the Social Justice Tradition of caring for social needs without reference to the condition of the heart. Organizations without number have begun with a wholehearted commitment to minister to both physical and spiritual needs, only to end up severing the spiritual underpinnings of their efforts. The only thing these organizations have left is a kind of social salvation that leaves people rooted in spiritual despair and alienated from God.

We must face the fact that, on a strictly human level, the state has more resources for providing social services than the Church does. And we should most certainly urge the state in just such efforts. But the Church has deeper reasons for its existence and ministry, reasons that are fundamentally spiritual in nature. For Christians social justice concerns must always be rooted in profound spiritual realities.

A second peril is that of strident legalism. This is a surprise to many, because the Social Justice Tradition is the stream with the least obvious religiosity, and it is the most deeply rooted in human need. But after the Holiness Tradition it is the stream most prone to rigidity and judgmentalism. This is because it operates primarily on the level of action and lifestyle, people can easily be judged on the most superficial of outward standards. People’s level of commitment to a simple lifestyle, for example, is often based upon the kind of housing they live in or the transportation they use or the clothing they wear.

In addition, the concerns of social justice are so critical to human life that we often cannot bring ourselves to allow the same latitude of differences that we might in other matters. We quickly and harshly condemn people who differ with us on matters, say, of abortion or capital punishment or racism or militarism or any number of other issues. Standards of who is in and who is out, who is right and who is wrong become more and more narrowly defined. It is a danger we tend to fall into because the stakes are so high.

A third arena of peril emerges whenever we become too closely identified with any particular political agenda. Our faith is political, and it does make value judgments on political concerns. But this political link needs to be handled in such a way that we are never co-opted by any political persuasion or for any political agenda. The Church must forever stand as the conscience of the state, insisting that it fulfill its divinely appointed function of providing justice and order in society. Too cozy a relationship with any political entity will blunt our prophetic edge. Now, this describes the task of those who stand outside the political process and bring prophetic critique to that process.

Those who are called to the body politic have a somewhat different task. They will, most certainly, take firm political positions — positions that prayerfully grow out of Christian conviction and are legitimate within the context of a pluralistic society — and they will initiate legislation and sponsor bills based on those political positions. But even here Christ’s disciples must maintain sufficient distance to speak prophetically to political agendas or to the very political structure itself, even to the point of resignation if necessary. Earlier in this chapter I mentioned the Quakers’ 1756 resignation from the Pennsylvania General Assembly, and perhaps that action can be a helpful model for us.⁷⁶

Other perils exist; we could never cover every circumstance. But we will be guided rightly if we, with purity of heart, ever keep before us the vision of loving God furiously and loving our neighbor as ourselves.

PRACTICING THE SOCIAL JUSTICE TRADITION

It is easy to feel that these issues are far beyond our small abilities, and most certainly they are. But even so, there is much that we can do. First, we can open ourselves to the possibility that God may want to use us in a significant way. History is full of ordinary people who, like Amos, were called to positions of influence far beyond their intentions. Second, we can get the facts. We become global citizens when we care enough to be informed about what happens to our neighbors in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Santiago and Johannesburg. Third, we can become advocates for the powerless and exploited. Our comfortable dinner parties need to hear the whimpering, moaning “songs from the slums.”⁷⁷ Our soft love needs the backbone of justice.

Fourth, we can support relief agencies in their good work both financially and through volunteer efforts. Such agencies need our help. Fifth, we can go beyond relief and become involved politically. Life is political, and if we refuse to influence public policy, someone else will. Sixth, we can use our literary skills in the cause of the poor. Letters to the editor, newsletters, magazine articles, substantive books, and good television and movie scripts are all needed. Our hymns and contemporary gospel music desperately need tough social content. Seventh, we can take the work of prayer into the social arena. It is necessary work if we are to defeat the demonic principalities and powers incarnated in so many institutional structures.

I conclude these brief comments on praxis with a word of caution: do not try to answer every cry of human need or respond to every instance of injustice. It would simply do you in. While it is important for us to take up some task of justice, we are not to take up every task of justice. God knows that we are finite human beings and does not ask us to do more than we can bear.

THE CALL TO COMPASSIONATE LIVING

QUESTION:

What is the Social Justice Tradition?

ANSWER:

A life committed to compassion and justice for all peoples.

QUESTION:

Why should we explore it?

ANSWER:

Because through it God develops in us the compassion to love our neighbor freely and develops in our world a place where justice and righteousness prevail.

God calls us to a life of social justice whose circumference embraces 360 degrees: personal, social, institutional. It is a life that receives all peoples: enemies and friends, poor and rich, illiterate and educated, whomever and whomever. It is a life that engages in outward conflict with all social, economic, and civil injustices of society, judging down wickedness and building up the good, the true, and the beautiful.

In the seventeenth century James Nayler was a vigorous protagonist in the cause of social justice across the length and breadth of England. In 1660, a year after his release from prison for his religious activity, he headed for home to see his wife and children. On his way he was attacked by bandits who robbed and beat him and left him for dead. Friends found Nayler in a field, mortally wounded. They took him to a nearby home and watched over him until he died. Fortunately, they recorded his words in the hours before his death — words that remain to this day a classic manifesto to the life of compassion and justice and shalom.

Perhaps Nayler’s dying words can be living words for you and for me:

There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thoughts to any other. If it be betrayed, it bears it, for its ground and spring is the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned; and takes its kingdom with entreaty and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind. In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its life. It’s conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it, nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It never rejoiceth but through sufferings: for with the world’s joy it is murdered. I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places in the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection and eternal holy life.⁷⁸

^* The Yearly Meeting constitutes the major legislative and administrative body among Friends. It covers a particular geographic region and exercises spiritual authority over its members in that region. John was a member of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.

^* As used by sociologists the term “Two-Thirds World” deals with geography, population, and economics. The underdeveloped countries comprise two-thirds of the population covering two-thirds of the earth’s land mass. It is certainly worth pondering whether these are truly “underdeveloped countries” or whether the remaining one-third are “overdeveloped countries.”

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