Class Session Summary: Tuesday, Jan. 24

Today’s class set up some of the foundational principles for how Christians should engage in justice and human rights. Using the readings, from Good News about Injustice by Gary Haughen and “God’s Justice: A Biblical View” by Sarah Dylan Breuer, we started by thinking about how our theology could (and should) shape our understanding of justice. Some ideas included the biblical command to “Love one another,” the frequent prophetic calls to “seek justice” (as in the prophets), the importance of lamenting over injustice (especially in Jeremiah and Lamentations), the imperative for Christians to join God in the work he’s doing to rescue the "least of these," among other ideas listed above. Haughen offered us four lessons he's learned as he's been doing justice work to guide our thinking: 1. "There is a God of justice who is active in the world"; 2. "The Word of God has the power to change lives"; 3. "God redeems and restores the victims of injustice"; and 4. "Christians are embracing the biblical call to justice." (14, 16, 18, 20). 

From there, we worked in groups to develop key questions we’re interested in pursuing in this course. You can see the list of all the questions, but one thing I pointed out was how many of the questions started with the word “How.” I talked about how tempting it is to want practical solutions, to want to know what to do in the face of suffering and injustice. Though we will spend some time thinking about practical applications of what we’re learning, the majority of our time together this semester will be doing by learning, by understanding, by listening. That may feel frustrating at times, so it’s important for us to keep the long view in mind: college is for equipping, so better understanding how justice and injustice look in different historical moments equips us to think carefully and critically about where we see the need for justice in other circumstances. Ultimately, the goal is that all of us would be better-equipped to practice justice in whatever situations the Lord puts in our path, but to do that, we need the tools of empathy, awareness, and critical thinking. Sarah Dylan Breuer writes in one of the readings for today that for those of us who profess to follow Jesus, "engaging God's mission of justice and reconciliation in the world isn't an optional add-on" (32). The way we will engage is in reading about injustice and looking for God at work, seeing how the God of all history is moving to make the world God made as it should be. 

Using Christopher Marshall’s book, Crowned with Glory: Human Rights in the Biblical Tradition, along with a variety of perspectives from pastors I’ve gleaned over the years, I talked through some of the theological principles that shape many Christians’ understanding of human rights. Moving from the dignity and worth of all people based on their having been created in the image of God to the hope of a redeemed and restored earth where all of God’s creation flourishes as God intended it to, the key movements in Scripture that undergird the rights of human beings in the world are: Creation, Fall, Covenant, Jesus, and Redemption. See the presentation posted on Blackboard for Scripture references and more explanation, and especially for the definition of "human rights" that Marshall cites and interprets. 

With those principles in mind, we then turned our attention to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Drafted in the wake of the atomic bomb and the world’s learning about the specifics of the holocaust, this document marks the first attempt by an international coalition to delineate specific universal rights that could apply in all national and cultural contexts. Groups talked through a few of them and tried to identify which biblical principles they seem to be upholding. We didn’t finish this activity, so we will return to it on Thursday.