Abolition Is Your Duty

When abolitionists say that our movement is “body-driven,” we mean that body of Christ, the Church, is the only group of people on earth that is specifically empowered by God to combat and overcome sin. Because abolition seeks the removal of national sins like chattel slavery, abortion, sex trafficking, etc, we thus rely on Christianity over human effort as the vehicle to bring God’s message of repentance and reconciliation to civil rulers and the culture at large. Because the Holy Spirit’s work in and through the Christians is so central to the abolition of national sin, when the Church neglects this aspect of our witness, abolitionists face an additional task of calling the Church to repent of its complicity and tolerance of grave evils that have taken over the culture.

Part of the problem in the modern Church is an unbiblical view of how justice ministry fits into the Christian life. Pastors frequently view justice ministries like anti-abortion activism as a special calling that individual Christians are free to choose or reject on the basis of whether or not they think they are gifted or called to that ministry. Because confronting people with their sin is deeply unpleasant work, especially when constrasted with other options like singing on a stage, teaching, or greeting people at the church door, justice ministry in the modern Church is largely neglected, leaving the culture largely unaccountable.

Abolitionism on the other hand teaches that justice ministry is like evangelism, discipleship, hospitality, teaching, etc. — a duty that every able Christian is obligated to participate in, to one extent or another, and that particular people may freely choose to focus on. So while not every Christian is a gifted evangelist with a full-time focus on outreach (Eph 4:11), every able Christian is nevertheless called and empowered to preach the gospel and make disciples as a matter of obedience to Jesus (Mat 28:18-20). While not every Christian will have a particular ministry overseeing the help of widows (Act 6:1-6), every able Christian is still called to contribute to the care of widows, orphans, and other people in need (Act 2:45, 5:4, Jas 1:27). In the same way, while not every Christian will lead political initiatives or otherwise focus on calling his nation to repent of its various sins, every able Christian is still called to participate in justice ministry, to one extent or another. Loving and pursuing justice is part of what it means to reflect God’s character, so it’s part of what it means to be a mature and complete Christian (Mic 6:6-8, Luk 11:37-12:12).

There are several reasons why Christians don’t think about biblical justice as being a normal part of the Christian life.

One major theological cause of this bad view of spiritual gifts is that modern church leaders generally believe in a reductionist gospel of pietism, that Christians are to be focused exclusively or predominantly on the saving of individual souls from personal sin and Hell, rather than present a comprehensive worldview that addresses both the physical and the spiritual implications of man’s fall from Eden.

For pietism, pastors who are faithful to preach personal repentance are teaching everything that God cares about regarding the subject of sin and its removal. National repentance as a ministry of the Church is thus completely left out of pastoral descriptions of Christian duty and the collective actions of the Church.

For pietism, in a culture where e.g. sex trafficking is ubiquitous, the pastor’s sole responsibility is to ensure that the individuals in his own flock abstain from (and as needed, repent of) participating in the enslaving and exploitation of women. With that accomplished, the Church can then live in relative peace alongside sex trafficking organizations in the broader culture, because we’re not called to solve social issues in the physical world; we are merely here to rescue as many people from spiritual death and Hell as we can.

The abolitionist argues that no, while evangelism and discipleship are part of the Christian calling, there are many other duties in scripture which we are called and accountable to God to fulfill as an expression of the Spirit’s work in our lives. The great commission is merely one of many commands given by Christ, with love of God and neighbor as the overarching summary of Christian ethics, which includes other duties beyond evangelism (Luk 10:25-37). One such duty is the advancement of national repentance, which itself even flows out of the great commission anyway, at least in part. When we realize that civil rulers are people who need God’s message of judgement and reconciliation, and that they are able to sin and repent in unique ways that impact the moral standing of the nation before God (1Co 15:21-22, Psa 2), then it becomes clear that Christians are to preach the law and gospel of Christ to civil rulers as well, and hold them accountable to repent of their oppression and other wickedness.

A second cause is a problem of sin rather than error — or rather a sin that produces error. The sheer amount of injustice in our day makes a strong case that the American Church is once again dealing with a problem of loveless, dehumanizing apathy toward our fellow man. Looking at abortion alone, which far outstrips the injustice of african slavery in terms of both numbers and the severity of oppression, we see that Christians in the United States who are living comparatively comfortable and wealthy lives generally fail to obey the golden rule, of treating other people the way in which we ourselves would want to be treated (Mat 7:12). Some of this can be explained by lack of love, and some can be explained by the dehumanizing social dynamic of ageism, which parallels the racism that maintained slavery in days past. In both national sins, the cultural conscience was/is so seared by our repeated mistreatment of human beings that we came to see them as subhuman, in our instinctive responses to their mistreatment, and eventually in our thinking.

The answer as with any sin is to correct our thinking and actions, so that our hearts and consciences will eventually fall back in line with a healthy view of reality. Concerning the Church’s former apathy toward slaves, one abolitionist leader made the following corrective speech about the Christian duty of love:

But, if they are men; if they are to run the same career of immortality with ourselves; if the same law of God is over them as over all others; if they have souls to be saved or lost; if Jesus included them among those for whom he laid down his life; if Christ is within many of them “the hope of glory;” then, when I claim for them all that we claim for ourselves, because we are created in the image of God, I am guilty of no extravagance, but am bound, by every principle of honour, by all the claims of human nature, by obedience to Almighty God, to “remember them that are in bonds as bound with them,” and to demand their immediate and unconditional emancipation.

— William Lloyd Garrison, No Compromise With Slavery

Aside from the question of preborn salvation, Garrison’s challenge applies equally to our own day. If preborn children truly are distinct and valuable human beings who are being exterminated with great efficiency and in great numbers — if they are men; if they are to run the same career of immortality with ourselves; if they are people whom we will all face in eternity to answer the question, “Did I do for you what I would have wanted done for me?” — then why is their systematic extermination such a low priority in our lives and theologies of the Christian life?

While the purpose of this article isn’t primarily to address the overwhelmingly cold heart of Christianity toward dying children, I do suspect that the article’s theological argument in favor of a Christian duty of abolition will be undermined for many readers unless this sweeping sin of partiality is highlighted and considered. As in antebellum America, I am convinced that the modern American Church has a problem of the heart that far outweighs any problem of the mind, where immoral desires have more to do with the abysmal state of our theology of justice than simply mistaken minds. We want our theology to justify ignoring the most needy and oppressed people around us, so we work at it until we find a way to make the Bible agree with our easy lifestyle.

For one person, you can quote the parable of the Good Samaritan, and mention that similar evils go on every day in the communities around us, and this alone is sufficient to change the course of his entire life and ministry, because his heart is good soil that is able to receive the correction of God’s word. For another person, you can make a robust, precise theological case across years of dialogue, and the smallest loophole in the tiniest verse is enough to undermine the entire argument, because his heart is choking the seed of scripture by the cares and riches of this world. We need both good teaching and receptive hearts to produce the fruit of the Spirit in the Christian life, and in my experience, much of the problem seems to be on the side of hearts that will not respond to solid biblical correction.

So I ask you, reader, to consider your heart before moving on to read the theological case for a duty of abolition, so that you can engage with the ideas fairly. Either the abolitionist detractors are right, and the Holy Spirit leaves justice work to the discretion of each believer, or those who fail to repent and engage in works of abolition are dealing with a sin issue of the heart that prevents good theology from bearing good fruit in this area of the Christian life.

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work? (Pro 24:11-12)

Part of the difficulty that comes with establishing a biblical duty of abolition is the sheer amount (and variety) of scripture that speaks to the issue. Justice is one of the central themes of the Bible, and the central problem of redemptive history and the cross, so a lot of scripture gives a lot of commentary on the issue from a lot of different angles.

Abolitionists have quick prooftexts that we use to encourage repentance in this area, like the parable of the good Samaritan, or the “rescue those” passage in proverbs, or various writings of the prophets and apostles, etc. But often these prooftexts, taken in context and with an eye to precision, speak to an angle of the problem that isn’t always directly applicable to the point we want to make.

For example, the parable of the good Samaritan has sometimes been used to compel involvement in justice work to protect slaves and preborn children, but it is primarily a passage compelling involvement in mercy ministry toward these groups. When the Jew fell among thieves, the Samaritan did not rally the civil authorities to establish justice for the criminal act of robbery; rather he helped the Jew, binding his wounds and ensuring that the man healed properly from the attack. In Secular views of justice, mercy ministry is considered to be part of social justice (e.g. feeding the poor as something that is justly due the poor, instead of an act of unmerited kindness). For the biblical worldview, justice and mercy/compassion are two separate categories, but we often misappropriate justice language and scripture to be fulfilled through mercy ministry on account of Secularism’s influence on Christianity. Both justice and mercy are duties laid on the shoulders of all Christians (and really, all humans), but they are distinct duties with different sets of principles surrounding them.

This distinction becomes important when you look at church solutions to justice issues like abortion. In the typical church that responds to the abortion holocaust, involvement in a pregnancy resource center is wrongly seen as a sufficient church response to the entire problem of abortion in the culture. This suffers from several problems, including the following:

1. A pregnancy resource center is a mercy ministry, and the Bible includes a separate duty of biblical justice that is left entirely unaddressed.
2. The church’s teaching is still bad, where justice and mercy toward preborn children are treated as special callings rather than duties of every Christian. Because the teaching is bad, the fruit is bad.

So it’s important to be clear about which scriptures and theological concepts apply to which aspects of the problem of national sin. The good Samaritan would apply to the typical church response to abortion, the support of a PRC. But it doesn’t apply directly or easily to justice ministries that preach repentance of abortion in the culture and the halls of power. To be extremely precise, the parable can and does apply to justice ministries when its application is fully developed theologically, because mercy and justice both flow out of the core ethic of love that Jesus points to in the parable. It is actually compassionate and loving to enact and enforce legislation that punishes parents who murder their children, because good law prevents the very situation that the good Samaritan had to resolve with his compassionate acts of healing.

But it takes theological work to get there from that particular parable, and you have to bring in other scriptures about the role of government to establish justice, and the duty of citizens to correct bad leadership, etc. Without that work of situating prooftexts in their proper contexts and logically integrating them with other biblical ideas, scripture can be wrongly applied, and duties be over-emphasized or (more commonly) altogether ignored. It’s important then, when discussing justice issues in society and the Church’s response to them, to have a clear understanding of the different ways in which sin impacts humanity and the dominion God has given to us, together with appropriate biblical responses to each facet of the problem. We need to have a well-developed theology of sin and redemption that harmonizes and integrates all relevant prooftexts into a comprehensive worldview.

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to set aside the various passages that address a duty of mercy, because the modern Church doesn’t have as much of a problem in this area. Mercy ministry is seen as commendable in the eyes of the world, so there’s understandably less neglect in this area — though again, pastors need to preach a universal duty of mercy to be faithful in their handling of scripture.

The primary area of neglect is biblical justice in civil government and society — the mission we have to magistrates and the broader culture where we expose national sin, and seek its removal through a message of repentance and accountability. When we focus on the justice aspect of national sin, the relevant prooftexts narrow to two basic varieties.

• Texts establishing a duty of justice generally.
• Texts establishing a duty of justice for particular sins.

The first variety is understandable enough, in that it more or less addresses the internal character that God wants to see in his people, that we all have a universal duty to love and pursue justice in general, in the various contexts that plays out in our particular lives (Isa 1:16-20, Mic 6:6-8, Amo 5:23-24, Mat 22:34-40). But what surprised me when I first read it is that the Bible even contains passages that describe a universal duty of justice for particular sins, including something close to the sin of abortion. Consider, for example, the following prohibition in the mosaic law against sacrificing children to the false god Molech:

Say to the people of Israel, Any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. The people of the land shall stone him with stones. I myself will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech, to make my sanctuary unclean and to profane my holy name.

And if the people of the land do at all close their eyes to that man when he gives one of his children to Molech, and do not put him to death, then I will set my face against that man and against his clan and will cut them off from among their people, him and all who follow him in whoring after Molech. (Lev 20:2-5)

What’s notable about this passage is that two crimes related to child sacrifice are punished, not one. Not only is child sacrifice to Molech prohibited, but the surrounding people in society are given a universal duty to establish justice for it through capital punishment, or else they too will be seen by God as complicit and under his judgement. Thus Leviticus gives us a universal duty — for all people in Israel regardless of gifting or special calling — to establish justice for a particular sin. When the duty of justice isn’t carried out, the entire clan/nation is then seen as complicit, and the personal sin becomes a collective, national sin that invites the judgement of God.

Two chapters earlier we get additional information which extends the principle beyond Israel, showing that it is a universal principle of justice among all human nations that child sacrifice to Molech must be both avoided and punished.

You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the LORD. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. And you shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion.

Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean. (Lev 18:21-24)

This particular passage focuses on the prohibition against Molech worship and other crimes without also explicitly talking about the duty of justice. But a duty of justice is implied by the final sentence, which explains why God drove out the Canaanites who previously occupied the land of Israel. Not every Canaanite was personally guilty of Molech worship or any other sin in this list; even children were killed by Israel’s invasion of the land (Deu 20:16-18). But like the flood of Noah, and like the standard described in the previous passage, the lack of justice in society brings the whole social order under God’s collective judgement. People are judged for their individual works in the the eternal judgement (Rev 20:12), but concerning God’s temporal judgement of nations, even those who are personally righteous come under judgement for national sin, and this is seen in God’s rationale for destroying the Canaanites before Israel.

The fact that God references the Canaanites’ bad example as Israel’s reason for avoiding these practices also shows us that these are universal principles of judgement that apply to all mankind, regardless of the fact that they are expressed here in Israel’s law code. God forbids all people from engaging in Molech worship, homosexuality, bestiality, and other sins listed in this context, and he doesn’t just punish the individuals. He punishes every nation, Jew or Gentile, which tolerates these practices by refusing to establish justice for them when they occur among the population.

The application can be further broadened to include modern forms of abortion when we recognize that the practice of child sacrifice was as detestable to God as the worship of particular false gods (Jer 7:31, 32:35), and that God sees preborn children as ethically equivalent to born children, in terms of the protections that he affords to human beings (Exo 21:22-25, Gen 9:5-6). Moreover, the prohibition + duty of justice is likewise seen in the seminal command against murder generally (Gen 9:5-6), which is binding on all human beings after the flood of Noah. Thus a fair summary of the matter is that all human beings have a duty to establish justice for abortion, homosexuality, bestiality, and various other particular national sins when they occur in a community of which they are a part. Failure to do so invites the judgement of God onto the community, and one cannot escape the judgement through personal innocence of these particular sins.

It’s important to recognize that in the mosaic law, everyday citizens were responsible for executing justice against lawbreakers. Town elders and judges would govern a case to ensure that a just decision was reached, but it was the people of the land who carried out the sentence (Deu 19:1-13).

For societies where punishment for crime is carried out by the same government that judges crime, such as what is typical in the modern age, the execution of justice rests on the government rather than the people. This is seen in Paul’s words concerning the Roman government to which the early Christian Church was asked to submit.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.

Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. (Rom 13:1-4)

In Paul’s context, the sword that expressed God’s wrath against criminal behavior was carried by the state rather than the people. This is seen as a legitimate fulfillment of Genesis 9:6, where the punishment for crime is carried out by a representative of the people, rather than the people themselves. In such a context, the enforcement of justice shifts from the people to a leader, and one could try to use this fact to then claim that the duty of justice likewise shifts, freeing the people from any obligation to be concerned about the matter.

But the point remains that regardless of who holds the sword of justice, all people in a society are under the judgement of God when justice is neglected, so we all have a vested interest in bringing our society to repent of its collective guilt. When the people hire the state to carry out the duty of the people, the duty still ultimately rests with the people, and we are merely expressing it through a covenant head, an authorized representative. Because the people are no longer personally authorized to carry out the sentence for an evil deed in American society, our duty in the face of national sin changes in its expression, from directly executing justice to calling our leaders to repent (Jer 38:7-13, 39:15-18, Psa 2). But the duty is ours nonetheless.

The usual push-back that we all feel toward this kind of reasoning is the sheer amount of time that it would seem to take to live in obedience to it. I barely understand the problem of abortion after years of ministry in that field, and yet I am also required to become a subject matter expert on justice for homosexuality, bestiality, sex trafficking, chattel slavery, and myriad other particular sins that the scriptures place on my shoulders? Because no one person can solve every problem in the world, we often fall back on the idea that justice for a particular evil, or justice in general, must be a special calling, where different parts of the community or the Church handle different duties, with personal duties being offloaded onto the collective.

But that isn’t how duty works. That’s how giftings and special callings work. I don’t get to say, “you have faith and I have works” (Jas 2:18), because faith and works are both universal duties that every believer must express in his own life. I don’t get to say to my parents, “Whatever you would have gained from me is…given to God” (Mar 7:11), because giving a return to parents is a universal duty, not a special calling that can be replaced with other righteous behavior.

Abolitionists readily accept that there are many gifts in the body of Christ (spiritual and physical), such that one person might carry out a duty of justice by creating tracts through his graphic design skills, and another might hand them out through her interpersonal skills, and yet another might learn from the tracts and teach good ideas from the pulpit. But all flow out of the same core duty of justice, even justice in regard to a particular evil.

Those who hold to a special calling view will typically appeal to three passages that talk about distinctions within the body of Christ (Rom 12:3-8, 1Co 12:4-11, Eph 4:11-16). But when you read these, nothing even resembling justice ministry is mentioned. All these do is establish that there is variety in the body of Christ; it doesn’t establish that a duty of justice is part of that variety, where one person establishes justice, and another person sings songs on the worship team.

Furthermore, even if a passage did recognize justice ministry as a special gift or calling, that wouldn’t automatically prove that a duty of justice is limited to only specific people. Consider the following verse:

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. (Rom 12:6-8)

Paul here postures teaching as if it were a special gift or calling given to only some people in the body of Christ, which it is (Eph 4:11). But it is also a universal duty that rests upon all Christians (Col 3:15-17, Tit 2:1-4, Mat 28:18-20). The proper way of viewing teaching is that it is a skill that is learned by all able people, and that is mastered by some people as a particular focus and gift to the body of Christ. Other forms of service function in the same way, such as ministries of mercy (Rom 12:8, Mat 5:7, 25:31-46), or expressions of faith (1Co 12:9, Rom 3:21-22, Jhn 6:29). Not every gift or variation in the body of Christ functions this way, as a general duty on which specialists focus. But some do.

Abolitionist detractors want to hand-wave away the plethora of scriptures which present a duty of justice as part of the everyday Christian life by simply arguing, “Special gifts and callings exist in scripture, therefore justice ministry is one of them, and the duty of justice only applies to the specially gifted or called.” The rhetoric is persuasive because it simply affirms the status quo of what churchgoers experience, and it appeals to the flesh. But biblically speaking, the logic fails hard on two levels.

1. Justice ministry is not presented as a special gift or calling; that is eisegeted into the passages that speak about special callings. Neither can it be theologically derived from such passages.
2. Even if it were rightly listed among such callings, we know that it would not automatically exclude a universal duty given to all Christians, because other gifts like teaching, mercy, and faith are presented as special and universal obligations without conflict or contradiction.

There is a philosophical problem in the special calling view as well, grounded in the very nature of what a duty is — an outworking of fundamental morality applied to particular contexts and covenants. Simply put, there is no genuine duty in existence that can be forsaken or neglected without the breaking of a moral duty before God, because God mediates all divine and human covenants with their consequent duties. Because duty flows out of Christian ethics and morality, duty is therefore a universal concept that cannot be offloaded from one person to another, because we are all universally obligated to behave morally (Jas 2:14-3:1). Thus if it is biblically accurate to say that a person living in a society with legalized homosexuality is obligated to establish justice for it, then that duty cannot be offloaded to another person who is more gifted or called or knowledgeable etc. to address the particular sin, though the fulfillment of that duty may be, as we’ll look at below.

Instead of an offloading paradigm, scripture presents several other principles to deal with the problem of human finitude in the face of overwhelming obligation.

Negative and positive commands in scripture are judged in different ways. Negative commands (prohibitions) offer a hard line that must never be crossed, on pain of incurring guilt (Jas 2:10). There is no difficulty of limited time with prohibitions, because they simply offer boundaries for our thoughts and behavior, and we are free to spend our time on whatever thoughts and behavior rest within the boundaries of what is lawful.

Positive commands, on the other hand, inherently involve rationing time because they offer us particular goals to pursue, not boundaries. When James commands us to confess our sins to one another (Jas 5:16), for example, he doesn’t mean that every moment of every day should involve the activity of confession, nor that every sin must be confessed to another human. If positive commands were to be obeyed universally with regard to our time, James’ charge would be impossible to keep for long, because all Christians in such a dialogue would need to be confessing our sins simultaneously throughout the remainder of our short, unfed lives. This would not only prevent us from eating, but it would also prevent us from breathing, or sleeping, or doing anything else that sustains human life.

More than this, we do not always engage in the practice of making disciples (Mat 28:18). Sometimes husbands are called to love and sacrifice themselves for their wives in various ways (Eph 5:25), raise up children with them (Gen 1:27-28), work for a living (1Ti 5:8), etc. Sometimes we have to go to the bathroom, which is generally a private affair.

No, it’s clear that positive commands are proportional by nature, involving a rationing of time according to some set of principles that determine priority and frequency of obedience, rather than total obedience at all times. We are living in obedience to positive commands when such thoughts and behaviors mark our lives to appropriate degrees (Mat 25:31-46).

While I have yet to read (or develop) a comprehensive theology of priorities that would resolve every possible decision, it is nevertheless clear that scripture sees positive duties as existing within some kind of a hierarchy of priorities. By this I mean that some obligations are more important to God than others, and when a conflict occurs between them (such as limited time), the obligation with greater weight takes priority.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” (Mat 23:23-24)

[Jesus] said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests?” (Mat 12:3-4)

All other things being equal, when we are faced with a choice between obedience to one command with a weightier impact and another command with less of an impact, we give greater time and priority to the weightier law. Thus we see God prioritize justice ministry over worship services (Isa 1:10-17, Amo 5:23-24), because justice is weightier in its impact than demonstrations of devotions to God, which are empty anyway when the people of God are not marked by justice, mercy, and humility etc. (Mic 6:6-8).

Aside from the objective weight of a particular command and its impact, at least one other dynamic impacts the prioritization process. Scripture describes a subjective priority that is given on the basis of one’s relationship to the impacted parties.

For example, it is actually moral and good to allow a stranger’s child to be murdered by his parents, while you sit in your home and teach your child the alphabet. It’s even acceptable to spend more time instructing your own children than you do saving others from death. If the objective weight of the command were the only dynamic at play, then God would want us to always prioritize the extreme injustices of society, extreme acts of compassion, and other weightier expressions of obedience to him over less impactful activities. But we have particular, heightened duties of care to those who are most closely related to us (1Ti 5:8, 2Co 12:13-14), on account of how God designed human civilization around the family, and the Church around local bodies of believers, and other localized covenants.

Again, this doesn’t mean that we can completely ignore the needs of non-Christians or those people more distantly connected to us, only that we prioritize the needs of those closest to us over the distant. As Paul wrote,

So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith. (Gal 6:10)

Practically speaking, this means spending a lot of time showing love to our heavenly and earthly households, (local churches and immediate families) and some time showing love to people outside of those groups. Within each “bracket,” we prioritize the weightier needs over the more superficial.

One final principle to consider is that while duty cannot be offloaded from one person to another, the fulfillment of a duty can be, which is an important distinction. Concerning the duty of justice, as described above we generally offload the practice of justice to specialists in civil government who carry out sentencing for criminal behavior. We then support the ministry of justice through taxation (Rom 13:6).

Because the duty remains with the people, this means that we are still obligated before God to perform the duty of justice; we are simply paying a professional to do it on our behalf so that we can focus on other areas of interest and duty. It also means that we have an obligation to hold the professional accountable when he fails to do his job, because our duty before God is no longer being fulfilled.

Modern abolitionists of abortion have historically been critical of the Church’s habit of paying specialists in the pro-life movement to carry out its duty of justice, rather than engage in direct action against abortion. Though there are many good reasons for this criticism, it isn’t at base a fair, biblical criticism, on account of this permission to offload the fulfillment of a duty. So it’s an area of rhetoric that’s been somewhat walked back in the movement. The problem that we see is really a combination of several other factors:

1. The amount of attention (in this case, money) given to the criminalization of abortion versus other areas of church interest is severely disproportionate to the weight of living in the midst of a holocaust. Paying money to the pro-life movement allows people to falsely feel like they are fulfilling their duty toward preborn children, when direct action would better inform them of the scope, severity, and proportion of the evil.
2. The pro-life movement is deeply corrupt and/or unbiblical, in terms of the organizations that people tend to fund. In particular, Christians often believe that the pro-life movement aims to criminalize abortion as homicide so that it is illegal (the biblical answer to murder), whereas major organizations have stated and proven that they actively oppose this goal out of supposed compassion for the mothers. In many states, abortion would be illegal already through the work of abolitionists, but for the intervention of the pro-life movement that stood against our bills. The biblical resolution to guilt is forgiveness through Christ, not corrupt law and a reduced standard of righteousness. Abolitionists argue that the pro-life strategy is hardening the conscience of the culture due to their biblical compromise, and Christian financial support of this movement is unwittingly helping to keep abortion legal.
3. Because money is often going to parachurch organizations rather than church-driven initiatives, these organizations are able to operate somewhat apart from biblical accountability, and churches gain less knowledge and experience in justice work among their own members.
4. Money is easy, whereas direct action is usually a cross to bear, in terms of reputational damage, relational damage, and conflict within and without the body of Christ. So while money is a legitimate and necessary way to support legitimate justice work (as rare as that is), it is often used as a way for Christians to avoid taking up a cross to follow Jesus.
5. Because justice and mercy ministries are conflated in the modern Church, funds often go to mercy ministries like pregnancy resource centers, and Christians believe that they are fulfilling their duty of justice because the church they support is supporting a mercy ministry.

To be clear, then, offloading of duty is impossible, but the offloading of a duty’s fulfillment is entirely biblical, at base. In the current context of a deceptive or otherwise unbiblical pro-life / pro-family / conservative environment, however, there is much wisdom to be gained from taking direct action against injustice, learning and comparing all things against scripture, and becoming a source of biblical wisdom and knowledge for other Christians in your life. At the very least, if and when Christians choose to offload the fulfillment of their various duties to specialists, they should hold their representatives accountable to ensure that biblical justice is being advanced against national sin.

All people have a duty of justice before God. We’ve traced in this article a line of reasoning showing that even particular crimes place universal duties of justice on the shoulders of everyone in society, including justice for the the two major crimes in our day of abortion and homosexuality. Because Christians are members of society, and because Christianity cultivates moral behavior in all of life, the Christian Church should therefore instruct its members on how to live as good citizens, establishing justice for injustice in the civil realm.

It is an embarrassment to the American Church that this kind of an argument even needs to be made, and it’s an embarrassment to me that I required reproof before I could see such an obvious truth in the pages of scripture. We are living in the midst of the greatest holocaust to ever exist upon the face of the earth, to say nothing of the other evils around us, and yet somehow we justify giving greater weight and priority to music and to prayer than to the rescuing of God’s image-bearers from death — in direct contradiction to the word of God (Isa 1:15, Amo 5:23-24).

Rather than relegate the biblical duty of civil justice to a special calling of the gifted few, pastors should repent of this false and destructive view, and teach their congregations to employ their various gifts to the common task and duty of abolition. Abortion, homosexuality, no-fault divorce, etc. are all forms of national sin, and the abolition of such crimes is national repentance.