Faith, Policy and Liberation Theology in the Church and State
I also totally disagree with my brothers who separate abortion from social justice. What greater injustice in the earth is there than terminating the life of the most innocent and vulnerable humans in the earth, all in the name of freedom and women’s rights! What about the rights of the unborn!
The Seventh Commandment deals with adultery.
As I previously stated, each of the Ten Commandments is a category that is extrapolated out into 613 laws. In the case of adultery, we see it expounded in Leviticus 18 as including same-sex relations. This means that, of the first three horizontal laws dealing with how we are to behave with our neighbor, two of the three can be applied as against the principle of same-sex marriage!
When people say that Jesus never dealt with same-sex relations I tell them He never directly mentioned incest either! He said in Matt. 5:17 that He didn’t come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. That being said, He spoke frequently against sexual immorality which includes gay marriage (Mark 7:21-23).
Thus, two of the first three commandments dealing with the proper relationship of neighbor to neighbor deal with the issues of marriage, family and abortion indirectly or directly, even before economics is mentioned.
The Eighth Commandment dealing with theft implies the right to own private property, which flies in the face of the Christian Marxist sympathizers who promote the state through extreme utilitarianism, which also compromises the rights of individual liberty and private property. Christians on the left who espouse socialistic policies point to Acts chapter 2 in which the early church is said to share all things in common. But this was a rare circumstance in which 3,000 people were saved who had nowhere to live because they were visiting Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost. The early church needed to open up their homes and share everything if those people were going to become disciples of Christ and sit under the apostles’ doctrine. This example is never promoted or shared again in the book of Acts or the New Testament.
In regard to economic policy, notice this commandment came after issues of marriage, family, and life. Thus, when we vote for a candidate primarily for economic issues of justice we are putting union benefits, entitlements and money as priorities before the basic building blocks of God’s kingdom. I have heard it said many times by those who espouse liberation theology that God favors the poor. I want to disagree with that statement since in the Pentateuch Moses wrote that you shall have the same judgment for both the poor and rich which was also in the context of taking care of immigrants and foreigners.
Leviticus 19:15 says: “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.”
Exodus 23:3, 6, 9 says: “Nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit….You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in his lawsuit….You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.”
Jesus even said in Matthew 25:29 that He would take away from the person who has nothing and give it to faithful stewards who multiplied talents. Furthermore, the parable of the Good Samaritan shows the importance of creating wealth so that we can be a blessing to our neighbor; a poor person could have never fulfilled the mission of the Good Samaritan as they would not have had the money to lend a donkey, pay for a hotel stay and provide for medical care! When Jesus told us to preach the gospel to the poor it wasn’t because He was choosing them and bypassing rich people; it was because He wanted to release them from poverty. Also, most likely the poor are usually more open to the gospel than more well-to-do people who are entrenched in their ways. In James 5, which condemns rich people, it is not a tone against having money in general, but was an indictment against a particular kind of rich person: the kind that held back wages and oppressed and took advantage of their workers.
