The fact that Christians put a strong emphasis on justice is nothing new. At my church we’re currently working through Amos in our home groups. Amos surveys the surrounding lands and finds great injustices occurring there. He notices that injustices are occurring in (i) the law courts (Amos 2:6), (ii) the market place (Amos 2:7), (iii) the bedroom (Amos 2:7) and (iv) religious temples (Amos 2:8). They’re all areas where justice is not being done; areas that God, so it seems, cares equally about but where His good standards are not being applied.
How does the good of justice apply in academic life? I want to suggest that it affects us in two ways: content and culture.
First, consider the content of our research. If we’re to be imaging God (Gen. 1:27) then we are to be concerned, like Him, with doing justice (in the doctrinal and social sense) in every aspect of our work. We are to be agents in His world bringing justice to those who are oppressed (Rom 13:3-5). Given God’s concern with all areas of life as demonstrated in Amos we must see all of the issues (doctrinal and social) as important. I was recently at a talk by Charles Taliaffero (a Christian philosopher) who defends a similar position to me with regards to the question ‘What are we?’ This talk was a particularly useful rebuke on this issue for me. At this talk I expected him to give a defence of the doctrinally orthodox Christian view we both share. But, instead, he called philosophers concerned with the above question to consider a more rounded intellectual strategy. Not just be concerned with defending the propositional statements they find most attractive but be concerned with thinking hard about the ramification of these positions in society.
Second, consider the academic culture. It’s no secret that the academy is rife with injustices. People take more credit for their work than they’re really due. We all live by the mantra ‘publish or perish’ and this means that people publish papers that are, let’s admit, not furthering a particular area of research but simply reinventing the wheel. People get jobs because of who they know and not because they’re the best candidate. The university wants departments to make more money – not to be seeking truth. All of these things seem to be injustices to me. How are we to be agents of justice in the culture of the academy? I daresay just not doing the above is not good enough. We need to be seeking ways to minimise injustices. In practice how might this be done? I don’t know the precise answer. Will encouraging open access be one step in the right direction? Will making use of blogs be another (they can encourage fruitful dialogue that can be hindered by the peer review process)? What I do know, however, is that there are injustices and we cannot sit idly by. Given God’s concern for justice and our imaging Him it’s surely something we can be thinking about more often.
- Report on the Tyndale Fellowship Quadrennial Conference: Marriage, family and relationships - September 5, 2016
- Whole-life fruitfulness - June 6, 2016
- Common Good and Kingdom of God: Implications for Christian Scholarship - March 22, 2016
