Generous Justice, by Timothy Keller

10 min readDec 12, 2021

Recently, I have been much more interested in the topic of justice and how the church can better answer the call from our generation about helping the needy. It’s good to see in Timothy Keller’s book a desire to reach out to young adults that have this exact concern: “While many young adults have a Christian faith, and also a desire to help people in need, these two things are not actually connected to each other in their lives. They have not thought out the implications of Jesus’s gospel for doing justice in all aspects of life.” (p. xi)

Since the book is from 2010, it’s clear that this topic is not so new anymore. It’s true that the church often failed to uphold justice to a higher level and was complacent on multiple atrocities throughout its history. We must recognize all the issues present in our history. However, Tim Keller was already trying to fight against the preconceptions of some Christians that doing justice will inevitably lead you to a loss of sound doctrine.

What is doing justice?

The author starts the first chapter with a citation of Micah 6:8: “And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” This passage includes the words chesedh (mercy) and mishpat (justice) in Hebrew. According to Keller, “to walk with God, then, we must do justice, out of merciful love.” (p. 2)

An interesting observation, though, is that mishpat means giving people what they are due, not only in terms of punishment, but in terms of care as well. Tim Keller starts his argument that God’s justice implies caring for the poor and the oppressed, and he continues by stating that this reflects God’s own character, as in Psalm 68:4–5: “a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows.” Finally, there is another word also related to justice, tzadeqah, which could be translated as righteousness. It refers to how we treat everyone around us with fairness and generosity in our day-to-day lives (p. 10): “When these two words, tzadeqah and mishpat, are tied together, as they are over three dozen times, the English expression that best conveys the meaning is ‘social justice.’” (p. 14)

In summary, that’s what Tim Keller means when he is talking about “doing justice”:

“We do justice when we give all human beings their due as creations of God. Doing justice includes not only the righting of wrongs, but generosity and social concern, especially toward the poor and vulnerable. This kind of life reflects the character of God. It consists of a broad range of activities, from simple fair and honest dealings with people in daily life, to regular, radically generous giving of your time and resources, to activism that seeks to end particular forms of injustice, violence, and oppression.” (p. 18)

Justice throughout the Bible

The author starts the chapter on justice in the Old Testament by arguing that we are not bound by the ceremonial and even the civil laws of Israel, but that we can still extract principles from them. One example would be that God often tells the Israelites to take care of the poor and the widows and give them good (Deut. 10:17–18): “Just as Israel was a “community of justice,” so the church is to reflect these same concerns for the poor.” (p. 23) Besides, Israel had multiple laws, like the law of release or the Jubilee year, that would help society in general to have “no poor among you.”

At the same time, Keller will say that the Bible is not clear on how the care of the poor should be done: is it the way Republicans prescribe, by privacy acts of charity? Or is it the way Democrats desire, by government actions? (p. 31) He will provide some answers to this in the chapter “How should we do justice?”

Then, the founding pastor of the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC will now focus on the New Testament and what Jesus says about justice. Jesus clearly shows a particular interest for the poor and the needy (Matt 11:4–5, Luke 14:12–13). He exhorts the disciples to sell everything and give to the poor (Luke 12:33); and gives the same instruction or command to the rich young ruler (Luke 18:22). Jesus’ point is “at least this — that his believers should not see any of their money as their own, and they should be profoundly involved with and generous to the poor.” (p. 49)

Later, the community that was formed with the followers of Jesus continued to show their concern and care for the oppressed:

“Acts gives us more insight into the love and justice of the early church… The church in Jerusalem conducted a ministry called the “daily diakonia” (Acts 6:1). This was a daily distribution of food and other resources to poor widows who were fully supported by the church… The Greek word diakonia came to mean “humble service to practical needs” in the New Testament, and “diaconal ministry” was a crucial part of the community life of the early church… However, the Bible is clear that Christians’ practical love, their generous justice, is not to be confined to only those who believe as we do. Galatians 6:10 strikes the balance when Paul says: ‘Do good to all people, especially the family of faith.’” (pp. 59–61)

Why should we do justice?

Tim Keller rightly points out that while most people know that they should share with others and help the oppressed, they are not motivated enough to do so (p. 79). For the pastor, only when you are saved by the grace of Jesus you can share all you have with others:

“Before you can give this neighbor-love, you need to receive it. Only if you see that you have been saved graciously by someone who owes you the opposite will you go out into the world looking to help absolutely anyone in need. Once we receive this ultimate, radical neighbor-love through Jesus, we can start to be the neighbors that the Bible calls us to be.” (p. 77)

The point made is that without a belief in creation, we have no common acceptance of human dignity for everyone, i.e. only when we believe that everyone is created in God’s image that we would be enough motivated for “serving the needs and guarding the rights of those arounds us” (p. 87).

Then, the American pastor rightly points out this is counterintuitive for some Americans: “We believe that if we have had success in life, it is mainly the result of our own hard work, and we therefore have an absolute right to use our money as we see fit.” (p. 89) However, the Bible does not agree with that. Keller goes back to the study of the words mishpat and tzadeqah, and quotes Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke: “the righteous [tzaddiq] . . . are willing to disadvantage themselves to advantage the community; the wicked are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves.” (p. 90, quote from Bruce Waltke’s The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1–15, p. 96)

The second motive for sharing our goods with those in need is to respond to God’s grace:

“One of the main themes of the writings of Paul is justification by faith. Many religions teach that if you live as you ought, then God will accept and bless you. But Paul taught that if you receive God’s acceptance and blessing as a free gift through Jesus Christ, then you can and will live as you ought.” (p. 97)

For Keller, the world tends to become interested in the poor through guilt: we realize that we have so much while others have so little, then we feel guilty for that. However, he also mentions that grace is the only way to keep us motivated through time: “when justice for the poor is connected not to guilt but to grace and to the gospel, this “pushes the button” down deep in believers’ souls, and they begin to wake up.” (p. 107).

In the debate about whether Christians should do justice only as a means to the end of evangelism, the author says that this is not compatible with Jesus’s Good Samaritan parable, where Jesus says we should not give to the needy expecting something in return (p. 138). On the other hand, there are some who say that doing justice is evangelism by itself: “Doing justice can indeed lead people to give the message of gospel grace a hearing, but to consider deeds of mercy and justice to be identical to gospel proclamation is a fatal confusion.” (p. 139)

“But, as we have seen, doing justice is inseparably connected to preaching grace. This is true in two ways. One way is that the gospel produces a concern for the poor. The other is that deeds of justice gain credibility for the preaching of the gospel. In other words, justification by faith leads to doing justice, and doing justice can make many seek to be justified by faith.” (p. 140)

How should we do justice?

After having the proper motivation, it’s important to know how to do justice: “God does not want us to merely give the poor perfunctory help, but to ponder long and hard about how to improve their entire situation.” (p. 110) In other words, as fallen human beings, even when we are helping the poor, we tend to just want to give them enough food or money to solve their problem for that day. However, the New York pastor argues that we should also think about how to improve their situation for the long run, structurally. The author presents different levels or layers where this help is applied:

“Relief is direct aid to meet immediate physical, material, and economic needs. The Good Samaritan provided relief when he gave physical protection, emergency medical treatment, and a rent subsidy (Luke 10:30–35)… A more assertive form of relief is advocacy, in which people in need are given active assistance to find legal aid, housing, and other kinds of help, such as protection from various forms of domestic abuse and violence.” (pp. 113–114)
Development “means giving an individual, family, or entire community what they need to move beyond dependency on relief into a condition of economic self-sufficiency.” (p. 114)
“Social reform moves beyond the relief of immediate needs and dependency and seeks to change the conditions and social structures that aggravate or cause that dependency… ” (p. 126)

Tim Keller argues, rightly in my opinion, that it is naive to think that we should change society one heart at a time (p. 127). Since society does not listen to people without power, those with power must be a catalyst of changes for the oppressed communities. For each of the layers of help above, there is a specific role that the church or church people can perform:

Relief: “Churches in poor neighborhoods can serve as healing communities” (p. 132), i.e. give direct and immediate help to the hungry and the sick.
Development: “Christians can form organizations that serve as healers of communities” (p. 132), like operating neighborhood banks, developing houses for the elderly, educating children, etc.
Social reform: “Finally, churches encourage people to be organizers for just communities. These are ways that the church can challenge and change social systems” (p. 133).

Local church or individuals?

Now that the author established that Christians must do justice in all the layers (relief, development, and social reform), there is still the question on whether they should do this as individuals (organic church) or as part of the local / institutional church. Basing a lot of this argument on Abraham Kuyper’s view of the spheres of justice, Keller argues that the church will disciple members that are willing to change the communities around them and even the society in general, but the local church will not engage in social reform as an institution:

“If we apply Kuyper’s view, then when we get to the more ambitious work of social reform and the addressing of social structure, believers should work through associations and organizations rather than through the local church. While the institutional church should do relief inside and around its community, the “organic” church should be doing development and social reform.” (pp. 145–146)

In other words, the church as an institution should continue to give food for the hungry, and help people that are struggling financially. However, according to Keller, only Christians as individuals should form organizations like schools or neighborhood banks to help the community as a whole, and also Christians as individuals that should advocate for structural changes in the society.

Conclusion

It is very clear from the Old and New Testament that God has a clear identification with the poor: “In Proverbs we see God identifying with the poor symbolically. But in the incarnation and death of Jesus we see God identifying with the poor and marginal literally” (p. 185). Although helping the poor and marginalized is a very important task, Keller concludes by arguing for the example of the ultimate care for all humans:

“This was the ultimate instance of God’s identification with the poor. He not only became one of the actually poor and marginalized, he stood in the place of all those of us in spiritual poverty and bankruptcy (Matthew 5:3) and paid our debt.” (p. 188)