Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth Quotes

“All injustice is a violation of the first commandment.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Christians should be known less as culture warriors and more as Good Samaritans who stop for battered neighbors, whether they are black, white, brown, male, female, gay, straight, rich, poor, old, young, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, capitalist, socialist, Republican, Democrat, near, far, tall, short, or smaller than a peanut.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Idolatry happens when we make some good thing an ultimate thing, in which case it becomes a destructive thing. Given our tendency to make good things into ultimate things, it would be naive to think idolatry can’t creep into our justice pursuits.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Black lives matter. It’s true. From a Christian worldview perspective, we can plumb even deeper than a three-word catchphrase or hashtag. Black lives don’t merely matter; every black life was fearfully and wonderfully made by God himself. Every black life bears the divine image. Black lives are worth enough for the Creator to take on flesh and endure torture, execution, and infinite wrath.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Social Justice B advocates find free markets repulsive because they lead to different outcomes for different people. Because different people with different priorities making different decisions experience different outcomes, any system that maximizes people’s freedoms to be their different selves will end up with different outcomes. If we believe that different outcomes are a priori evidence of injustice, then freedom itself is unjust.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Does our vision of social justice take any group-identity more seriously than our identities “in Adam” and “in Christ”? Does it buy into divisive propaganda? Does it replace love, peace, and patience with suspicion, division, and rage?”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“The Bible is clear that discrimination exists and that Christians must resist it. Sinful discrimination indeed causes some disparities. But the Bible never goes to the extreme that we find in the thinking of Ibram X. Kendi. In his award-winning bestseller Stamped from the Beginning, Kendi argues that “racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“How do you think preaching the gospel to ourselves every day— reminding ourselves of the amazing grace God extended to us when we were hostile to him—could impact our approach to social justice? How might excluding the good news of God’s forgiveness from our daily thought lives and emotions pollute our passion for social justice?”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“We can no more separate truth from justice than we can subtract one side from a triangle and still consider it a triangle.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“[One bad idea] inspired the lynching trees of America, the smokestacks of Auschwitz, the gulags of Siberia, killing fields of Khmer Rouge, and the butchery of those in Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, and more. Given its bloody track record you would think that this idea would be universally rejected but it is staging a massive comeback in the 21st century, rebranding itself as “justice.” What is this bad idea?
Tribalism is the idea that we should divide people into group identities then assign undesirable or evil trait to that group and such a way that we don't see the unique image-bearers of God before us.”
― Thaddeus J. Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Each of us has a machine like that deep in our consciousness, an apparatus of fundamental convictions that signals what constitutes justice versus what we should get mad about. Philosophers call it our worldview. A worldview is not what we might say we believe in a street survey or online quiz. It’s what we truly believe and act from in our core about who we are, where we came from, and where humanity is headed.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“But what happens if we leave God out of the picture? Does our need for the not guilty sentence magically disappear? No. The need to feel justified is irrepressibly human.17”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“In sum, making an idol out of the self is just plain mean. We were never designed to bear the God-sized weight of creating and sustaining our own identities. It puts an unbearable weight on people’s shoulders, especially children, when they are indoctrinated to follow their hearts, be true to themselves, and dream up their own identities. It deprives them of the unspeakable joy and meaning that go with being authored by Someone far more brilliant, strong, and loving than we are. Our churches must serve as trauma recovery centers for those crushed by the mainstream credo of self-creation.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Follow your heart” is actually a call to be slavishly devoted to the ideologies of others.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Because reality is so massively important, Christianity has a long history of taking words and the definitions of words extremely seriously. We could fill libraries with Christian works arguing about the definitions of words like homoousia and homoiousia (same nature vs. similar nature), justification, free will, kingdom, and many other words. Is this because Christians throughout history have been word sticklers and dictionary snobs? No. It is because Christianity is a religion of truth. Since words have tremendous power to illuminate or obfuscate truth, definitions should be a big deal for Christians.”
― Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, | am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.? - C.S. Lewis, Forgiveness, cp7 , Mere Christianity,”
― Thaddeus J. Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice