Three wise men

No one explains Christian principles of poverty-fighting more clearly than Darrow Miller: His latest book, Rethinking Social Justice (YWAM, 2015), should be required reading at Christian colleges. No one offers challenges better grounded in reality and more deeply based on the understanding that “Christ did not die to make us safe.” All Christians who have succumbed to secular definitions of social justice need to rethink understandings, and this book is the best starting point.

Miller’s new book should also remind classical Christian schoolmasters that while the teaching of Latin and logic is good, they should not hold up classical civilization as something to emulate. Miller points out that “in the Roman world life was merciless, especially to the slave and to the child. The slave, as Aristotle said (Nicomachean Ethics 8.II.6), was no different from a living tool, and what consideration can a tool receive?” That treatment of humans as things justified selling old or sickly slaves “and whatever else is superfluous” (On Agriculture 2.7).

Scholars still debate whether Plato in The Republic (460B) wanted any defective child to be killed, but Aristotle was clearer: “Let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared” (Politics 7.14.10). Exposure of unwanted children, particularly girls, was routine, as one saying noted: “The poor man raises his sons, but the daughters, if one is poor, we expose.”

———

Shelby Steele’s Shame (Basic, 2015) sympathetically examines the lack of progress among black Americans and blames liberals: He shows that welfare and affirmative action programs have harmed those who were supposed to be the beneficiaries. All kinds of statistics support Steele’s thesis, but one is most telling: In 50 years the percentage of African-American births to single women has tripled, going from 24 to 72 percent.

Steele, born in 1944 to a white mom and a black dad, sees his biracial birth as “an absolute gift, the greatest source of insight and understanding. … Race was demystified for me. I could never see white people as just some unified group who hated blacks.” He came close to doing so after his college graduation in 1968, when he worked in an East St. Louis anti-poverty program and spent time with Black Panthers, but he saw early on that liberal race policy was becoming “a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs.”

Steele proposes an alternative to the “broad, guilt-driven, moralistic liberalism” that encourages minorities to build “a group identity singularly focused on protest.” He wants them to focus on “becoming competitive,” on developing talent as blacks have done in sports and music, competitive fields where “excellence and merit ultimately prevailed over all else.” He wants an end to dependence on “contrite white people,” on pleading for “programs” and “preferences.” He sees no reason why 50 years after the success of the civil rights movement, “we remain—by most important measures—in the position of inferiors and dependents.”

———

Theologian Tom Oden’s memoir, A Change of Heart (IVP, 2014), explains how sociologist of religion Will Herberg mentored Oden’s movement from liberal new-new-thing thinking to respect for ancient Christianity. Oden writes that Herberg left Communism in 1939 and “seemed on the verge of converting to Christianity,” but Reinhold Niebuhr urged Herberg to rediscover his Jewish roots. Oden relishes the irony: “Herberg became a Jew by listening to a Christian; I became a Christian by listening to a Jew.”

Octogenarian Oden also writes that women seminary students who struggled with their own abortions changed him: “They were grieving over loss. … They had thoughtlessly become involved in sexual activity as ‘flower children’ committed to making love, not war. They did make love, but a subtler war ensued. It was a war against children. I belatedly recognized that millions of innocent lives were being destroyed on behalf of a narcissism that was careless of its consequences.”