John Mark Hicks has the following to say on being “pro-life”:
Last Tuesday, many within Churches of Christ voted for Obama, especially those who have come to see that voting for social justice is just as important as voting against abortion–both are pro-life orientations. Deuteronomy, for example, is just as concerned about just wages, fair treatment of aliens, and protection for the poor as it is protecting innocent life. Unjust wages and abortion, I believe, are both murder (read James 5:1-6, for example).
Aside from the extreme difficulty there is in defining any meaningful boundary beyond which a wage becomes “unjust,” let’s look at the James 5:1-6 passage (Darby translation).
1Go to now, ye rich, weep, howling over your miseries that [are] coming upon [you].
2Your wealth is become rotten, and your garments moth-eaten.
3Your gold and silver is eaten away, and their canker shall be for a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire. Ye have heaped up treasure in [the] last days.
4Behold, the wages of your labourers, who have harvested your fields, wrongfully kept back by you, cry, and the cries of those that have reaped are entered into the ears of [the] Lord of sabaoth.
5Ye have lived luxuriously on the earth and indulged yourselves; ye have nourished your hearts [as] in a day of slaughter;
6ye have condemned, ye have killed the just; he does not resist you.
To imagine that these six verses are a statement that paying low wages in the US (and remember, “low wages” in the US are positively luxurious when compared even to “high wages” in biblical times) is somehow equivalent to murder is the result of an incredibly bizarre series of mental contortions. I won’t even try to elaborate.
4 Comments
Mitchell, how you gonna rip on JMH???? But in all seriousness…v5-6 are the critical points in that passage. The fact is, there is a significant portion of our population who “have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence (ESV)” while their employees have to make decisions about which bill they can go without paying this month (and I’m not talking here of on-demand or the country club).
It would be one thing if JMH were to maintain that wages should be legislated upwards (even then I’d disagree with him, back that’s another story). But what he’s said is that “Unjust wages and abortion . . . are both murder.”
I agree that all too many live in luxury while disregarding the hardships of the less fortunate. But murder? As someone who’s lived well below the legal poverty line, I can assure you that the US poor are a ways out from being murdered by lack of money. And with very, very few exceptions, those choosing which bill to pay aren’t dropping dead of malnutrition.
I agree completely that the US standard of living is incredible. And while I haven’t read Hick’s full article, I think the text (James 5.6) seems to back him up, without getting into an in-depth discussion of what exactly are “unjust wages” in the biblical context and how those translate into our world (which wasn’t his point). His point, I think, is that there are other morally terrible things wrong in America that are issues for God—issues that are as contrary to God as murder. We can’t just focus on one or two issues as the heaviest issues that God’s cares about (that aren’t definitively addressed or answered in our scripture). The scriptural witness seems to be that God cares about injustice in any form it takes. And as God’s people, we should be concerned for those issues as well.
Murder in America? Sometimes. But do we murder people in developing countries with our exploits? I’d have to say yes.
[It's been awhile since I've been on you blog...good talking w/ ya bro]
Brad,
Always good to catch up.
I think if you read Hick’s article, you will see that his point is exactly how the “unjust wages” of the Bible translate into the present day. It’s how he argues that low wages is a political issue equally important as abortion.
If we’re murdering people in the developing world at all, it’s with guns, not wages. The exploitation that US companies are accused of consists in almost every case of offering wages much higher than going local wage rates but much lower than US wage rates. There a reason people are paying a month of wages to get into Nike sweatshops, and that’s because conditions in Nike sweatshops are better than the conditions for those not in Nike sweatshops.
If that’s exploitation, what the world needs is more, not less.