Social Justice in the New Testament

"No social program is given in Scripture for the institutional church in relation to civil society in general despite the grave social problems in the New Testament world. In fact, the New Testament barely mentions the social climate of its world at all. Slavery, a pernicious social ill in the Roman world, is never addressed as a structural evil to be eliminated by social "partnering" with evangelism or in any other specific manner. Jesus, Paul, nor any other writer called for the abolition of slavery . . . If the new evangelicals and others are right in their theory of societal activism, Paul's actions and counsel were either in error or the Apostle was unforgivably apathetic. If Paul today would denounce entrenched structural evil in the United Nations sessions and in corporate boardrooms across the world, as Carl Henry assumes he would, it is surely not asking too much for the great Apostle to have written even a few such lines in private correspondence to a Christian friend . . . Christian social involvement embraces the social responsibilities the church had toward its own people. The New Testament teaches the benevolence of the local church to its own members; it does not portray the church as the God-appointed watchdog over the social welfare of the world at large. The economic commonality of Acts 4:32-35 was of believers only and was not projected into civil society at large in fulfillment of some notion of a social mandate. In Acts 6:1-3 the local church developed a strategy to handle the social well-being of its own widows, not all of the widows in the wider area. The Christians in Antioch contributed to the relief of the famine-stricken believers in Judea (Acts 11:27-30). Romans 12:9-21 gives direction to believers in practical affairs, but there is no social directive except "contributing to the needs of the saints" (v. 13). Paul gathered money from the churches of Macedonia and Achaia for the poor saints in Jerusalem (Rom 15:25, 27; 2 Cor 8-9). 1 Timothy 5:3-16 gives numerous instructions for the physical/financial support of the local church for its destitute widows, guidelines that demonstrate that the church's social program clearly was not intended for the greater civil community. James 2:15-16 involves a brother or a sister--a fellow believer--who is in need of food or clothing, and for whom mere platitudes are worthless gestures. James declares that the evidence of genuine, persevering faith is to "give them what is necessary for their body" (v. 16). In 1 John 3:17, the context is again limited to the saints and not the world at large; the material compassion is for the "brother" in need" (Rolland Mccune, Promise Unfulfilled: The Failed Strategy of Modern Evangelicalism, 261).