Justice for the Poor

The anchor verses come from an unusual voice. Proverbs 31 opens with 'the words of King Lemuel - the burden that his mother taught him' (Proverbs 31:1), and it is the only part of the book presented as a woman's own teaching. Before the famous portrait of the capable wife, a queen mother instructs her son in how to rule. She warns him against two things that ruin kings, wasting his strength on women and drinking, 'lest they drink and forget what is decreed, depriving all the oppressed of justice' (31:5). Then she tells him what his power is for: 'Open your mouth for those with no voice, for the cause of all the dispossessed. Open your mouth, judge righteously, and defend the cause of the poor and needy' (31:8-9).

The Hebrew is vivid. Those with no voice are the illem, the mute: not people who have nothing to say but people who are not allowed to say it, or who cannot be heard where decisions are made. The dispossessed are bene chalof, a rare phrase, literally the sons of passing away, which interpreters take as the destitute, the vanishing, those left behind. Lemuel's mother does not tell him to give them money, though he may. She tells him to use his mouth and his judgment for them in the place where their case is heard. That is the difference between charity and justice in a single verse.

The same picture runs through scripture. Psalm 72 prays that the king will 'save the children of the needy and crush the oppressor' (Psalm 72:4), because 'their blood is precious in his sight' (72:14). Jeremiah says of Josiah, 'He took up the cause of the poor and needy, and so it went well with him. Is this not what it means to know Me?' declares the LORD (Jeremiah 22:16). And when Jesus began his ministry he read from Isaiah, 'He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed' (Luke 4:18).

Most students will never be kings. But most have a mouth that can be heard somewhere a poor person's cannot: in the church council, at the chief's court, before a teacher, in a family meeting over an inheritance, at the police station, or simply as someone who can read the form. The charge to Lemuel is the charge to anyone with a little more standing than the person beside them.

Scripture requires both mercy to the poor and justice for them, and it does not let either replace the other. The law commanded charity in many forms: leave the edges of your field and the fallen grapes 'for the poor and the foreigner' (Leviticus 19:10), and do not go back for a forgotten sheaf (Deuteronomy 24:19). 'Kindness to the poor is a loan to the LORD, and He will repay the lender' (Proverbs 19:17). Notice, though, that gleaning was not a voluntary gift; it was a legal right of the poor written into the structure of land ownership. Ruth did not ask Boaz for alms; she went to glean (Ruth 2:2).

The prophets add justice: the setting right of the structures by which people are made poor. Isaiah pronounces woe on 'those who enact unjust statutes and issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of fair treatment' (Isaiah 10:1-2). Amos condemns merchants who say 'let us cheat with dishonest scales. Let us buy the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals' (Amos 8:5-6). The Hebrew pair mishpat and tsedaqah, justice and righteousness, appears together again and again: 'But let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream' (Amos 5:24). The prophets do not only ask Israel to give to the poor. They ask why the poor are poor, and they name the courts, the scales, the land deals and the laws.

The Brazilian archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara is remembered for observing that when he fed the poor he was called a saint, and when he asked why the poor had no food he was called a communist. His remark names a temptation in every church: to welcome charity, which leaves the powerful comfortable, and to grow suspicious when someone asks about causes. The opposite temptation is just as real. A church that campaigns about systems but never visits the sick widow down the road has also abandoned the poor, and James' question still stands: 'If one of you tells him, "Go in peace; stay warm and well fed," but does not provide for his physical needs, what good is that?' (James 2:16). The Pastoral Care track's lesson Practical Care and the Poor deals with the church's direct care; this lesson is about justice.

Justice must also be just. The same law that commands defence of the poor forbids perverting judgment in their favour: 'You must not pervert justice; you must not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the rich' (Leviticus 19:15). A Christian who speaks for the poor must still tell the truth, hear the other side, and not assume that the poor person is always right or the rich person always wrong. How that impartiality relates to God's special concern for the poor is the question at the heart of the next two sections.

The fullest body of Christian teaching on justice for the poor in the modern era is Catholic social teaching, a series of papal encyclicals and church documents beginning with Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891), on the condition of workers. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004) gathers its principles. The dignity of every human person comes first, as made in God's image. The common good is the sum of the conditions that allow people and groups to flourish. Subsidiarity, set out by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno (1931), holds that larger bodies such as the state should not take over what families, churches and local communities can do, but should help them do it. Solidarity, developed by John Paul II, is a firm commitment to the good of all, especially the weakest. And the universal destination of goods, met in the previous lesson, holds that God made the earth for everyone.

Within this teaching grew the phrase the preferential option for the poor. It came into general use through the Latin American bishops' conferences at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968 and at Puebla, Mexico, in 1979, and John Paul II used the language of an option or love of preference for the poor in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987). In Catholic teaching it does not mean that God loves the poor more than the rich or that the poor are saved by poverty. It means that the church, in its decisions and its witness, must look at the world from the standpoint of the poor and give special attention to their needs.

Protestants have reached many of the same convictions by different routes. Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands taught that God has given different spheres of life, family, church, business, state, each its own authority, so that none should swallow the others, and he called Christians to address poverty as a matter of public justice. The Lausanne Covenant (1974), in its fifth paragraph on Christian social responsibility, affirmed that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of Christian duty, after Latin American evangelicals such as René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the congress on it. The Micah Network, named after Micah 6:8, issued a Declaration on Integral Mission (2001) which argued that proclamation and social action belong together. Many Pentecostal churches, especially in the global south, practise justice more than they theorise it, through schools, clinics and microenterprise.

Liberation theology arose in Latin America in the late 1960s among Catholic priests and theologians working among the very poor. Its founding text is A Theology of Liberation by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, published in Lima in 1971. Gutiérrez, who lived and worked for decades in a poor district of Lima and died in 2024, defined theology as critical reflection on Christian practice in the light of the word of God. That reverses the usual order: first comes commitment to and with the poor, and then theology reflects on it. Others developed the movement, among them the Brazilian Leonardo Boff and Jon Sobrino in El Salvador, and it spread through thousands of base ecclesial communities, small groups of poor Christians reading the Bible together and applying it to their lives. Related movements grew elsewhere: James Cone's A Black Theology of Liberation (1970) in the United States, and in South Africa the Kairos Document (1985), signed by many theologians against apartheid. The movement also had its martyrs: Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador, who was not one of the movement's theologians but spoke for the poor against the violence of the army, was shot while celebrating Mass on 24 March 1980, and was canonised in 2018.

Its defenders state its case like this. God is not neutral between oppressor and oppressed. In the exodus he says, 'I have indeed seen the affliction of My people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their oppressors' (Exodus 3:7), and he comes down to deliver them. Mary sings that God 'has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty' (Luke 1:53). Jesus announces good news to the poor and release to the oppressed (Luke 4:18), and in Luke's version of the beatitudes he blesses the poor, not only the poor in spirit (Luke 6:20). Sin is personal, but it also takes shape in structures: unjust land tenure, laws that favour the powerful, an economic order that keeps whole nations poor. A theology that speaks only of individual souls, in a continent where most Christians were poor and their rulers called themselves Christian, had become a theology of the comfortable. Gutiérrez insisted that liberation had three levels, social and political, human and personal, and liberation from sin by Christ, and that the third was the root of the others. His later book We Drink from Our Own Wells (1983) is a work of spirituality.

Its critics state their case with equal force. The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued an Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation in 1984. It affirmed concern for the poor as a gospel duty, but criticised the uncritical borrowing of Marxist analysis, especially the idea of class struggle as the key to history, which it argued turned the church into a party and made salvation a political project. A second instruction, in 1986, set out a positive Catholic theology of Christian freedom and liberation. Evangelical critics, among them Emilio Antonio Núñez, a Salvadoran-born theologian who taught for decades in Guatemala, worried that the exodus had displaced the cross as the centre of salvation, that sin was being reduced to oppression, and that the poor were being treated as saved by their poverty. They also note that scripture forbids partiality to the poor in judgment (Leviticus 19:15), that the poor sin and need forgiveness like everyone else, and they argue that the economic programmes some liberationists favoured did not help the poor where they were tried. Michael Novak's Will It Liberate? (1986) pressed the economic criticism.

Defenders reply that the critics attacked a caricature: Gutiérrez never made class struggle the gospel, and the option for the poor is not exclusive. Critics reply that the movement's best theologians were not always its most influential voices, and that Marxist categories shaped much of its practice. Both of these replies have evidence on their side. What the debate has left behind is a broad agreement that it would have been hard to imagine in 1960: that the God of scripture has a special concern for the poor, that sin can be built into structures as well as hearts, and that theology done without listening to the poor will miss things. What remains disputed is how far that concern should shape a theology's method, how sin and salvation are defined, and which social analysis Christians should use. A student should be able to give both sides at their best before taking a view.

In the Bible land is not merely property; it is the family's place before God and its means of life. 'The land must not be sold permanently, because it is Mine, and you are but foreigners and residents with Me' (Leviticus 25:23). When King Ahab wanted Naboth's vineyard, Naboth replied, 'The LORD forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers' (1 Kings 21:3). Jezebel arranged false witnesses, Naboth was stoned, and Elijah met Ahab with God's charge: 'Have you not murdered a man and seized his land?' (21:19). The prophets condemned the gradual version of the same crime: 'Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field until no place is left and you live alone in the land' (Isaiah 5:8); 'They covet fields and seize them; they take away houses' (Micah 2:2).

Scripture also contains one of the oldest stories of women claiming land. When Zelophehad died without sons, his five daughters came before Moses and the whole assembly to ask for their father's inheritance, and the LORD said, 'The daughters of Zelophehad speak correctly. You certainly must give them property as an inheritance' (Numbers 27:7). The law was changed as a result. In many places today widows and daughters are driven off family land after a death by relatives who claim it, a practice often called property grabbing. The Loomba Foundation's World Widows Report (2015) estimated that there were about 258 million widows in the world, many of them in poverty. A church that buries a man on Saturday and watches his widow put off her land on Monday has not heard Numbers 27.

Land injustice also has a long colonial history that many students live with. In South Africa, the Natives Land Act of 1913 set aside roughly seven percent of the country's land for the black majority. Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, land taken under colonial rule, or by later governments and investors, remains a source of poverty and conflict, and Christians have been on every side of these struggles, including as landowners. Churches and missions themselves hold large amounts of land in many countries, and that is a question the church must ask of itself.

How to secure the poor's land is a live disagreement among Christians who care about the same texts. Some, drawing on the economist Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital (2000), argue that the poor hold vast assets they cannot use because they lack legal title, and that formal registration of land would protect them from seizure and let them borrow against it. Others answer that titling programmes have sometimes registered family land in the name of the male head alone, cutting out wives and widows, have overridden customary and communal rights, and have made it easier for the powerful to buy out the poor, so that the jubilee's aim of keeping families on their land is better served by protecting customary tenure. Both sides can point to cases where their approach protected the poor and where the other's failed them. What both agree on is that the poor need a voice when their land is decided, which is what Proverbs 31:8 commands.

Turn to a new page in your casebook and write: Case 5, Justice for the Poor. Use the four headings: The situation. The texts. The positions. What I would counsel, and why. This is the last case of this module, and it is the one in which you are asked to act, not only to counsel.

For the situation, take the person you described in the inquiry, or another real case: a widow whose land is being taken, a family that cannot get a birth certificate for a child, a worker dismissed without pay, a village whose water is being diverted, a member who cannot read the summons he has been given. Describe it without names and without details that would identify anyone. Write down who decides the matter, where it is decided, and who currently speaks for the person without a voice.

For the texts, write out Proverbs 31:8-9 and at least two other passages from this lesson. For the positions, if the case touches a live disagreement, such as how far the church should engage with law and politics, or titling against customary land, write each view as its own defenders would put it. Then write your counsel, separating what is charity, meeting the immediate need, from what is justice, changing the decision or the structure.

Then do one thing this week that opens your mouth for that person, with their consent and at their side, not instead of them. Many people lack the papers that would let them claim their rights: the World Bank's Identification for Development initiative estimated that in 2021 about 850 million people had no official proof of identity. You might go with someone to the registry office, help them fill in a form, find the legal aid clinic or a church lawyer, speak to the chief or the church council on their behalf, or simply sit with them in the waiting room so they are not alone. Write in your casebook what you did, what happened and what you learned. You now have five cases from this module, and they will feed the case study you write at the end of this track.