TL;DR: In trying to make moral arguments more broadly appealing, the church has often traded shared authority and formation for sentiment and compassion alone.
This frustrates me as someone who worked on Immigration through church based community organizing (when I was in Minnesota). We certainly cared about compassion but we led with policy and constitution. The policy in the cities that adopted those strategies did NOT adopt them out of compassion but out of practical and constitutional realities. Scriptural authority about how to treat the stranger and sojourner also came in. We also had workshops helping us to understand how complex Immigration law is. It’s frustrating that this part of the discussion does not get through. I wonder why.
It gets a little tricky quoting Micah 6:8 when one spends a good chunk of their effort explaining away the authority of the rest of scripture. I think though, that folks hold verses like this up to people who claim to take the authority of scripture seriously but then explain away our so called "social justice" sound bites.
“This isn’t an indictment so much as an observation about how moral language functions when it is detached from formation, theological anthropology, and a shared sense of telos.”
I think your emphasis on teleological formation is spot on.
This frustrates me as someone who worked on Immigration through church based community organizing (when I was in Minnesota). We certainly cared about compassion but we led with policy and constitution. The policy in the cities that adopted those strategies did NOT adopt them out of compassion but out of practical and constitutional realities. Scriptural authority about how to treat the stranger and sojourner also came in. We also had workshops helping us to understand how complex Immigration law is. It’s frustrating that this part of the discussion does not get through. I wonder why.
It gets a little tricky quoting Micah 6:8 when one spends a good chunk of their effort explaining away the authority of the rest of scripture. I think though, that folks hold verses like this up to people who claim to take the authority of scripture seriously but then explain away our so called "social justice" sound bites.
“This isn’t an indictment so much as an observation about how moral language functions when it is detached from formation, theological anthropology, and a shared sense of telos.”
I think your emphasis on teleological formation is spot on.
Should be “police.”