When I was in Milwaukee a few weeks ago I wrote about the “Black Lives Matter” protests and some of the community reaction to it. I was quite taken by the police who are pictured here paving the way for the protesters and making sure they were safe. There is a tension called into more graphic clarity by political election seasons between “law” and “order” and between justice and social justice. The tensions may naturally exist because of a fallen world or they may be artificially produced by political agitation. It is hard to take seriously a student at an Ivy League school whose parents are spending $100,000 a year on tuition, asking for tests to be delayed because he is stressed out from protesting the horrors of the “establishment”. But there is a place for social action and demands for justice. This from Theodore Laetsch written back in 1940 (CTM)
The Christian citizen as a Christian will demand of all men no more and no less than God requires in His Word concerning social relations within and without the Church. He will never forget that the social order laid down by the Lord Himself is the only social order which the Church as Church, and he as a member of that Church, must proclaim and maintain. Yet he will constantly remember that it is God’s will to have this order established only within His Church and by no other body than this Church. While he will make use of every opportunity to bring Christ and all spiritual, material, and social blessings connected with the Christian religion to the unchurched, he will realize that he can never hope for a Christianized world or a Christian social order within this world. He will therefore endeavor by word and example to help in establishing and maintaining a social order of the highest possible standards within his community. To this end he will study to understand the underlying causes of social maladjustments and bend every effort to the removal of these causes.
