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3 A Theo-Ethics of Solidarity Over the last two hundred years, Christian ethics has offered two pathways for addressing problems of social injustice: prophetic and pragmatic. While the prophetic tradition traces its history back to the Hebrew prophets, it has more recently been associated with the Social Gospel Movement and liberation theology. In the Christian tradition, there have always been prophets who have functioned as social commentators, challenging widespread social and economic injustice and calling the people of God to accountability. From Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Micah in the Hebrew Bible to the modern-day prophets Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr., prophets function to call their communities to accountability before God and they help imagine what a new world might be like. The Social Gospel Movement responded to the injustice and social inequality that resulted from the Industrial Revolution and the urbanization of US American culture by fighting for living wages, worker safety, abolishing child labor, and a shorter workweek. Ultimately, the political and moral evil of two world wars led a new generation of theologians to reject the theology of the Social Gospel as utopian and politically naïve. One of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr, shared the Social Gospelers’ emphasis on love as the starting point of Christian ethics. However, Niebuhr’s understanding of love was tempered by a theological anthropology that emphasized the sinful nature of the human condition and led to the development of a more pragmatic approach to social ethics known as Christian Realism. Niebuhr was interested in social ethics and theology that had the capacity to make real social change to improve the lives of people. This pragmatism led to the development of a model of Christian ethics centered on what were called “middle axioms,” which involved the articulation of moral principles that ought to guide social action and policy in the political sphere.1 Realism dominated Protestant social ethics from the 1930s to the early 1970s, and the methodology of middle axioms has 49 strongly influenced the way denominational and ecumenical social policies have been developed even up to the present day.2 In the 1960s, theologians from the developing world and from marginalized communities in the first world developed a new theological movement known as liberation theology, which takes God’s act of liberating the slaves from Egypt as the starting point for thinking about God, salvation, and God’s desire for life on earth. The prophetic vision of liberation from oppression and injustice that became the rallying cry of the movement hearkened back to the progressive vision of Christianity promoted by the Social Gospelers. In the early 1970s, the tension between pragmatism and prophecy was manifest in the confrontations between Christian realists, who denounced the liberationists as naïve and utopian, and the liberation theologians, who charged the realists with being “Establishment” theologians.3 Balancing Prophecy and Pragmatism All of these movements are part of the tradition of social Christianity within Protestantism that began with the Social Gospel Movement. This tradition focuses on embodying social justice by working for the democratization of economic and social power in the world. The ethic of solidarity presented here seeks to incorporate insights from all three of these significant theological movements that have shaped faith and life in the United States for the last two hundred years. Regardless of the hermeneutic that shapes theological inquiry—whether it is hope, sin, liberation, love, or justice—a Christian ethic of solidarity will negotiate the delicate territory between pragmatism and prophetic vision. From a pragmatic perspective, it is true that a shift from neoliberal capitalism to a more just economic model of society appears to be a utopian vision, an impossibility given the political-economic structures of our present-day world. However, prophetic vision plays an important role in society by allowing people to imagine what the world could be like. Even if it is practically unlikely, the vision offers something to strive toward that calls people beyond the reality that they know toward a better future. Shaped by realism, any justice ethic must recognize and acknowledge the devastation and destruction that humans have waged on one another. Seeking to understand war, terrorism, racism, prejudice, or any other form of personal or systemic violence can help people gain insight into the ways in which human behavior and attitudes contribute to the persistence of evil in the world. Possessing a deeper knowledge of human nature and human sin offers a more realistic...

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