Brian Matz - Introducing Protestant Social Ethics: Foundations in Scripture, History, and Practice

2017 by Brian Matz

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-0664-7

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled NET are from the NET BIBLE, copyright 2003 by Biblical Studies Press, LLC. http://netbible.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. TM Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

For The Cent Store

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of several years spent reflecting on and teaching principles of social ethics to students at Fontbonne University, Carroll College, Seattle University, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. By no means am I finished. I got a late start, in fact. My undergraduate degree was in accounting, and the education that led me there was steeped in a worldview that gave little consideration to the questions that animate social ethics. So it is to my students, colleagues, and mentors at each of these institutions that I owe a great debt of gratitude. They have taught me far more than I once thought was needed, and they continue to remind me just how indispensable this is to our world, its people, and its cultures.

Among those many teachers and mentors is Prof. Dr. Johan Verstraeten. He was my first teacher in social ethics, and he was gracious enough to take me under his wing as a postdoc researcher at his Centrum voor Katholieke Sociale Denken / Center for Catholic Social Thought at the K. U. Leuven during 20059. Professor Verstraeten led me through the texts of Catholic social teaching, the extended literature of Catholic social thought, and the writings of critical thinkers such as John Rawls, Paul Ricoeur, Michael Hollenbach, and many others. Through him, I was introduced to a cadre of scholars in the field of social ethics that took me (seemingly) far outside my principal field of patristic studies. The rewards have been immensely personal as well as, I hope, beneficial to my students during the years since.

I also wish to thank colleagues and friends with whom I have shared, and occasionally debated, ideas in this book. Some of these individuals were helpful for things that they said in a conversation that seemed, even at the time, to be unrelated to this book. I thank Rev. Seth Dombach, Chris Fuller, Martha Gonzalez, Scott and Beth Haile, John Hannah, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, Brenda Ihssen, Helen Rhee, Rev. John Richardson, Julie Rubio, and Jim and Krista Slagle. Thanks are also due to my research assistant, Brittany Hanewinkel, for helping prepare the index. Finally, I thank the academic institutions with which I have been affiliated: Carroll College, which blessed me with appointment to the Raymond G. Hunthausen Professor of Social Ethics; and Fontbonne University, at which I hold an endowed chair in Catholic thought. The funding from those endowed chairs provided the necessary space for writing many of the chapters of this book.

Abbreviations

Old Testament

New Testament

General

Introduction

Near the end of my junior year of high school, my grandparents bought me a car. It was a used car, but only a year or so old. I had never owned anything so valuable in my life. I did what I could to protect the car from dents and scratches on the outside and from my friends dirt-crusted shoes on the inside. One day, witnessing how neurotic I must have been about the car, my pastor and friend Dale Swanson asked me, Whose car is it? I told him that it was mine, of course, to which he replied, No. The car belongs to God. And God might need to give a ride to someone with dirty shoes.