I recently joined the society of Twitter. I honestly didn't know what to expect, but I have to say--I am really enjoying it. It is a great tool that allows me to keep up with a wide variety of people, organizations, news topics and even special interest groups without spending hours and hours on the internet browsing websites ad nauseum.
One of the organizations I follow on Twitter is Sojourners. Yesterday, I saw a tweet from Sojo that intrigued me: "Harry Potter and Social Justice" by Julie Clawson. As a fan of Harry Potter I dutifully followed the link; here is what I found: Clawson's description of the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), their desire to end injustice(s) in the world and her thoughts about the HPA's work. Her basic conclusion?
"Justice is justice, and good is good wherever it may be found. The more people that can use love to seek a better world the better. Call ourselves the DA (Dumbledore’s Army) or the citizens of the kingdom; we are working for the same goal."
On one level I agree with Ms. Clawson; justice is recognizable to just about everyone on our planet--injustice even more so (see my previous post, "Musings: Justice"). But I believe that she is mistaken in her conclusion that "we" (citizens of the kingdom and Dumbledore's Army) are "working for the same goal."
The HPA's mission is "...to empower our members to act like the heroes that they love by acting for a better world. By bringing together fans of blockbuster books, TV shows, movies, and YouTube celebrities we are harnessing the power of popular culture toward making our world a better place. Our goal is to make civic engagement exciting by channeling the entertainment-saturated facets of our culture toward mobilization for deep and lasting social change." (see http://thehpalliance.org/what-we-do/) I applaud the HPA in their efforts to use popular culture for significant social change; the idea really is brilliant.
But the HPA's mission is not the same as the kingdom mission. In the kingdom mission, God is the only One who knows all circumstances intimately and He is the only One who can be fully just. Human attempts at justice are great and all--but they remain imperfect apart from Him.
The kingdom mission recognizes that Christ's death on the cross and our redemption was the infinite, perfect satisfaction of God's justice. Thus the justice authored by Christ is eternal life and that is what citizens of the kingdom work towards; human efforts to accomplish justice in the world are necessarily temporal unless His redemption sculpts them.
"Deep and lasting social change" cannot be eternal; "Eternal life" cannot be contained.
Good response, in my opinion. I think of the attempts to form utopian societies in the past. The goals are lofty, but they wanted to leave God out, relying on the "goodness" of humankind. They worked for a while, but in the end they failed.
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