Regarding theologians who condemn calls for systemic justice:

There are two routes to denying the existence or prevalence of systemic injustice in the United States (e.g., systemic racism). One route is theoretical and the other is factual.

The theoretical route claims that systemic injustice, as a concept, is bankrupt: there can’t be any systemic injustice in the U.S., because there’s no such thing as systemic injustice in the first place.

This route is useless to any Christian theologian, since Scripture itself provides example after example of systemic injustice, alongside God’s emphatic condemnation thereof.

God’s pronouncement in Isaiah 5:20 is especially pointed: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil.” There’s no clearer instance of systemic injustice than laws that call evil good, and good evil.

So, through his prophet Isaiah, God furnishes an illustration of systemic injustice and an invocation of exquisite suffering upon those who endorse it.

The theoretical route is thus foreclosed: in the plainest of terms, Scripture tells us that systemic injustice is a real phenomenon, and God hates it.

That leaves the factual route, along which one might claim that, as a matter of fact, there’s no evidence of systemic injustice in the present day United States (even if systemic injustice is a genuine theoretical possibility, per Scripture).

Notice that this is a claim of empirical fact that can only be supported by empirical evidence—ideally, evidence gathered by social scientists who are trained to negotiate complex social structures that implicate subtle questions in economics, sociology, psychology and so forth.

So, what are the theologian’s prospects for pursuing this line of argument successfully? With a couple of narrow caveats to follow, the answer to this question is a definitive “None whatsoever.”

The first caveat is that a professional theologian might also be a professional social scientist. That said, it would be expertise in social science—not theology—that qualifies her to address factual questions about the existence or prevalence of systemic injustice in the U.S.

The second caveat is that theologians, like all of us, are entitled to hold personal, non-expert opinions; and the First Amendment gives them the right to express their personal, non-expert opinions without official interference.

That said, it is academically fraudulent and spiritually abusive for a theologian to use his public platform *as a theologian* to make pronouncements on matters of empirical fact that lie far afield from his professional competence.

As I’ve said before on this website, dinner parties and book clubs are intimate settings in which it is appropriate for amateurs to discuss their passions.

No good is served when ambitious theologians speak with unearned confidence about technical matters that they haven’t studied in any disciplined way; and it is harmful when they present their personal, inexpert opinions as somehow derived from the Word of God.