text: You seem to be contradicting yourself, Monte. You first argued that God's #1 concern is to mitigate want and suffering on earth. That can be inferred , you reason, from His unconditional love. Therefore, whatever God's church does, whether through law or charity, to mitigate want and suffering, is advancing the Kingdom. Your logic is internally sound. 
  
  But now you say (and I agree with you) that the existence of want and suffering on this earth is not a measure of God's love; that the persistence of suffering and earthly injustice is not inconsistent with God's unconditional love and eternal purposes for humanity. I agree. So how does it follow that SJ (the mitigation of social and economic inequities through political action) is the vocation of the church? 
  
  Social justice was the overarching concern for Jews in 1st Century Palestine. It was because the Jews would not trust a messiah who refused to deal with injustice on a political level that they rejected his unconditional love.