The NXR Podcast - BONUS - Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, real quick before we get started I have a small request. If you've been blessed by our

00:00:04.600 content and you like this show, would you take just a brief moment and leave us a five-star

00:00:09.040 review? This is quite possibly the most effective thing that you can do to ensure that this content

00:00:14.700 gets out to as many people as possible. Thanks. A couple thank yous. One, let's do a warm round

00:00:21.480 of applause, thanking John and A.D. and their wives for flying out here. Super grateful for

00:00:30.600 both of them, their wives, but especially these men actually being men. We live in trying times.

00:00:39.880 We have all been so disenchanted and disappointed by pastors, by men, by fathers, by leaders,

00:00:47.920 and virtually every institution within our society,

00:00:50.260 and the church, sadly, has not been an exception.

00:00:53.720 And so we need men.

00:00:55.780 We need men.

00:00:56.800 And both John and A.D. have served as faithful examples of that.

00:01:01.880 You guys are here because you've been blessed by their ministry

00:01:04.640 and other men like them,

00:01:05.840 and so I'm super grateful that they were willing to fly out here

00:01:09.240 and be here and minister to you, minister to me, my family,

00:01:14.060 and so super grateful for them.

00:01:16.040 The second thank you is for Christ Fellowship Church.

00:01:19.460 Part of the reason why we were able to keep our expenses low for Right Response,

00:01:23.200 Right Response fit the bill for this, and it was a lower bill, praise God,

00:01:26.800 because we didn't have to rent a venue.

00:01:29.180 Christ Fellowship Church allowed us to use their space for free.

00:01:32.100 So can we give a warm round of applause?

00:01:34.260 That's Pastor Jeff Ripple.

00:01:36.100 Can you raise your hand?

00:01:39.040 So, yeah, thank you.

00:01:40.880 So that's Pastor Jeff Ripple, and this is Christ Fellowship Church.

00:01:44.780 and that helped us to make this affordable and so uh last let's see yeah last last announcement is

00:01:51.740 so we want it to be free we want the conference to be free to you especially since it's four hours

00:01:56.020 and especially if somebody's driving 13 hours you know i want it to be free because that takes some

00:02:00.560 of the pressure off of me and john and at so that if it's lousy conference we'd be like hey we will

00:02:05.660 we'll give you a free you know full refund you know now the problem is though is if you guys

00:02:10.800 from georgia say okay will you give me a gas refund with biden's economy right putin's spike

00:02:15.880 i mean biden so anyways um so thank you so much to you guys coming and uh and for you guys helping

00:02:22.540 us to lower our costs but for anybody we want it to be free we're not charging you but if you are

00:02:27.760 willing and able we do ask if you would prayerfully consider helping right response ministries to

00:02:33.540 offset some of our cost a lot of you guys probably aren't prepared to give or anything like that

00:02:38.000 physically. But if you are, you could put it in the bucket right there where the note cards for

00:02:42.080 the questions are. If you want to do cash or check, if you'd like to give a donation, or you

00:02:46.200 could also go to rightresponseministries.com slash donate. One of our prayers is that God would move

00:02:51.220 on the hearts of men and women who have courage, who want to stand for biblical virtues and doctrine

00:02:56.280 and courage, all these things, that they would become monthly partners, that they would help us

00:03:00.580 in the ministry. And our goal is, Lord willing, that we'd be able to do something like this

00:03:05.020 twice a year as of now we're going to try to make it an annual thing but within a couple years i

00:03:10.060 would love if we could do spring and fall uh moscow idaho they've got enough stuff right that

00:03:16.000 you know it's not fair and then we've got you know you've got phoenix and you've got arizona

00:03:19.660 with james white you know and jeff durbin you've got john mccarthur in southern california but

00:03:24.220 texas needs something and i keep thinking of revelation you know three two or two three i

00:03:29.260 always get it backwards but strengthen that which remains and is about to die right there are places

00:03:34.820 that I, you know, where people would argue, the battle's raging. And I would say, no, the battle's

00:03:39.320 not raging in California. The battle was raging and we lost. We lost. And then there's the proverbial

00:03:45.100 uncontested, you know, Timbuktu with a population of 247 people in the backwoods and staunchly

00:03:50.240 conservative. And praise God for Timbuktu, you know, South Dakota, whatever it is. But then there's

00:03:55.520 the battle of Bunkers Hill. There's a decisive point. There's the thing where there's still

00:04:00.440 life. It still remains, but it's about to die. And we need reinforcements. We need conferences.

00:04:04.820 We need things like this to remind us we're not alone, and for us to do this, we need help.

00:04:11.120 So if you would consider becoming one of our co-laborers, one of our ministry partners with Right Response Ministries, we'd be grateful.

00:04:18.200 All right, without further ado, let's give a round of applause for Mr. John Harris.

00:04:29.060 Well, thank you, Joel.

00:04:30.440 And, man, I feel like I have such a long list of people to thank to put this together.

00:04:34.080 I'm just amazed at everyone who's come out.

00:04:37.000 And I actually, I was distracted temporarily.

00:04:40.760 Who came the farthest again?

00:04:43.160 Can you raise your hand?

00:04:43.980 Who won that?

00:04:46.820 Oh, y'all did.

00:04:50.720 Did you get your free book?

00:04:52.820 Go grab that before you leave.

00:04:54.740 Yeah, grab two books, you know.

00:04:57.400 Yeah, thank you so much.

00:04:59.160 And we met first in the restaurant.

00:05:01.700 So, yeah, that was providential.

00:05:03.800 I'm so glad that you're here. And technically, actually, A.D. came the farthest to speak from

00:05:09.760 New Hampshire. That's pretty far. And my wife told me this morning, we came from upstate New York,

00:05:14.640 it's snowing there right now. So I'm, some people are nodding their heads. Yeah, I'm very grateful

00:05:20.260 to be here right now. It's much better than being in upstate New York. Well, we're going to talk

00:05:25.160 today about social justice and the church, Christianity. How do these two religions

00:05:30.780 conflict. I believe social justice is a religion. Many of you who listen to my podcast, you know I 0.96

00:05:35.000 make that argument quite a bit. And some of this material will be from the book. For those who

00:05:40.780 have read the book, this will be somewhat of a review. I wanted to start, though, with Ephesians

00:05:46.020 chapter 5, if I may, because one of the things I've realized is being more academic and putting

00:05:55.060 this whole issue through the grid of an academic eye, you can tend to start to think, and I fall

00:06:02.040 into this, that it's just ideas. There's just ideas and there's people and there's places and

00:06:07.040 one thing led to another and here we are with George Soros about to take over the world, right?

00:06:11.560 It was like these little incremental steps and here we are. And there's some truth to that. I

00:06:18.540 really think it's good to look at things historically, to trace lines, to figure out

00:06:22.720 Where did these ideas come from? Who are we being influenced by? But there's something that's so

00:06:27.020 basic that we cannot forget. And Ephesians chapter 5, the entire chapter to me, 5 and 6 actually,

00:06:36.500 really, to me, simplifies all of this and breaks it down into something very simple.

00:06:42.700 Ephesians chapter 5 opens with, there's a vice list, and it's the opposite of love. I don't want

00:06:48.320 the left to take that word, by the way. That belongs to us. God is love, okay? Real love, not

00:06:53.560 this fake tolerance love of I tweeted something, but I never fed anyone, and that means I love

00:06:58.260 people. No, like real love, sacrificing oneself for the people in proximity to us that we actually

00:07:03.860 know. And there's a vice list given of all the things that are not love, sexual morality,

00:07:08.960 impurity, covetousness, right? And it goes on. And then you get to the end of chapter five,

00:07:14.440 and there's all these hierarchies that are brought up. Husbands and wives, labor relationships,

00:07:20.220 right? And you have an order that God has put down running into chapter six, children and parents.

00:07:28.400 And then we get to, and this is the pivotal moment for me, and I think it's something that

00:07:33.740 we should all have on the front of our minds as often as possible, and that's

00:07:38.440 That's verse 10, finally be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might, put on the full

00:07:44.640 armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle

00:07:50.900 against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic

00:07:55.320 spiritual powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the

00:08:01.060 heavenly places. It's ultimately where the battle is, okay? It's not with Biden, it's not with Putin,

00:08:08.440 or Zelensky, or any of the figures that we talk about, ultimately, Satan likes to use people,

00:08:13.160 and he does. They work for him, but they're not ultimately the enemy. The enemy is a spiritual

00:08:17.740 enemy. And so, everything that I'm about to present to you, which is very important, historical,

00:08:23.700 philosophical, we need to know those things, but just remember that this is a spiritual battle,

00:08:30.060 ultimately. And Satan is on one side, and God is on the other side. And the church hangs in the

00:08:36.820 balance. Now we know ultimately the church, God wins, the church is victorious. We know this.

00:08:42.180 But right now in our country, there is a great apostasy, a great falling away, and there's few

00:08:47.260 men willing to stand up and call a spade a spade. And I think there's a variety of reasons. I think

00:08:52.480 one of it is possibly a lack of understanding. And that's why we're here today is to understand

00:08:57.040 better. And so that's my task right now is to walk through the history, the philosophy, so we

00:09:02.340 understand what is it we're dealing with. If we were in Utah, we would want to understand Mormonism

00:09:07.880 to reach our neighbor, right? If you're a Christian in Utah and you don't understand anything about

00:09:11.620 Mormonism, you're a sitting duck. If you're in Saudi Arabia and you don't know anything about 0.99

00:09:16.460 Islam and you think you're going to reach these people, you're fooling yourself. You have to know

00:09:21.280 something about what they believe. Otherwise, they can use lingo that sounds really similar to what

00:09:26.080 you mean and you can think, well, we're the same and you're not. It's the difference between heaven

00:09:31.160 and hell. So we live in a culture saturated with social justice, with this political religion.

00:09:38.180 So we need to understand what social justice teaches, to be able to refute it, to answer it.

00:09:43.800 So that's what we're going to do. Let's open in a word of prayer, if we can, before we get started

00:09:47.700 here. Lord Jesus Christ, you are the maker of heaven and earth. Father, you sent your son,

00:09:56.740 You sent Jesus to die on behalf of sinners, and we just thank you so much for the sacrifice that you made.

00:10:03.520 We thank you for the gospel.

00:10:05.640 Lord, we want to oppose anything that would come against it because we know, Lord, how important it is.

00:10:10.020 We know where we would be without your grace and mercy, and we want others to know that.

00:10:14.340 So, Lord, I pray you'd fill our hearts, not just with the knowledge of social justice and what it teaches and why it's wrong,

00:10:20.460 but with a heart of compassion for the lost, with humility, knowing that we, without your grace, that's where we'd be,

00:10:27.660 and with a just, make the immaterial world more real than the material world to us today as we go through this.

00:10:34.360 In Jesus' name, amen.

00:10:37.240 Well, I'm going to take you through a slideshow, and I know what you're thinking.

00:10:42.020 There's no projector here, so I'm going to try to be very descriptive with my words as much as I possibly can.

00:10:47.520 and we're going to start just with the history of social justice and I don't know where Joel went

00:10:53.280 Joel yeah if you could just like 10 minutes before I'm supposed to stop you could just get my

00:10:57.860 attention in the back you know that'd be great so I don't lose track when I when I get into history

00:11:01.640 mode I just I lose focus of everything as I think I think AD and Joel kind of figured that out the

00:11:07.780 last few days so we're going to start with what social justice is what is it right that's the big

00:11:13.940 question. We hear this word all the time. It's actually been popular for quite some time.

00:11:19.420 And I'm going to give you a definition that I think captures its essence. It's pretty technical,

00:11:24.160 and we're going to come back to it at the end. And the way I think of it, this is a fog,

00:11:29.620 all right? So if you don't understand right away, that's totally fine. As we put more meat on the

00:11:33.440 bones, it will be more understandable. Here's my definition. The modern social justice movement

00:11:39.160 is a repackaged configuration of egalitarian ideas, heavily influenced over the past century

00:11:48.140 by postmodern and Marxist derivatives. Its purpose is to rectify disparities and advantages between

00:11:55.140 social groups through reallocation. Oh, thanks, John. We know what social justice is now, right?

00:12:02.520 That was as clear as mud. Let me read it for you one more time, okay? The modern social justice

00:12:07.440 movement is a repackaged configuration of egalitarian ideas heavily influenced over the

00:12:12.580 past century by postmodern and Marxist derivatives. Its purpose is to rectify disparities in advantages

00:12:19.820 between social groups through reallocation, okay? So definitions are very important in this. And

00:12:26.240 anytime you're arguing with the left, they love to play language games. These battles are mostly

00:12:31.360 over the dictionary. So I think it's really important from the start, we need to understand

00:12:35.920 what social justice is. And to do that, let's take a little walk down memory lane. Now, one of the

00:12:41.620 things you'll hear is that social justice can be Christian, it can be conservative, because there's

00:12:47.900 Roman Catholics who use the term. And there is some truth to this. I'm not going to spend a lot

00:12:52.820 of time on it, but that's not the social justice tradition we're talking about. There was an effort

00:12:59.200 And this term was used in the 1800s, mid-1800s, to try to preserve the social bonds that existed before the Industrial Revolution.

00:13:08.860 And social justice was sometimes used to refer to that.

00:13:12.760 Rerum Novarum was one of the encyclicals that Pope Leon put out, and it talks about this.

00:13:19.580 Now, that word did not catch on.

00:13:22.740 It wasn't popular.

00:13:23.860 People didn't use it.

00:13:25.060 if you do like a Google Ngram, I don't know if anyone's done that, you can put like a word

00:13:30.000 into this search bar and it'll show you the books written over the past, you know, whatever time

00:13:34.320 frame you want to give it, 100 years, when they became popular, when they were in use. Social

00:13:39.020 justice doesn't even really become a popular word until the turn of the century. And then it becomes

00:13:44.720 more popular. So we're going to trace it from when it became popular. And that's the tradition that

00:13:50.280 we stand in when people use it. That goes back to the time during the Fabian Socialism phase,

00:13:57.960 and the Fabian Socialists are still around, but when it first became popular in Great Britain.

00:14:01.900 One of the most famous Fabian Socialists, some of you might recognize, is a guy named H.G. Wells.

00:14:06.180 Wrote a number of fantasy, science fiction novels. I actually like a lot of his stuff,

00:14:10.100 but he was an atheist. He was a socialist. And Fabian Socialism really taught that we're going

00:14:17.680 to get there through progression. It's not going to be a revolution. We're going to bring about

00:14:22.060 the revolution through this march through the institutions over time. And there were some

00:14:26.520 Christians in the United States that thought, wow, we really like this idea. One of them being

00:14:31.060 Walter Rauschenbusch. I really like the Fabian socialists and their ideas. Problem is, if I go

00:14:36.120 back to America and I start talking about Fabian socialism, everyone's going to reject me because

00:14:41.100 they think socialism means you're immoral, and they think it means that you deny the existence

00:14:45.920 of God. And I don't want those associations. So instead he called it social justice. And justice

00:14:52.680 wasn't even really a word that socialists were using that much. In fact, Karl Marx thought

00:14:56.560 justice? Justice is just a word that the oppressors use. You know, the courts belong to them and they

00:15:02.060 oppress the people they hate. That's what justice is. It was kind of a religious term. And then it's

00:15:07.780 used by a number of people, Walter Rauschenbusch probably being the most famous, to refer to

00:15:12.820 socialism. And they were pretty much the same thing. It was a Christianized socialism.

00:15:17.760 And there's, in the book, Christianity and Social Justice, the new one I have over there,

00:15:22.060 I trace a lot of this. And most of them are pastors, seminary professors, people like that

00:15:26.380 who are using this term during that time. So that's the kind of social justice we're talking

00:15:32.560 about. Now, what is that? Socialism, right? But at the base level, what is socialism? It's a

00:15:38.640 redistribution scheme. So another word you could use, if you wanted to be accurate, if you wanted

00:15:43.340 to be more conceptual and not get tied up with wrangling about the term, you could just call it

00:15:48.020 redistributive justice. That's what it is. And for that concept, I trace this back to Jean-Jacques

00:15:54.300 Rousseau, the philosopher of the French Revolution. And there were three things that Rousseau wanted

00:15:59.960 to achieve. He wanted an egalitarian ideal. Egalitarian is a French word for equal, but it's

00:16:06.180 not equality before the law, it's the elimination of disparities between people. It's where we're

00:16:11.800 all flatlined into having the same kind of outcome. We have the same level of income,

00:16:18.080 the same privilege, the same everything, and that way everything's fair, right? And that's socialism

00:16:22.700 at the end of the day. That's what they're teaching. Well, Rousseau was kind of a proto-socialist,

00:16:26.880 a socialist before socialism, and he thought this ought to be achieved. The problem is standing in

00:16:32.720 the way of achieving this great heaven on earth, this utopia, was social institutions that were

00:16:38.740 preventing it. The church, right? You have clerics who people call them pastor and honor them, and

00:16:43.800 they have a hierarchy. They have authority. You had families that are passing down their money

00:16:48.840 and inheritance, and that's not fair because wealth gets passed down. And there's all these

00:16:52.840 institutions in society that are preventing the achievement of this utopia. So he proposed the

00:16:59.500 third element to this is we need to implement a force capable of

00:17:03.380 executing this utopian dream. We need to crush all of

00:17:07.500 these institutions that are preventing heaven on earth from happening.

00:17:11.640 And so, who's going to do that? The government, right?

00:17:15.400 That's the logical conclusion. You're going to have to have a force capable,

00:17:19.400 a big bully who's capable of destroying all the little bullies that are out there

00:17:23.520 and then we'll have equality, right? Now you can see the problem with this already.

00:17:27.540 If the problem is disparities, you just created the biggest disparity there ever existed in human history.

00:17:32.740 You have the government up here and then just an atomistic individual kind of naked in the public square

00:17:37.820 with no voluntary associations or institutions to protect him from this guy.

00:17:43.160 So I don't know if it occurred to him, like, what if the top dog, what if the government goes tyrannical?

00:17:49.620 Then what?

00:17:50.980 So that's kind of the Achilles heel of this.

00:17:53.000 But that's been the scheme of social justice from the beginning.

00:17:55.700 And every iteration, I don't care which one you're talking about, the Me Too movement, feminism, the Black Lives Matter, even in some ways the COVID stuff, which I'll get to, every iteration carries this with it.

00:18:09.540 So fast forward to Karl Marx, socialism and communism.

00:18:12.620 In 1848, there's a bunch of revolutions across the European continent, and they fail.

00:18:17.360 But they're all socialist revolutions.

00:18:19.860 And in that same year, Karl Marx writes the Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels.

00:18:24.420 And he says, you know, the reason there's inequality, it's because of economic factors out there.

00:18:31.860 You have the bourgeois property and you have the proletariat and they're oppressed.

00:18:37.840 And so here's what we got to do.

00:18:39.300 We need to implement some policies that are going to prevent this economic disparity from emerging.

00:18:46.060 So elimination, abolish, actually, bourgeois property through state control of credit,

00:18:50.860 transportation and production as well as free public education i don't know if you knew that

00:18:56.460 free public education is a communist idea we've just kind of accepted it now it's normal it was

00:19:00.720 not normal for uh the greater part of human history and what i mean by that is a top-down

00:19:05.800 government controlled curriculum for children now during the same time you have in the united

00:19:12.740 states a bunch of social reform movements now you know it's not communism but uh you have 0.57

00:19:18.240 prohibitionism, you have anti-masonry movement, you have abolitionism, you have the woman's

00:19:22.160 emancipation movement. All this stuff is going on during the revivalistic

00:19:26.240 times, okay? And we need a perfect society. And

00:19:29.920 at the time of these failed revolutions in 1848, a bunch

00:19:34.180 of people from Europe, Germany especially, flocked to the United States.

00:19:38.920 And they settled, a lot of them settled in the Midwest, they settled

00:19:42.260 mostly in the North, and some settled down South, but mostly in the

00:19:46.220 Midwest, and they controlled newspapers. A lot of them became, they worked themselves in the Union

00:19:50.580 Army, and there was a merging happening. These ideas were being introduced into the greatest

00:19:56.340 environment that they could be introduced into, and so this is where we get the social gospel

00:20:02.200 movement that starts right after this. Now, I've already talked a little bit about Fabian socialism.

00:20:08.100 The social gospel movement is really, is an Americanized version of that, using the term

00:20:12.640 social justice. After this, though, we have in this development cultural Marxism, all right? So

00:20:19.280 to review, we have Marxism, we have communism, it's property. There's economic factors that are

00:20:25.980 causing the disparities that we see, and that's what's causing everything to be unfair. 0.58

00:20:30.860 And then we have after that these Fabian socialists who are saying, well, yeah, that's true,

00:20:35.380 but we're not going to get there by a revolution. That failed. Let's just kind of progressively do

00:20:39.460 it. Then came cultural Marxism. Some of you probably heard this term. And the father of

00:20:44.880 cultural Marxism is an Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci. And he said that the workers

00:20:50.080 failed to sufficiently revolt because they were controlled by the property class. And so there

00:20:55.500 were things in society like libraries, schools, voluntary associations, architecture, street names,

00:21:01.140 and the church and all these things prevented the oppressed people from realizing that they were

00:21:06.500 truly oppressed. You know, 4th of July, not in their context, in our context, the 4th of July

00:21:11.560 parade happens and what's everyone doing? American flags coming by, right? They're holding doors open

00:21:17.220 for women. They have monuments to people. That's oppressing people, right? We're privileging some 1.00

00:21:23.560 over others. This is all unfair. And so Antonio Gramsci said what needs to happen is we need to

00:21:30.180 cease contenting ourselves to operate within the values of the state and start critiquing

00:21:34.300 the status quo. Build our own hegemony, I mean our own system of hierarchy, our own that's fair,

00:21:43.540 and then wait for the collapse of the old order. Now from this, the next really rung on this ladder

00:21:50.060 is the Frankfurt School in Germany. So we're going from Italy to Germany, and they came up with a

00:21:56.220 term called critical theory. Now you all have heard of critical race theory, right? Critical theory

00:22:02.500 comes before critical race theory, and they drilled down deeper into society than Antonio

00:22:08.020 Gramsci did. They were going to find that oppression because it's there. It's somewhere,

00:22:12.640 it's maybe not seen overtly, but it's down there if we can really find it. It's the advertisements

00:22:20.000 you see. You really need that car? They're making you think you need that car. You're being oppressed.

00:22:25.860 And one of the members that I like to mention is a guy named Theodore Adorno. He wrote a book in

00:22:31.840 1950 called The Authoritarian Personality. Let me give you the short form so you don't

00:22:36.980 have to read the book. I know none of you really want to read this book, right? You're

00:22:39.920 a Nazi, okay? There you go. There's the book. And The Authoritarian Personality had a profound 1.00

00:22:45.580 impact on university research and psychology departments. And he said things like submission

00:22:50.440 to parental authority, a belief in traditional gender roles, family pride, a fear of homosexuality,

00:22:55.420 is where homophobia comes from, right? And maybe Freud before that. But a strong devotion

00:22:59.400 to Christianity, the notion that foreign ideas posed a threat to American institutions,

00:23:03.700 all that stuff makes you a Nazi. And it gives you a level on the F scale. F means fascist.

00:23:09.800 So if you really love your parents, you know, kind of a Nazi, maybe not like Hitler level, 0.52

00:23:15.340 but like there's something there. And is it a wonder that today everyone's called a Nazi,

00:23:20.480 if they have an idea to the right of Bernie Sanders? No, because this is what university,

00:23:26.240 This is what our elites have been training in for years.

00:23:29.280 This has been going on forever.

00:23:30.340 It didn't just pop out of nowhere.

00:23:33.040 Now, add to this, to drill down even deeper, radical subjectivity.

00:23:36.920 And by the way, some people separate these and say, well, there's postmodernism here,

00:23:40.340 there's Marxism over here.

00:23:41.220 They're not separated in my mind.

00:23:42.900 They're the same thing.

00:23:44.080 Why do you say that, John?

00:23:44.880 Well, because the postmodern theorists said that.

00:23:47.600 Jacques Derrida, one of the French postmodernists, said that what he was doing was a certain

00:23:51.980 kind of Marxism.

00:23:53.440 Well, what was he doing?

00:23:54.820 He believed that meaning was not found in what was said,

00:23:57.460 but rather by what was meant in accordance with the hegemony of language.

00:24:01.480 Okay, so now there's this hegemony of language.

00:24:03.820 There's like words that we can say and words we can't say,

00:24:06.520 and they have oppression values attached to them.

00:24:09.080 There's no concrete, rooted in reality, objective truth.

00:24:13.060 There's just competing social groups.

00:24:15.840 So have you ever used this oppressive term?

00:24:18.040 I don't know to shock all of you, but have you ever said, like called someone a woman?

00:24:24.300 You ever said that? Yeah. Or maybe a man. That's another really oppressive term. 0.97

00:24:30.120 Well, you're imposing your values, right? Because there is no such thing as reality. There's

00:24:34.760 rootedness, objectivity. There's no woman or man. There's just this subjective categorizations that 0.82

00:24:41.720 we create in order to oppress other people. So we're going to conform someone to our standard

00:24:46.280 because, well, they have short hair and they're more muscular and they're taller. And we're going

00:24:50.240 say that's a man. Well, you're, you know, you're just, you know, you know where this is going

00:24:54.180 because you live it every day. Well, this is rooted in radical subjectivity, Jacques Derrida.

00:24:58.940 You can thank him for it next time. Well, if you're going to heaven, you'll never be able to

00:25:03.600 probably thank him, but I hold him responsible. Another guy is Michel Foucault, and he's,

00:25:11.300 he deconstructed knowledge by making it dependent on power. So he said, basically, everything's a

00:25:16.720 power play. And so think about it this way. This is the best way I can articulate it. If right now,

00:25:22.280 outside this door, let's say there was a car accident and it was a police chase and a criminal

00:25:28.280 gets out of the car and he's got the money bag and he's running in here for cover and the police

00:25:32.280 officer shoots the criminal before he gets in here. And there's eyewitnesses and they all have

00:25:37.100 a story to tell about this. Well, Foucault would teach us that the way that this story is told,

00:25:42.600 the things that are emphasized, this is all designed for a power play to take place. We're

00:25:49.080 supposed to have a bias towards either the criminal or the cop. And of course, I'm bringing

00:25:53.980 out a bias by saying criminal, right? So the way that the story is told is very important. There's

00:25:58.840 really no truth. There's just narratives out there that support either, in this case, the police or

00:26:03.880 the criminal. And Foucault deconstructed all of knowledge this way. The things you know,

00:26:09.520 it's not because they're objectively rooted anywhere. It's because it's a story you've

00:26:14.360 been told to support some kind of a power structure. Now this brings us to Derrick Bell

00:26:20.640 and critical race theory. Derrick Bell was a law professor at Harvard and one of the founders of

00:26:25.480 critical race theory and he believed that progress in American race relations was largely a mirage

00:26:30.260 obscuring the fact that whites continue consciously or unconsciously to do all in

00:26:35.360 their power to ensure their dominion and maintain control. So that whole ending slavery, the whole 0.84

00:26:42.300 civil right, meaningless. It's still, there's still this systemic racism out there that is

00:26:47.560 oppressing people. And the only way really to solve this problem is to look through the lens

00:26:54.100 of minority experience, to gain a solution. And society has to address this. So there's a number

00:27:02.660 of elements to critical race theory. I break it down into two, for simplicity's sake, because

00:27:07.400 there's like seven elements here. But number one is the Marxism. So you have oppressor, oppressed,

00:27:13.760 these sides kind of pivoted against each other. And then you have kind of the postmodern, which

00:27:18.680 is a deeper kind of Marxism, but there's subjective truth, that you need a certain kind of lens from

00:27:24.240 my minority experience to even approach solving this problem. And so this became, this evolved

00:27:32.260 or was built upon by his student, Kimberly Crenshaw, and she came up with the term

00:27:36.460 intersectionality. So critical race theory, critiquing society, it's all racist, it's all bad,

00:27:41.620 racism is normative, we've got to change our history books and vilify a certain group of

00:27:46.340 people, right? Then you have intersectionality, and this is not about ripping things down,

00:27:50.240 This is about building things. We're going to build the great new society based on this principle.

00:27:55.400 There are people out there who are more oppressed than others, and some have multiple identities of oppression.

00:28:01.560 If you're a woman and you're gluten-free, that's two levels of oppression.

00:28:05.140 No, she didn't say that. My brothers are celiac, by the way, so I can say that joke.

00:28:10.960 If you, though, are homosexual and you're also some other identity that's oppressed, you're an immigrant, 1.00

00:28:16.960 like you understand oppression in a unique way so the goal should be find the most oppressed people 0.88

00:28:22.400 and then we take our cues from them because they know more they've experienced oppression

00:28:26.060 and you can see what this does there's a race to the bottom now everyone's oppressed right like

00:28:32.100 everyone wants to be oppressed if they're not oppressed they start making up stuff about

00:28:35.260 themselves being oppressed so they can impress you with how oppressed they are uh and and it you

00:28:40.560 know the quality of everything goes down i mean we're reaping the consequences of this but the

00:28:45.700 Yeah, the bottom line is, you know, this is going to undo the wrongs that society has imposed.

00:28:52.540 Now, what's the end goal of all of this? 0.89

00:28:54.460 The end goal is this, and this is my thesis, is to destroy Christianity, okay? 0.98

00:28:59.800 And I know some conservative commentators say, that's just against white people. 0.99

00:29:03.920 Oh, they just don't like men. 0.87

00:29:05.500 They just don't like America.

00:29:06.800 They don't, yeah, okay, I see all that.

00:29:09.340 But ultimately, if you wanted to, you know, look at it, think of it like as a circle with interlaying like levels of circles.

00:29:16.600 Yeah, of course, there's all these things.

00:29:18.020 But where's the trajectory?

00:29:19.220 Where are they headed? 1.00

00:29:19.840 They're headed to Christianity. 1.00

00:29:21.160 That is the ultimate goal of this whole thing. 0.98

00:29:24.240 And I have a number of quotes.

00:29:25.900 I can't read them all to you.

00:29:26.800 Let me read you a few, though. 0.84

00:29:27.640 Karl Marx, the social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling in a press class, meaning they believe in a hierarchy. 0.83

00:29:34.480 The proletariat, though, is revolutionary. 0.74

00:29:36.280 How about Antonio Gramsci? He wanted socialism to kill Christianity. His words, not mine.

00:29:44.360 Foucault desired to liberate people from political rationality, which he thought stood on the idea

00:29:49.900 of Christian pastoral power, and I can go on. Now, that's part one, destroy Christianity. Part two,

00:29:56.020 replace Christianity. How are you going to do that? Well, Rousseau believed Christian law was harmful 0.99

00:30:01.640 to the constitution of the state. 0.99

00:30:03.200 So instead, he imagined a religion

00:30:04.840 that would one day make a revolution among men.

00:30:08.520 Rather than biblical revelation,

00:30:10.380 he based his new faith on the innate principle

00:30:12.300 of justice and virtue.

00:30:14.240 People are good.

00:30:15.600 We can come together.

00:30:16.520 We can have our own religion.

00:30:19.020 H.G. Wells was actually, his word, not mine,

00:30:21.800 he said the New World Order would,

00:30:24.660 he compared it to a religion. 0.79

00:30:26.340 That's what it's going to be.

00:30:28.540 Herbert Marcuse, one of the Frankfurt School members,

00:30:31.640 He believed that religion inspired guilt in the present life.

00:30:34.920 It postponed human fulfillment to the afterlife and reinforced the evil status quo.

00:30:40.180 Yet he also held out hope that religion could be beneficial in transforming society if it

00:30:45.300 became a heretical expression of a political attitude.

00:30:48.300 In other words, maybe if we can subvert Christianity and kind of rearrange some things, then it 0.90

00:30:54.420 might be helpful.

00:30:56.220 Derek Bell, father of critical race theory, thought fundamentalist Christians divert

00:31:01.300 political protest and reaffirmed the conservative values on which the white middle class's traditional

00:31:06.160 illusions of superiority are grounded. Nevertheless, he also saw how a new interpretation of Christianity

00:31:12.540 could lead to enlightenment instead of pacification. We need to reimagine Christianity. We need to

00:31:20.040 reinterpret Christianity. We need to change Christianity. And the whole intent is to replace 1.00

00:31:25.740 Christianity. Don't buy it. That's what we're living in right now. People who studied this, 0.88

00:31:32.160 who knew the writings of these utopianists, weren't surprised by what just happened and what

00:31:38.440 they're seeing in the church. This has happened before in other ways. Liberation theology

00:31:44.720 being probably one of the most recent examples. So that brings us to our context. And I can't

00:31:53.460 show you the pictures, but you can probably imagine some of them from 2020. Riots in the

00:31:59.340 streets, civil religion on full display, white people bowing down to BLM protesters. Michael 0.51

00:32:07.800 Tracy, a reporter, said, I'm telling you, every protest I've been to so far perfectly mirrors an

00:32:12.880 outdoor evangelical Christian worship service. It's not a Christian observation. That is someone

00:32:17.940 from the world. Why did he say that? Well, it's because we have a new religion in front of us.

00:32:23.460 salvation right in christianity it's original sin that's the bad news there's a divine law

00:32:29.700 we've broken it and there's going to be some judgment the good news is we can be born again

00:32:34.040 there's um there's also i i put in the sacraments but you use a different word for that um ordinances

00:32:40.980 there's things that christians should do when they're saved and then there's a heaven in the 0.57

00:32:46.460 hereafter where we'll be with god well in social justice it's whiteness it's maleness it's

00:32:51.340 heterosexuality. These are original sin. These are the replacements for that. Political correctness 0.89

00:32:58.060 replaces the divine law. Judgment is getting canceled because there's no afterlife. You got

00:33:01.960 to have it now. The good news is you can become woke, which is like being born again. You can do

00:33:08.640 progressive political things. Those are your sacraments. And then you can have social equity,

00:33:14.040 inclusion and diversity and they have their own deity and it's not a personal deity just like in

00:33:22.420 some religions like some eastern religions there's no personal deity but they believe that social

00:33:27.840 conflict theory is the hand of providence you didn't build that someone else did that for you

00:33:33.920 wasn't hard work it was because of the forces of history conflict theory through the years brought

00:33:39.020 you to this point and benefited you because you have white privilege or something along those

00:33:42.940 lines. Instead of the love of Christianity, we have a revolution, and they call it love. It's not.

00:33:50.540 The collective state becomes justice. We have the canon of woke books instead of the Bible,

00:33:56.800 and oppressed perspectives are inspired, and you may not question them. They're inherent.

00:34:04.040 They are infallible, inhumanly good. We have social studies programs instead of seminary,

00:34:10.760 And, of course, they have their own hierarchy, even though they're against hierarchy.

00:34:14.760 The critical theorists, the media, the community organizers.

00:34:18.260 They participate in activism and implicit bias training and decolonization.

00:34:22.440 This is evangelism. This is discipleship.

00:34:26.040 Instead of the world of flesh and the devil, it's systemic racism, white privilege, and white supremacists lurking around every corner.

00:34:31.940 and the hope is if there is a hope is that intersectionality is going to be applied by

00:34:38.800 the social justice warriors with the inspiration of our saints the victims of police shootings and

00:34:43.800 we'll get there one day to equality and it's a pipe dream it only produces less equality

00:34:50.640 it produces more pain because this isn't how humans are actually wired and the covid religion

00:34:57.500 actually really parallels this in fact they're very similar salvation is vaccination the sacraments

00:35:03.260 are masks social distancing lockdowns and booster shots proselytizing is public service announcements

00:35:09.200 and social media virtue signals membership in the club in the religion is your vaccine card

00:35:14.500 the heathens are the unvaccinated the heretics are the anti-vax conspiracy theorists

00:35:19.880 the high any conspiracy theorists here there's a few okay wow okay

00:35:24.500 okay the high priests are anthony fauci and the government health officials

00:35:30.640 god is government and the savior is science you don't you think this is political how about all 0.71

00:35:37.900 the pastors who said this is just a political thing i'm staying out of it what foolishness

00:35:42.240 can they not see what's right in front of them

00:35:44.680 so we know people and i'm sure you do too that got woke checked their privilege and then started

00:35:52.220 to shame others. That's the progression, right? They get woke, and you've got to check everyone's

00:35:56.080 privilege, become the policeman, and we just got to shame people when we figure out they're part

00:36:00.200 of the problem. And this saddens me. There's real people that are caught up in this, and compassion

00:36:05.300 should make us strive to, as we would with a Mormon or a Jehovah's Witness, to help them see 0.94

00:36:12.500 the error of their ways. And this is not going to provide satisfaction. You're just going to get 1.00

00:36:15.980 angrier. I don't know if you've seen that with your friends or your family members who've gone

00:36:20.600 this direction is exactly what I've seen. They're never satisfied because there is no utopia here

00:36:24.980 on earth. We're never going to breach a state of equality in that sense. So to review the

00:36:30.260 social justice, what is it? It's a modern, the modern movement is a repackaged configuration

00:36:35.460 of egalitarian ideas heavily influenced over the past century by postmodern and Marxist

00:36:41.140 derivatives. And its purpose is to rectify disparities and advantages between social groups

00:36:46.040 through reallocation. Goals are achieving an egalitarian idea, dismantling the social

00:36:51.520 institutions that prevent its achievement, and implementing a force capable of executing

00:36:56.080 the utopian dream. So that's the history. That brings us to today. Now, I think I probably had

00:37:02.300 like maybe 10 minutes or five, I don't even know. I don't have much time, but I want to bring you

00:37:06.220 through briefly the philosophy, real quick. That's what it is, and we've gone through some of that.

00:37:11.200 what does it teach? Let's talk about, let's drive down deeper into what is it actually saying? What

00:37:17.340 are people actually buying into? What are they assuming when they go into this religion? And I

00:37:23.360 want to break this down really into four sections here briefly. We're going to talk about metaphysics,

00:37:29.200 epistemology, and value theory. Sorry, I say metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, value theory,

00:37:37.060 and then also just the gospel.

00:37:39.260 I want to talk about their scheme of how do you get saved and all of that.

00:37:43.600 So Christianity has attempted to merge with this,

00:37:48.360 and the clearest way to see it is to compare what Christians believe about these things

00:37:52.800 and what social justice warriors teach.

00:37:55.400 So metaphysics, that's the first category.

00:37:57.260 Metaphysics is a philosophical study that concerns what is reality.

00:38:02.540 What stuff exists in the universe?

00:38:04.600 What's the universe composed of?

00:38:05.940 What's it made of?

00:38:07.060 Now, I'm not recommending this movie, okay? Don't tell anyone I recommended this movie. But if you happen to have seen this movie in your BC days for some, right? The Matrix. Have anyone seen The Matrix? Okay. Everything's broken down into a computer. It's ones and zeros. That's reality. And you were deceived, right? Into thinking there's real tangible things out there. Like I'm in reality, but actually I'm not. I'm asleep and it's all one big giant computer.

00:38:35.700 It's just a bunch of ones and zeros out there, right?

00:38:38.140 That's the matrix.

00:38:40.720 Social justice is like that, okay?

00:38:43.280 It flattens reality down into ones and zeros.

00:38:46.700 Everything has an oppression value.

00:38:50.780 So it doesn't matter if it's the McDonald's menu.

00:38:54.340 You're going to find some racism on it or sexism or something.

00:38:58.220 It's not like you walk in and you're like, is there racism here?

00:39:03.360 It's like, where's the racism?

00:39:04.520 We know it's here.

00:39:05.700 you're hiding it. Now, have anyone ever seen this show, CSI? Don't raise your hand. CSI,

00:39:11.300 Crime Scene Investigation, all right? My parents used to love watching this show,

00:39:15.120 and you know the murder happens, and the guys walk in with the lights that show the blood,

00:39:20.000 and they're like, oh, that's where it happened. I can see, you know, here's the blood and everything.

00:39:24.500 Well, social justice warriors, they have this like defective light that they walk in,

00:39:28.200 they're like, it's blood everywhere. Everything's blood. So that's kind of the way to view social

00:39:33.020 justice metaphysics. What's reality composed of? Well, it's oppression. And it's everywhere.

00:39:38.140 And if you don't see it, you just need the right glasses so you can see it.

00:39:42.760 And you can see the dangers of this right away. It destroys social trust by presuming guilt on

00:39:47.740 any human activity, not advancing egalitarianism. Like, if you're not with the revolution,

00:39:52.220 there's only one other option. You're with the oppressors, right? It doesn't matter who you are,

00:39:57.340 what your experiences were. It also requires immediacy. This is an emergency. We got to act

00:40:02.960 now how many of the things over the last few years it's like don't think about it don't research it

00:40:07.400 act now right so it's this horrible evil it's this big boogeyman that we didn't even see and

00:40:13.040 all of a sudden we can see it's going to destroy us it reorientates the purpose of life towards

00:40:18.620 political activism as well so everything just becomes political there pastors who say like i'm

00:40:24.880 just going to sidestep politics i'm a pastor you know i can be neutral on that well this is a

00:40:30.000 political religion and they see you as political and if you don't see them as political you're the

00:40:34.900 one at the disadvantage so what are how do we respond to this what are some some things well

00:40:41.660 one of them is this um social justice warriors ideologues they do not apply their own standards

00:40:53.600 to themselves. Have you ever noticed that? If everything is oppression, what about the idea

00:41:00.400 that everything is oppression? Could that be oppression too? What about all the efforts to

00:41:06.660 bring about this egalitarian utopia? Could that also be part of oppression? How do we know that

00:41:11.160 we haven't been duped into thinking everything is about oppression and that itself is oppression

00:41:16.320 somehow? Someone's behind that. It's like Wizard of Oz. There's someone behind that curtain too.

00:41:22.120 So it's kind of self-refuting.

00:41:24.980 That's one of the problems with it.

00:41:28.140 It also has limitations.

00:41:30.740 It is impossible to impose these egalitarian abstractions

00:41:33.960 beyond the limits of rationality and of reality.

00:41:38.360 So, you know, really, this little girl with a doll that's oppression,

00:41:41.880 like, you know, you're going to find an oppression value here, right?

00:41:44.900 There's certain things that we just intuitively were like,

00:41:47.120 well, that's not a threat.

00:41:48.880 That can't be oppression.

00:41:49.700 there's we know it but we have to buy into this ideology to put these glasses on to just subvert

00:41:56.300 what we already know attempting to immediately force the destruction of hierarchies representing

00:42:02.160 barriers to this vision often produces unintended consequences the solutions often are the cures

00:42:08.320 are worse than the disease oftentimes so that's another problem with this and it fails to take

00:42:13.760 into account the full spectrum of attributes woven into the created order including the

00:42:17.340 categories of being people share beyond oppression level we're not just oppressors or oppressed

00:42:22.280 there's so many other things that we are we're made in the image of god we're accountable to god

00:42:26.820 we're subject to the law of god we're in need of salvation and if we're saved we're redeemed

00:42:31.420 a lot more fundamental than whether i'm an oppressor or impressed and that's the glue

00:42:35.400 that can hold us together this stuff only breaks people apart so it's metaphysics

00:42:42.560 ideology is fundamentally grounded in an abstract world that doesn't exist it's a figment of

00:42:52.860 someone's imagination and they're just imposing it upon the real world that we all know exists

00:42:57.000 but we suppress an unrighteousness it's an attempt to recreate what god has already created

00:43:02.940 now there's some questions some practical things you can ask people um you can ask basic questions

00:43:11.040 has proper time and attention been given to comprehending all the available facts things

00:43:15.000 like that generally unless they're already a little reasonable you're not going to get many

00:43:19.300 places with that but one of the questions i think that gets to the heart of it could the motives of

00:43:23.600 social justice activists be connected to a desire to oppress that'll make them really think if not

00:43:29.140 why not another question what tangible things are social justice activists personally doing to

00:43:34.280 elevate the condition of suffering people well that's that exposes it right away did you know

00:43:39.620 actually question um and free book if if and if you already have a free book grab a dvd or

00:43:45.120 something does anyone know the most the state in this country that gives the most to charity anyone

00:43:51.240 no one's gotten it yet yeah right what'd you say okay that i'll take that one there's one other

00:44:01.700 state. It's Utah. You're close. Utah and Mississippi compete every year for who's going to be the

00:44:11.200 most, who's going to give the most to charity. And how could it be that the poorest state in

00:44:16.540 the country, Mississippi, with those backward hillbillies are given more to charity than New 1.00

00:44:21.460 York and California? How is that possible? Do you know political conservatives give more to charity 1.00

00:44:27.480 than political liberals who say they care about the poor so much?

00:44:31.020 Isn't that weird?

00:44:33.060 What are these ideologues doing to actually tangibly help real people?

00:44:36.480 Or is it just they want to take our money to go do something? 0.92

00:44:39.220 Well, that's hypocrisy.

00:44:40.240 So these are the questions you can ask to help people.

00:44:43.160 And, of course, I have a lot of Bible verses here I don't have time to get to

00:44:47.100 about charity and about the problems with ideology,

00:44:50.420 but this is totally against a biblical worldview.

00:44:52.920 The Bible does not see mankind like this.

00:44:54.680 the Bible sees a robust vision for human nature. We have so many identities. We have,

00:45:02.240 and I don't mean the ones we make up, like real ones that we actually know we have, like I'm a

00:45:06.200 man, right? And there's responsibilities attached to that. I have a culture. There's borders around

00:45:10.940 me. I have them in my house. I have them in my county. I have them in my state. I have them in

00:45:14.580 my country. There's things I enjoy doing. I like fishing and stuff, and people that like those

00:45:20.520 things. I have an identity with them. It's a weak identity, but there is, you know, that's part of

00:45:25.360 who I am. There's so many things that God has put around us that confer identity, and it's not just

00:45:32.480 where you sit on a spectrum. So that's metaphysics. I want to talk a little bit about standpoint

00:45:38.760 epistemology. This is the social justice warrior's epistemological belief. You know, how do we know

00:45:45.400 truth? That's epistemology. What is truth? How can we come to understand what things are actually

00:45:49.900 out there. And they believe in standpoint theory or standpoint epistemology. And it's a Marxist

00:45:56.000 belief imported into feminist critical theory. Marx called it class consciousness. It's developed

00:46:00.980 since then. The underlying assumption is that different experiences produce different kinds

00:46:05.180 of knowledge, which in turn produce different understandings of reality. Standpoint theorists

00:46:09.760 consider oppressed experiences to be superior in understanding because they require knowing the

00:46:15.000 standards of the group oppressing them as well as their own standards. So I have some cartoon

00:46:21.340 characters that I can't show you, but I can try to explain to you how this works. Imagine with me

00:46:26.120 for a minute, you're going to have to be very imaginative here. You have blue world and red

00:46:30.340 world, okay? And there's boxes around blue world and red world, and no one can get out. There's a

00:46:35.060 blue man in blue world, there's a red man in red world, and they're stick figures, and they just

00:46:39.420 cannot transcend the 2D box they're in. So everything looks, to the blue man, it looks blue. 0.59

00:46:45.260 He thinks blue lives matter. To the red man, it looks red. And they can't see it any other way,

00:46:50.140 right? Well, how are we going to know who's lying to us if they contradict each other? Blue says

00:46:55.060 one thing, red says another. Blue says we should fund the police, red says we shouldn't. Well,

00:46:59.320 how do we know, how do we adjudicate between blue and red? If everything falls into these categories,

00:47:05.960 then who's going to come and tell us, right? Well, the sociologists will come. And they'll

00:47:10.660 compare blue and red. And they'll tell us, actually, you need to trust red. Red is the

00:47:16.380 experience that's right in this. So somehow the sociologist gets a pass. They can transcend,

00:47:22.560 look at both of these red world and blue world objectively and say, it's red world. Red world's 0.61

00:47:27.300 the one. Now, they never tell you this. They just assume that everyone should know we should trust 0.98

00:47:32.680 red, red nose, all right? And so what does the Bible teach about this? And actually, let me say

00:47:39.680 one more thing before I get to the Bible. So blue needs to put on some red glasses too, okay, to try

00:47:45.180 to somehow see the world red's way. They'll never get there, but, you know, it's on the hamster wheel

00:47:49.800 of trying it. So it's really hopeless. The Bible, though, presents a different story on knowing

00:47:57.360 truth. There's God's view. Not the sociologist. There's just God's view. He has the objective

00:48:02.740 view, bird's eye view. He sees everything. And blue world and red world don't exist. There's

00:48:07.640 God's world. And blue man and red man need to put on God's glasses. They need to see their 0.51

00:48:13.280 experiences through the revelation of God. They need to look at things, and they need to see that

00:48:18.560 there's natural revelation, there's special revelation, and this should inform how we think

00:48:22.960 about what's in front of us. And guess what? We can all do it. There's no barrier. Social location

00:48:29.080 doesn't prevent us from doing it. It's the man of God who is equipped. It's the Bereans who even

00:48:34.860 checked Paul out. And Paul's like, that was good. You should do that. We can all get there. If

00:48:39.160 anything, Proverbs would teach, it's those who are wise we should go to. Why are they wise? Because

00:48:44.440 they're godly. It's not because they have a social location. It took work to get there.

00:48:48.920 we got it flipped upside down we got it flipped way upside down we should today you don't trust 0.92

00:48:55.760 the old guys right don't trust anyone who's who's got experience and wisdom trust that oppressed

00:49:01.500 social location but behind the oppressed social location isn't an oppressed person

00:49:06.060 it's an elite sociologist telling you what the oppressed person thinks it's they're not going

00:49:12.360 to the the factory line and asking what bob the the factory worker thinks about things they're

00:49:17.280 telling you in their theories what Bob, what would be good for Bob. And that's why it drives

00:49:23.580 them nuts if they lose elections and it's the working class that, you know, outvote them because 0.77

00:49:27.880 they're like, no, we represent the poor and the lowly and they don't. So we see this everywhere 0.82

00:49:34.000 in our society. Believe women, right? Why? Because they're women. They're oppressed. We should 0.99

00:49:37.380 believe them. White people need to listen when people of color talk about racism. Hillary Clinton.

00:49:42.980 Why? 1.00

00:49:43.880 Just because they're people of color, that's the only reason? 1.00

00:49:47.080 How about whether or not there's truth? 1.00

00:49:48.800 That should be the concern, truth.

00:49:52.520 How about every time there's a police shooting, right?

00:49:54.940 Or not a police shooting, sorry, a school shooting.

00:49:57.320 Who gets on the television?

00:49:58.680 It's some kid who survived it or parents of the kid.

00:50:01.040 And they're going to lecture us on gun rights.

00:50:03.420 Why?

00:50:03.760 They have no experience in that.

00:50:05.440 They just survived a shooting.

00:50:06.680 That doesn't give them the authority to lecture everyone else.

00:50:09.920 But that's the world we live in now.

00:50:12.000 The Bible talks a lot about truth, objective truth in particular, right?

00:50:17.700 John 4 says, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.

00:50:22.380 John 8, you will know the truth, the truth will set you free.

00:50:24.480 I could go on and on and on.

00:50:25.460 I'm the way, the truth, and the life.

00:50:26.860 Truth is assumed.

00:50:27.880 Objective truth is assumed in Scripture.

00:50:31.100 It's something that we can all access.

00:50:33.200 God has given us a word, and that should be a comforting thought.

00:50:37.380 You're not morally or intellectually inferior

00:50:41.160 because you come from some social location.

00:50:43.640 God's spoken to you.

00:50:44.920 He's put you here for such a time as this,

00:50:47.080 and he's given you a word, and he's given you things to do.

00:50:49.620 And we can know what he wants you to do.

00:50:52.100 It's in his word.

00:50:54.040 So responding to this, obviously, biblically,

00:50:57.260 God's justice is universally accessible.

00:50:59.080 We have principles.

00:51:00.260 God's justice is known by the righteous,

00:51:02.060 not people from a certain social location.

00:51:04.140 God gave us an objective standard.

00:51:06.460 his word Christians should have no business going to the world for 0.94

00:51:11.680 understanding justice questions to ask people why should a person's external 0.67

00:51:17.080 identity factors or personal experience alone qualify them more than someone

00:51:21.100 else to speak authoritatively on law justice in history or how about this why

00:51:27.100 would we assume someone is qualified to write instruction manuals for surgeons

00:51:31.000 simply because they underwent an operation.

00:51:34.520 You want the diversified guy who didn't go to school to operate on your brain?

00:51:39.380 If so, that's fine, but I don't want that.

00:51:41.280 I want someone who did well in medical school

00:51:43.600 and who knows what they're doing and has been tested.

00:51:48.120 And I don't care what they look like, frankly.

00:51:51.840 All that matters is, are they going to be able to do the job?

00:51:55.360 So that's standpoint epistemology.

00:51:57.380 Now, the third philosophical branch here is ethics.

00:52:01.000 and social justice warriors, as we talked about before, they believe in egalitarianism.

00:52:06.120 Now, I love this definition of socialism. This is from a former secretary of the Treasury,

00:52:11.120 Leslie Shaw. He said, socialism is the idea that men must succeed equally regardless of aptitude.

00:52:17.860 Socialism is the idea that men must succeed equally regardless of aptitude. Okay, you want

00:52:22.660 to break it all down? That's what they're teaching. Today's march towards equity, diversity, and

00:52:27.460 inclusion seeks to universally eliminate disparities in influence privilege and resources

00:52:33.100 between various social groups and the term egalitarianism is often applied to a similar

00:52:38.340 set of ideas promoted during the french revolution as we just discussed and they they called it at

00:52:43.080 that time liberty equality fraternity same idea is just getting repackaged okay and so the goal

00:52:50.300 is not equality before the law where lady justice is blind and anyone walking through that courtroom

00:52:55.880 is going to have applied to them the just standard. 1.00

00:52:59.180 Instead, Lady Justice takes off the blindfold and says, wait, okay, that's a woman over 1.00

00:53:04.780 there, so we're going to have to treat that person differently than the man we just sentenced 1.00

00:53:08.760 for the same exact crime.

00:53:10.720 Lower the sentence, right?

00:53:11.840 That would be true justice in the egalitarian sense. 1.00

00:53:15.020 So Lady Justice is blind, Lady Justice takes the blindfold off. 0.99

00:53:18.720 That's the difference. 0.95

00:53:20.220 And just about every social move in our society right now is towards egalitarianism.

00:53:27.000 Positive rights, which would be like, you have the right to free health care, you have the right to living wage.

00:53:31.480 Preferred pronouns, hate speech laws, being a global citizen, defunding law enforcement, reparations, replacing historical monuments, the list goes on and on and on.

00:53:41.000 These are all about forwarding egalitarianism.

00:53:43.740 That's all they are.

00:53:44.940 That's what it's rooted in.

00:53:45.980 now as Christians we know justice is the faithful application of God's law irrespective of who a

00:53:52.520 person is biblical justice is retributive meaning criminals are punished for their actual crime

00:53:57.620 today's social justice is redistributive meaning it seeks to reallocate in order to create more

00:54:03.320 equitable outcomes in society so the go-to section for Christians on this is Exodus 23 in my mind

00:54:09.620 where God lays down his justice and and he talks about the different groups that we should not be

00:54:15.540 influenced by. If it's your family and they're like, hey, you know, give a break to so-and-so,

00:54:19.860 it's a relative, don't listen to them. If it's the alien and the sojourner, if it's a stranger

00:54:25.460 and they don't have the way of navigating the culture because they just, they're new and they

00:54:31.340 don't have the widow maybe who doesn't have a husband protecting her, these kinds of things,

00:54:36.080 the orphan doesn't have parents, don't take advantage of those people, right? Treat them

00:54:39.860 equally, equal before the law. It also says though in verse 3 of Exodus 23, you shall not be partial

00:54:45.940 to a poor man in a dispute. Just because they give you a story and they're poor and they're

00:54:50.360 oppressed, don't be partial to that. Don't let that sway you emotionally. You need to apply justice

00:54:56.440 faithfully. Giving a man his due. Questions to ask. Is God's law just? It's not egalitarian.

00:55:07.640 Does diversity, equity, and inclusion exist as part of the state of nature or the state of grace?

00:55:11.980 Now, this is more maybe heady, but, you know, where do those things actually exist, if they exist anywhere?

00:55:19.340 You often hear every tribe, tongue, nation, right?

00:55:21.900 Well, that's a heavenly reality, right?

00:55:23.660 And we have a preview of that in the church, but we live in the real world.

00:55:27.380 There's real hierarchies.

00:55:28.540 There's real things that exist here and relationships we have that are going to change when we enter the eternal state.

00:55:34.740 And that's fine.

00:55:35.320 God made it that way.

00:55:36.720 on what basis are humans entitled to social privileges now this is actually an interesting

00:55:41.820 question for instance what makes an american an american and able to access all of the privileges

00:55:48.280 that come with that is it they just live here well a lot of people live here they moved here

00:55:53.660 from other places they they land here you know from from england or somewhere you know does that

00:55:57.720 make you an american uh does it make you an american uh because you happen to like baseball

00:56:03.200 on apple pie? I mean, what is it that makes you an American, right? That's actually a harder

00:56:08.400 question than I think. So we have in our country a process of citizenship where you have to actually

00:56:13.240 share in American values. You have to know something about this country. You have to value

00:56:17.140 its history. You have to defend the liberties for which it stands. You have to take some ownership

00:56:22.020 of the country that you're coming into, knowing that men have bled and died. Women have sacrificed 1.00

00:56:26.800 for centuries to bring us to the point we are now and all the blessings we enjoy. It doesn't just 0.99

00:56:31.940 belong to everyone. It's not for the whole world. And that's the distinction of nations and

00:56:38.620 countries. Are there certain hierarchies that should not be deconstructed? Do they produce

00:56:44.220 disparate social outcomes? So like, all right, if it's a Christian, you know, deconstruct the 1.00

00:56:48.480 nation. Well, what about the family? It's just like, you know, the nation's kind of an extension 1.00

00:56:52.640 of the family. Do we just get rid of the family too? Like, where does this train end? Because

00:56:57.080 This is a slippery slope we're on, a real one.

00:57:01.260 So the last section of this that I want to end with,

00:57:05.260 the difference between Christianity and social justice,

00:57:07.300 is on the, and I wish I had more time,

00:57:10.380 but let me just briefly give it to you.

00:57:11.600 It's on redemption.

00:57:13.000 It's on the different gospel that social justice promotes.

00:57:16.560 For secular social justice activists,

00:57:18.320 human participation in achieving egalitarian equality is good news.

00:57:22.440 It means the world will eventually overcome inequalities

00:57:24.960 through corporate human action and enter a utopian state.

00:57:28.040 And social justice activists within Christianity often merge the gospel's message of salvation

00:57:32.440 by grace through faith with a law derived from the principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion.

00:57:37.820 And such fusion merges elements of law with gospel.

00:57:42.120 And this is one thing Paul said we can't do.

00:57:44.500 That's Galatians. 0.89

00:57:46.460 So, J. Gresham Machen, by the way, just I want to tip a hat to him because he actually pointed this out.

00:57:52.080 He said, look, this is what's happening 100 years ago.

00:57:54.020 same thing's happening again in a repackaged form and and we can we can see this all over the place

00:57:59.880 Desmond Tutu right just died here recently he believed that Christian the Christian message

00:58:05.460 was that God relied on us to help make this world all that God has dreamed of it being which meant

00:58:09.860 a diverse equal and inclusive place MLK Jr. believed just as the apostle Paul left his

00:58:15.060 little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet

00:58:18.660 in the Greco-Roman world I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom and he called

00:58:23.660 his march in selma the third great awakening this is a gospel move even with people who don't

00:58:29.220 believe the gospel right that's the crazy part of this i could go on and on in evangelical circles

00:58:35.580 richard mau ron sider john perkins they said some of the same things they're the kind of the

00:58:39.380 grandparents of the movement we have now but today who do we have paul david tripp he says i was

00:58:44.280 guilty of believing a truncated and incomplete gospel in 2018 which left out the gospel of god's

00:58:49.660 justice. Russell Moore preached the gospel through activism, and he said that the civil

00:58:57.260 rights movement failed to be a gospel people during the civil rights movement, Christians,

00:59:03.160 because of our silence in the face of systemic sin, and we could learn from MLK. He was doing 0.64

00:59:08.880 it right. Anthony Bradley believes evangelicals have never had the gospel because of their failure 1.00

00:59:15.840 to believe in black equality, apparently. Eric Mason, I don't know if any of you have read Woke

00:59:22.680 Church. What a dog's breakfast. I mean, this book is just a mess. And I can't believe, I'm just going

00:59:28.120 to call him out. Lincoln Duncan wrote the foreword to that, and he ought to know better. And if you

00:59:32.420 look at some of the things Lincoln Duncan said years ago, he would never have said what he said

00:59:36.520 in the complimentary fashion he said to Eric Mason's book. But Eric Mason thinks that Epiphany

00:59:41.420 fellowship, his church, can learn about how to apply the gospel from who? From Rwanda's, 0.99

00:59:47.440 and I'm probably going to botch this, but Gassana court. From South Africa's racial 0.86

00:59:52.500 reconciliation committee. Germany's denazification programs. These are examples of promoting the 0.51

00:59:58.580 gospel in society. Really? Because they're not even Christians. Where do we come up with this

01:00:04.740 stuff? This is not the gospel of grace. Through Jesus Christ. Salvation by grace. So what is the

01:00:10.560 gospel. It's really important, right? The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone

01:00:17.500 who believes. That's the gospel. Nevertheless, Galatians 2.16, knowing that a man is not justified

01:00:25.100 by the works of the law, but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ

01:00:29.060 Jesus so that we may be justified by the faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, since by

01:00:34.140 the works of the law, no flesh will be justified. There's the gospel issue, gospel above all,

01:00:41.600 it's gospel-centered this and that, and you're never talking about the gospel, but somehow the

01:00:45.400 gospel is attached to it. This is the gospel. It's salvation through Christ. That's what it is. It's

01:00:53.700 God's work, not our work. So you can't, as a Christian, because you fail in some work, that

01:00:58.660 doesn't mean you're failing the gospel. You don't have half the gospel. No, no, it's Christ's work.

01:01:03.840 that's the gospel so in closing i just want to say in the book of galatians paul talks about

01:01:10.800 false brethren the pseudodelphas who came in they subverted the church i think we're seeing the same

01:01:16.120 thing and they said look you got to have the gospel plus circumcision plus the law and he said

01:01:19.880 that's heresy that's anathema curse that he said to peter you're giving them cover you're being

01:01:25.160 confusing and and you need to stop and peter repented and and that's what we need to do today

01:01:30.980 when this kind of stuff comes into your church.

01:01:35.000 In fact, on the issue of circumcision,

01:01:38.580 Paul was fine in one circumstance in Acts 16

01:01:41.840 promoting the circumcision of Timothy,

01:01:44.980 but he was not fine promoting the circumcision of Titus in Galatians.

01:01:48.360 Why? Because they made it a gospel issue.

01:01:51.060 That was the whole difference.

01:01:54.020 So I want to end with this. 0.94

01:01:56.700 What does Christianity offer, right? 1.00

01:01:58.220 Social justice, warriors picking apart our culture, our families, our very way of life. 0.92

01:02:04.220 And Christianity all along offered this. 0.58

01:02:05.980 Forgiveness of sins, including injustice, real injustice.

01:02:09.480 Unity in Christ.

01:02:11.200 Gender, class, age, tribe, tongue, nation, all of it unified in Christ.

01:02:14.920 There is a unity there.

01:02:15.820 Those distinctions don't go away, but there's a unity that we have.

01:02:19.800 Fulfilling identity.

01:02:21.160 You're more than just power relationships.

01:02:23.800 You're something way more than that, way more valuable than that.

01:02:27.120 Roles and responsibilities.

01:02:28.680 Social justice doesn't give us a clear insight on,

01:02:31.580 people are confused.

01:02:32.520 Am I a guy?

01:02:33.340 Am I, who am I?

01:02:35.600 There's a purpose in Christianity.

01:02:38.240 There's function, a basis for rights.

01:02:40.820 They're found in responsibilities.

01:02:42.020 God's given different responsibilities to different people.

01:02:44.560 That's how we know what our rights should be.

01:02:46.260 Government, you can't tell me what to, 1.00

01:02:48.720 you know, how to spank my kids or discipline them. 0.99

01:02:51.260 That's my responsibility, right?

01:02:53.400 It's not the pastor's job either.

01:02:54.860 In the same way, like, it's not the government's job to go and impose upon the pastor and tell them what they can and can't preach.

01:03:01.180 And so there's different, there's distinctions there.

01:03:03.740 We have a basis for rights.

01:03:05.400 And we have a theology of culture.

01:03:06.900 There's a sense of belonging that Christians have.

01:03:09.160 We know the world's not our home ultimately.

01:03:11.340 We know that there's a heavenly home.

01:03:13.120 We also know God put us here for such a time as this, for good works which he preordained.

01:03:18.240 And so we're not confused.

01:03:20.060 We're actually the stable ones in society as Christians.

01:03:23.100 and that's what we need to offer to the world.

01:03:25.500 There's a stability that we have.

01:03:27.820 And I would just suggest,

01:03:28.680 if anyone's looking to be practical,

01:03:29.920 find your local college campus,

01:03:31.360 open your home,

01:03:32.440 go find whatever ministry and say,

01:03:34.100 come on over, I got pizza.

01:03:35.360 And they'll flock.

01:03:36.280 You'll find people that, you know,

01:03:37.800 all over your house that you're like,

01:03:39.180 how did you get here?

01:03:40.600 And it's not just because they want pizza.

01:03:42.880 It's because they want to see a stable home

01:03:45.000 and most of them now haven't seen it.

01:03:46.760 Their parents are divorced.

01:03:48.180 They've moved all over the country.

01:03:49.360 They have no identity

01:03:50.140 and you can show them the stability

01:03:51.900 that comes from being in Christ.

01:03:53.880 Let's pray.

01:03:54.940 Father, thank you for all that you've given us in your word,

01:03:59.460 that you've given us a clear word.

01:04:01.360 Lord, I know this is a lot to take in,

01:04:03.280 and we just went so fast through so much,

01:04:05.800 but Father, I pray this would spark in the minds of many here, Lord,

01:04:09.180 a passion to go and to battle, Lord, in this world

01:04:14.020 where the devil's fill is all around us,

01:04:17.300 and young people especially are being swept away

01:04:20.120 into an alternative to the family and to the church.

01:04:23.720 And Lord, let us give them the real deal.

01:04:25.900 Let us show them, Lord, what it means to be in Christ

01:04:28.880 and to be secure in him.

01:04:30.060 In Jesus' name, amen.

01:04:36.840 As a special thank you for your gift of any amount,

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01:04:46.280 slash offer.

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01:04:49.700 Am I Truly Saved? If you or someone you know has wrestled with doubts about the love of God,

01:04:54.920 this would be a great resource. As a reminder, to get this offer,

01:04:58.380 go to rightresponseministries.com slash offer. And thank you for your generous support.

01:05:09.280 Thanks so much for listening. But real quick, before you go, do us a small favor,

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The NXR Podcast - March 20, 2022

BONUS - Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice

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