What Does a Christian Know About Social Justice? Session 3

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:07

Alright, we come to that session where the risk of snoring is the greatest, all that food is digesting away, your body is sending all that extra blood to the digestive system and generally the only place to take it from is the brain.

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And so, slowly all the words being spoken from the front start melding into one melodious quiet sound.

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I used to run a television camera for a large Southern Baptist church when I was much younger and it was camera one so I would swing out during the sermon and get audience shots.

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And what you were looking for was to try to get a group of people that actually looked like they were still conscious, that was best, very, very best for the

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TV. But always what would happen is, okay, we're coming to you one, okay, alright, and then you've got some guy and it looks like he's just been, and then it's just like, right in the middle of the shot.

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So you always had to have an ISO shot to catch, you know, to cover that over for the edited version, though it was a live program, so the live thing.

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Or the worst one was you're out there and they don't know you're on them because you're over here, you know, and they just watch it and they look like they're, and then it's like, live

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TV man, it's great, it's wonderful. Or the real one is like, yep, yep, yep, yep.

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So you're lucky that all the cameras are still there, you're not panning and finding, you're not gonna go and get the audience or anything like that.

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You might now. I've given them an idea, it's sort of fun, yeah, yeah, it's fun.

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Yeah, I've done a lot of interesting stuff in my life, but anyhow, so the first two sessions are pretty easy for me to do,

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Roman Catholicism and Islam are the two groups I've done the most formal public debates with, and so that's sort of second nature, didn't need to have any notes or anything like that.

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But this next subject is much closer to home in the sense that it's much more contemporaneous and it has exploded into our consciousness literally over the past couple of years.

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Now, I'm well aware of the fact that if you were to, for example, dig up denominational newspapers in the most left -leaning denominations from the 1970s and 80s, it would sound like you'd be reading stuff from today.

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I went to, my first master's degree was from a seminary that was way to my left, and so at the time

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I wondered why the Lord was putting me through this, I've learned since then why that was and that it was His wisdom and His purpose, but I honestly believed that amongst at least what would be called the

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Reformed, that the doctrine of sola scriptura, the sufficiency of Scripture to function as the sole and fallible rule of faith, and the corollaries that flow from that, specifically that if you're going to teach something as being binding upon the people of God, you need to provide a positive, exegetically consistent foundation for saying that.

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I thought that that would function as a barrier, as a bulwark to keep much of what

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I knew was out there in liberalism from invading our space in essence, and that is one of many things that I've been wrong about.

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Like a flood, at least in the United States, in early 2018, it was like somebody either kicked in a door, flipped a switch, or an email went out to everybody who was already in the right positions, go, and they went, and even amongst as conservative a denomination generally speaking as the

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Southern Baptists, there was a sudden leftward swing, just like someone grabbed the steering wheel in the car and just pulled it left, and now we're having to deal with this, and the problem is first and foremost one of definition.

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When you talk about, for example, Michael just now said, how do you deal with someone who's been influenced by the social gospel?

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Well, is that different than someone who has been influenced by social justice?

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And unfortunately, historically, they are different things. Generally, the social gospel name has been applied to what came out of places like Union Theological Seminary in New York, which you all heard about Union recently.

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You remember, that's where they were confessing to the plants. That's taking church planting to the extreme, yeah.

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But Union went wacky liberal around 1900, so I call it the

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Walker Seminary, but I'm talking about the walking dead, you know, it's been dead for a long time, but it still keeps moving around, and that can be very dangerous, as walkers are, and so you know that that's there, and what they came up with was the social gospel.

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Once there was no longer any biblical revelation, once there was no longer any supernaturalism, then you have to come up with some reason for still having church open on Sunday, and so you come up with a social gospel that allegedly gives you purpose, but really doesn't have any meaning, it can't provide any redemption, doesn't have any answers, but it's why you still show up and expect somebody to drop a few dollars on the plate to keep the place open.

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And that infected many denominations, what we call in the United States the mainline denominations,

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I don't know why they're called the mainline denominations, unless the mainline is just always going down, because they are, but they just keep moving around like the corpses, and so that's social gospel.

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Social justice is now a term that is being used in conservative evangelical circles as something that we need to be on board with if we want to remain relevant in the future in Western society.

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And with what has gone on recently here in Australia, you are now getting to see up close and personal the culture of death that we have been dealing with in the

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United States for a very long time. We have a group there called Planned Parenthood, which is what they call the worshipers of Moloch today, who offer children in sacrifice to Moloch every single day, and they pretty much own half of our government, which is why our government then gives them lots and lots of money.

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It's a wonderfully corrupt system, how that works. We've been dealing with this for a very, very long time.

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The church where I'm a pastor now, Apologia Church, remember Jeff was here with me a couple years ago, we started a group called

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End Abortion Now, and we have literally, though we never expected this, we have literally seen thousands of babies saved from abortion now.

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Every weekend those churches are reporting back to us of individuals, we saw a video just a couple weeks ago of a grandmother and her daughter and the baby that was saved by an

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End Abortion Now work outside of an abortuary. Thankfully in the United States, we can still get close enough to preach.

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We have protections still, won't have them for long, but we have protections that you don't necessarily have in other places.

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So the whole idea being that we have been, we've seen what you're dealing with now in regards to marriage, homosexuality, abortion, the whole culture of death, they are associated with one another, whether you recognize that or not, they are, for a very, very long time.

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But the fact that this has become a recent explosion of reality for you will help you understand that this social justice movement has to be defined, and unfortunately there are 14 dozen different definitions.

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Social justice sounds like a perfectly good idea, if it were biblical justice in a biblical meaning of society, but what lies behind the modern

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Western social justice movement are not biblical categories of thought, and when you attempt to wed a biblical vocabulary with an unbiblical worldview, the result is a confusing mess.

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And that's what we're dealing with in the United States, and if it's not hit here fully, it will in a very short period of time.

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So let me first of all acknowledge my indebtedness to others, especially to my daughter,

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Summer. Some of you have kindly mentioned that you listen to Sheologians, she and her friend

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Joy's webcast that they do, they were on this stuff two years before I was. They were dealing with first, second, third wave feminism and all the rest of this stuff, and my daughter was reading

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Jordan Peterson before I even knew who Jordan Peterson was, and in fact, if you've not seen it, I spoke at a conference about a year ago, or maybe it was two years ago, when you get my age, who cares.

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They all meld into one. But we spoke at a conference where, it was just last year

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I guess, where Jordan Peterson spoke at the same conference, and Summer had to speak immediately before him.

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And she was so nervous about it, it was the first time she had spoken publicly, and so to have Jordan Peterson sitting there, she's like, oh man.

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But she did a really good job, and when Jordan Peterson spoke four times during his talk, he said, now as the previous speaker said, making reference to Summer, it was like, yes!

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I'm in the back, you know, proud dad head going, you know, it was fun, it was great.

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But all I talked about was the Reformation, so nobody cared about what I had to say. But there was more than once I had to contact

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Summer on WhatsApp and go, how would you define this term?

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I mean, it's starting to come up, and well, here's what I've seen, and he's like, oh, thank you very, very much. So I make no claims to being on the cutting edge on this one, but one thing is for certain, we put out a statement in,

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I believe it was September of last year, after a meeting in June of last year, where a number of us who had become very concerned about what was taking place, we put out a statement on social justice and the gospel.

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And we had met in June earlier, it was a group of men such as myself and Bodhi Balcombe and John McArthur and Phil Johnson and Josh Bice and Tom Askell and others were in the room.

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And we put out a statement attempting to address some of these issues as best you could, given how many different manifestations of this movement there are and how many variations it has.

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But I think what would help you to recognize it, no matter what mask it happens to be wearing, or how consistently it's being applied, and what would allow us to look to some scriptures as well, is to define a couple terms for you, and specifically, let's start with something called critical theory.

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Now critical theory is defined in many different ways.

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It's identified with the Frankfurt School. It's identified with Derrida and Michel Foucault and writers like this from the middle of the last century, who were influential in ways that most of us have never even heard of, to be honest with you, unless you had to suffer through some kind of class in university on what they said.

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It was not a part of my experience, it was not a part of my education at all to deal with these particular contemporary thinkers.

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But to simplify it and hopefully to help you to recognize it, critical theory is meant to break down any current societal norm or understanding.

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In its most basic form, critical theory breaks apart all of the cultural bonds that we have created over time to give a culture stability.

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And so you can put almost anything between those two words, critical and theory, and create havoc in the process.

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So critical gender theory. Oh, transgenderism, 48 different genders, 200 different genders.

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Some of you saw even someone as far on the left as Piers Morgan in the

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UK a couple of weeks ago, that video went viral of him talking to some guy that was promoting the

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BBC's idea that there are over 100 genders, or was it 200 genders, I've lost track. But he's sitting there reading from the list to this guy, well what does this mean, what does that mean?

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And the poor kid didn't even know. And Piers, who is nowhere near a right -wing conservative, but he is a dad, hmm, changing diapers helps you with this particular thing for some reason, being in the real world.

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And don't, we laugh, but many of the people that are promoting this kind of stuff are childless, they have chosen not to have children.

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And I don't care what you say, parents, you and I, we've been changed by having children.

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We have been matured by having children. We had to. When you don't have kids, you get to sort of form the world in your own way and get to just continue being a kid if you generally will want to.

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I mean, let's be honest, what's, in Australia, what's the average age now for marriage for a man?

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30 plus, okay, in the United States it's like 29 now. I was 19, and it's not because I had to get married either.

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I was 19, she was 18, we got engaged. Because I was raised in a generation where once you're 18, you're supposed to be taking care of yourself, you're responsible for yourself.

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And when I saw that young lady as a sophomore in high school, I said, that's what I want right there. And it took me a couple years to get her attention, but I did, and we've been married for over 37 years, so I did something right.

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And so things have changed greatly. And I know that once we had kids, that changed me a lot.

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It grounded me a lot in reality and what you, you know, when your son's diaper reaches critical pressure mass at 2 a .m.

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in the morning, and then let's go, you know, you pick that dripping, smelly thing up, you hand it to mom, get in the tub, and then you start scrubbing the walls.

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Hey, that way, that matures you, that grows you up, that's all there is to it. No online shooter game is actually gonna do that for you, okay?

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It's reality. And then, I will tell you something else. When that baby grows up and has babies, then you get changed again in a way you never ever expected to be.

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When you've got grandkids, all of a sudden, your vision down the road, your close -up vision stinks.

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I can't read anything close -up anymore, that's why I've got giant print on my iPad. But distance -wise, all of a sudden, everything changes, and you really do start thinking about the future in a completely different fashion.

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And thankfully, since I got started with kids long before most other people did, I'm hoping to be a great granddad someday if I live that long.

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I have a nine -year -old granddaughter, so I've got a shot at it, so we'll see.

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But the point is, a lot of these people that are coming up with these theories, like 200 different genders, have never changed a diaper.

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And there's only two kinds of diaper changing, there really is. I don't care, it could be one or the other, that's pretty much all there is to it.

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So there is a grounding in reality that, unfortunately, is not a part of most gender studies programs in the university.

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And so you've got this stuff coming out, and so critical gender theory results in a destruction of all the societal norms that have provided stability to Western society,

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Western law, and everything else for a very, very long time. Put in race, critical race theory.

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Well, now all of a sudden you have, and it depends on where you are, how this manifests, it's gonna manifest differently here than it does in the

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United States, because of the history of slavery in the United States, the American Civil War, et cetera, et cetera.

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It's gonna be different there than it is in England, which abolished slavery before the United States did.

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You've got the indigenous peoples in the United States, as well as here. So it's gonna manifest itself differently, but what critical theory cannot do, because of its nature, is build anything.

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It cannot unite, it can only divide. It is meant to destroy, it is meant to break down.

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And the result of this is a term you've probably heard called intersectionality, intersectionality, a term that, honestly, a year ago, most of us had not heard of.

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Intersectionality is the idea that when you look at someone, and you look at, and part of critical theory and, yes, neo -Marxism on a political level, is the idea of the oppressors and the oppressed.

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And the more oppressed groups you are in, they intersect together with one another, and the more oppression you experience, the greater the value of your voice in society.

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The less, in other words, the more you are in the oppressor classes, then the less your voice should have any weight within the society.

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And so, there are people that just work really hard to get a very high intersectionality score. So, in the

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United States, a black lesbian woman is going to have a much higher intersectionality score than a white, heterosexual, married male, me, because that means if you're heteronormative, and you're white, and you're a male, and you're educated, then you're just completely and totally invested in your own privilege.

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And it may be something you earned. I mean, I grew up with nothing. My parents had nothing.

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I can show you pictures of my immigrant great -great -grandparents scratching out a living from the dirt of the

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Broken Bow, Nebraska. They had nothing. They're living in a mud hut, but it doesn't matter.

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They were white. Therefore, they're oppressors. You have to understand that in critical theory and in the social justice movement, who you are doesn't matter.

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It's what you are. It's a depersonalizing thing. So, that's why, for example, they say that if you're in a minority, you cannot be a racist, because you don't have enough power to be.

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You have to have power to be a racist. And so, I can read someone, if you've ever run into him, if you want an example of this.

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Blessing to you. That is a Gesundheit sneeze right there.

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Auf Deutsch. In fact, that was so good, I'm going to do the rest of the lecture in German. All right, so. Wir haben einen.

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Okay, no. I didn't see who it was, but is he under the pew now?

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Just wondering about that. What was I talking about?

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Oh, Moses was in the bulrushes. So, yeah. There is a writer that, in the

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United States, is considered the father of black theology, and his name is Dr.

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James Cone. He passed away last year. And, I remember reading some of his books on the air in 2008, because he had deeply influenced

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Barack Obama's pastor. And, I think just last week on the

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Dividing Line, I read a quotation from him. And it was the quotation that said that blacks must nurture their, what was the term?

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Their anger. It was basically saying that there can be no racial reconciliation except on their basis, and that whites have absolutely nothing to say about this.

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And, to make a long story short, James Cone's books are black racism on steroids.

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But, that's perfectly acceptable in critical theory. It's perfectly acceptable to be a black racist, because you actually can't be a black racist, because you don't have enough power to be.

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So, whites are racist by definition, even if they do not have the slightest animus in their heart whatsoever toward anyone of any other ethnicity.

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Critical theory is opposed to the Christian understanding that each one of us will be judged by God based upon what filled our hearts and how we acted upon the desires of our hearts.

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No, no, no, no, that's irrelevant. That does not matter. It's the group you're in. And so, this totally turns upside down the

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Christian ethic in many, many different ways. And so, this whole concept of intersectionality, we're now seeing this being played out on the public stage in the

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United States. I am always shocked at the amount of knowledge that people overseas have of the politics going on in the

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United States. I remember the last time I was over, I was in New Zealand and sat around with some brothers there, and man, they knew more about the

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Clinton -Trump election than a lot of people in the United States did.

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It was really surprising to me. Well, it shouldn't be surprising. I understand why it is. But there are a lot of people in the

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United States who don't even know. Right now, we have a group running on the left in the

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United States. Well, one just came out today. One of them is still in the race, saying that all churches who speak against the redefinition of marriage and LGBTQIRSTUVWXYZ rights, believe me, it's eventually going to be that long.

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All those churches should have their tax exempt status revoked and should be punished for their positions based on the government.

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And you need to understand something. The reason in the United States that churches are tax exempt is because the power to tax is the power to destroy.

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And we already know that the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service, the tax service in the United States, has used its power to promote one side over the other.

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That's a documented reality. And so they're coming out straightforward. Churches who do not support our moral revolution are going to be targeted by us.

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And we will seek to damage them and to shut them down. So they're being very open about it. This is something that, honestly, even four years ago,

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I don't think anyone could have imagined that someone would be that bold as to make that kind of statement, though we knew it was coming.

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Now it's there. Well, what's the basis of that? What is the basis of making that incoherent group of letters?

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And think about it. They are incoherent. You cannot put them together and make any sense out of it. And they're discovering this.

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Remember what happened to Martina Navratilova just about, what, six months ago? It was actually December of last year.

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It's been a little less than a year. Remember what happened with her? Y 'all remember Martina Navratilova back in the days when

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Chrissy Everett and Martina Navratilova were the best two women's tennis players in the world.

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Wait till they start letting the guys do that. She came out as a lesbian.

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And she has been a spokesperson for the homosexual movement for a long time.

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Well, what is definitional of lesbianism? A two -gender system. A recognition that women are women and men are men.

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And that there is an attraction only to one of those two. Well, once you throw the T in, that comes apart.

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And so she actually made the mistake of basically saying that it's insane to allow biological men to compete with biological women.

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Because Martina Navratilova knows that at her best, at her best when she was

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Wimbledon champion, the guy who was 150th amongst the men would have wiped her off the court.

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And she knows that. It's a simple fact of physics. A man's serve is going to be so much faster than a woman's serve.

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He's just stronger, bigger, he can cover more of the net. And she knows that a biological male would kill her at her best in tennis.

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And so this whole transgenderism idea is an utter destruction of what? Women's sports and fundamentally of the identity of women as women.

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And so she didn't prove to be intersectional enough. She was a woman and she's a lesbian, but she dared say something against transgenderism.

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And she had to to be consistent. And then throw in lesbian, gay,

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LGB, bisexual, bi. How can you have bi when there's 100 or 200 genders?

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Right? Once you throw the T in, it destroys everything. There's no way to even define the preceding ones.

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That's why when someone says, well, the LGBTQ community, there is no LGBTQ community. That's impossible.

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The terms contradict each other. But they're being held together because they are a very useful political tool.

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And trust me, once those who want to use these tools to overthrow any meaningful form of culture that has any connection whatsoever to the

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Judeo -Christian worldview and understanding of the image of God, law, and everything else, once they accomplish what they want to accomplish, they will throw that stuff overboard in a nanosecond.

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It's useful to get power. They don't care about those people for anything. They'll throw that over and get rid of it quickly.

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So we see this stuff happening around us, and we see it becoming more and more bold and more and more vociferous.

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But how did it get into the church? I actually, about a year and a half ago,

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I was in a conversation with someone. I started making some comments about this. And I was in a conversation with someone that was using the term in the church of black spaces, the need to have black spaces.

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Now, I have never, ever, ever thought of the church as a white space or a

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Hispanic space or a black space or an Asian space or whatever else.

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Never crossed my mind. But there are people who think in this fashion. And this individual was saying, look, you need to recognize there are some times when we're going to need to have black spaces in the church.

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What they were talking about was voluntary segregation, where you just let the black folks do what the black folks want to do, and you all just get out of the way.

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And I'm like, what's the foundation of our unity in the church?

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How would this have worked in the early church? How would this have functioned in Corinth or Rome or Ephesus?

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And the problem is, this movement doesn't care about what would have happened in the early church.

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That's not the point. Its only relevance is today. But I made a statement, and then

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I turned it into a meme. I self -memed. I'm not sure if that's legal or not, but I self -memed, and I put it up as a graphic.

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And basically what I said was, at the Lord's table, I said, the

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Lord's table is a Christ space. There is no room for any other than Christ at the table.

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It's not a white space, it's not a black space, it's not a Hispanic space, it's not an Asian space. It's a

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Christ space. And if you try to import any of your self -created divisions into that place, you do not understand what the table is about in the first place.

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Well, that resulted in a fairly well -known individual in the

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United States to literally call for an ecumenical council.

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Now, remember when the last ecumenical council was? Long time ago. And to call for an ecumenical council to have declared to meet in Philadelphia, of all places, the city of brotherly love, to have what they describe my position as colorblind theology identified as a heresy.

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They called for an ecumenical council to have me identified as the new Arius. There you go.

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Because I dare to say, in the Lord's Supper, there has to be absolute unity of focus upon Christ and Christ alone.

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And who your grandpappy was does not matter at the table. And it is sinful if I think who your grandpappy was is relevant, or you think what my grandpappy was is relevant at the table.

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Why? It's real simple. What is the fundamental foundation of our unity?

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I mean, I look around this room, I can't even identify half the ethnicities in here. I mean, some of you folks just have me completely befuddled as to where in the world you came from.

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And Michael I can handle because he's got a phone. That's easy. And he keeps telling me about it.

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See, I'm going to take another picture. I'm Asian. What? You've been doing that, haven't you?

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He has. See, he admits it. I mean, if I was wearing one of my kilts, okay, that would be a dead giveaway as to where I'm coming from too.

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But there are a bunch of you in here, I have no idea where you're coming from. But if we had the

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Lord's Supper in the service tomorrow, what would that matter?

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Some of you know that last year I moved from the church I had been at for 29 and a half years to Apologia.

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There was lots of things behind that. I'm thankful to be there. I never expected to be in leadership, but lo and behold, here

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I am. And one of the things I had to get used to is we have the Lord's Supper in every service.

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Well, we only have one service because we don't have a building. So we rent from other people. So it is very much a part of how we do things.

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And we do it a little bit differently. We actually get up and come forward to receive the elements rather than passing around, which is fine.

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I like the idea of being actively involved in proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes and so on and so forth.

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So the point is I very often end up giving the instructions before the

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Lord's Supper. And one of the things that I did sort of bring over with me is, for example, we ask if you're under discipline from a like -minded church that you not partake of the supper.

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Don't use our supper to try to get around the discipline of another local church that you're under discipline from or things like that.

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But when we call people to partake, what do we say? If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you have repented of your sins, and you're following Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, you're invited to partake of the supper in a worthy manner.

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We talk about self -reflection and so on and so forth. I just did a whole series on the Lord's Supper that you can listen to if you're interested.

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But the point is there is nothing in anything in the

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New Testament that would indicate that the participation of that congregation is based on anything more than their common dependence upon Jesus as their

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Lord and Savior. Slave, master,

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Greek, Gentile, Jew, powerful, not powerful, rich, poor, it doesn't matter.

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They all come to the same table. There aren't two tables. That's what was so grave about what happened in Antioch.

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That's why Paul immediately stands up to Peter, because Peter withdraws from table of fellowship with the

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Gentiles. He says, no, no, no, no, no, that wasn't the Lord's table they were talking about. They were just talking about fellowship. But the point is there is only one table because there is only one body, and there is only one access before God the

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Father. And what unites us is the fact that each believer in Jesus Christ has the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ imputed to their account.

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That's why you have peace with God. It's not because of what you've done, it's because of what he's done in your place. Every person, if you're going to have peace with God, there is only one righteousness that is going to avail.

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And there isn't a different version depending on your ethnicity, the background, your politics, or anything else.

36:00

There is only one righteousness. And what is the fundamental assumption of every one of the epistles of the

36:08

New Testament? Every believer is indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God. That's just an assumption.

36:14

That's just always the way it is. And so one righteousness, one spirit, one body, one confession of faith, one table, we are one.

36:27

Now that was absolutely necessary in the days of Paul because think about it. We think we're getting massively divided thanks to critical theory, which we are.

36:36

But think about the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire comes along and squishes together all of these little kingdoms and little nation states and things like that and says, you all are going to get along or the

36:51

Roman Legion is going to come and crush you. And so all of a sudden people who have been at ethnic warfare with the poor people on the other side of the mountain for the past 400 years, all of a sudden have to stop that and behave.

37:08

And thanks to the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, all of a sudden commerce is taking place and all of a sudden you're having to rub elbows with people who 50 years ago were your mortal, mortal, mortal enemies and your great, great grandfather hated their great, great grandfather and taught you to do the same.

37:22

But all of a sudden you've heard about Jesus of Nazareth and you've heard about his resurrection and you've heard about the one body of Christ and now you're in a church and you're sitting next to somebody from that other group across the mountain.

37:38

If the apostles allowed for any kind of socio -political ethnic divisions to be given a place in the body, it would have destroyed the early church.

37:54

The radical reality of the early church was that since you died with Christ, you died to all of that.

38:04

You died to who your great grandpappy was. You have a new reality. You are now a servant of Jesus Christ.

38:11

And if he places you in the body next to somebody whose great grandpappy killed your great grandpappy, you have no basis whatsoever for having anything but unconditional love in your heart for that person because they are approaching

38:26

God on the same basis that you are. And if you understand all the sins you've been forgiven of and they understand all the sins they've been forgiven of, then neither one of you have any basis to hate the other one.

38:38

Now, this is exactly where the pushback from the social justice movement is.

38:44

And here's the form it takes. You're saying that we are to be colorblind, which means since God made me in a certain way, that I can't celebrate the gifts of God in my ethnicity.

38:59

I didn't say anything about celebration. I said anything that would cause division. And that we've died to anything that would define us outside of and contrary to the one thing that we stand before the

39:12

Lordship of Jesus Christ. If it is not sinful, if it is the result of God's grace, we can celebrate it.

39:21

But if it is sinful and if it will create division, then we need to lay it aside. So, if someone asked me to officiate at a wedding and said, we want you to wear your most formal garb.

39:36

We want you to wear one of your kilts. I would. That's cool.

39:43

But if I told everybody that everybody else had to celebrate my kilt to continue having unity with me, that's a problem.

39:51

That's a problem. So, someone, I suppose, might say, well,

39:57

I object to a kilt because I watched Braveheart and they killed people. So, how many of you have seen

40:06

Braveheart? Okay. So, I can use this joke. Dr. Ferguson, who is

40:12

Scottish, Sinclair Ferguson, when Braveheart first came out, his students were telling him, oh,

40:18

Dr. Ferguson, what an incredible movie this is. So, Dr.

40:24

Ferguson goes, well, I have to go see it then. And then Mom's like, well, just so you know, sir, it's extremely violent.

40:33

I mean, there's a lot of bloodshed. He says, oh, this is, for a Scotsman, killing an

40:38

Englishman isn't violence, it's patriotism. I like telling that story until I got all my genealogy done.

40:51

I discover I'm mainly Scottish, but I've got a big British component to it, so I'm constantly in conflict with myself.

40:56

But, so if someone were to come along and say, well,

41:02

I object to your kilt because of what happened way, way, way back then. All of us, whatever our ethnicity is, if we go back far enough, we can find our ancestors enslaved to somebody.

41:17

I mean, the English did treat my Scottish ancestors pretty badly. It's really easy to do that.

41:23

How far back do we want to keep going? Does the gospel cause us to be backward -oriented or forward -oriented?

41:32

Isn't there something about leaving behind the things that are behind and pressing on to the high calling of Christ?

41:39

But what critical theory does is critical theory says your identity is first and foremost framed by your ethnicity and by what has happened to your progenitors.

41:50

And therefore, once you look through that lens, then you have to look at everybody else in the body of Christ in the exact same way.

41:58

Now, I have been attacked very vociferously and personally because I dared tell a personal story about my own experience.

42:07

And what I've discovered is, if you are white, and I guess I am, I've got a really bad name for this whole subject as well.

42:19

So, even if you're a poor white guy whose parents and ancestors just scraped out a living and just barely made it and had zippity -dippity privilege, it doesn't matter, you're part of just a group, you're an oppressor.

42:35

And so, I'm not supposed to have personal experiences. My personal experience doesn't matter.

42:42

Within critical theory, if you're part of the oppressor group, your personal experience is irrelevant. And so is, in essence, if you are a part of the minority.

42:50

You are a victim, whether you view yourself as one or not. LeBron James in the United States is a victim.

42:56

He may be the stinking richest victim in the world, but he's still a victim. That's the idea. And so,

43:04

I dared tell the story early on before I realized that I'm not allowed to have these stories.

43:11

My view of ethnicity was formed by the reality that the first human being that I know in this world outside of my mom, my dad, and my sister was my best friend,

43:26

Kevin. And Kevin was brown. And I started playing with Kevin.

43:31

We lived in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. And Kevin was the only other kid my age around, and so we were best friends.

43:40

That's what kids do. Kids don't really care about the color thing, unless you teach them to. And then one day,

43:46

I went to Kevin's house and asked what I met Kevin's mommy and daddy. So this was the first mommy and daddy that I encountered outside of my own mommy and daddy.

43:56

And Kevin's mommy looked like she had never seen the sun. I mean, this woman was almost albino.

44:03

I mean, she was as white as a sheet. She really, really was. And Kevin's daddy was the biggest, blackest

44:16

Minnesota cop I had ever seen in my life. He scared me to death. He was a moving black mountain.

44:24

He was huge. He was like 6 '4". I mean, he was just, whoa. He was a really nice guy, but he was huge.

44:33

So the first family outside of my family, in my memory, was a mixed -race family.

44:40

A black man and a white woman and a brown kid who was my best friend. And so I'm sorry.

44:47

Up until the past couple of years, the first thing that I would see when I would look at somebody had nothing to do with their ethnicity.

44:56

Before all this stuff broke out, I met with a brother who contacted me.

45:02

He knew I was gonna be visiting London, and he said, I would really, really like to have lunch with you and tell you about what your ministry has meant to me.

45:12

And when he said, I'll take you to the, oh,

45:17

Sherlock Holmes Pub in downtown, which was within walking distance of the hotel

45:23

I was staying at. Sherlock Holmes Pub, great place to go. Good food, too. I'm like, I'm on.

45:29

Let's do it. And so I walk in, and I meet him. And we sit down, and he's talking about how he grew up and the situation he was in and how

45:39

Alvin Macon Ministries, my videos on agnosticism, atheism, reliability of scripture, things like that, had been key in his coming to faith in Christ.

45:49

I'm like, that's really, really exciting. That's great to hear. Somewhere in the midst of all that, it sort of entered into my thinking sort of only on the side.

46:04

He's, well, he's, I guess we'd call Caribbean black. So as you know, well, you may or may not know, the transatlantic slave trade where black slave traders in Western Africa would capture blacks from other tribes and put them on those ships, and more than a million died just going across the ocean.

46:28

85 % of those ships did not go to the United States. They went to the Caribbean. They went to the islands there and to South America.

46:39

Most people don't know that. They just think they all went to Virginia or something like that, and they did not. The vast majority went there.

46:44

So there's a huge black populace there that came from Africa. And it sort of entered into my thinking at some point.

46:53

It's not the same color. Who cares? Didn't mean anything, but literally it took most of the conversation before it just sort of became one of the facts that I put into the hopper, but that's just not what

47:05

I saw. You know what the sad thing is? That's changed because I have been attacked so much by people for daring to not have that as a definitional thing you see the first instant you look at somebody, and that's a crying shame.

47:22

It should not be that way, but that's the world that we live in now. And so for me, when

47:29

I look at critical theory, when I look at intersectionality, I realize this is something that is fundamentally drawn from a worldview that is in opposition to Christianity.

47:41

And you can put all the nice, warm words on it you want, and you go to, sadly, you go to almost any university, even

47:51

Christian universities, and if you don't buy into this stuff, you're never going to get a teaching job.

47:58

Sadly, even most of the reformed seminaries in the United States are already deeply infected with this thought.

48:05

And I mean, I can show you right now. Right before I flew here, a friend of mine sent me a link to a body of materials, and if I gave you names, you'd recognize every one of them, that is being utilized and promoted to help white people recognize their inherent racism.

48:30

And it's a discussion of white privilege and white fragility. That's the one that really gets me, is the white fragility.

48:36

Because if you, in any way, shape, or form, say, this does not reflect my reality, it's not biblical, that's just your white fragility speaking.

48:45

Because if there's any discussion about it, if there's any pushback, you're just fragile. That's all it is. This stuff is being promoted in churches.

48:53

I could give you the names, and you'd go, oh, really? The problem is, there is no redemption in the social justice movement.

49:04

There's no endgame. There's no endgame. You cannot say,

49:10

I am sorry for what happened 160 years ago. Can we consider it all under the blood of Christ, and can we hold hands and move forward, and social justice says, no.

49:23

No. There's no redemption. You continue, it's like Rome's penitential system.

49:32

As long as you're in that one group, you have no penance to do. If you're in the other group, you'll be doing penance forever.

49:38

That's all there is to it. The past is the past. It defines the future. There can be no change. There can be no essential harmony and unity.

49:46

There is no redemption in it. The woke church does not offer forgiveness.

49:53

That's the problem. And I see it as fundamentally breaking the bonds of unity that we need to have very firmly in place as we face a society that is more and more going to punish us for daring to say what we need to say.

50:14

Our Lord taught us that in the beginning, God created men, male and female, and that that was his intention from the start, and that it was good, and that the only relationship that he blesses is a relationship between a man and a woman.

50:33

And we have to make a decision, will we honor his teachings, or will we compromise his teachings to hold to what society says is good?

50:43

And once, we already have an apologia. We already have one of our ladies who lost her job a few weeks ago teaching because she would not and could not, in good conscience, work with a student to promote transgenderism in her class.

51:03

Because that is now considered to be the good. That is the moral good. And if you hold to Jesus' teaching, you are a hater and you're morally bad.

51:12

We are going to need each other more than ever. And that pressure, if it's coming against a fractured church where we are divided along lines, there's nothing that you and I can do about, is going to be an injured church.

51:27

It's not going to be able to do what it needs to do. We are going to need one another. We're going to need to support one another, sacrificially, and that means we're going to need unity and critical theory destroys all unity.

51:40

It cannot build anything in its place. That's what's happening.

51:46

And I think, theologically, if you understand justification, if you understand the imputed righteousness of Christ, if you understand the presence of the

51:54

Holy Spirit in all believers, that is a more than sufficient refutation, more than sufficient refutation, of the application of critical theory and the importing of critical theory into the

52:05

Christian faith. It creates, the result of bringing critical theory is, it creates a theology that is incoherent.

52:14

It creates a theology that has no redemptive message. So what do you do when you encounter folks who've been compromised by this?

52:26

If there is a fundamental commitment to the authority of scripture, I go to Colossians 3,

52:33

I go to Ephesians 4, and I say, look, in Colossians 3, do not lie to one another since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the one who created him, a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian,

52:59

Scythian, slave, and free man, but Christ is all and in all. Most of us just skip over Scythian because we have no earthy idea what that's about anyways.

53:11

That is an ethnic group that would have been relevant to the people in Colossae. They're up to the northeast.

53:17

They were sort of barbaric and warlike, but thanks to Rome, there probably were

53:25

Scythians in Colossae that were now part of the church because they had been converted by the gospel of Jesus Christ. And Paul's point is there is none of these things.

53:33

The renewal that the Holy Spirit brings wipes all of that out. Now, if you want to rejoice in the good positive things about Scythian history, that's fine, but if you use it to in any way, shape, or form divide the body, you are in sin.

53:50

You are in sin. Well, that's where I would go. That's what I have been doing, and I haven't been getting much of a meaningful response from others other than, well, you just won't listen.

54:02

No, I'm trying to listen. I just sit there and go, and what's your end game?

54:08

What's gonna be the basis of unity in the church? Do I think this is gonna go away?

54:14

I wish. Like I said, I can name on one hand the number of schools in the

54:22

United States, seminaries, major seminaries, that have not already been deeply influenced by this. Deeply influenced by it.

54:29

I can tell you good, schools of 10 years ago, I would have unreservedly said,

54:36

I've never said to anybody, when you go to seminary, you can just close your eyes, and now you're there, just believe everything you're told.

54:41

I've never said that. You always have to be discerning, but now, far more than ever, because this perspective is becoming pervasive in theological education, which means,

54:55

I hate to tell you this, but there are well -known, very widely -read blog sites and organizations that have put on huge conferences in the past, where a lot of the people associated with them are promoting critical theory -influenced materials.

55:16

And I'll just have to be honest with you, that includes the Gospel Coalition. Big time. Big time. I wish

55:23

I didn't have to say that. Westminster Seminary. Big time. Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

55:30

There are even professors at Southern Seminary that we're just going, how did they get in there? I don't know. It's everywhere.

55:40

And so we just simply have to be extremely discerning. When you hear it, in the back of your mind, you just have to start this filter up and start recognizing, is this meant to break down or to create unity?

55:53

Not a surface level unity. I mean, can you imagine a deeper level of unity?

56:00

If you truly believe in justification by faith, if you truly understand the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, there could not be a deeper level of unity than the very one upon which you have peace with God.

56:17

My relationship with God, your relationship with God, based on the same thing. Therefore, anything else that would divide us has to be put aside.

56:26

Has to be put aside. So once you start hearing that stuff and you start seeing, well, this group is now being put over there, they're told that they need to be doing this kind of penitential thing, and it doesn't matter if they've ever done anything, they're a part of this group, they just need to realize that, you know, they are suffering this and this group's been oppressed this way.

56:49

But it's going to be, it already is all over the place, and it's going to get more and more prevalent as time goes by.

56:58

And I can guarantee you there are already many, many doors that have been closed to me because I'm not buying that for love of money.

57:07

I can't. I can't. So keep your eyes open for that.

57:13

It is going to be everywhere. Brother? Maybe we'll start with some questions.

57:21

What is the key difference between biblical justice and social justice?

57:27

And what biblical text do social justice proponents use to try to justify their views?

57:34

Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, biblical justice, obviously, is reflective of God's law, and God's law specifically...

57:43

Now, okay, let's back up the truck a second. One of the reasons that this movement is having the success that it is in advancement is because there is a lot of fundamental antinomianism amongst evangelicals.

58:02

God's law, who cares about that? God's law, what does that matter? God's law, how does that function today?

58:11

We're not under law, we're under grace, so let's not worry about all that type of stuff. And so once you adopt the idea that we're not under law, we're under grace, and what's being said by that, not how do we gain righteousness with God, but instead, the idea is, that was just all for Israel, let's not worry about that.

58:31

Well, the problem is, when Paul writes the Corinthians, he assumes...

58:38

I'm really glad that door is open. Leave it open. I'm feeling the need up here. Paul assumes, when he writes the

58:46

Corinthians, that they understand that incest is wrong.

58:53

God's law said incest was wrong, but he assumes that they are fully cognizant and recognize that this is a reality.

59:03

So much of what the apostles write assumes the continuing, abiding, moral validity of what the law had to say.

59:12

And so we have really robbed ourselves, to be honest with you, of a deep element of biblical revelation when we've bought into the, that was just all for Israel, we don't have to worry about that stuff.

59:25

I did 35 sermons in a series called The Holiness Code. It's available on Sermon Audio, where I really dove into that.

59:34

And I didn't dodge any of the tough texts. I really didn't.

59:40

I did an entire sermon, I did this, on the passage that says, if a woman, if two men are fighting, and a woman reaches out and grabs one of the men's personal parts, that you're to cut her hand off.

59:53

How many of you ever preached that sermon before? It's there.

01:00:02

And Paul said, all scripture is theionistos, so there's something there. And so we dealt with it.

01:00:08

And we dealt with the stuff about slavery, selling women into servitude, you know,

01:00:16

I tried to provide some historical foundations, some background, but fundamentally, I have a very high view of God's law.

01:00:25

And I believe that the, and I believe the 1689 had a very high view of God's law as well, the

01:00:31

Puritans did. And so we have to think through what that means.

01:00:38

And so we at least, I'm speaking as a elder in a church that is confessional and uses the 1689.

01:00:47

We have a foundation upon which to define biblical justice, but it has to come from God's law.

01:00:54

And not from Michel Foucault, or Jacques Derrida, or the Frankfurt School, or anybody else.

01:01:02

Fundamentally, what I've discovered is that social justice today is being used to push equity, not equality.

01:01:11

That is, everybody should have the same amount of stuff and the same amount of opportunities, no matter how hard you try.

01:01:18

We tried that before. It was called the Soviet Union. It didn't work.

01:01:25

It can't work, it never will work, but we're trying it again because we forget the past, and we forget, and really, as biblical

01:01:33

Christians, we should understand, we should understand something. When you concentrate power in the hands of the few, who are the few?

01:01:43

They're sinners. What are they gonna do with that power? They are going to promote themselves and their own good at the expense of others.

01:01:52

If you have a biblical anthropology, you want strong regulation that limits the power of other people because they're gonna use that power in a corrupt fashion.

01:02:05

And I run into a lot of folks who are like, well, I just think you just ought to trust these folks. It's like, have you read history?

01:02:11

Can we talk Genghis Khan? Can we talk Stalin? Can we talk... I mean, every century, we've got these folks.

01:02:20

And it's like, Romans 1 plays out over and over again and then gets forgotten and thrown out until the next tin pot dictator comes along.

01:02:28

It's like, wake up, people. There is something really, really good about the limitation of power.

01:02:35

And where did that come from in Europe? What allowed Europe to prosper? It was a

01:02:41

Christian worldview and application. Oh, it wasn't done perfectly. No, it wasn't, but man, it's a whole lot better than the

01:02:46

Dark Ages. It's a whole lot better than what has prevailed in a lot of other places. I mean, when you're eating your neighbors, that's probably not nearly as good as even the worst application of the

01:02:58

Christian worldview is. So, let's keep that in mind. So, biblical justice would be the application of God's law of righteousness across the spectrum of a society.

01:03:15

Social justice becomes the... Well, social justice, this is what the goal is.

01:03:23

Social justice's aim is to end all forms of oppression. Well, that sounds good.

01:03:30

We don't want oppression, except oppression is defined as one person having more opportunities, skills, or capacities than another.

01:03:42

Well, excuse me, but LeBron James has significantly greater skills and capacity to play basketball than I do.

01:03:50

And no one's gonna watch a game called basketball if you force LeBron James and me to score the same number of points.

01:03:58

That's gonna be really boring. And the reality is you know this at your workplace.

01:04:05

I know this at my workplace. There are some people that are just go -getters. They are willing to sacrifice.

01:04:11

They are willing to do whatever needs to be done. And then there are other folks that just, you know, just don't really work quite as hard.

01:04:19

And biblically, there is no basis for saying that you are supposed to penalize the one who works hard and give what he earns to the person who's sitting over there twiddling his thumbs or playing online first -person shooter games.

01:04:32

So that's what people, but that's what social justice has come to mean. Everybody gets the same amount.

01:04:38

It never works. It never works, and there's no basis for it. It's called theft, is what it's called.

01:04:44

And that's totally different than biblical justice. Much is made of the need for restitution from the

01:04:53

Bible. How do we answer this and apply this today? Yeah, that happened on the cross, and that's a very important thing because, again, if you try to say...

01:05:05

See, biblical law has no place for what we've done in the

01:05:11

West, something called prisons. Unless that prison is being used to house someone who is working on providing restitution to the person that they have stolen from or damaged or something else.

01:05:27

Biblical law has no idea of just robbing someone of their freedom and then making everybody else pay to keep them locked up in that cell.

01:05:35

Where does that come from in Scripture? I see nothing like that. What you have is the idea of providing restitution by your work, and if you have property and you stole somebody else's property, four times you're supposed to make that restitution.

01:05:53

That means you may have to work for someone for a long period of time. But we've somehow gotten way off track on that.

01:06:02

And now we've got, in the United States, this idea we're using to term reparations, where even if you cannot prove that somebody was a descendant of slaves, even if you cannot prove that someone...

01:06:14

I have documented evidence that my great -great -great -grandfather was married in Dundee, Scotland, in 1884, as I recall.

01:06:23

I've got a picture of him in Broken Bow, Nebraska, in 1889. We weren't around, okay?

01:06:29

We were poor as church mice. But that doesn't matter. We are a part of the oppressor class, and therefore, what they're saying is we're gonna take from you forcibly and give to somebody else to somehow fix something that happened in history.

01:06:44

That nobody that we're doing this to had anything to do with at all, whatsoever.

01:06:51

It's absolutely unworkable. In the Old Testament, when you had significantly less movement of peoples, or even ability to move peoples long distances, then you could have one tribe pay restitution to another tribe that's next door and always have been.

01:07:14

But I flew from the United States here yesterday. It took me 14 hours. That is a completely modern situation.

01:07:23

And what that means now is most of us, if you do your genealogy thing, it's like, whoa, look at that!

01:07:31

Mutt! A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Comes from over there, comes from over there, comes from all over the place, because we don't have the kind of you're -in -one -place situation that we once had.

01:07:45

And so, if you're talking in a generation or two, if you're talking about wars that are taking place in Africa right now, if you're talking about what

01:07:56

Boko Haram is doing, or something along those lines, then there's a meaningful context to say, two years ago, your group went in and wiped out this village, and now we're gonna force you to go in and rebuild it.

01:08:09

That's one thing. But if you're talking about stuff that happened 200 years ago, and you can't even tell if the people here had anything to do with these people over there, now all you're doing is doing social engineering.

01:08:21

Now you're just doing play economics to try to steal from some people. And of course, there's always someone that gets their cut, and they're doing all that.

01:08:28

You gotta keep that in mind. So it really depends on the context. But fundamentally, as far as the church is concerned, yes, reparation is very important.

01:08:39

That's why only one could do it, and that was what the cross was all about. And you lose sight of that, and you're in deep trouble.

01:08:54

Well, there could be a number of reasons.

01:09:00

There was a reference to the Ten Commandments. And so some

01:09:07

New Covenant guys, out of commitment to that, couldn't sign that because they don't believe the

01:09:12

Ten Commandments has to be repeated. So just the Fourth Commandment was enough for some people not to sign it. We've had that.

01:09:19

There is pressure on certain... Well, there are certain professors and others in seminaries that recognize that to sign that is death to your future, your entire career.

01:09:36

And so I wish that there would be more willingness to do that. We also did not have the kind of institutional money.

01:09:47

I mean, we just wrote it and put it out there. We don't have money to advertise it. We don't have money to... You know, we've done a couple little conference things.

01:09:54

We did something at G3. But we don't have the kind of money that the other side has that can get the big names out there and do that kind of thing.

01:10:04

And to be honest with you, most of us that were involved in writing it, it's not the only thing we're involved with. Sadly, many on the other side, this is their thing.

01:10:14

It isn't my thing. It's one thing amongst many things that I'm involved with. So I think that's some of the reasons.

01:10:21

And we just didn't have a lot of advertising either. What advice would you give to young people in university and how can they be faithful in that environment in light of cultural

01:10:34

Marxism? Well, we're coming to the point in time where decisions about success in your academic studies may...

01:10:50

You may have to balance that against what you feel you have to say.

01:10:58

In my day, you could disagree and still survive. My daughter,

01:11:04

Summer, ran into a buzzsaw in her first year of college, a rabidly anti -Christian guy.

01:11:12

And she did suffer grade point -wise for having done that, but not to such an extent that she couldn't continue education.

01:11:21

But the fact is that the totalitarians, and they are totalitarians, they...

01:11:28

I started saying this a long time ago. These groups do not want equal rights. They want

01:11:33

Uber rights. They want to force the rest of us to not only bow down, but to celebrate whatever they think defines them.

01:11:42

And so, you know, first we were told, oh, my gay marriage isn't going to affect your marriage. Now we're being told, if you don't celebrate gay marriage, we will close your church down.

01:11:51

That was fast. But it shouldn't surprise us because we knew that was the motivation in the first place.

01:12:02

So there is a time coming. The left does not want us invading the holy place of the culture of death.

01:12:12

So the culture of death, and what is the culture of death? It's not just the abortion industry. It's not just...

01:12:18

Did you hear about the American doctor that was discovered about two months ago? He had died. There were 2 ,346 aborted babies in his garage, in cardboard boxes.

01:12:31

You tell me. I mean, we've got Kermit Gosnell, we've got these people.

01:12:37

I knew a guy in Arizona. He eventually was thrown in prison for abusing his patients.

01:12:44

He was the lead abortionist, late -term abortionist in Arizona. He'd knock them out, then he'd sexually abuse them before aborting the baby.

01:12:53

He's in prison, thankfully. But you've got these people. The culture of death isn't just them, but they do celebrate death.

01:13:01

Did you see the artist lady about a month ago? A picture came out of a woman,

01:13:07

I think you saw it, who had had a tattoo done on her womb of a baby with a dagger in its forehead.

01:13:15

And they had the artist sitting there with the picture, like, you know, celebrating.

01:13:23

It's the culture of death, but it's not just abortion. The culture of death is anything that is meant to destroy the flourishing of human beings who are made in the image of God by the fundamental denial of God's right to rule over that aspect of their existence.

01:13:45

So it's not just abortion. It is the movement at the end of life to get rid of those who are worthless to society.

01:13:56

And it is the entire homosexual, transgender movement, which destroys the ability to reproduce and have children, destroys the image of God.

01:14:08

If you are putting the same drugs in an eight -year -old's body that you use to castrate sex offenders, something is wrong with your society.

01:14:22

When you as a parent can be so twisted as to think that your stinking eight -year -old can figure out their gender, they can't figure out when to go to bed at night, and you think they can figure out their gender, and so you will chemically castrate them?

01:14:41

I'm sorry. That makes me extremely angry. I can't think of a more obvious form of child abuse than that.

01:14:48

It's parental abuse. That is part of the same culture of death that creates the abortion holocaust that we have as well.

01:15:00

It destroys the ability of mankind to function the way that God has designed mankind to function.

01:15:08

And it's all around us. So, in answer to the question, finally, the time is coming when you're going to have to make a decision as a person looking at university and things like that.

01:15:23

What is my ultimate priority as to what I'm going to be able to do? Because the fact is there are certain areas that will be closed off to us if we're going to be faithful.

01:15:31

The Caesar is telling you that to enter into these areas, you need to offer the pinch of incense on the altar.

01:15:39

You know what I'm talking about? Remember in the early church? Let me tell you really quickly what brought so much persecution to the early church.

01:15:47

You see, the Roman Empire didn't care what you believed about God as long as you were willing to acknowledge the authority of the

01:15:55

Caesar along with whatever god you had. No exclusivity. No lordship of Jesus.

01:16:02

And so what they did is they established the offering of incense. And so once a year, you had to take a pinch of incense and offer it on the altar and say,

01:16:12

Kaiser kurios. Caesar is Lord. Just once. One little pinch of incense.

01:16:18

And then you were given what was called a libelus. It was a certificate that said you had offered sacrifice.

01:16:24

Now you could buy, sell, trade. You proved that you were a good Roman citizen. Okay? Jews couldn't do that.

01:16:33

And they had already worked something out with Rome before Jesus' day. The Christians couldn't do that because what does 1

01:16:39

Corinthians say? It is only by the Holy Spirit of God that anyone can say what? Jesus kurios. Jesus is

01:16:44

Lord. So the Christians couldn't say Kaiser kurios. Caesar is Lord. They had to say

01:16:50

Jesus is Lord. They could not offer the pinch of incense upon the altar. That meant that they suffered economically.

01:16:58

Our society is saying, it's just a pinch of incense. Just don't say anything about the transgenderism.

01:17:04

Go ahead and celebrate. Go ahead and pretend. You don't have to really celebrate. But just don't say anything.

01:17:12

Make it look like you are. The response to persecution in the early church created more division than even heresy did in the early church.

01:17:23

How do you respond to people after the persecution is over when people want to come back into the church? That caused the biggest divisions in the early church was how to handle that issue.

01:17:36

We don't even know what those issues were anymore because we are so arrogant that we don't realize we could learn a lot from people who were indwelt by the

01:17:42

Holy Spirit before we were. That's why I love teaching church history. It really does help to shed light on where we are today.

01:17:50

But we are being asked, and each one of us, if you're a believer, when is it that society is finally going to tell you offer the pinch of incense?

01:18:04

As a young believer, that's what you've got to decide.

01:18:11

We may not have the freedom to enter into certain areas in our society in the future.

01:18:17

Many of our fellow believers already live in that situation. In Islamic countries, there are a lot of things that are not open to Christians.

01:18:26

Remember about 10 years ago when a suicide bomber tried to blow up a girls' school in Pakistan?

01:18:33

Because you know that educating women is what the Taliban...

01:18:38

Taliban, their very name is about not educating women. So here is a

01:18:44

Pakistani school that is educating girls. And a suicide bomber could go in there and kill as many of them as he can.

01:18:52

He was stopped outside and was killed outside when his vest went off.

01:18:59

But you know who stopped him? The Christian janitor for the school. He recognized what he was.

01:19:07

And he loved those girls even though that's the only job he could have because he was Christian. He loved those girls so much he gave his life to stop that terrorist.

01:19:16

So there are already believers who have had to sacrifice. And we may not get to have all the world's goodies in the future.

01:19:26

And the culture of death recognizes the university. We have to have the children.

01:19:33

We have to shape the minds. And so that's the Holy Grail. And you're going into the

01:19:39

Holy of Holies when you go in there. And so what's going to be our opportunity in the future?

01:19:46

We may not have it. I don't know what the future's going to bring. Not a prophet nor a son of a prophet.

01:19:52

But if current trends continue the way they're going we're going to be having to make changes in the future and sacrifices in the future.

01:20:05

I've got 50 other questions. 50? Five minutes? That's called a speed round.

01:20:11

I think we'll wrap it up there. Do you want to keep going? We told them till three.

01:20:19

I don't want to see any disappointment. We'll keep going.

01:20:25

Well, till three. Some people might have flights to catch. We advertise to three.

01:20:31

Let's not shortchange anybody. Dr. White, in a multicultural city, what are your thoughts on the place of an ethnic based church?

01:20:42

Say, U .S., Black, Sydney, Asian. I'll just be honest with you.

01:20:50

That concerns me. I understand that we are more comfortable with our traditions.

01:20:56

But in the United States, there's a lot of Chinese, Baptist, Korean, Presbyterian, and things like that.

01:21:03

And I've gone to Korean Presbyterian. I went to a Korean Presbyterian church real near to where our office was. And everybody showed up wearing bow ties.

01:21:10

Including the ladies. I thought that was really great. And I didn't wear one that night.

01:21:15

I felt totally naked. It was terrible. But let's be honest.

01:21:24

I understand naturally where some of that comes from. But at the same time, that concerns me a little bit.

01:21:32

It does, I think, tend to cut us off. Every church I've ever been in, we simply left it to the

01:21:40

Spirit of God to draw the people that God wanted to have in that place. We just let the Gospel do it.

01:21:46

We're not going to close the door to somebody. We're not going to go looking for a particular group. We're not going to advertise ourselves as some ethnicity.

01:21:55

We try to preach the whole counsel of God. And if there are people who want that, then they're going to find a home there.

01:22:04

I'm not going to condemn the others, but I'm certainly not going to say it. It gives me pause. It does give me pause. How do we deal with those within our own churches who are really interested in social justice?

01:22:16

In our own evangelical churches. Excommunication. No. Just wanted to see if you're still awake.

01:22:24

Come on. Well, you know, it's interesting.

01:22:32

The question I would have if someone came to me in my context that I'm at right now and raised these issues, is

01:22:42

I would just go what is the origin and source? What are you reading? Who are you listening to?

01:22:49

That's giving you these concepts and ideas. And then once I could determine that, then

01:22:55

I would go to the text that I already mentioned in Ephesians and Colossians. I'd lay out the foundation and ask, now, can you see the fundamental difference between the theological foundation of biblical justice and the reality that there is no

01:23:13

Jew, Greek, Scythian, slave, free, bondman, whatever it might be. And the origin and source of the ideas that you're bringing to us.

01:23:23

That's where I'd have to start. And by then, I'd have a pretty good idea of what was really bringing in that type of motivation.

01:23:31

But I'd want to find out what the motivation was. Is there something else that is causing this perspective to manifest itself in this particular person?

01:23:40

In the preaching of the elders at the church, Jeff, myself, Luke, Zach, sometimes

01:23:47

John Sampson preaches for us. He did this past weekend. You're not going to be getting anything that would give rise to that.

01:23:54

So it must be coming from someplace else. This was a question from two previous sessions.

01:24:02

Are there areas in which Christians can work with Roman Catholics or Muslims in a world that's increasingly denying

01:24:10

God? That's a good one to end with. I think that's a very good one. Because I found myself in a situation in 1989, within a day or two of my daughter's birth, where I had to really struggle with this personally.

01:24:24

So I can only give you my own conclusion on this and what I've lived in, the commitment

01:24:30

I've made since then. I was involved back then with a group called Operation Rescue.

01:24:37

And it was a group that was basically closing down abortion clinics by just protesting outside, not letting anybody in or out.

01:24:44

And then we'd meet with the media and we would present what was going on. And it became very clear to me very quickly that my book on Roman Catholicism was a problem.

01:25:00

There were many Roman Catholics involved and basically the idea was we appreciate because I've done a few debates, hadn't done very many at that point.

01:25:10

In fact, that was right before I started doing debates, but I still could hold my own back then. And so I'd do media appearances and stuff like that.

01:25:19

But it was being made very clear to me that basically we need you to either not be involved with us or not deal with the

01:25:27

Roman Catholic issue. And so I had to come to a conclusion. The conclusion I came to is I, for me personally, is

01:25:33

I cannot put myself in a situation where I could not speak the gospel to someone when they needed to hear what that gospel was.

01:25:41

Now that was only in regards to Roman Catholicism. The same thing would be true with Islam.

01:25:49

If Yasir Qadhi and I together wanted to do something, let's say in light of what just happened in the

01:26:02

United States over the weekend with this fellow Beto O 'Rourke. Let's say somehow he got elected and moved to fundamentally damaged churches that would not buy into the

01:26:18

LGBTQ perspective. And if he was consistent, which he wouldn't be, but if he was, moved to do the same thing against mosques that likewise would not buy into the

01:26:29

LGBTQ thing. Could I work with Yasir Qadhi in opposing that? Yes.

01:26:35

Why? Because Yasir Qadhi knows exactly what I believe. He is not going to take that as some idea that we're all just on the, you know, we're all singing

01:26:44

Kumbaya and rowing down the boat, rowing down the river kindly together. He well knows that I want to convert every one of his people, and I know that he thinks all my people need to convert.

01:26:56

And we're going to continue talking with one another about those things, but in the process, we, if we're going to continue that dialogue, we have to have the freedom to continue to exist.

01:27:08

And so in that context, I could see us being able to cooperate together. As long as the gospel remains paramount, and as long as there is no restriction upon being able to share that.

01:27:18

That to me, I think, is the dividing line. Now, other people, the dividing line. Get it? See, I'm just seeing who's still awake.

01:27:25

We're right at the end here. Congratulations on making it this far. That's very, very good. None of you had to run out and get a cup of coffee, for those of you who are caffeine addicts.

01:27:34

Well, he did, but other than that. And did our did our sneezer survive?

01:27:39

Are you okay back there? Because, I mean, that was absolutely epic. I mean, that was wonderful. That was wow, that was great.

01:27:47

That was an epic sneeze. Alright, I think that's we gave them everything they wanted and two and a half minutes longer than that, so we're good.

01:27:56

That's fantastic. Please join me in thanking Dr. White for three fantastic presentations. Now, just a couple of housekeeping things.

01:28:13

The sessions have been recorded, and they'll be processed and uploaded as soon as possible.

01:28:18

For everyone who's registered, we'll send you a link to where that'll be. But do follow the church

01:28:25

Facebook page and YouTube and various future events will be announced then. Some of you obviously still want to hear more of Dr.

01:28:33

White, and so I just want to mention a couple of other events he will be speaking at in the next few days.

01:28:40

And as I say, the things for tomorrow, I do want to emphasise if you are part of a local church and have committed to be part of that local church,

01:28:49

I would strongly encourage you to be at your local church first, but if you happen to have some free time, we have

01:28:58

Dr. White speaking here tomorrow morning at 10 .30 and he will be speaking at Logos Christian Church tomorrow evening at 5pm in Auburn.

01:29:08

I know many of you will be free on Thursday evening, and there are still a few tickets left, so that is the debate that Dr.

01:29:16

White mentioned earlier with Dr. Abdullah Kunde. So that's doors open 7 o 'clock, and we'll try to make sure we do a little bit better than we did.

01:29:26

We didn't mention what the subject was. Let me just mention it, and I'm going to stay seated if that's okay.

01:29:34

Unless you want to hear the... You know you're getting older when every time you get out of a chair, it's accompanied by very interesting sound effects.

01:29:40

But I've tried to get a Muslim for a long time to do a debate on the issue of the

01:29:48

Apostle Paul because it's very clear the author of the Quran did not have any knowledge of Paul, Paul's theology,

01:29:56

Pauline epistles, anything like that. And so I was really surprised when Abdullah said, yeah, we can do that.

01:30:03

And so the topic is, was Paul an apostle or an innovator?

01:30:10

Because from the perspective of the Quran, there is no way that Paul's message could possibly be consistent with what

01:30:19

Jesus actually taught. And so there's a huge amount of literature, huge amount of literature out there promoting what

01:30:25

I would call anti -Paulinism and the idea that Paul changed

01:30:30

Jesus' message or made up the message himself. And many people who are taught that Paul's really the founder of what modern day

01:30:38

Christianity is. And so that's going to be the subject. I've never heard a

01:30:44

Muslim Christian debate on that subject. So that's I'm trying to add to the body of discussion and dialogue that's out there without necessarily repeating the same thing over and over again.

01:30:58

So that's what the debate will be about. So that's Thursday evening. And if you want tickets, just go back to Eventbrite and you can get some tickets for that.

01:31:07

Do we have antifreeze for that event? Do you have Prestone down here? Because I mean we need to be very special about what antifreeze we get.

01:31:17

Can you see Abdullah if I poured the antifreeze? That would be really classic. That would be awesome. So that's

01:31:23

Dr. White here in Sydney and if you have friends in Melbourne Dr. White's making his first trip down to Melbourne and then he will truly see that Sydney is the superior city.

01:31:34

But nevertheless he's there for ministry. So look up Hills Bible Church.

01:31:39

They have a number of events and a dialogue there on Saturday afternoon as well with a new dialogue partner for Dr.

01:31:47

White. So do please pray for James over the remaining time that he has with us in Sydney.

01:31:54

To wrap up, Dr. White has encouraged us to know the gospel, to stand fast on the gospel, to love our neighbours, to sit with them, to bear with them and for them to bear with us and not to take shortcuts in these things.

01:32:10

I'd like us just to close off with a final song. I think it's a wonderful song to finish.

01:32:17

It's an old hymn that's been modernised by the Gettys as they want to do, Facing a

01:32:22

Task Unfinished and then I'll ask David Roberts to close for us in prayer. So let's stand to sing Facing a