What Does a Christian Know About Social Justice? Session 3

All right, 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.

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

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 TV. But always what would happen is, okay, we're coming to you one.

All right, 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. 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.

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 that's it. Live TV, man, it's great, it's wonderful.

Or the real one is like, yep, yep, yep, yep. So, you're lucky that all the cameras are still, they're not, you're not spanning and finding, you're not gonna go and get the audience or anything like that.

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

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. 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. 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.

I went to, my first master's degree was from a seminary that was way to my left. And so, at the time, 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 Reformed, that the doctrine of sola scriptura, the sufficiency of Scripture to function as the sole and foul 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.

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

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

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

You remember. That's where they were confessing to the plants. That's church plant. That's taking church planting to the extreme. Yeah, yeah. But Union went wacky liberal around 1900. So I call it the 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's there. And what they came up with was the social gospel.

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

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

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. 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 United States for a very long time.

We have a group there called Planned Parenthood, which is what they call the worshipers of Mulloch today, who offer children in sacrifice to Mulloch 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.

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

And we have literally, though we never expected this, we have literally seen thousands of babies saved from abortion now. 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 End Abortion Now work outside of an abortuary.

Thankfully, in the United States, we can still get close enough to preach. We have protections still, won't have them for long, but we have protections that you don't necessarily have in other places.

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. 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.

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 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. 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.

The Rise of Social Justice and the Social Gospel

So let me first of all acknowledge my indebtedness to others, especially to my daughter, Summer. Some of you have kindly mentioned that you listen to Sheologians, she and her friend 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 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. Now, when you get my age, who cares? They all meld into one. But we spoke at a conference where, yeah, it was just last year, I guess, where Jordan Peterson spoke at the same conference.

And Summer had to speak immediately before him. 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. 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's like, yes, you know, I'm in the back, you know, proud dad head going, you know, it was fun.

It was great. 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 Summer on WhatsApp and go, how would you define this term?

I mean, it's starting to come up. And well, you know, here's what I've seen. It'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, 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.

And we had met in June earlier. It was a group of men such as myself and Votie Baucom and John MacArthur and Phil Johnson and Josh Bice and Tom Askell and others were in the room. 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.

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. Now, critical theory is defined in many different ways. 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, unless you had to suffer through some kind of class in university on what they said.

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. 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.

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

So critical gender theory. Oh, transgenderism. 48 different genders, 200 different genders. Some of you saw even someone as far on the left as Piers Morgan in the UK a couple of weeks ago. That video went viral of him talking to some guy that was promoting the BBC's idea that there were 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? And the poor kid didn't even know. And Piers, who is nowhere near a right-wing conservative, but he is a dad.

Changing diapers helps you with this particular thing for some reason. You know, being in the real world. 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. And I don't care what you say. Parents, you and I, we've been changed by having children. 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.

I mean, let's be honest. What's in Australia? What's the average age now for marriage for a man? 30 plus. Okay. Yeah, in the United States, it's like 29 now. I was 19. And it's not because I had to get married either.

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. 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, took me a couple of years to get her attention, but I did. And we've been married for over 37 years. So I did something right. And so things have, things have changed greatly. And I know that once we had kids, that changed me a lot.

It grounded me a lot in reality. And what you, you know, when, when, when your son, when your son's diaper reaches critical pressure mass at 2 a .m. in the morning, and then let's go, you know, you pick that dripping smelly thing up, you hand it to mom, get, get in the tub, and then you start scrubbing the walls.

Hey, that way, that, that, that, that matures you, that grows you up. That's all there is to it. No online shooter game is actually going to do that for you. Okay. 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, ever expected to be. When you've got grandkids, all of a sudden your vision down the road, your, your close up vision stinks.

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, in a, in a completely different fashion.

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

So we'll, we'll see. 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. And there's only two kinds of change, diaper changing.

There really is. I don't care all, it could be one or the other. That's pretty much all there is to it. So there is a grounding in reality that unfortunately is not a part of most gender studies programs in, in the university.

And so you've got this stuff, 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, Western law, and everything else for a very, very long time.

Put in race, critical race theory. Well, now all of a sudden you have, and it depends on where you are, how this manifests. It's going to manifest differently here than it does in the United States because of the history of slavery in the United States, the American Civil War, et cetera, et cetera.

It's going to be different there than it is in England, which abolished slavery before the United States did. You've got the indigenous peoples in the United States as well as here. So it's going to, it's going to manifest itself differently.

But what critical theory cannot do because of its nature is build anything. It cannot unite. It can only divide. It is meant to destroy. It is meant to break down. 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. 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.

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. 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.

And so there are people that just work really hard to get a very high intersectionality score. So in the United States, a black lesbian woman is going to have a much higher intersectionality score than a white heterosexual married male.

Me. 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. And it may be something you earned.

I mean, I grew up with nothing. My parents had nothing. I can show you pictures of my immigrant great-great-grandparents scratching out a living from the dirt of the Broken Bow, Nebraska. They had nothing.

They're living in a mud hut. But it doesn't matter. 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.

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. You have to have power to be a racist.

And so I can read someone, if you've ever went into him, if you want an example of this. Blessing to you. That is a Gesundheit sneeze right there. Auf Deutsch. In fact, that was so good, I'm going to do the rest of the lecture in German.

All right. So, Verhabeneinheit. Okay, no, I didn't see who it was. But is he under the pew now? I'm just wondering about that. Okay. What was I talking about? Moses was in the bulrushes. So, yeah, there is a writer that in the United States is considered the father of Black theology.

And his name is Dr. 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 Barack Obama's pastor. And just, I think, just last week on The Dividing Line, I read a quotation from him.

And it was the quotation that said that Blacks must nurture their, what was the term? 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.

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

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 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 United States.

I am always shocked at the amount of knowledge that people overseas have of the politics going on in the 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 Clinton-Trump election than a lot of people in the United States did. 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 United States who don't even know.

Right now, we have a group running on the left in the United States. Well, one just came out today, one of them is still in the race, saying that all churches who do not— all churches who speak against the redefinition of marriage and LGBTQIRSTUVWXYZ rights— believe me, it's eventually going to be that long— all those churches should have their tax-exempt status revoked and should be punished for their positions based on the government.

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. 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.

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, 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, 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.

Now it's there. Well, what's the basis of that? What is the basis of making that incoherent group of letters? And think about it. They are incoherent. You cannot put them together and make any sense out of it.

And they're discovering this. Remember what happened to Martina Navratilova? Just about, what, six months ago? It was actually December of last year. It's been a little less than a year. Remember what happened with her?

Y 'all remember Martina Navratilova back in the days when Chrissy Everett and Martina Navratilova were the best two women's tennis players in the world. Wait till they start letting the guys do that. She came out as a lesbian, and she has been a spokesperson for the homosexual movement for a long time.

Well, what is definitional of lesbianism? A two-gender system. A recognition that women are women and men are men, and that there is an attraction only to one of those two. Well, once you throw the T in, that comes apart.

And so she actually made the mistake of basically saying that it's insane to allow biological men to compete with biological women. Because Martina Navratilova knows that at her best, at her best, when she was Wimbledon champion, the guy who was 150th amongst the men would have wiped her off the court.

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

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

And she had to, to be consistent. And then throw in lesbian, gay, LGB, bisexual, bi. How can you have bi when there's 100 or 200 genders, right? Once you throw the T in, it destroys everything. There's no way to even define the preceding ones.

That's why when someone says, well, the LGBTQ community, there is no LGBTQ community. That's impossible. The terms contradict each other, but they're being held together because they are a very useful political tool.

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 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.

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

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

Now, I have never, ever, ever thought of the church as a white space or a Hispanic space or a black space or an Asian space or whatever else. 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 gonna need to have black spaces in the church. What they were talking about was voluntary segregation, where you just let the black folks do what the black folks wanna do and you all just get out of the way.

And I'm like, what's the foundation of our unity in the church? How would this have worked in the early church? How would this have functioned in Corinth or Rome or Ephesus? And the problem is, this movement doesn't care about what would have happened in the early church.

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

And basically what I said was, at the Lord's table, at the Lord's table, I said, the Lord's table is a Christ space. There is no room for any other than Christ at the table. 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 Christ space. And if you try to import any of your self-created divisions into that place, you do not understand what the table's about in the first place.

Well, that resulted in a fairly well-known individual in the United States to literally call for an ecumenical council. 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, city of brotherly love, to have what they described my position as colorblind theology identified as a heresy.

They called for an ecumenical council to have me identified as the new Arius. There you go. Because I dared to say in the Lord's Supper, there has to be absolute unity of focus upon Christ and Christ alone.

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. Why? It's real simple.

What is the fundamental foundation of our unity? 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.

I mean, Michael, I can handle because he's got a phone. So he's, you know, that's easy. And he keeps telling me about it. See, I'm gonna take another picture. I'm Asian. You know, what? You've been doing that, haven't you?

He has. See, he admits it. I mean, if I was wearing one of my kilts, okay, that'd be a dead giveaway as to where I'm coming from too. But there are a bunch of you in here. I have no idea where you're coming from.

But if we had the Lord's Supper in the service tomorrow, what would that matter? Some of you know that last year I moved from the church I had been at for 29 and a half years to Apologia. 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 I am. And one of the things I had to get used to is we have the Lord's Supper in every service. 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. 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.

I like the idea of being actively involved in proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes and so on and so forth. So the point is, I very often end up giving the instructions before the Lord's Supper.

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

But when we call people to partake, what do we say? If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, if 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.

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. But the point is, there is nothing in anything in the New Testament that would indicate that the participation of that congregation is based on anything more than their common dependence upon Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

Slave, master, Greek, Gentile, Jew, powerful, not powerful, rich, poor, it doesn't matter. They all come to the same table. There aren't two tables. That's what was so grave about what happened in Antioch.

That's why Paul immediately stands up to Peter because Peter withdraws from table of fellowship with the Gentiles. He says, no, no, no, no, no. Now, that wasn't the Lord's table they were talking about there.

He was 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 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.

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.

And there isn't a different version depending on your ethnicity, the background, your politics or anything else. There is only one righteousness. And what is the fundamental assumption of every one of the epistles of the New Testament?

Every believer is indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God. That's just an assumption. That's just always the way that it is. And so one righteousness, one spirit, one body, one confession of faith, one table.

We are one. 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. 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 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. 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.

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.

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

You died to who your great-grandpappy was. You have a new reality. You are now a servant of Jesus Christ. 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 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. Now, this is exactly where the pushback from the social justice movement is.

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

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. We want you to wear one of your kilts.

I would. That's cool. But if I told everybody that everybody else had to celebrate my kilt to continue having unity with me, that's a problem. That's a problem. So, someone, I suppose, might say, well, I object to a kilt because I watched Braveheart and they killed people.

So, how many of you have seen Braveheart? Okay, so I can use this joke. Dr. Ferguson, who is Scottish, Sinclair Ferguson, when Braveheart first came out, his students were telling him, oh, Dr. Ferguson, what an incredible movie this is.

It's just, so Dr. 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. I mean, there's a lot of bloodshed. He says, oh, this is, for a Scotsman, killing an Englishman isn't violence, it's patriotism.

I like telling that story until I got all my genealogy done. I discover I'm mainly Scottish, but I've got a big British component too, so I'm constantly in conflict with myself. You know, it's like that.

But so if someone were to come along and say, well, I object to your guilt because 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.

I mean, the English did treat my Scottish ancestors pretty badly. It's really easy to do that. How far back do we want to keep going? Does the gospel cause us to be backward-oriented or forward-oriented?

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

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

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. 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 a part of just a group. You're an oppressor. And so I'm not supposed to have personal experiences. My personal experience doesn't matter. Within critical theory, if you're a part of the oppressor group, your personal experience is irrelevant.

And so is, in essence, if you are a part of the minority, you are a victim whether you view yourself as one or not. LeBron James in the United States is a victim. He may be the stinking richest victim in the world, but he's still a victim.

That's the idea. And so I dared tell the story early on before I realized that I'm not allowed to have these stories. 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, Kevin.