October 24, 2018 Show with Dr. E Calvin Beisner on “Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice: How Good Intentions Undermine Justice & Gospel” AND Dr. Tony Costa on “The Marxist Connections to Social Justice Ideology”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world.

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Proverbs 27, verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 24th day of October 2018.

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You know, since the social justice issue is frequently being discussed and debated in churches and in institutions of higher learning and on the media and on the internet, we thought that it'd be wise to once again have another program on this issue, since we have already discussed it, even though I should say we have already discussed it on a number of occasions.

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But this is the first time we're discussing it with these two individuals. For the first hour,

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I have Dr. E. Calvin Beisner on the program. He is founder and national spokesman for the

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Cornwell Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, and he's going to be discussing a new booklet that he has written,

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Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice, How Good Intentions Undermine Justice and Gospel.

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The second hour, we're going to be joined by my friend Dr. Tony Costa, professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary, and he's going to be discussing later on the

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Marxist connections to social justice ideology. But first of all, it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

02:32

E. Calvin Beisner. Hey, very good to be back with you. Thanks very much for having me on.

02:37

Hey, my pleasure. And let me right away give our listeners our email address if they have questions of their own.

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It's chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Before we go on to the subject at hand,

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Dr. Beisner, why don't you tell our listeners about the Cornwell Alliance for Stewardship of Creation?

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Thanks, Chris. Appreciate the chance. Cornwell Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation is a network of evangelical scholars, almost 70 of us now in the network, natural scientists, economists, theologians, others, working to educate for three things simultaneously and really related to each other.

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The first is biblical earth stewardship. Second is economic development for the poor. And the third is the proclamation and defense of the gospel of Christ.

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Our aim is to promote what we call biblical earth stewardship, that is godly dominion, men and women working together to enhance the fruitfulness, the beauty, and the safety of the earth to the glory of God and to the benefit of our neighbors, so that we're really addressing two great commandments, to love

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God and to love neighbor. Second, to promote economic development for the poorest countries in the world through a combination of private property rights and entrepreneurship, free trade, limited government, the rule of law, things of that sort, and abundant, affordable, reliable energy without which no society can rise or stay out of poverty.

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And then third, of course, the gospel of Christ, because frankly, people will not use

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God's word and world properly until they have been reconciled to God from our natural, sinful state.

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And so we want to see people come to Christ and be taught, as Jesus told us, to obey all things that he has commanded us, and that's what discipleship is all about.

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So we try to work on all three of those things together and to intertwine them as Christians who think consistently.

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Now, wouldn't you say, in summary, that most often, if not all the time, when those on the left make claims that they are champions for the causes of those that are less fortunate, those that are poor, those that are starving, those that are persecuted, that when they seek to represent those cases on behalf of the less fortunate, when they are considering themselves to be champions for the less fortunate, since they are not approaching these issues typically biblically, or at the very least, they are not approaching them from an authentic biblical perspective, even if they claim they are approaching it biblically, since they are so wrong so often, they are actually doing a 180 degrees reverse—they're having a 180 degrees reverse impact upon those that are less fortunate, whether they are conscious of it or not.

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They are really usually harming those that are less fortunate rather than aiding them in any way. Yeah, I think that's clearly the case.

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There's a very fine African -American economist by the name of Walter Williams, who clear back around 1980, published a book called

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The State Against Blacks, and in that book, in an end note, he had one of the most brilliant, short, simple statements

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I've ever seen. He wrote, "...truly compassionate policy requires dispassionate analysis."

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That is, an awful lot of what people think helps the poor turns out not to help them, but often actually to harm them instead, and good intentions aren't enough to ensure that what we do actually helps people.

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Sometimes instead, we have, with the very best of intentions, embraced policies that are quite harmful.

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With the case of the left and their claim to care so much about the poor, well,

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I think what you really need to do is to look at the actual consequences of their policies in countries that have embraced them and implemented them quite thoroughly.

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Those countries would be communist countries and heavily socialist countries, and what you find in those countries is that there are far more poor people there than there are in free market, capitalistic countries, and that while perhaps they may have a little greater equality of income among the population at large than there is in free market countries, it's basically an equality of poverty, not an equality of prosperity.

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And there are a variety of different reasons why that's so. You know, I think a lot of it has to do with a misunderstanding of what justice really means, and a lot of it has to do with a misunderstanding of human nature as well.

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Well, I understand that one of the reasons you wrote the booklet that we are discussing today—by the way, this is available for free for anyone who donates to the

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Cornwell Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation an amount of any size, but we'll give you that information in a little bit—but your booklet,

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Social Justice versus Biblical Justice, How Good Intentions Undermine Justice and Gospel, this came about because of the paper, the statement that you were a signer on, in fact, one of the original signers of the statement on social justice and the gospel.

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If you could, for those of our listeners who might be new listeners, they haven't heard my programs on this before or they just haven't heard of this statement in general.

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Why don't you tell us a summary about what this statement is and then why you found a need, even though this statement exists in print, you found a need to write an additional booklet on the subject.

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Well, the statement itself came out, I think it was around the first week in September that it went public.

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I was actually not quite exactly one of the original signers. I was one of the earliest, but not one of the original.

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And the statement basically says, look, in view of questionable sociological, psychological, and political theories presently permeating our culture and making inroads into Christ's Church, we wish to clarify certain key

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Christian doctrines and ethical principles prescribed in God's Word. And then it goes on to treat various of those doctrines and ethical principles.

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And very important in it is particularly the statement on justice, the item number on justice, where they say, we affirm that since he is holy, righteous, and just,

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God requires those who bear his image to live justly in the world. This includes showing appropriate respect to every person and giving to each one what he or she is due.

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We affirm that societies must establish laws to correct injustices that have been imposed through cultural prejudice.

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And then each one of their statements has not only an affirmation like that, but also a denial to clarify.

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So on this one, for instance, they say, we deny that justice can be culturally defined or that standards of justice that are merely socially constructed can be imposed with the same authority as those that are derived from Scripture.

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And then they go on from there. Well, I found this statement generally quite good.

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I don't think it's perfect. I think there are some things that could have been done better in it. But hey, I'm not a perfectionist, and I don't expect perfection from anybody else.

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And so I was willing to cite it. But I think one of the key weaknesses in the statement is precisely that I don't think that it gives a very thorough definition of justice.

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And I don't think that it backs that definition up very well in terms of biblical data.

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And that's actually a study that I've studied for many years. I began doing intensive study on the meaning of justice in both the

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Old Testament and the New Testament back in 1983. And I wrote extensively about it in my book,

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Prosperity and Poverty, back in 1988, and in a number of different articles and papers published in journals and books back in the 80s and 90s.

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So it's been a very important subject to me. And so what I wanted to do was to bring my book, my booklet out, to provide the more precise definition of justice that the statement didn't have, and to provide the biblical backing for that statement, and then also to answer the claims of certain people on the evangelical left that social justice, or sort of a soft socialism, or even a hard socialism, is itself compatible with the

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Bible and is what the Bible means by justice. I don't think that it is. And so I answered their various arguments in this booklet.

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Well, if you could, define for us justice. Yeah, as I worked through all of their various uses of the words just and justice and right and righteous throughout both the

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Old and New Testaments, what I came to, what I concluded was that justice means rendering impartially and proportionally to everyone his due in accord with the righteous standards of God's moral law.

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And so there are a number of criteria here. Impartiality. We don't play favorites, and we don't exempt people from the rules.

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We don't give special benefit to some people that doesn't go to all people.

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There's proportionality. The punishment should fit the crime, as one way to put it.

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You don't use capital punishment for petty theft. And you don't use a minor slap on the wrist for murder, right?

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And the third criterion, after impartiality and proportionality, is conformity with a standard, and that is the standard of God's moral law.

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How do we figure out what's due to this or that behavior? Well, God's moral law tells us that.

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How do we know what is righteous and just behavior? God's moral law tells us that.

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And then finally, the fourth criterion is that we render what is due to people, not special favors.

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And justice means that we look at what people do.

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We look at their actions, their performance, and then we reward them or we punish them accordingly.

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Unfortunately, a lot of people have come to think that justice instead means some sort of an approximation of economic equality.

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Are you there, Cal? Giving things to people that they haven't earned, things of that sort.

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And so they'll support the welfare state. They'll support government efforts to equalize wealth.

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On the claim that this is social justice, and actually what I believe it is, it's the exact opposite of justice.

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Social justice, defined that way, is simply injustice, according to the Bible. Now, there are those on the left, as you know, who will say it is impossible, or perhaps a better way of phrasing it, it would be wrong.

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It would be unjust for us to act as if we are working on an equal playing field, and that everybody is to be treated in exactly the same way, regardless of their skin color, their ethnicity, or their socioeconomic status.

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Because of the fact that you have Blacks and Hispanics, and perhaps

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Native Americans could be added to that list, of course, numerically less in number. But those would be the primary folks who have been persecuted, oppressed.

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They still have not climbed up the ladder to be the socioeconomic equals of Whites, because of persecution they have received in the past.

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And therefore - We need to give them special favors now. Yes, yes, and it seems that Asians would be left out of that equation, because they excel in many things that they seek out to do, and in fact are being discriminated against in some universities, actually.

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Yeah, well, the biblical principle of impartiality, the scripture tells us very clearly, we're not supposed to be partial to the poor in any dispute, neither are we supposed to be partial to the rich in any dispute.

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That biblical principle of impartiality says that our laws should be equally applicable to all people.

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There should be absolutely no favoritism, there should be absolutely no negative discrimination against anybody in law, right?

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That's the key issue. Now, some folks on the left will say, well, but there are these groups that have been disadvantaged by things that happened in the past.

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Well, yeah, that's true. That is historically true. But scripture also teaches us that you are not to punish children for the acts of their parents, or their grandparents, or their great -great -great -great -great -great -grandparents, right?

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The soul of sins shall die, is what scripture teaches us. And so if we are going to take from one group of people something that that group of people has earned, in order to give to another group of people something that that group of people has not earned, and to say that by doing so we are making up for some disadvantage that the recipient group experienced in the past, then we're actually saying that we're punishing some people now for what other people did in the past.

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And that is itself injustice. Thomas Full, fine economist, argued in his book,

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In Search of Cosmic Justice, that we actually do a lot of injustice in the quest for sort of an ideal, utopian notion of justice that doesn't adequately account for the fact that we just simply live in a fallen world where not all things go as we wish they would.

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And we can't always correct all the problems of the past without doing new wrong things in the present.

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So we need to be careful not to do that. We can treat everybody equally before the law.

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That's possible. What we can't do is to assure either equality of outcome or even equality of opportunity.

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I think what most people tend to think of when they think equality of opportunity is simply that, okay, there's no law saying that if you are of this skin color or of this ethnic background or of this political persuasion, you're not allowed to start a business or to take out a bank loan or to go to this or that state -supported school or something like that, right?

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What most people think equality of opportunity means is there are no legal barriers to anybody.

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They don't think in terms of, well, everybody has the same chance of achieving this or that thing.

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But social justice warriors seem to think that if you don't have equality of opportunity, you don't have justice.

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But frankly, I was 6 '5 until I shrank a little bit when

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I ruptured a disc in my back. And as I grew up through high school and into college, I had some distinct advantages in playing basketball over people who were 5 '2".

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People who are born to parents who highly value education and reading and whose parents teach them to read early on have some advantages over people who aren't born to those parents.

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People born in the late 20th century have advantages of access to antibiotics that people born in the 19th century didn't have.

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We cannot equalize opportunity. Uh, in any significant way, other than simply by saying we won't put legal barriers in the way of people doing what

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God permits them to do. We have a listener, Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania.

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And he wants to know, from your knowledge of what is going on in economics around the today and particularly here in the

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United States, do you see that there is really injustice towards those of other races outside of the white race and those who are of the female gender going on in any major way, especially in the larger corporations and in government institutions?

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Obviously, privately owned small businesses, there may be things going on that we're unaware of, but I'm talking about in the mainstream of things, do you think that the injustices towards those outside of the white race are really going on and are women really being mistreated in this way as well?

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And of course, to add something to the question, I'm assuming you would agree with me that there is really only one race.

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It's the human race, and we use that phrase wrongly, but we understand what the listener is saying about skin color.

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Yeah, yeah, there's only one race, the human race, but we do in common conversation use the term to refer to differences of pigmentation, differences of eye shape, things of that sort.

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And I'm not terribly uptight about that kind of terminology, but basically, we're all human beings, and all human beings bear the image of God and are properly due justice rather than injustice.

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Now, as the question is asked, I think we would be crazy to deny that there is any injustice being done in any corporations, in any companies, in any countries toward any particular group of people or any individuals.

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Our doctrine of the sinfulness of man tells us that we all sin. We all sin every day, and every time

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I sin against my neighbor, I'm doing him an injustice. So that's one answer to it.

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I think what the questioner really wants to know is, are there systematic, legally driven injustices being done to various groups in various places?

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And I think the answer to that is, in some countries, absolutely. In the

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United States, I think it's a very, very rare thing. Now, some of this,

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I think people's perception of it will change or will differ depending on how they interpret certain data.

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For example, there is a difference between the average wage of women of a particular age in a particular sort of job and men of the same age in the same sort of job.

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And some people will say, see, that shows discrimination against women. However, if you control for a number of very significant variables, that difference essentially disappears.

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You control for the number of years background that the woman has in the job or of the man that the man has in the job.

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You control for the level of education achieved. You control for whether the woman intends to have a child and stay home taking care of that child for a long time.

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And more women choose to do that than men do.

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So there are all kinds of different choices that people make that have an effect on the wages that they earn.

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When you control for those, you find that the so -called wage gap between men and women in the

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United States essentially disappears in pretty much every different vocation.

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And actually, where there is a wage gap, it tends instead to be the opposite direction that women tend to have.

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When all the different variables are controlled for, women tend to have higher wages than men in comparable positions.

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Really? Yeah. In fact, I don't know if you would agree with Shelby Steele.

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Are you familiar with Shelby? I am, yes. Yes, he basically said that he does not believe there is any large -scale discrimination against blacks in the

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United States in the corporate world or in the government. He believes that that is a sin of this nation that has certainly been reversed.

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So I'm assuming... I would agree with him. Yes. Well, thank you, Arnie. Keep listening to Iron Trip and Zion Radio and keep spreading the word about it in Perry County and beyond.

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We're going to go to our station break. It's going to be shorter than normal because we already ran one of the ads in that break when we lost phone contact with Dr.

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Beisner. But if you have a question you'd like to ask of your own, send it to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. E. Calvin Beisner in our discussion on social justice right after these messages.

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We are now back with Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, and we are discussing social justice.

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In fact, we are specifically addressing his booklet, Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice, How Good Intentions Undermine Justice and Gospel.

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If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. We have

33:21

CJ in Lyndonhurst, Long Island, New York, who says, The way things are going, if left unchecked, could we not reasonably expect, within the next 20 to 30 years, a situation in the

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United States that is a mirror image of the way that blacks were persecuted and oppressed by whites from centuries past through the

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John Crow years up until the early 70s, where this time you will have whites being the victims.

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And a reverse image will be prevalent in this country. Isn't that something that is a no -brainer?

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You know, actually, Chris, I don't think so. Um, it's easy to commit what statisticians call the straight -line fallacy.

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You see a particular trend happening, and you project that in a straight line off into the future, and it leads to terrible, terrible, terrible consequences.

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The fact is that most trends don't go in a straight line over a long period of time. And I happen to think that Americans have enough of a sense of commitment to our

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Constitution, to the real idea of justice, of impartiality, of proportionality, of rendering what is due, but I don't think we're going to go back to anything similar to Jim Crow, let alone slavery, which we once had.

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I think what we are seeing is there are some, by comparison with Jim Crow or slavery, relatively minor group injustices done to white

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Americans now, or rather injustices done to particular whites because they're white.

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You know, I experienced that clear back in 1978 when I graduated from college. I was an applicant for a major graduate studies fellowship, and I had been recommended to apply for that by the dean of the

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College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California, where I went. And she said, oh, you're a shoo -in.

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You should get this easily. Your GPA, your graduate record exams, all these are very high.

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Your recommendations are outstanding. You'll get it. Not only did I not get it,

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I didn't even come in close. And yet, my scores were higher than the top 5 % of those who did receive the fellowship.

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And when the dean of the college examined the data on those who did receive this fellowship, she said, the reason you didn't get it is you're a white male.

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So those things do happen, but I seriously don't think we're headed for something that bad.

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There's a trend in that direction right now, but I think it will stop way short of that.

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Well, if you could, before we go to any more listener questions, I really want you to hammer out why this is such an important issue and how it affects the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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The primary reason why it's so important is that if you're confused about the nature of justice, you're going to be confused also about the nature of grace.

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And since grace is essential to the gospel, if you're confused about the nature of grace, you're going to be confused about the nature of the gospel itself.

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What social justice does is it turns justice into essentially a form of grace that is administered by the state.

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But when you do that, when you start to treat benefits as a matter of grace rather than harms as a matter of justice, then you twist the whole understanding of the gospel.

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And that's exactly what the apostle Paul was arguing against in Romans and Galatians and various other places.

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Paul tells us clearly in Romans chapter 4 that if Abraham had been justified by works, then he'd have something to boast about because good works demand reward.

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But he wasn't justified by works, he was justified, Paul goes on to tell us, by faith, because of grace.

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And in Romans chapter 11, he tells us very clearly that whatever is of justice is not of grace, and whatever is of grace is not of justice.

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So the gospel itself is at stake when people confuse justice and grace.

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At the same time, our whole understanding of the proper role of the state gets jeopardized as well.

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God ordained the state to enforce justice, and we're told in Romans chapter 13 that the authorities, the governing authorities, are servants of God, ordained by Him to exercise justice, to do vengeance on those who do evil, to punish those who do evil.

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If instead we turn justice into some form of grace, where government gives special benefits to people, rather than exercising due punishment on evil action, then government begins to do actual injustice.

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For example, government can only give benefits to some people if it takes them away from other people.

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This is one reason we know that the idea of so -called positive rights, that is, rights to benefits that one has not earned, is not a biblical, not a just idea, because you can only enforce positive rights, rights to benefits, by violating other people's negative rights, rights against harm.

40:19

So when we misunderstand justice and turn it into a variety of grace, we corrupt both the gospel and our understanding of the

40:32

God -ordained role of the state, and we bring about huge injustices in society, and we have people fail to understand that they are to be reconciled to God, not by desert, not by what they earn, but by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

40:55

Yeah, the gospel is really antithetical to a merit -based system, which, when it comes to people achieving various goals in life in the socioeconomic sphere, that is a good thing, to have a merit -based system.

41:23

And, of course, it becomes a heretical and damning thing when we have that as our gospel, that we earn it in any way.

41:32

But, at the same time, it is dangerous when people are equating the grace of the gospel with how we are to treat not only the poor, but the rich, or anybody in between.

41:47

Well, and we need to make a very careful distinction between how we are to treat the poor, or the downtrodden, etc.,

41:55

and how the state, the government, is to treat them. What do we mean by we?

42:02

Well, if we mean the state, if we mean the government, and most of us, by the way, are not officers in the state, but if we mean that, well, we're told in Scripture that God ordained the state, the government, to execute justice by punishing those who do evil.

42:20

So, you know, the state properly should have law enforcement, defense, a court system in order to back up the law enforcement, you know, such administrative tasks as necessary to do that.

42:32

But that's God's call for the state. He does not call me to execute justice on my neighbor.

42:40

I can do self -defense, but if my neighbor has stolen from me,

42:46

I'm not allowed to go out and capture my neighbor and and take back my stuff.

42:53

I'm supposed to call the state to do that. God has called me as an individual to exercise grace to others.

43:02

And so, whereas I do have to do justice in the way of not mistreating my neighbor,

43:10

I can't do justice in the way of exercising vengeance. So that's the difference between the end of Romans chapter 12, where Paul tells us not to take vengeance on others, and chapter 13, where he tells us that the powers that be, the

43:26

God -ordained authorities, are supposed to execute justice. There's a difference between personal and social ethics.

43:36

So, you know, that's a part of the answer. But then, in addition, we need to recognize that we as individuals are called by God in many ways to give graciously, exemplifying the gospel of gracious, unearned benefits in our approach to the poor, to those who have been harmed in various ways, the sick, the blind, etc.

44:09

You know, think about what Jesus said at the very outset of his ministry in quoting Isaiah, that the Spirit of the Lord God was upon him and had anointed him to preach good news to the poor, the recovery of sight to the blind, release to the captives, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and so on.

44:31

All those things we are supposed to do as private individuals and as voluntary associations and as churches, but it's not the same thing that the state is supposed to do.

44:41

Yes, in the reverse of seeking vengeance, we have to understand, as a

44:50

Christian, it is our duty as a Christian if a murderer has savagely and grotesquely and gruesomely murdered everyone in our entire family, but that murderer from behind bars demonstrates genuine repentance and pleads with us for forgiveness.

45:15

We as Christians have to extend that forgiveness. We are obligated to do that, but that does not mean that we are going to help that prisoner break out of his prison cell.

45:27

We're not going to help him dig a tunnel out of the prison or anything like that, and especially when that person may have killed people that are not in your family.

45:41

The difference between what God ordains the state to do and what God tells me as a private individual to do, or what

45:48

God tells the church to do, or what God tells private voluntary associations to do, that difference is really important, and justice comes into play in distinguishing the two different spheres of life, so to speak.

46:06

We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who asks, Can you give us some practical advice when discussing these very sensitive and at times explosive issues with those who are radically in favor of this social justice warrior mentality?

46:27

How can we convince them in a calm and logical and reasonable and most of all biblical fashion that we are not racist, even if we are most often accused of being so just because we oppose the social justice warrior phenomena?

46:46

Well, my first response to that would be simply that our own demeanor, our own conduct should give the lie to all such accusations.

46:57

There should be nothing about us, there should be nothing in our conduct that would justify anybody's accusation that we are racist, sexist, that we want to do harm to anybody.

47:12

So as long as our own character doesn't back up the claim, we've gone a good way toward refuting the claim.

47:22

But now I'm going to give another bit of advice, and this might sound a little self -serving, but frankly we need to be able to argue the case well, and that's why

47:35

I wrote my booklet. So I would recommend that this questioner be in touch with the

47:44

Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Just go online to CornwallAlliance .org

47:50

and through the end of October we will send a free copy of Social Justice vs.

47:57

Biblical Justice to anyone who makes a donation to the Cornwall Alliance of any size, literally any size.

48:06

We'll send a free copy of the booklet to them, if they'll just do that and make the request for it.

48:12

They can make a donation on our secure online website just by clicking on the donate button on practically any page at CornwallAlliance .org,

48:23

or they can phone our office at 703 -569 -4653 and make a donation by credit card over the phone.

48:34

We have, let's see here, we have Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, and Ronald says, one of the things that's disturbing to me about many in the social justice warrior crowd is the hatred that seems to pour out of many of them.

48:57

Not only hatred, but vengeance and racism itself. It seems that many are treating white people with the same kind of bigotry that blacks have received for centuries and two wrongs don't make a right as the old saying goes.

49:15

What are your comments on that? Well of course they're wrong to do that, but you know we don't have any control over what other people do.

49:24

We have control over what we do and our appropriate response to that is to show them love, to be gracious, to be compassionate, to be gentle, to be humble, to listen carefully to what they say and then respond in a way that is respectful even as we disagree with them.

49:43

We can respect them as fellow human beings. I think we should go out of our way to look for opportunities to give gifts to those who want to be harmful to us.

49:58

You know, Paul tells us, don't respond to evil with evil, but overcome evil with good.

50:06

In Romans chapter 12, Jesus says, do good to those who persecute you.

50:12

This is what we're supposed to do. And yeah, it can be frustrating to see people with the anger that is really quite common on the left.

50:24

And unfortunately some of that has even become common among our evangelical brothers and sisters.

50:30

That's really sad. We need to pray for them. We need to respond with love and mercy and grace and generosity, exactly the opposite of responding in kind.

50:46

And I'm assuming you would agree that particularly when it comes to the sins that are often associated with the social justice warrior movement, when they are occurring within evangelicalism, when they are occurring perhaps in our own denominations, perhaps in our own congregations, those issues need to be treated with love at all times as we are always to treat others.

51:12

But at the same time, uh, in the church, heresy and dangerous error and aberration is not to be tolerated in the church.

51:22

Am I right? Right. Well, depending on what you mean by tolerated, I mean, some people think that to not tolerate something means to kill the person who's doing it.

51:32

I don't know. It shouldn't be approved and it should be disciplined.

51:38

It should be corrected. And that's the whole reason why John MacArthur and various others worked together to produce this statement on social justice and the gospel.

51:50

It's the reason why I wrote my booklet. It's the reason why I'm glad to have opportunities to speak at churches around the country on this very issue.

52:00

We do need to correct error where it occurs, but we need to do it gently. We need to do it with a spirit of peace rather than a spirit of rancor.

52:11

And we need to trust God. Really, we need to trust God to work in the hearts of our brothers and sisters.

52:18

When we bring biblical truth before them, we need to trust the Lord to implant that truth in the heart.

52:25

And sometimes it takes time. We need to not just condemn because they're not instantaneously persuaded to agree with us.

52:35

You know, after all, we have our own faults too, don't we? And for each one of us, it's taken time to come to certain truths that we once resisted.

52:48

Well, Cal, I'd like you to have about four minutes of time where you just summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners uninterrupted.

52:57

Hmm. Well, you know, I do think that the social justice movement and the whole cultural

53:05

Marxist progressive movement that is associated with it, identity politics, reflexivity, intersectionality, these sorts of things that essentially do group politics, where you're determining how you treat people because of what groups they're members of, rather than because of their own conduct.

53:33

I think that's very unjust, and I think it's very destructive of a peaceful, well -ordered society of liberty and justice.

53:44

So we, all of us, need to commit ourselves to doing what the prophet

53:49

Micah said God requires of us, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our

53:56

God. Again, this is why I wrote my booklet, Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice.

54:02

In it, I provide what I think is a good, solid biblical definition of justice, rendering impartially and proportionally that everyone is due in accord with the righteous standard of God's moral law.

54:12

I answer the various arguments of those who think that biblical justice requires some sort of wealth redistribution, some sort of special treatment to those who've been harmed in the past.

54:27

Of course, we should punish those who do injustice, and we should demand restitution where someone has treated someone else unjustly, but we shouldn't demand restitution by Johnny when it was his father, or grandfather, or great -grandfather, who did the injustice.

54:48

We're not supposed to punish people for other people's sins. And I point out in this booklet the difference between what

54:58

I call positive rights, that is, rights to benefit, and negative rights, that is, rights against harm.

55:04

Positive rights cannot be enforced consistently. They inevitably lead to contradictions, whereas negative rights can.

55:13

We can all refrain from punching each other in the nose without violating anybody else's right by refraining from doing that.

55:22

We can't assure everybody the same income without violating some people's rights by taking what they earn from them and giving it to those who didn't earn it.

55:32

So I'd encourage people to study up on this very carefully, read your Bible, study carefully how the words just, and justice, and justly, and right, and righteousness, and righteous are used in the

55:44

Bible, and get a copy of my booklet, Donation of Any Size to the

55:49

Cornwall Alliance at cornwallalliance .org. Just click on the donate button and ask for social justice.

55:56

We'll send you a copy of the book. Great, that's Cornwall Cornwall, I'm sorry, cornwallalliance .org.

56:03

That's c -o -r -n -w -a -l -l -alliance .org. Thank you so much,

56:09

Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, for being on the program. We look forward to your frequent returns to Iron Trip and Zion Radio in the future as our guest.

56:17

Well, thank you very much, Chris, and the Lord bless your ongoing ministry. Thank you very much. And don't go away, folks, because Dr.

56:25

Tony Costa, who is on the faculty at Toronto Baptist Seminary, he is the professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

56:34

He's going to be continuing this theme on social justice today, and he is more specifically going to be addressing the

56:42

Marxist connections to social justice ideology. If you have a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

56:51

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

57:00

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Don't go away.

57:05

We will be right back with Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary, right after these messages from our sponsor.

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We just have a few upcoming events that we've got to announce before we are joined by Dr.

01:08:33

Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary. First of all, next month on November 9th and the 10th,

01:08:41

I will be manning, God willing, an Iron Shepard's Iron Radio booth, exhibitor's booth, at the

01:08:49

Glory of the Cross conference. That's actually the Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology on the theme,

01:08:56

The Glory of the Cross. That's going to be held, God willing, as I said, November 9th and the 10th at Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quakertown, Pennsylvania.

01:09:05

The speakers include David Garner, Ray Ortland, Richard Phillips, Timothy Gibson, and Carlton Wynn.

01:09:12

November 9th and the 10th at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quakertown, Pennsylvania. I hope as many of you as possible join me there and come and meet me during a break at the

01:09:21

Iron Shepard's Iron Radio exhibitor's booth, November 9th and the 10th at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quakertown.

01:09:27

Go to AllianceNet .org, AllianceNet .org, click on events, and then scroll down to the

01:09:34

Quakertown Conference on Reformed Theology. And then, coming up in January, the

01:09:41

G3 conference returns to the Georgia International Convention Center in College Park, Georgia, which is a suburb of Atlanta.

01:09:49

The theme in January is The Mission of God, A Biblical Understanding of Missions. It's from Thursday, January 17th through Saturday, January 19th.

01:09:59

The G3 conference does have a special Spanish -speaking edition of the conference also on Wednesday, January 16th, so tell your

01:10:09

Spanish -speaking and bilingual friends about that Spanish conference on Wednesday, January 16th.

01:10:15

But the English conference from the 17th through the 19th has an enormous lineup of speakers, absolutely phenomenal as they do every year, and I am just always blown away by the size of this roster.

01:10:35

Dr. James R. White, John Piper, Steven J. Lawson, Votie Baucom, Mark Dever, Conrad M. Bayway, Tim Challies, Phil Johnson, Josh Bice, the founder of the

01:10:45

G3 conference, Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio, Steven J. Nichols, the president of Reformation Bible College, the college founded by R .C.

01:10:53

Sproul and Ligonier Ministries, and many more are on that roster. If you'd like to register, go to g3conference .com,

01:11:00

g3conference .com, and by the way, I strongly urge you, if you have a church, parachurch ministry or business that you want to promote,

01:11:11

I would strongly urge you to also register for an exhibitor's booth just like the one

01:11:17

I'll be manning at the G3 conference because they are expecting between 4 ,000 and 5 ,000 people to attend this event.

01:11:24

In fact, I sure hope that my guest, Dr. Tony Costa, can man an exhibitor's booth for Toronto Baptist Seminary.

01:11:31

It'd be great to share fellowship with him in the exhibitor's hall there, but go to g3conference .com,

01:11:37

g3conference .com to register for attendance or for an exhibitor's booth. Make sure you tell them that you heard about the

01:11:44

G3 conference from Chris Arns and Yvonne Trippins on radio. By the way, the G3 stands for gospel, grace, and glory.

01:11:50

Last but not least, if you love Iron Trippins Iron Radio, you don't want us to disappear from the airwaves, then please go to irontrippinsironradio .com,

01:11:57

click support, then click, click to donate now. You could donate instantly that way through a debit or credit card.

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You could send in a check made payable to Iron Trippins Iron Radio. The caveat that I remind you of every day is please never siphon money away from your regular giving to your local church in order to give to Iron Trippins Iron Radio.

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Never put your family in financial jeopardy by giving to Iron Trippins Iron Radio. Those two things are commands of God providing for church and home.

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Providing for Iron Trippins Iron Radio is obviously not a command of God, but if you love the show, you don't want it to disappear, and you are financially blessed above and beyond your ability to obey those two commands, then please donate as heavily as you can and as frequently as you can to Iron Trippins Iron Radio.

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Go to irontrippinsironradio .com, click support, then click, click to donate now. If you'd like to advertise with us, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com

01:13:03

and put advertising in the subject line. That's chrisarnson at gmail .com and we will help you launch an ad campaign as long as whatever it is you want to promote is compatible with what we believe on Iron Trippins Iron Radio.

01:13:17

You don't have to believe identically with me, but you just have to be promoting something that is compatible with what I believe.

01:13:24

It's chrisarnson at gmail .com, put advertising in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in a question to Dr.

01:13:30

Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. That's chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:13:36

We are continuing the theme of the

01:13:45

Marxist connections to social justice ideology.

01:13:51

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trippins Iron Radio, Dr. Tony Costa. Why don't you tell our listeners, for those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with Toronto Baptist Seminary, tell us about that fine institution.

01:14:04

Yes, Toronto Baptist Seminary is a reformed Baptist seminary in Toronto, Canada. It started in the 1930s under the supervision of the late

01:14:17

Dr. T .T. Shields, who was the pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church, also in Toronto. It has been training men and women for missions and theology.

01:14:28

We train men for the pastorate and also for the mission field.

01:14:35

We grant both undergraduate and graduate degrees in the master's level, THM, MDiv, and so forth.

01:14:43

The one thing I appreciate about Toronto Baptist Seminary is that Dr. T .T. Shields once made the claim that if the seminary was ever to become liberal, he said, shut it down immediately.

01:14:56

And so we've been true to that calling, and we've maintained a very conservative and biblical seminary.

01:15:06

Yes, of course, the problem would be, though, if it became a liberal seminary, those in charge of that seminary would not want to shut it down.

01:15:15

Correct, correct. And so in that case, it'd become a cemetery. That's right.

01:15:20

Well, also, let us know about an interesting phenomenon. You are being added to the leadership team at Oakwood Wesleyan Church in Toronto, Canada, alongside of Pastor Sule Prince, who is the senior pastor.

01:15:40

I am pronouncing his name correctly, right? Sule? That's correct, yes. And the thing that's interesting about this is that both you and Pastor Sule are theologically reformed, and yet you are in the leadership at a

01:15:53

Wesleyan church. So tell us about Oakwood Wesleyan Church. Yeah, we're really ducks sitting on chicken eggs over there.

01:16:03

And the people are actually moving towards the darkness of grace.

01:16:09

So I can imagine John Wesley is spinning in his grave as we speak. Well, I believe

01:16:17

John Wesley is in heaven, and he is a Calvin, so that's not happening. Right, and he's nearest to the throne, so yes.

01:16:27

And for those of you who are interested in visiting the Oakwood Wesleyan Church, if you happen to be visiting

01:16:34

Toronto, or if you live in Toronto, we do have listeners in Toronto and nearby.

01:16:40

Go to oakwoodwesleyan .org, oakwoodwesleyan .org. And of course, Toronto Baptist Seminary is tbs .edu,

01:16:48

tbs .edu. Well, Dr. Costa, I know that as a part of your apologetic curriculum there at Toronto Baptist Seminary, you do deal with the issue of Marxism.

01:17:04

In fact, when you gave a lecture at one of my recent

01:17:10

Iron Sherpins Iron Radio Pastors luncheons, you dealt with the negative impacts of Marxism upon the church and society.

01:17:23

So tell us about what—we already had the definition of social justice ideology in our first hour.

01:17:30

Give us a definition of Marxism. That may seem like a no -brainer, but there may be many people who are unfamiliar with what

01:17:39

Karl Marx actually stood for. There are Christians who actually think that regardless of what

01:17:47

Karl Marx believed about Jesus Christ, about the Bible, and about theology and doctrine, that there is much of what he taught that was compatible, in fact, maybe also clearly biblical, not just compatible with it, because there seems to be a facade, at the very least, of a very high regard for the poor and less fortunate, wanting to elevate those who are less fortunate and impoverished above their socioeconomic status so that they can live out successful and happy lives.

01:18:24

There seems to be, in the rhetoric of many who would even openly and unashamedly identify themselves as Marxist, socialist, or communist, that they are indeed continuing that emphasis of Jesus Christ to have compassion and love for those who are poor and less fortunate.

01:18:49

So if you could cut through the fog here and let us know what the real story is.

01:18:55

Sure. Well, first of all, Karl Marx wasn't a materialist. He claimed that religion was the opium or the opiate of the people.

01:19:03

It was a drug. And that is one reason why he called for the abolition of religion altogether, mainly

01:19:10

Christianity. And of course, in its place, the communist state would become, if you will, the priesthood of the new communist state.

01:19:20

So Karl Marx regarded the problem with history, according to Karl Marx, was economic. And he saw that there was a tension between the classes in society.

01:19:32

He saw that the capitalists, whom he called the bourgeoisie, he said that they were accumulating a lot of wealth at the expense of the poor and basically enslaving those who were less fortunate.

01:19:46

And he envisioned that the working class that he called the proletariat, he envisioned that the only way to smooth things out, the only way to achieve a fair society was if the working class would eventually revolt or perform or commit a revolution against the capitalists or the working class and abolish the distinction between the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, landowners, and so forth from the free markets, and basically abolish these class distinctions so that everyone would have equality, or as he would put it, something along the lines of equality of outcome.

01:20:27

Now, that theory failed miserably because it never fleshed out in Marx's lifetime.

01:20:34

But when Vladimir Lenin in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution, when he started implementing

01:20:40

Marxist ideas, we did not see heaven on earth. What we saw was a mass slaughter of those who disagreed, the seizure of property, the seizure of destruction of churches, the assassination of the

01:20:56

Russian Tsar Nicholas, and also when Mao brought

01:21:01

Communism to China, we saw the same thing, slaughter upon slaughter. And so 100 million lives have been lost because of this

01:21:09

Marxist vision, which never succeeded in any way. Now, when we talk about cultural

01:21:15

Marxism, what the cultural Marxists have done is the cultural Marxists have realized that while Marxist theory was correct, he had the wrong idea in terms of thinking that it was an economic struggle.

01:21:27

They believed that the problem was not the economy, the problem was culture, and that culture had to change.

01:21:36

And the only way it could change is if we we destroy the oppressor, the oppressor in Western society they thought to be primarily

01:21:46

Christianity and the values that Christianity has imposed on society and on the government.

01:21:54

And so they saw that the only way we could achieve this utopian state was culturally.

01:22:01

So what did that mean? Well, what that meant was they had to picture Christianity as the oppressor and that the ideas like the family, the nuclear family of a husband, wife, child, and so forth, these types of things have to be redefined.

01:22:16

They have to redefine the family, redefine sexual gender, which is horrifically being fulfilled before our eyes today.

01:22:24

And so what eventually happened, Chris, was they believed that the medium in order to achieve this would be through the academic institutions.

01:22:32

And that's why when these Marxists, neo -Marxists, came to America, they went straight to New York City, they started teaching in Columbia University, and their successors, their students who graduated from this institution, went all over America teaching this

01:22:51

Marxist ideology, which still continues to this day. And the most frightening aspect of this,

01:22:57

I think, Chris, is that it has now seeped into the churches and we see it primarily in the so -called critical race theory that is now evolving within churches, particularly black churches.

01:23:09

And so the Marxist roots are all based on this idea of the oppressor versus the oppressed.

01:23:18

The oppressor is Christianity, Western society, and the oppressed are all these special interest groups, whether it's homosexuals, whether it's women's rights, whether it's black rights, or Hispanic rights, and on and on and on it goes.

01:23:33

And the whole idea is that the Marxist roots of social justice basically say that what the government should do is give more power to the government, which acts like a nanny, and what the government does is it redistributes wealth.

01:23:47

It takes from the rich, it taxes the rich, so that they can take that extra tax money and redistribute it to those who are less fortunate.

01:23:57

And here you see the Marxist earmarks. Marx also talked about the redistribution of wealth and so forth.

01:24:03

So that in a nutshell, in a mouthful, is basically the Marxist roots of the social justice movement today.

01:24:09

Now, the thing that I find interesting is that when I was growing up as a kid,

01:24:16

I was born in 62, and my earliest remembrance of issues about communism and socialism coming up in the media and so on was probably in the 70s when

01:24:32

I was a teenager. I'm not saying that they didn't come up earlier than that, but I'm talking about my memory. And of course, in the 80s, when

01:24:41

I was in college, practically straight up through the presidency of Barack Obama, when you would hear accusations by conservatives against liberals, and they were being identified as either socialists or Marxists or communists, there would be laughter, there would be mockery of conservatives as being moronic, as being, you know, living in the dark ages and slandering those who are liberal with these outrageous accusations.

01:25:26

McCarthyism would come up about people whose lives may have been destroyed, particularly those who were actors and involved in the arts, if they were falsely accused of being communists during the

01:25:40

McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. But now, you have people who are winning elections or gaining extremely large popularity, who are openly saying, yes,

01:25:58

I am a socialist, I am a Marxist, and you might even have some saying that they're communists, which is less frequently uttered than the other two, it seems.

01:26:08

But tell us about that. This is an interesting phenomenon, isn't it? Well, it is. And I think it's important to state that it has been the

01:26:15

Democrats in particular that have been advocates of this type of social justice and cultural

01:26:21

Marxism. And if you notice, just recently, President Donald Trump declared himself to be a nationalist.

01:26:27

Now, this is a very important statement on the part of the president, because what it shows is that the cultural

01:26:34

Marxist worldview is not that of nationalism, it's globalism. And the idea here is that we should have open borders.

01:26:42

And our prime minister here in Canada, Justin Trudeau, confessively a globalist himself, he believes in open borders.

01:26:51

Now, think of this, Chris, with all these Hondurians moving up Central America, up through El Salvador and then into Mexico, and then they're aiming for the border with California.

01:27:02

The ones who hold to a globalist ideology, an open border system, would say, no, just let them in.

01:27:08

You know, we have to show compassion and so forth. So I think there's something so diabolical here,

01:27:14

Chris, because the first thing that God did, for instance, when he called Abram, before his name was changed to Abraham in Genesis 12, when the

01:27:23

Lord called Abram from Ur of the Chaldeans, he said, I will make of you a great nation, and I will make your name great.

01:27:31

Now, this is important, because what it shows us is that God is the creator of nations. God is the one who created nations out of Adam.

01:27:40

And what we see in this globalist agenda is almost a Tower of Babel reaction. It's a pushback against God's design of the creation of nations.

01:27:51

And so what we see in this Marxist ideology is, you'll notice it's the

01:27:56

Democrats that far and wide have been supporting this idea of redistribution of wealth.

01:28:03

Think of Bernie Sanders, for instance. And it's the Republicans who have been maintaining that, no, we need to maintain the importance of the individual, every man or every person is created equal, and so forth.

01:28:18

And here's another difference, Chris, is that Marxism emphasizes the collective.

01:28:24

It emphasizes group identity over the individual. And if you don't go with the group, if you don't think with the group, then you're the odd man out.

01:28:35

And so it's a very pernicious ideology. And what concerns me greatly is that it's coming into the church.

01:28:44

Let me repeat our email address if anybody has any questions that they would like to ask of Dr.

01:28:51

Tony Costa. It is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:28:58

And please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

01:29:05

We have Susan Margaret in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, who said, I heard Chris Arnson's interview with Pastor Sule Prince, your pastor there in Toronto at the

01:29:17

Oakwood Wesleyan Church, and I happen to know that he is a black Christian. Can you tell us what you know of his own personal responses to the social justice warrior movement?

01:29:28

Yes, Pastor Sule's responses are exactly like mine. He takes the same position.

01:29:35

He's been referred, he's been called some very unsavory terms by other black

01:29:40

Christians who oppose him because he takes offense against this

01:29:46

Marxist ideology. So Pastor Sule is clearly in league with me in that respect.

01:29:52

We're on the same page on that. And again, he has taken a lot of criticism for that.

01:29:59

But he sees it for what it is and recognizes that what this ideology has done, especially to black

01:30:06

Christians, it has kept them suppressed. It has victimized them. The culture

01:30:12

Marxists feed on this ideology of this oppression of the black community, but they don't care.

01:30:19

At the end of the day, they don't care about the black community or any other community in the United States. All they care about is really maintaining this oppression so that they can have the comfortable jobs and so forth.

01:30:32

So he's very, very aware of Black Lives Matter, for example. He's very aware of the

01:30:38

Marxist roots of that movement as well. So he's on the same page. All right.

01:30:44

Well, thank you, Susan Margaret. Keep listening to the program and spreading the word in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania and beyond.

01:30:51

One thing that we hear come up a lot by socialists, whether they are professing to be

01:31:00

Christian or just like to use the Bible as a weapon against those who are

01:31:05

Christians, like Michael Moore would frequently do. But we go to the classic passage in Acts chapter 2, verse 45, and it says in regard to Christians or the church or members of the church, they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all as anyone might have need.

01:31:32

The New International Version puts they sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.

01:31:40

And they'll say, see, there you go. That's the early church acting as socialists or, dare

01:31:46

I say, communists. Now, how do you respond to that? How do you respond? Yeah, that's a text that has been taken to allegedly support socialism or even communism, because I think the

01:31:59

King James Version says they held all things in common. And so they capitalize on that term, holding all things in common.

01:32:06

I think two things have to be said. First and foremost, this was not a communist state.

01:32:12

The church was providing for its own needs. That is, this is dealing with the early church at its very, very early stage.

01:32:20

The church was rejected by the synagogue, and it was also rejected by the

01:32:26

Roman Empire. And so as a family, the apostles took it upon themselves to take care of their own.

01:32:34

And secondly, I think we need to be careful here because the Book of Acts is not telling us what should always be the case.

01:32:41

In other words, the Book of Acts gives us the history of the early church, but it's not a blueprint for the way the church should always be.

01:32:49

So, for example, we're also told in Acts 1 that they cast lots to see who would replace

01:32:56

Judas Iscariot. And they cast lots, and then they prayed. We're also told in Acts 2 that they frequented the temple and met daily and prayed in the temple.

01:33:07

We don't do that today at the church. And so I think we need to understand that the

01:33:13

Book of Acts is Scripture, but it's also giving us case -specific situations, situational ethics, if you will, situational cases where the church acted in a certain way.

01:33:28

And remember, we're still talking about a very Jewish Christian church in Acts 2. There are no

01:33:33

Gentiles in the church yet. That all changes with Acts 8 with the

01:33:38

Samaritans coming in, and then in Acts 10 with the Gentiles coming in. And it doesn't refer to the church functioning that way any longer, that is, selling everything and keeping all things in common, because now the church has gone beyond the environs of Jerusalem and has gone out into the

01:33:56

Greco -Roman world. So the danger here is, like so many others, trying to say, well, because this happened in the

01:34:04

Book of Acts, this must always be the case in church history. And that's simply not the case.

01:34:09

It doesn't logically follow. All right, we have to go to our final break right now. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, send it now or forever hold your peace, because we're going to be out of time before you know it.

01:34:20

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr.

01:34:25

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01:42:29

Spread the word about firstloveradio .org. Welcome back.

01:42:42

We are going to be with Dr. Tony Costa for about 15 more minutes.

01:42:47

We are discussing the Marxist connections to social injustice, social justice ideology.

01:42:54

Excuse the Freudian slip there. The Marxist connections to social justice ideology.

01:43:00

If you have a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N gmail .com.

01:43:08

Before we go to any more listener questions, Dr. Costa, I want to go back to the text we were citing in the book of Acts.

01:43:17

Chapter 2, verse 45 specifically. There are a couple of other things that set it apart, radically set it apart from socialism or communism.

01:43:28

First of all, these were voluntary acts of compassion, benevolence, and love.

01:43:35

They weren't enforced upon the members of the church.

01:43:41

Also, this was not an effort to make everyone on an exact same socioeconomic footing.

01:43:50

It wasn't like everybody in the congregation needs to make the exact amount of money.

01:43:57

Everything that is above a determined wage will be taken from that individual and distributed evenly to everyone else.

01:44:08

I would even say that, even in the 21st century, if a church actually has somebody in need, not somebody who just wants something, but somebody who is actually in need, they are a member of the church, and the church doesn't at this moment have the finances in savings or in their checking account to help this person in need,

01:44:36

I think that the church would be obliged in some way to have the sale of some possessions in order to make sure the needs of the member of the church were met.

01:44:49

So I don't even think that that's necessarily an outdated concept, but it's not socialism or communism.

01:44:57

No, no, you're absolutely right. Pastor Sully and I, we recently did the same with a sister who was in desperate need and providing for her food and some clothing and so forth.

01:45:11

But remember, the book of Acts is not saying that the apostles were setting to change the whole Greco -Roman world into a socialist state.

01:45:18

This is the church. This is the family of God, and they're caring for each other's needs. And again, they were alienated from the synagogue.

01:45:24

They were alienated, again, from the Greco -Roman world. That's why the Christians suffered profusely under Roman rule.

01:45:30

And we need to understand, once again, that this is an in -house thing. This is the church taking care of its own.

01:45:39

And so to extrapolate from the text, this ecclesiastical context where they're dealing with a church context, taking care of the people of God, to a secular context where this was indicative of the fact that Christians wanted to make the whole world at the time a socialist state.

01:45:58

Again, it doesn't logically follow. We need to read it in context. And as we move throughout the book of Acts, we begin to see that this practice eventually faded out in the early church.

01:46:10

Okay, we have, let's see here. We have

01:46:16

Bobby in Hartsdale, New York, and he asks,

01:46:21

I know that you disagree with the social justice warrior movement on many fronts, but how is it specifically jeopardizing the gospel message?

01:46:33

It's jeopardizing the gospel message because what social justice does is it emphasizes group identity over the individual identity.

01:46:42

And it also emphasizes grievances of the oppressed group against the oppressor.

01:46:49

And so what ends up happening, for example, take Black Lives Matter, for example, where they talk about the injustices that have been committed against African -Americans and so forth.

01:47:01

And they ask for reparations, for instance, that white Americans should be paying reparations for what was done during the slave trade and so forth and so on.

01:47:11

That has no place in the Church of Jesus Christ. The Church of Jesus Christ, Galatians 3 .28,

01:47:18

says that in Christ there is no Jew, no Gentile, no slave, no free man, no male, no female, but you are one in Christ.

01:47:26

Christ has redeemed us. Christ has broken down the walls of division. He's brought us together into Himself as one body.

01:47:35

And because we are one in Christ, there is no place for one group in the

01:47:41

Church to lay grievances at the feet of another. All has been forgiven. The past is forgiven.

01:47:47

All becomes new in Jesus Christ. And so to bring this type of thinking into the Church is to bring schism into the

01:47:55

Church and to divide the Church. We are brothers and sisters in Christ. It doesn't matter what color your skin is, what color your eyes are.

01:48:03

It doesn't matter whether you're a male or a female, whether you're a Jew or a Gentile. In Christ, we are one.

01:48:10

But in the social justice movement, in the critical race theory that we see in the Church, what we're now finding is now we're finding calls for white

01:48:18

Christians to apologize for what was done in the past and to acknowledge that they oppressed black

01:48:27

Christians and so forth. This has no place in the Church of Jesus Christ. Can we condemn what was done to African Americans?

01:48:34

Absolutely, just as much as we should condemn what was done to the Jews during the Holocaust and the pogroms in Russia and in Poland and so forth.

01:48:43

So at the end of the day, this type of rhetoric has no place in the Church of Jesus Christ.

01:48:50

Now, if you have a Christian who is old enough to have actually been a part of the—gleefully a part of supporting the

01:49:01

Jim Crow laws and who has actually personally oppressed or treated those of another color or treated anybody, for that matter, with hateful or harmful activity, that person does need to repent and to seek forgiveness.

01:49:25

But when you are demanding that a whole group of people, just because of what color their skin is, that they ask for forgiveness for something they didn't personally do, it's really absurd.

01:49:36

Well, absolutely. I mean, it's like asking the Jewish people today, you need to apologize for what the

01:49:44

Jewish Sanhedrin did in the first century when they put Jesus to death and condemned him to death and so forth.

01:49:51

I mean, it's a ludicrous concept. If you really think about it, Chris, even in the continent of Africa, even prior to the slave trade, there were blacks enslaving other blacks in Africa.

01:50:04

And are we to demand that if the descendants of those slave masters from Africa, if their descendants in the

01:50:09

United States can be traced, should we demand that they also pay reparations to other blacks who were enslaved and so forth?

01:50:18

I mean, this degree of oppressive groups, I mean, we could just keep going on who's the most oppressed.

01:50:25

It really is, at the end of the day, just a very, very ridiculous claim when you think about it.

01:50:32

We have Linda in Hilltop Lakes, Texas, who says, it is my understanding that justice and righteousness come from the same

01:50:42

Greek word. And therefore, can there be social justice without social righteousness?

01:50:49

It seems the more unrighteous a people become, the more intervention by the state is required to maintain order.

01:50:57

Is she correct on that? Well, she's correct in the sense that in the social justice movement, they want to give more power to the government.

01:51:05

And so it's less power to the people, more power to the government. So that way, the government has the power to redistribute wealth, and the government also has the power to punish you if you are against the social justice worldview.

01:51:21

For example, if you oppose same -sex marriage, you're going to be branded a homophobe, and you should have your rights stripped away from you.

01:51:28

Consider what happened to those Christian bakers, and how the case went all the way up to the

01:51:34

Supreme Court, and so forth. The other thing we need to bear in mind, Chris, is that whenever we put a certain adjective in front of the word justice, when we talk about justice, we put the word social in front of it.

01:51:47

It's like the word correctness. When you put the word political in front of it, it changes the meaning.

01:51:52

Because justice, of course, is what we all want in a society. We want justice. The opposite of justice is injustice.

01:52:01

And so when we say social justice, well, justice for which social group? Well, it so happens that what they mean by that is we want equality of outcome.

01:52:12

We want all of these marginalized groups in the United States, or whichever in the

01:52:17

Western world, we want these marginalized groups to have an equal share.

01:52:23

In other words, social justice means that the oppressed groups should be receiving the very same privileges or the same income that everyone else gets.

01:52:34

And so once again, it's back to the government taking from those who have more, that is, let's say, in a capitalist free society like that of the

01:52:43

West, you take from those who earn more and you tax them more so that you can take from them and redistribute that wealth to those who don't have.

01:52:53

So it basically comes down, Chris, to the difference between the haves and the have -nots. And those who have have a lot, and those who have not are the ones who really should be compensated.

01:53:04

And as you can see, this, of course, is exactly what happened in the

01:53:09

Soviet Union. It's what happened in China. It's what happened in Cuba. It's presently what's happening in Venezuela.

01:53:15

And just look at the disaster that is occurring right now in Venezuela with crime, with starvation, and the whole country is falling apart.

01:53:25

Socialism doesn't work. It's a total failure. Chris It was, Linda, correct in her understanding that justice and righteousness come from the same

01:53:34

Greek word? David Yes, she is correct, that the word dikaio means righteousness and justice.

01:53:41

So yes, she is correct. Chris Well, thank you, Linda. Keep listening to Iron Trip and Zion Radio in Hilltop Lakes, Texas, and spreading the word there and beyond.

01:53:50

Thank you so much for your faithful listening to our program, and also for your generous and benevolent financial support of this program.

01:54:00

Thank you and your husband, Glenn. We are indebted to you both, and we love you both.

01:54:06

Thank you so much. Um, I have come to believe that much of what is said in the social justice warrior movement, much of what is declared and demanded, and I would add to this within Marxism and socialism and communism, it involves three very serious sins on the part of those in those movements.

01:54:38

That is the sin of covetousness. They want wealth that does not belong to them.

01:54:45

It involves actual theft, not that they're breaking through people's windows and climbing into their houses and stealing things, but when they do get their way on occasion, that is actually stealing from other citizens in regards to the tax payments that are distributed in the fashion that they are demanding.

01:55:06

And also, it involves vengeance. There is a desire to seek vengeance, it seems, upon those that are more fortunate financially and in other socioeconomic ways.

01:55:19

There seems to be an attitude of vengeance. I don't care if you were personally involved in the oppression of my family and my people, you're going to pay anyway, just because of the fact that you happen to have a certain skin color or lack of color.

01:55:32

If you could comment on what I said. I couldn't say it better myself, Chris. That's exactly right.

01:55:38

You're right, it is covetousness. It's basically saying that you are entitled to the money of those who've worked hard and those who succeeded.

01:55:49

The difference, Chris, between the equality of outcome and the equality of opportunity is that the equality of outcome basically says everyone's the same at the end of the day, and so everyone should have equal wealth at the end of the day.

01:56:05

What this does is it stunts progress. It stunts educational pursuits and so forth.

01:56:11

Why bother learning and expanding your base of knowledge to become a lawyer, a doctor, whatever it may be, if at the end of the day we're all the same?

01:56:22

Well, equality of opportunity is what the West was built on. Equality of opportunity says, look, if you work hard and you apply yourself, you can make something of yourself.

01:56:32

If you work and earn a gainful employment and pay your taxes as a law -abiding citizen, you can save your money, you can go to college, you can go to university and make something of yourself.

01:56:46

That is available in the United States, in Canada, in the West, and so forth. And so this is the principle

01:56:52

God laid down, that by the sweat of your brow you shall eat your bread. In other words, the way that we make a living is we have to work.

01:57:00

We have to work with our hands. And what the social justice warrior movement is saying is, no, everyone's entitled, and so they're entitled to welfare, which is another vicious cycle that just perpetuates this poverty and this victimization of various groups.

01:57:16

It doesn't solve the problem. It's getting rid of the smoke, but the fire is still there. And so I think you're absolutely right,

01:57:24

Chris. Those three sins are entrenched in the social justice movement, and I see it as nothing but basically a stymied growth.

01:57:34

It retards the progress of a society. So as I've always said before, if you want to see what socialism looks like, look at Venezuela, look at Cuba, look at modern -day

01:57:44

China. And it's interesting that China, even though it's communist, has adopted the capitalist free market methodology, and that's why they're so economically successful.

01:57:53

But there's no freedom of speech, there's no freedom of assembly, there's no freedom of religion. And so at the end of the day, it's really a rule of the mob against those who rightfully earned their income.

01:58:09

Look at South Africa, Chris, where you have these white farmers being murdered, and there's calls for them to take their land and so forth.

01:58:18

That is precisely what happened in Russia under Lenin and Stalin and Mao and China, precisely the same thing.

01:58:26

And so it is a pernicious movement that cloaks itself in the guise of caring for their neighbor and caring for the other person.

01:58:34

It's nothing of the sort. Well, ladies and gentlemen, spread the word to all of your pastors and to men in leadership that Dr.

01:58:45

Tony Costa, God willing, is going to be our speaker once again at the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Pastors Luncheon in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

01:58:53

We are working on the date of December 27th, which is a

01:58:59

Thursday. It's not etched in stone yet. But please at least mark it on your calendar with pencil right now and tell your pastors, your deacons, and other men in leadership that all are invited as long as they register for this free

01:59:16

Pastors Luncheon. And we are looking forward to this very much, having

01:59:21

Tony Costa back here in this area. I want you to remember that the website for Toronto Baptist Seminary is tbs .edu,

01:59:29

tbs .edu, and also the website for Oakwood Wesleyan Church in Toronto, Canada is oakwoodwesleyan .org,

01:59:38

oakwoodwesleyan .org. Thank you so much, Dr. Costa. We look forward to your return, not only soon, but very frequently to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:59:47

Always a pleasure, Chris. Thank you. And I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater