Social Justice & the Gospel with Dr. James White

Non-rockabodas must stop. I don't want to rock the boat. I want to sink it.

Are you gonna bark all day little doggie? Or are you gonna bite?

We're being delusional. Yeah, I love you Jess.

Delusional? Delusional is okay in your world view. I'm an animal. You don't chastise chickens for being delusional. You don't chastise pigs for being delusional. So you calling me delusional using your world view is perfectly okay.

It doesn't really hurt. She hung up on me!

What? What?

What?

Faithful Men, the Great Commission, and Truth-Telling

Desperate times call for faithful men and not for careful men. The careful men come later and write the biographies of the faithful men, lauding them for their courage. Go into all the world and make disciples.

Not go into the world and make buddies. Not to make brosives. Right. Don't go into the world and make homies. Right. Disciples.

I got a bit of a jiggle neck.

Ha ha ha!

That's a joke, pastor.

When we have the real message of truth, we cannot let somebody say they're speaking truth when they're not.

Introduction: Social Justice, the Gospel, and a Special Guest

What's up, guys? Welcome back to the Gospel Heard Around the World. This is Apologia Radio. I'm Jeff. They call me the Ninja. You guys can get more at ApologiaStudios .com. That's A-P-O-L-O-G-I-A-Studios .com.

We're back with another episode. Exciting episode today. I'm super thrilled to do this episode.

I can tell.

I am very, very excited because of the topic. I think it's an important topic. Discussion is necessary. Needs to be heard. And we have a very special guest in the studio today. We're going to tell you a little bit more about that, but first I'll introduce over here Luke the Bear.

What up?

And that's Joy the Girl.

Hello.

And she is holding another human being in her right now. Make sure you say a prayer for her.

She's holding it.

Holding it.

And growing it.

And growing it. That's right. And over here we have Dr. James White, which we don't have an official pet name for Dr. White yet. And that's usually your job.

Yeah.

To come up with that.

It's going to take a while.

It might take a while. Dr. James White.

We're trying, yeah.

Who is, so welcome.

Good to be here.

Who is also Pastor James. We're trying to get used to that.

That's the weird, yeah.

That's the weird thing for us. Yes. Very long relationship.

Not feeling it yet.

Yeah. Two decades. It's always been Dr. James White. When I'm teaching and mentioning things, referencing or telling people, it's always Dr. James White. And now, if you haven't heard yet, it is official.

Dr. James White has been a member of Apologia Church. And now he has officially joined the eldership of Apologia Church and is now one of the elders at Apologia Church. And we'll be doing the official installation on, I don't even know where I'm at.

June 2nd.

June what?

June 2nd.

June 2nd.

June 2nd is the official installation. But he's Pastor James. So welcome. Maybe that'll just be it. Pastor James.

PJ.

The Elder Elder.

The Elderly Elder.

The Elder Elder.

Elderly Elder.

Elderly Elder.

And welcome that old guy, Dr. White.

Just the old guy.

You can get away with that.

I can.

You can get away with that.

Yes.

Okay.

So welcome, welcome.

What's up?

The Deacons were thinking about Punkle. But I was like, I'm not sure if that would allow that.

Punkle James.

Punkle James.

Yeah.

That's my vote right now.

That can end up working against us in context where we need a little more respect.

Yeah. Great.

During cross-examination, Punkle James, it's your turn. All right, guys. So welcome to our live audience. Make sure you guys share this across your social media platforms. Very important discussion we're going to have today.

Why Social Justice Needs a Biblical Definition

We are going to talk about the issue of social justice. The gospel, justice, the word of God, and justice. The issue of justice. Hot topic today. Very important topic today. And we have to have a consistent answer as Christians.

An answer that's consistent with the biblical worldview, the Christian message. Specifically the gospel itself. This issue of justice. I'll just start here and let you guys jump in. From my perspective, it's a tough moment because—.

Sorry about all that stuff happening on my computer here. It's a tough issue before us because God does care about righteousness. He does care about justice. He's spoken and given his own character. He's given us the reference point in terms of how we're to view the issues of justice.

God is the one who gives us the foundation to be concerned with the issue of justice in the first place. What are all these humanists, what are all these atheists doing talking about justice when their worldview can't make sense of the call to justice and righteousness in a society?

When you tell people that they are the random results of processes that didn't have them in mind and they're just bags of stuff floating through a purposeless cosmos, what's the point of talking about justice?

Who cares about justice? What's with all these people that don't hold a biblical worldview being concerned with justice? They have to adopt Christian standards of a concern for justice and human value and dignity and equality.

They adopt those standards, drag them over into their worldview, and then use them against the Christian worldview. But there's always a distortion and perversion before it even comes back. And so this is an important issue because we're facing something— and I've said this to Pastor James many times in the past.

When I was watching The Dividing Line back in 2002, 2003, and 2004, I think, somewhere in there, you started to talk about a folder you were keeping on your computer. You were just talking about all the degradation happening in society around us.

You were just keeping a file of all the new stuff and talking about how this rapid pace that we're going, that we're losing so much ground, and this stuff's coming so fast. And I've said to you so many times, I didn't take you seriously.

Then you said, I don't know if I took myself seriously. But here we are, 2019, and oh my goodness, who would have thought back then we'd have gay mirage, we'd have all the gender confusion that is just now part of pop culture.

If you don't accept it, you're in trouble. If you don't accept it, you're the bad guy. We even have an issue—you know, I'll just toss it out there. We don't have to talk a lot about it. But in terms of—as much as I see Steven Anderson as a dangerous man, as much as he's dangerous theologically, what happened to him this past week was a horrific and scary, terrifying thing.

For Bank of America to shut down his bank accounts, it's a scary thing.

We'll send you a cashier's check later.

We'll send you a cashier's check. We're going to shut your accounts down with our business. And what's it surrounding? It's not surrounding what I'm concerned about with his view of man and sin and God's gracious gift of salvation and his power to save and God's sovereignty.

They're not concerned with Calvinism. Like Bank of America, isn't it? Like, you don't hold to the five points, and so you're losing your account, young man. They're doing it because of other things and the culture's complaining.

And that's a dangerous thing. We're in a spot now where we're in trouble. We're facing rough days ahead, I think, if we don't, as a church, be a solid witness and light and trust in God and his grace and mercy in our culture to open hearts to the truth.

The issue of social justice. Joy's going to help us a lot today with this, so I'm glad you're here, Joy. This issue today, we talk about intersectionality and all the things that are part of pop culture and becoming definitional for us.

So I'll pass it off to you guys. That's the introduction to our discussion today. Very important. Social justice and the gospel. That's what we're doing.

Critical Theory, Intersectionality, and the Rewriting of Meaning

I brought up the issue because of the fact that, especially over the past number of months since I've been here and now, as of last Sunday, we announced that we get to refer to each other as pastors, which is sort of an odd thing, how we exactly do that.

But I am 16 years older.

That's right.

So that's why you call me the elderly.

Yes.

But we are obviously involved. What was it, two weeks ago that we went to the Phoenix City Council?

City Council, yeah.

And that was the first time I had spoken, and I spoke on the issue of what American forces had done in a situation once they liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp and how we made people from Weimar march through and see what had been done right under their noses.

And one of the things I said was we would say that what they did was a just act.

Yeah.

Okay, but how do you define that? And so we're talking about justice for pre-born children. We're talking about where people would say, and in fact, I've had a number of people say, you should never, ever, ever preach another pro-life sermon unless you are involved in the promotion of social justice.

The problem is we never get a definition of it.

Mm-hmm.

And what's happening is, and what's happened to me, and I was mentioning this with the elders over lunch, I said, a little over a year ago, I'm texting Summer going, what does this word mean? Right. And what is that about?

And because all of a sudden, the door got kicked in last spring in the church. And here's the problem. What came running through uses our lexicon, but has redefined the terminology based upon critical theory.

Yeah.

And the vast majority of, certainly of my generation is clueless. We're sitting here and we see Ekamini Uwan at the Sparrow Conference.

Right.

Are you guys going to do anything on that?

Yeah.

I don't know.

I would highly recommend it. I haven't talked to Summer about it, but.

I feel like maybe we did have something planned.

Yeah, that would be a really good idea because it's a woman's conference. It's about peacemaking.

Right.

And this woman is sitting there, a graduate, master's divinity graduate from Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia.

That's what blew my mind.

Yeah.

Is sitting there talking about the wickedness of whiteness.

Right.

And that it's something you need to repent of. Now, people in my society, in my age group are sitting here going, how do I repent of whiteness? I don't get it. So there's obviously something more going on here.

And younger people who have already been in the university classrooms and things like that, they've already been getting the foundational stuff like this. And the problem is they're accepting what they've been taught within the university framework.

And then when they come to the church, they start using that as a filter through which to read the scriptures.

Right.

And so you generally have older people doing the proclamation from the front that don't understand what those filters are.

Yeah.

And then the younger people, it's creating a massive divide that is going to result in a huge division in the church. And it already is resulting in a huge division, but much more so as the years go on.

I've talked with Reformed men older than me, and they're like, this isn't going to affect us. And I'm like, you're not going to be here forever. Someone's going to end up taking your pulpit someday, and they're being trained in seminaries that are already buying into all of this stuff.

The speed with which this has come into our seminaries is astounding. Now, don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong. There are a bunch of people in our seminaries that see the danger, but they're in a situation where they can't speak out because it's the leadership that has already been deeply impacted.

And I could go into some of the reasons for that. Follow the money.

Right, right.

Donations have been made from big, big, big outside the United States sources that has led to all this. It's not that it happened so fast. It's just that we noticed that it happened so fast. This has been being planned for a long time.

I know, I sound like a conspiracy theorist.

You sound like a conspiracy theorist. I know exactly what you're talking about, and it's the truth.

Did you say from Big Soros?

That's one of them, but there are others. But there are others. And so there's been donations given to set up professorships and all the rest of this stuff. And if you've got the big box seminaries that have huge budgets, whether you've got students walking in there or not, you need that external money.

So that stuff's going on. But the point is, I had never heard, I think it was Summer that explained to me what intersectionality was. I didn't know what it was.

Yeah.

I mean, this was not something that was taught in seminary when I was in seminary.

Nope, nope.

And until you get a grasp on what critical theory is, not just critical race theory, there's critical gender theory and family theory. And you can put critical, put almost anything in between it, and put theory at the end.

And you'll have somebody who's already written a book on it in some gender studies program someplace.

Yeah.

Once you understand what critical theory is, then you can hear Ekamini Uwan, who was the woman who said, you need to repent of your whiteness. And you can at least sit back and go, okay, the best interpretation I can give of a Westminster seminary graduate saying you need to repent of your whiteness.

Because I don't remember that from any of the apostles. I don't remember anything of that that can even come close from any of the apostles.

Okay? So...

Did you think they knew a lot of white people?

No, I was just thinking that.

Well, that's just it.

Yeah, there wasn't any white people.

That's just it. See, in those days, in those... See, when we talk about whiteness now, in this context, the best interpretation is that you're talking about power.

Right.

Structural power and oppression.

Mm-hmm.

So white privilege in those days would have been Roman privilege.

Right.

Exactly.

So it wouldn't have been connected to a particular skin color. It would have been a social status.

But whiteness just means you were the most power-holding, powerful, authoritative race that there was.

Which is why this is so confusing to people outside the United States or Western culture.

Right.

When we export this to South Africa or some place like that, it is poison.

Oh, yeah.

It is absolute poison. What we're hearing, what we're hearing from Ekemeni Awan, even though she's Nigerian or whatever the tribe she actually identified with...

Well, that's our colonial term now, so...

That's the colonial tag, right.

Right.

She can't... Yeah, that got weird.

What we're hearing from her is a very Americanized version of these things. It does not have global application because you can't take this to China.

Right.

White privilege in China is Chinese privilege. Really, all white privileges is majority privilege. So if you have a majority in a country, they're going to design things for their benefit. And so if you come into that situation, if I, as a white man, try to go live in Zaire, I'm going to be in the minority and I'm going to be outside of that realm of quote-unquote privilege.

So the problem... Here's where the problem is. They don't remain consistent with that definition because when they then speak to the black experience, it becomes very much something that flows from their ethnic experience.

Right.

So if on the one hand you say whiteness, it doesn't really have to do with your skin color, but then you turn around and say the antidote for that has something to do with skin color, how do you hold these things together?

There's a conflict there.

You can't make heads or tails out of it. So the one thing that's really helped me to understand all of this is to understand that in critical theory, the categories that you and I function on of truth and error, logic, factuality and history, representing the other side accurately, all that comes and in fact is being identified as colonial or an expression of white privilege and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

Within critical theory, since everything is defined on the basis of power structures, oppressor, oppressed, when you define morality, and this is where we get into issues regarding abortion and everything else, when you define morality, morality is the destruction of oppression.

Right.

That is the sunum bonum, that's the highest good, is you must destroy oppression. Now be careful because you and I automatically defined oppression in a biblical context.

Yes.

We're not talking about that. This is where when you bring this into the church, it creates such massive confusion and is creating massive confusion all across the United States right now.

Right.

It's causing tremendous division even amongst Reformed churches. I never thought it could happen because I thought sola scriptura would keep this from happening. I was silly.

Yeah, how does it make its way in when people hold to that principle?

It just went through the back door.

And so fast.

And so fast that the rest was simply going,.

What happened?

Lightning speed right now.

Yeah, then we're all looking really stupid. So when you ask what oppression is, oppression is difference in socioeconomic status. So I don't have to oppress you. I don't have to be forcing you to do something you don't want to do.

But if I have things you don't have, then I'm oppressing you simply by my being a part of a different group than you are. See, you must understand, critical theory cannot build anything up. It can only tear down.

That's why I've heard Joy and Summer talk about when they talk about intersectionality that if you just follow it long enough, you're going to end up alone.

Right.

It just divides, divides, divides, divides, divides. You think you've gotten down to this really neat group and then you discover that you're actually a little more oppressed than somebody else. So now you've got to divide again.

That's what intersectionality does and that's a function of critical theory. It breaks everything down and it destroys. Having any common basis upon which you can have, you start building something back up.

You've got to have a foundation to build a building.

Right.

But since all this can do is break down and can't build anything, we're seeing the destructive impact that it has upon society.

So Joy, can you help us with this? Help us. We're using words like intersectionality and critical theory. These are now important definitional terms and they're being used to build a new society, a new world, a new way to see the world.

And I would imagine that much of our live audience right now and those thousands of you guys who are going to listen to this later, much of you feel like probably us before we started hearing you talk about it definitionally, like what exactly does that mean?

Is it very important to understand it? And it is.

Once you understand it, you see it everywhere.

All over the place.

I'm going to toss it over to you, but in terms of what I was even just seeing.

This morning,.

I got out of bed, said hello to my wife and got something to eat. I just pulled up my phone to make sure no emergencies are going on, pastoral emergencies. I looked at the feed and I start seeing the articles come up from Vice and all the popular mega channels that are pumping stuff into the minds of our youth and just young people in college age and the pop culture stuff.

And these are the important,.

Listen to us.

And when you understand this, it's every article you see from like say Vice or Motherboard, you're like, and there it is. It's almost like they sit in a board meeting and they go, now does this cross the T's and dot the I's of the worldview we are trying to propagate?

Make sure that you are using the language in this article. Make sure that you are making sure you're instructing people that this is how we're supposed to think about these things. This is what is right.

And you see it. You're right everywhere. So help us with that because people are going to come across this. If you're concerned with impacting the world with the truth of the gospel, you're going to face this in the days ahead.

You're going to see it in media, especially in the next election. Goodness gracious. It is going to be definitional in so many different ways. So Joy, help us understand intersectionality and all the rest.

Well, so I think the, I think critical theory and intersectionality, they like defining them together definitely helps you sort of understand. So when I'm talking about what intersectionality is, keep in mind what Pastor James, I was going to call you Dr. White, said.

Or you can just call me Summer's dad.

Or Summer's dad.

Yeah.

But only I get to call him that. Well, so intersectionality was a term, an idea that was coined basically by the third wave of feminists who came out of the second wave and what they saw was obviously lots of pro-female ideology, lots of legislation that was raising the rights of women and making them more equal to men.

But then you had portions of women, basically people, women who were not white and women who were not straight that felt like feminism didn't represent them at all. And so Kimberly Crenshaw specifically, she was an author in the kind of, I mean mainly I guess she's known for the third wave, but she was around during the second wave.

And so she had all the same sort of idea about equality as the women in the second wave, but she also had this idea that feminism should be representing all the groups in her that were oppressed. So she was oppressed.

She was the minority, not just because she was a female, but we also needed to address the fact that she was black and we also needed to address the fact that if there were women out there that were lesbians, they weren't being like justly represented by this vast white feminism.

So she coined the term intersectionality and basically like a good way to think of it is is intersections, even if you want to consider like driving down the road, an intersection and consider that basically the more intersections you go through.

So if you're on the corner of female street, then you pass through that and then you pass through African-American Avenue and then you can pass through Raised in Poverty Boulevard. And so basically the more intersections that you go through, the more nuanced your representation should be, I suppose.

And so I think intersectionality is actually it's interesting because I think that really represents the breakdown of critical theory quite a bit more than just like defining critical theory because that's where you really see like the only way that I don't know like you basically you just end up having a bunch of people defining themselves by all these intersections that they can go through.

But the thing is, is that well, generally there's an assumption you were talking about with critical theory. The assumption is, is that if you're white, you have these certain things, but chances are according to intersectionality, you'd pass through, you may be white and you may pass through other intersections.

So this is where you see a lot of for me, I think this is where you get into a lot of the inconsistency because the assumption is that if you're white, that you're like, you're a part of the oppressed, oppression group.

But really, realistically, according to so, for example, like I passed through an intersection that you guys don't because I'm female. But like what if you guys pass through an intersection that I don't, which is you grew up poor or your parents, like my parents were divorced, but maybe your parents stayed together.

And so it just like it breaks down and it breaks down until like he was saying, you're alone. You've passed through a million intersections and you're alone.

Like no group, right? Cannot produce a harmonious group. And that's why that's why a lot of feminists are getting upset with transgenderism,.

Right?

Because transgenderism fundamentally undercuts everything. The feminists were trying to fight for. If there is no such thing as the feminine, if you can't even define it anymore.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, look at look at Martina Navratilova. In my age, she was the very icon of rebellion,.

You know,.

The lesbian tennis player, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now she's on the outs because she dares to realize, hey, wait a minute. If we're taking this too far, this is going to result in a complete destruction of of women's sports,.

Right?

It's not fair to have a guy playing a gal,.

Right?

It's just not. It's just not right. And so she's now on the outs. It just divides, divides, divides, divides, divides. And there is no foundation for bringing it together because of the issue of oppressor versus the oppressed.

So if you're a white,.

Cisgendered,.

And I even had to figure what that was, but white, cisgendered, male, American, then you have all this privilege. And that means by your breathing air, you are an oppressor, right? You're guilty of oppression.

And that's the whiteness that you have to repent of. So repentance doesn't mean what we think it means. Oppression doesn't mean what we think it means. None of these words mean what we define them as meaning coming out of the page of Scripture.

And so when this comes into the church and starts adopting that language, and now you have a Christian minister, or in this case, a woman with a master's degree from Westminster Seminary sitting up there and presenting this, the confusion is amazing.

And it's extremely dangerous. And it destroys what should bring us together because it's designed societally is to break society down so that eventually it collapses and can be remade into something new.

That sounds familiar.

Which sounds very, very familiar. But what happens when you bring that into the church?

Yeah.

Who's going to remake the church?

Yeah.

By what standard?

Exactly. And so this is what we're really fighting now is that in our very seminaries, and we're talking Dallas. We're talking Westminster. We're talking even some of the RTS campuses. We're talking everywhere.

The Church, the Table, and One Righteousness in Christ

Yeah.

Well, let me read you this quote. Somebody's live in the feed right here. A couple hundred listening right now.

It says,.

Timothy says, Amen, Dr. White. Thank you for clarifying this dangerous leaven. In my grad program, we're studying this to such an extent it's coming out of my ears, eyes, and nose.

Oh, yeah.

Yep.

And that's why when I talk to older Reformed men, they go, This isn't going to impact us.

I'm going,.

Someone's going to stand in your pulpit someday. You're not going to live forever.

Right.

And this is what is being presented. And we have not prepared people for it. We don't even know what the lines are right now. We are in such a transitionary period here that we don't even know who's on what side.

And if you dare push back, then you're accused of divisiveness. And we're all talking about the divisiveness of this. That's what critical theory does.

It divides.

So the other side is saying, Well, if you just would come along with us, then everything would be fine. Well, we can't. And that's why in my naivete, I mean, my first major comment on this in the current session was after the MLK 50 thing just a little over a year ago.

And silly me, what did I do? I went to scripture. Now scripture doesn't talk about critical theory. So you have to ask a more basic question. And that is, how did the apostles deal with the pressures that face them?

Or did they, did pressures face them that could be made even somewhat similar to what we're facing in our society today? And the fact is, you look at the early church, and there were all sorts of possible divisions in the early church based upon forms of ethnicity.

Oh, yeah.

The Romans were forcing all sorts of people to peaceably live with one another, lest the Roman come and cut your head off, who hated each other. And so one of the things that I went to was in Colossians 3, when Paul's talking about this renewal in which there is no, and then he goes through all these possible divisors, male and female and Jew and Greek, and then he uses Scythians and barbarians.

Those are ethnic designators. Barbarians were anybody outside the borders of the Roman Empire. The Scythians, this is interesting, were just northeast, looking at a map there, northeast of where Colossae was.

And these were warrior people. And so if you can imagine what it was like in Colossae, very easy to see how when the church gathered at the table, there would be people who in their parents' generation may have had what we would call war crimes or genocide or horrible things took place.

This is powerful, yeah.

Because these Scythians came in and there was war going on, and the Romans finally come in and say, stop all that. But the point is, there would be strong ethnic tribal divisions that exist within the church.