Responding to Joe Carter on Social Justice

AD Robles

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Well, all right, I woke up this morning and I was inspired to do a response to this

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Joe Carter article about what Christians should know about social justice. And I had seen this article before,

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I wasn't going to do a response to it, but I figured I would because this is Gospel Coalition's attempt to sort of preempt the

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John MacArthur stuff and all the stuff that is forthcoming regarding the topic of social justice, all the pushback.

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And I'll start this by saying that Joe Carter in general is a pretty good resource. You know, if you, you know,

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I've been very critical of the Gospel Coalition and I will continue to be so because I believe it is a political operative.

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I believe it's a political propaganda machine in a lot of ways. There's still a lot of good stuff on the

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Gospel Coalition, but clearly it is being used by political operatives. Anyway, and this is not like tinfoil hat stuff.

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I don't mean that like in a secret kind of way. It's very obvious what's happening. But anyway, so Joe Carter, he's good if there's a topic that's in the news or something like that and you're not really that interested in the topic.

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He'll put out these things where it's like five things you need to know about so -and -so or whatever. And, you know, usually he does a pretty good job of explaining things.

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But I would recommend though, if it's a topic that you are very interested in, that you don't rely on Joe Carter because you're not going to get a full orbed picture and he's not intending to do that.

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He's just giving you some basic summaries. Like, for example, he did something about the alt -right and I read it and it was pretty helpful.

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But I was actually very interested in the alt -right. So I actually just started watching their videos. I watched a lot of Richard Spencer presentations.

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I watched Red Ice TV for a while. And so obviously there are things that Joe Carter has to leave out because he's just writing a simple article.

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So I would recommend it. Don't rely on Joe Carter if it's a topic you're very interested in. If social justice is a topic you're interested in, don't rely on this article.

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But in general, he's pretty good. Okay. All that to say, this article, what Christians should know about social justice.

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I think it's actually a decent article. He starts off explaining what social justice is, where the term originated, what exactly it is, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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And he also talks about biblical justice as well. And he quotes Tim Keller about what justice means according to the

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Old Testament language. How does social justice relate to biblical justice?

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Again, he quotes Tim Keller. I'm not going to go into this too deep in depth because it's just, I don't know, it's just not really worth my time,

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I don't think. But anyway, so again, it's pretty good in general. But what

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I wanted to engage with is sort of this idea here, how Christians should engage with social justice.

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And I actually like the way he starts here. He says, whether we use the term or not,

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Christians are engaged in social justice when we advocate for issues such as abortion, racial reconciliation, religious liberty, and sex trafficking.

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We engage in social justice whenever we seek moral reform of our society in a way that ensures every person is treated with dignity and given their due.

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And in a way, I kind of agree with Joe Carter here because a lot of people would say, well, the gospel is not about reforming culture.

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But at the same time, they're anti -abortion and they're anti -abortion because they believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ and the law of God.

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And I always thought that that was a little bit inconsistent. He's right. If you're advocating for anti -abortion to make abortion illegal and criminalize it, if you're against sex trafficking, you're against these kinds of things because the scriptures demand it.

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Or if you're for the death penalty, for example, capital punishment, like I am, the scriptures demand that I am for that.

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And if you're a Christian, you're against the death penalty. You're wrong, first of all, and I'd love to debate you on that. But the point is, though, that he's right about this.

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I wouldn't say we're engaged in social justice. We'll talk about that in a minute, but we are engaged in letting the gospel apply to the area of justice.

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There's no question about that. And so when Christians say that the

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Bible is not about social justice, I think most often they're not talking about the stuff that's biblical.

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So abortion, sex trafficking, the death penalty, things like that. What they're actually talking about is sort of the skewed way that we view justice.

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And he actually, what Joe Carter does here, I think is very not helpful.

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I'll say that just to be charitable, but he conflates so many things here. Abortion, very clearly the

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Bible is against murder. Sex trafficking, very clearly the

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Bible is against kidnapping women and putting them into sex slavery. Very clearly, we could go to the

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Bible and easily see where kidnapping is punishable by death, where murder is punishable by death.

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But then he includes religious liberty and racial reconciliation here. And this is very, very unhelpful because these are not the same at all.

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Because if you talk about racial reconciliation, well, what verse do you go to to show an example of racial reconciliation and how that's a matter of biblical justice?

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Now, partiality is a sin, right? Partiality is a sin before God, there's no question about that.

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But is there a civil penalty for partiality in the scripture that we can draw from, that we can say, okay, the general equity of this law of God means that today we have to criminalize whatever it is?

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I don't think so. These things are not the same, Joe Carter. And so for you to conflate these is very confusing.

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And I think does a disservice to your readers. Religious liberty is another one of those things. I mean, where do you go to in the scripture to say, well, we should actually help

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Muslims be able to build mosques in the United States. Because that was something that Russell Moore came out and very much advocated.

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And I think that's insane for a Christian to say, well, you know, we need to make sure that our country is able for every pagan deity to be worshipped freely.

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I don't think you can find a law in the scripture that says, okay, we'll apply that general equity of that law today.

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And that means we should support mosques being built by according to law. So by conflating all of this stuff,

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Joe Carter confuses the issue here because social justice is not the same as biblical justice anymore.

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Maybe it used to be, and Joe makes a pretty good case for that up here, that it used to be used synonymously or something like that.

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But it's not anymore. And Joe, actually, unfortunately, Joe Carter is a very good example of that.

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He's using these terms in ways that are inappropriate and confusing. Then he says, what is a social justice warrior?

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Over the past five years, the term social justice warrior, SJW, has become a pejorative term for an individual who promotes social justice from a socially progressive perspective, especially one rooted in identity politics.

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He's right about that. That is how it is a pejorative, and it was used in that way. And then he says, more recently, the term has been used in a broader sense to refer to anyone, whether liberal, libertarian, or conservative, who advocates for social justice, especially on the issues of racial reconciliation.

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I'm not sure if that's actually true. It seems like kind of an anecdotal point. But the point is, though, that if you are advocating for things like social engineering or racial reconciliation or things like that, and these things are not defined by scripture, they're instead defined by socialistic -type ideologies, it doesn't matter whether you consider yourself a conservative, a libertarian, or a liberal.

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The reality is that that idea is very progressive. And so you're not being called a social justice warrior because you're a libertarian.

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You're being called a social justice warrior because you are advocating a very progressive idea that's not in the Bible. And so is this a pejorative?

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Well, I certainly do use it as a pejorative. I mean it to be a way to mark out people who

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I think have bad ideas, very bad ideas. And so people don't like when you're called a social justice warrior.

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If I was for social justice, and I was advocating for it aggressively, and somebody called me a social justice warrior,

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I wouldn't care. One time, somebody called me a Marxist hunter. And I was like, well, that's stupid.

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But it didn't bother me that much. So I don't know. It just seems kind of petty. So I do use that word.

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I know people don't like it. But sorry, you can't control my language. Anyway, shouldn't conservative

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Christians abandon the term social justice? This is the point of this article. The last line, he says, social justice as a biblical concept is not a term we should abandon without a fight.

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To paraphrase Colson, we should not shrink from the term or allow the secular world to distort its biblical meaning. Now this is the whole point of this article.

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This is the thrust of it. Joe Carter wants to still use the term social justice. I disagree fundamentally.

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And the reason why is because he says we shouldn't abandon it without a fight. Well, the fight is already over. They have won the fight.

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The people who misuse this term have already won the fight. Social justice means something very specific in our time.

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And it doesn't mean biblical justice. You cannot show me anyone who uses the term social justice to mean something that is fundamentally biblical.

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And Joe Carter, you actually are part of this. By conflating these things, you say, you talk about, uh, let me find this here.

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You talk about abortion, racial reconciliation, religious liberty, and sex trafficking. These are, you are conflating the correct use of the term and the incorrect use of the term.

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And so here's the thing. This is my challenge to the gospel coalition council and to everyone who's coming from this perspective.

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If you want to use that term social justice in a way that means biblical justice, then you're going to have to clean house and start separating these ideas that are biblical and these ideas that just come from progressive ideology.

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I'll start using the term if you can somehow, uh, in your own house, clean up shop and start separating these things that are, that need to be separated.

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Abortion is not the same thing. The crime of murder is not the same thing as racial reconciliation. That's not the same thing at all.

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And so, um, so, so the reason I won't use the term and I suggest nobody use it is because it's very confusing and you're conflating things that aren't all biblical.

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You're doing this in this very article, Joe Carter, and lots of people from your perspective are doing this. And so when you talk about income, when

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David Platt talks about income inequalities as an injustice, well, I know the scripture talks about income inequalities in a way that does not mean that they're an injustice.

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Jesus himself talks about wealth, uh, wealth and income inequalities in a way that he says that they're perfectly just to have those inequalities.

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It's perfectly just. Uh, so when you are, uh, saying things are unjust, that the scripture does not call unjust, you're adding to the scripture.

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And so we're not, we will not use the term biblical justice or social justice to describe those things. I think the term has already been abandoned by people who hold to biblical principles.

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Uh, and that's, and that's totally fine. And so if you want to use this term, you're going to have to clean shop and show us how racial reconciliation, how income inequalities, how, uh, religious liberty are fundamentally foundationally, uh, derived from biblical law, applying the general equity of God's law to today.

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And that's how you come up with it. Uh, anyway, I hope this was helpful. God bless. One more thing, uh, on racial reconciliation yesterday,

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I was talking to a guy on Twitter and he was telling me what he thinks racial reconciliation is. And I was talking about regular reconciliation, you know, like if somebody sins against you and you go to that person and you tell them about the sin that they've done against you and hopefully you're reconciled there and then it's squashed, it's over.

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Uh, that's how you become reconciled to someone. If, if, if someone sins against you, you go to them. If they don't listen, you bring somebody else.

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If they don't listen, you go to the elders and the whole goal is to be reconciled and that, that, that whatever's between you is squashed.

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And so I said, okay, well with racial reconciliation, how does it work? And he didn't answer. And I said, so,

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I mean, let's say 51 % of people of white people said, Hey, sorry for my racism. Would that be enough?

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Would racial reconciliation be accomplished? And he didn't answer. Uh, and the reason he didn't answer is because there is no answer.

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There's no way to be actually, racial reconciliation is, is a goal that can never be accomplished because no matter what, there's always going to be one person that's going to not,

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I don't know, see white privilege for what it is. Whatever racial reconciliation is, I never get a real good definition for it.

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But it's a never ending gripe. It's a never ending conflict. When there's real reconciliation, biblical reconciliation between two people, it's squashed and it's over.