Session 2: The Social Justice Religion and Standpoint Epistemology

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October 14, 2020

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00:00: The important thing to remember from the last session is that what Rousseau, and that's the first thinker that I can really point to that had these elements, what
00:09: Rousseau started, which is that we need to have an egalitarian utopia and we need to destroy or disassemble somehow the structures in society that keep us from getting there and then implement a central authority that's going to maintain, create and maintain by force this utopia.
00:28: Those three elements have survived the last 300 years and those are what ultimately are still motivating the modern social justice movement.
00:38: It's gotten more complicated and that's the point that I wanted to make in the last presentation was that because of Marxism and cultural
00:47: Marxism and post -modernism, these ideas have worked themselves into all kinds of areas to the point now that you can't hardly look at someone without someone thinking that it's political, that there's some kind of power relationship involved, that there's domination, it really reduces man.
01:06: It's not a Christian anthropology, it reduces man down to power relationships and so you lose the individual in that.
01:14: You don't look at people as individuals, you look at them as part of social groups that are either oppressed or oppressors or a combination and that's why it's frustrating for some.
01:25: Obviously I have mostly British and Scottish and German and European, Northern European genetics, so if someone looks at me and they can say that I am the axis of evil in this system because of the color of my skin and the genetic heritage, it doesn't matter that I can go back and I can point you to places where my
01:46: Puritan ancestors were persecuted and killed for their faith. My Scottish ancestors would have been persecuted for their beliefs.
01:54: We have family that came here on the Mayflower, family that came as indentured servants, family even in the
02:01: Civil War, I have family on both sides, but some of those in the South would have been burned out of their homes and they never owned slaves, they were victims in a sense,
02:09: I could try to claim that, but it doesn't matter because the categories are determined by sociologists, they're not determined by minorities, they're not determined by God, they're determined by elite sociologists who have said that these are the categories that are oppressed, these are the categories that are oppressors.
02:30: And now what's happened today is we've imported it into Christianity, that whole ideology. So I want to show you in this session what that looks like.
02:39: How in the world do we get Marxism, post -modernism, egalitarianism that we can now call social justice theory, how in the world does this import itself into Christianity?
02:52: How does it attach itself? These two things should be the most contradictory things in the world, there's nothing in common, but yet it's happening, and it's happened before.
03:01: So we're going to talk about the history, we're going to talk about what happens and how to respond to it. I'm going to read for you
03:07: John 10 .10. Jesus taught, the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy, I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
03:16: The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. And I'd like to suggest that's exactly what social justice theory does today.
03:23: And we're seeing it play out on our streets, stealing, killing, destroying. That's what the thief comes to do, and it's not happening just in our streets, the sad part is it's starting to happen, that the narrative that leads to this is starting to take root in our churches.
03:39: And I'm going to give you some examples of that. This is not something that comes from Jesus. That's the last place we should look for that, in fact, it's antithetical to Jesus Christ.
03:50: This is a chart that I made, and some of, I know it's hard, I'm going to read it to you, I know some of that's fine print for those sitting in the room, hopefully those on Zoom can see it.
03:59: This is the social justice religion, and I introduced this about, I want to say three months ago maybe, maybe more than that now, four months ago, after some of the looting started in various cities across our country.
04:17: And it immediately occurred to me, this is a religion, this is not a political move, just solely a political move.
04:25: It is political, but it is a religion that we're dealing with. And it was, I think two days after I had released a video where I explained this religion, and I showed a slide similar to this,
04:35: I think Ben Shapiro had come out with the social justice religion. And then after that, I'm not saying he got it from me, but after that, a number of people recognized through at least the conservative media, conservative political media, that wait a minute, this looks an awful lot, even people that weren't conservatives were saying this looks an awful lot like a crusade, or some of these gatherings, they seem like an evangelistic outreach of some kind.
05:00: And so I want to walk you through how this is a religion, why so many of us are starting to come to this conclusion that we're dealing with a different gospel, a different religion.
05:11: So we're going to start with social justice, and its current form parallels the gospel. So in the
05:17: Christian gospel, we have, we start with the bad news, and then the good news is the gospel, right, itself. And so the bad news in the social justice paradigm is that there is systemic oppression.
05:29: And systemic oppression is deterministic. It influences everything. It's basically the parallel to our conception of providence.
05:37: When things happen, whether bad or good, we say, it was in the providence of God that something happened, because God has a decree, that he has decreed before the foundation of the world, and we believe that God is in control of the activities that happen in this world.
05:51: Well, the control element in social justice theory is not God. It's not certainly a loving
05:57: God. It is a, it is this idea of systemic oppression.
06:02: It is the idea that there's privileges and resource -allocating devices, like I just quoted in the last session,
06:10: Jamar Tisby says, racism will never go away, it just changes forms. It's embedded.
06:16: And so, so this is inescapable, as it were. There's no way to get out of this, which, in my opinion, is an
06:24: Achilles heel for this whole entire paradigm. If it's inescapable, if it's always around, then why bother to do anything?
06:31: There's nothing we can do. As soon as we pass civil rights legislation, as soon as we get rid of laws that discriminate against women, or minorities, or homosexuals, or any minority group, disenfranchised group you can think of, according to their theory, then they will still claim that abuse is happening.
06:51: Because it's now, it's embedded in other places, and it creates a race to the bottom, searching all the time for ways in which the most mundane, innocent things can be communicating racism.
07:02: I woke up this morning, I looked on my email, and someone had sent me where Barbie is now apologizing for her whiteness.
07:11: Barbie. This is a child's toy. I don't think Barbie ever killed anyone, or motivated anyone to kill anyone.
07:18: Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, I mean, Barbie, she's very thin, and maybe it made some girls feel like they didn't measure up to Barbie or something.
07:26: I mean, you can see maybe things that marketers and Barbie could have, negative effects that Barbie can have,
07:33: I guess, but it's ridiculous that Barbie's apologizing for anything.
07:39: It's a toy. The company that made Barbie wants to let everyone know that it was standards of whiteness that created
07:47: Barbie. This is how ridiculous it's gotten. It's not just in children's toys, it's in every area of life.
07:54: We need to apologize. I had a pastor come to me at a conference earlier this year and tell me that his church was being split apart by social justice.
08:04: I said, how so? Church down in Georgia. And he said, well, we had some family come, and they were black, and they told us that singing hymns was oppressive to them.
08:17: Because hymns are white. Hymns come from Europeans, and they're tools to oppress.
08:24: And in order to rectify the situation, you need to do music that is more in keeping with African style of some kind.
08:33: Now, I'm not sure exactly, he didn't go into detail about what that was, whether it was spirituals or modern
08:38: R &B or what, but the point is they had a problem with the fact that this church did traditional hymns.
08:46: And that is a perfect example of this. We just sang some hymns. Do we find racism?
08:52: Do we find oppression? What do we find in there? We just find, hopefully, if they're good hymns, we just find beautiful poetry about the
09:00: God that we worship. And everyone can come into worship using that style. In fact, it doesn't have to be that style.
09:06: There's a lot of other styles that can be used to glorify God as well. But these particular individuals who must have been indoctrinated in some way thought that no hymns were oppressive because they use a meter that is
09:21: Western and European, and they're written by white people, so therefore they're bad.
09:26: So we problematize all sorts of things because there's systemic oppression embedded within them.
09:32: White male straight privilege is the original sin. So as Christians, we know that we're all born into sin.
09:39: We have this, the stain of sin is upon us because of our father, Adam, and we cannot help but sin because we follow in his footsteps.
09:48: And we rely on the second Adam to get rid of that sin, the curse of that sin, through the gospel, right?
09:55: And that's a beautiful message. There is no forgiveness in the social justice religion, but there is original sin.
10:02: If you're white, if you're male, if you're straight, and the list can go on, by the way. The list, because of intersectionality, now there are,
10:11: I've heard at least there are certain segments in which brown people, meaning people who aren't black, who aren't white, because that's the scale they use in racial identity, they have to also realize that they're also complicit, but they're also victims.
10:26: They're very confused people, I guess, because they're victimizing because they have maybe
10:32: Spanish ancestry, or there's something in there that's a power relationship that is negative, and then there's also something in them that is victimized.
10:44: And I've seen some lament sessions for black people, or white people,
10:53: I shouldn't say lament, education sessions for diversity training at jobs, black people, white people, brown people, because they're all different, they all have different perspectives.
11:05: And we need to understand these complex perspectives. And so the original sin, honestly, it gets into everything.
11:12: It's not just, people think it's whether you're white or black. It's not that. It's much more than that.
11:18: It's much more complicated than that. And as we'll find out, if you're a Clarence Thomas, or a
11:23: Thomas Sowell, or a Walter Williams, or a Candace Owens, or the list goes on, you do not qualify to be not part of this original sin.
11:36: Somehow, because you're using the white narrative, you're now part of the problem. So when we talk about white, male, straight, we're talking about culturally determined identity factors.
11:48: We're not talking necessarily, it's not just about your genetics. It's about the ideology that you express.
11:55: It's very convenient, isn't it? Because anyone who disagrees with you can now be just an oppressor, and they have the stain of original sin, and no matter what they say, it can be dismissed.
12:02: They can be the smartest person in the world, but you can dismiss what they say. And I'd like to suggest that Jesus Christ, God himself, is the ultimate power of the universe.
12:15: So if we were to think about this scale rationally, if we were to take it to its logical conclusion,
12:22: God himself must be canceled, because he is the least victimized of anyone, because he holds all the power.
12:29: Now, of course, liberation theologians want to say Jesus, of course. He was a victim, and they want to, but Jesus, for the joy set before him, endured the cross, and now he's sitting at the right hand of God.
12:38: What do you do with that? What do you do with the Jesus who comes back with a double -edged sword and slays his enemies?
12:43: Talk about oppression. So this, applied to Christianity, this can go into some very bad directions.
12:51: Political correctness is the law. We talked about that in the last session a little bit.
12:58: It's the idea that Marcuse really came up with, that we can shut up people who don't fit the narrative, and they don't have the right to free speech, because they're oppressing.
13:09: So we have a law. We have judgment. Judgment is being canceled.
13:15: Judgment is shunned by the culture, not able to participate in business, losing your contracts, losing your ability to provide for your family.
13:26: Because you said something that didn't agree with the newspeak of our day.
13:33: The good news, if there is good news in the social justice religion, is that being woke means there's some semblance of being born again.
13:42: If you're woke, even if you're an oppressor, if you get woke and you realize that you're an oppressor, then some kind of grace can be extended to you.
13:50: Maybe you won't get canceled. You have to maybe publicly lament or apologize or participate in those things.
13:56: And if you fail to, you may get canceled. There are many examples of that lately. Someone just grabbed me a drink of water real quick.
14:05: I should have brought one up, and I forgot. I apologize for that. So woke is being born again.
14:11: Liberal politics are the sacraments. You are expected to donate to Black Lives Matter if you're a business, or show solidarity with the
14:21: LGBTQ agenda. And we're getting to the point now, if you don't do that during the appropriate religious holidays, religious months, times to celebrate those things, then you are a target for cancellation.
14:32: Not because of what you said, but because of what you did not say. You failed to make the sacrifice to Caesar.
14:39: And that's why the early church was persecuted in the first place, right? They would not sacrifice to Caesar and say
14:48: Caesar was Lord, because it conflicted with their idea that Jesus was Lord. They weren't persecuted because they were
14:53: Christians. They were persecuted because they were against the state religion. It didn't matter if they were
14:59: Christians or not. And so we're seeing a similar thing happen today, where I think of in Chicago, there was a donut, it was a coffee shop,
15:07: I guess, that got canceled within two weeks, graffitied up, vandalized.
15:15: And it was a very popular coffee shop. But because the owner was a Christian who said that all lives matter, even though he was minority, he was an ex -homosexual,
15:27: I mean, he was, you would have thought that this guy would have been one of their favorites. But because he did not go along with the
15:34: Black Lives Matter narrative, he is no longer in business anymore. And it's not because he's a
15:39: Christian, ultimately. And we could say it is in a sense, because that's what led him to this conviction.
15:44: But it's because he wouldn't go along. If he had said that, yes, Jesus is Lord, but Caesar is also
15:50: Lord, Black Lives Matter narrative is correct, and their whole narrative, then he would have been in business still.
15:57: That's why he's not in business. Liberal politics are the sacraments. Equity is heaven.
16:03: Equity is unlike equality in the modern, you got to keep track sometimes of these terms because they're weasel words that change.
16:11: The word now is not equality. Equality is bad. Equity is, and the new definition of equity, which equity was a good word, it's used in a lot of the translations,
16:19: King James uses it in the Old Testament. But now what equity means is equality of outcome, essentially adjusting for historic disadvantages.
16:27: And so someone whose ancestry, it might not even be their ancestry, just the group, the social group they're part of may have been victims at one point or another, they deserve compensation for that situation.
16:41: And so they must be made the bosses, and they must get the professorships, and they must get the scholarships, and all the privileges that have been denied them for so many years.
16:51: That's equity. Well, once equity takes its full effect, we live in a society in which everything is fair.
16:59: Everyone is equal in the sense that they will all have the equal outcome, and there will be no differences between anyone, no privileges that one person has and another doesn't, even though we know the system actually creates a new hierarchy, they want to think that it does not.
17:14: It will create a utopia. And that's their heaven. It's on this earth. It is not, as Christians believe, that there will always be injustice in this earth.
17:22: You can never get rid of all of it. You can have good laws, but they won't catch everything. And we look forward to heaven, when
17:29: Christ reigns, and we'll wipe every tear away, and when every tribe, tongue, and nation is gathered around the throne.
17:36: They do not believe that. They want to implement something similar to that here on earth and without Christ.
17:43: So how does social justice contradict the gospel? Here's four direct ways. The focus is on external behaviors instead of heart conditions.
17:50: External behaviors instead of heart conditions. So what you say, what you do, it doesn't matter what you meant, ultimately.
17:59: It doesn't matter what your intent was behind anything. What matters is what your behavior meant to those whom you are oppressing.
18:07: How it oppressed them. The group identity, the way that sin is thought of, is that the oppressor classes are the problem, not individual sinners.
18:21: We know, through Christianity, that the most oppressed person is deserving of judgment in hell.
18:28: That's controversial today, but it is true. Whenever you bring up any kind of oppression, the reality is, if you believe what the
18:35: Bible says, that person actually deserved a whole lot more in their sinful state than any oppression they got on this earth.
18:41: It's God's grace that that's all they received. I know that's controversial. I know when you start talking about women being denied the right to vote, or slavery, or colonization, or the list goes on, how can you say that those people were deserving of that?
18:57: And I'm not saying that all of those instances are just. What I am saying is, though, according to Scripture, people who are victims in any system, in any historical situation, they are always deserving of much more than the oppression that humans were enacting upon them.
19:19: They're actually, they're not just victims, they're culprits. That's what the Bible teaches.
19:24: They are actually going to stand in judgment against the holy
19:29: God, and they're not going to be able to bring up the fact that, well, my ancestors were oppressed, or I was oppressed. God's going to say,
19:35: I want to know what you did in the circumstances in which you were placed, which I preordained.
19:41: Joseph even said it was what men meant for evil,
19:47: God meant for good. And God is, really, we should be looking to God when we're in a situation where we're oppressed.
19:54: God, what are you doing? What are you trying to teach me? We know this isn't all there is. You have a plan somewhere, and ultimately, the only hope for an oppressed person is
20:04: Jesus Christ. That's the only hope, because they are under judgment just as much as their oppressor, and their oppressor will be judged too, but so will they, for their sin, for their breaking
20:13: God's law. Social justice doesn't look at it that way. There's only certain groups that are guilty.
20:20: The order is different. Sanctification precedes justification. You must do things to prove that you are with the agenda of the social justice movement before you can be accepted as someone who is woke enough to not be canceled.
20:37: And their idea of power is different. Perpetual repentance instead of justification. The power of the gospel is not present in social justice.
20:47: It is a hamster wheel of having to, we just saw this recently, by the way, with Donald Trump at the debate.
20:52: Did you catch when Chris Wallace said, do you want to make
20:58: Trump make a statement against white supremacy? And Trump said, sure, sure, but who are you talking about?
21:04: The Proud Boys? Because Trump was trying to say, what do you mean by white supremacy? I don't know what I mean.
21:10: I don't know what you guys mean, which was appropriate. And this was used, especially Christians were using it.
21:15: I saw a bunch of Christians, even the president of the Southern Baptists, using this as Trump didn't denounce white supremacy.
21:21: Well, Trump has done that many times. I mean, there's clips on YouTube where they've strung this together.
21:28: And just during the campaign in 2016, it was like 15 times he denounced white supremacy. Clearly, unequivocally, but because he didn't denounce it to the specifications the social justice warriors wanted him to at a specific moment, he is complicit in white supremacy of some kind.
21:46: He endorses it on some level, because it doesn't matter what you did five minutes ago. You must renew and show that you still believe that white supremacy is wrong, or whatever oppression that you can think of is wrong.
21:58: It is assumed that the benefit of doubt is not extended. It is assumed you are guilty unless you, like I said, sacrifice to Caesar and say
22:08: Caesar is Lord on the next holiday. So it's perpetual repentance.
22:14: There's no justification, and you can never, if you're an oppressor, ultimately reach a time in which you will be completely exonerated.
22:22: You're always guilty. The best you can hope for is that people will let your business still continue, and you can function in society because you've sworn allegiance to Caesar.
22:33: Here's the church of social justice. Just to give you a few ideas here, and you'll recognize these.
22:40: The victims are the saints. The victims are the saints. George Floyd is a saint. It doesn't matter what he did in his life, what kinds of crimes he was committing.
22:48: It doesn't matter what Breonna Taylor was doing at the moment that she died, right before that. It doesn't matter what
22:54: Ahmaud Arbery was doing in the neighborhood where he was. It doesn't, and the list goes on. All the victims of police shootings, whether it was justified or not, these people are raised to a level of sainthood.
23:07: They become figures that never did anything wrong, and their only identity is that of the helpless victim.
23:14: And we know, if you look into, let's say, George Floyd's past. We know he was not a helpless victim.
23:19: That wasn't his only identity at all. He was a criminal, but he's elevated to, those sins are washed away.
23:26: He is elevated to sainthood because of something that happened to him at the end of his life. The sociologists are the apostles and the prophets, ultimately.
23:34: They are the ones that bring us the revelation of the oppressed identities.
23:40: It's not, you know, George Floyd isn't telling us how to restructure our system of government. I mean, if he did have ideas on that, they're not being talked about.
23:48: It is people like D 'Angelo and white fragility and critical race theorists who are the ones that we look to to find out, well, what does
23:57: George Floyd dying actually mean? What does it mean we should do? So we're not looking to victims to find out what to do.
24:05: We're looking to experts who represent these victims, and those are the apostles and prophets. They can glean the oppressed perspective and tell us.
24:13: Community organizers are the clergy of this movement. Remember Obama was a community organizer, and everyone wondered at the time, what does that mean?
24:21: Well, it does mean something. You are recalibrating a community, and your goal is to work within that community to get out the boat, to make sure that social justice is taking place in the localized environment where you live.
24:36: Social justice warriors are the missionaries, the more radical elements. They go out there, and they support their cause.
24:44: They hold rallies. They're the ones that are likely to knock on your door and try to get you to sign a petition or shame you online.
24:52: You have revelation being the oppressed perspectives. Sociology is the new canon.
24:58: You got to read these books. You ever been told that? Well, you just don't understand. You're a white person. You must read these 10 books before you can really understand.
25:05: Well, what about the Bible? What about that book? Doesn't that have something to say about justice?
25:10: Well, no, you need to first go to these books, Divided by Faith, Color of Compromise, White Fragility, the list goes on.
25:20: Universities are the seminaries. That's what they've become. They're not universities anymore. They're not teaching people how to think critically, to have debate, to engage in the
25:27: Socratic method. They're teaching people a theology that then they can go and spread into their field or discipline, and activism is the church.
25:38: So when you see people get together in these rallies, you're watching a church service. You're not watching just something that's motivated by a particular political issue.
25:47: You're watching something that when that political issue is alleviated will continue because it is something that the social justice warriors hold to with a religious devotion.
25:59: So the steps in this are to get woke. That's your salvation experience. Come to an understanding of systemic oppression. Realize you are complicit in the system as a result of privilege.
26:07: To repent of your own privilege. Stop supporting whiteness. That's the put off. Participate in lamenting and raising awareness.
26:14: That is the put on. Find forgiveness from oppressed people or media elites, really, who those people are, the new priests, and then shame others.
26:23: That's the evangelism. Promote oppressed perspectives, the new holy books, and make ultimatums. That's the new catechism.
26:30: People must, as we just saw with Donald Trump, they must make sure that you're in line with the correct thinking of the day.
26:39: And we've seen this all over the place. I'll give you a few examples in these pictures here. On the top left, you see this is one of the
26:46: Black Lives Matter rallies where they're all showing solidarity with George Floyd by trying to get in the position that he was right before his death.
26:54: I don't think they're six feet apart, but the masks will help them, I guess. You have on the bottom left, this is a church.
27:03: It was, I believe, in Tennessee. It was somewhere in the south, but it was a church service. The pastor came up with his church, and there was a
27:09: Black Lives Matter post -test. And the church all bowed down before the Black Lives Matter protesters, apologized for the sin of systemic racism, begged their forgiveness.
27:21: And they did it in a prayer to God. This, in the middle, and these are just a few examples.
27:28: I mean, I had to narrow this down. In the middle, you see white cops wash the feet of black organizers and ask for forgiveness.
27:34: What are they doing? This isn't political. This is religious kind of stuff. On the bottom right, you see this is
27:40: Herschel York and Curtis Woods, two professors. Well, Curtis Woods is now, I think he's a pastor in Kentucky, but Herschel York is still a professor at the
27:50: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where Al Mohler is the president. And here he is washing the feet of Curtis Woods to show, to basically show some subservience as a white man to a black person.
28:04: This is somehow important to do, and this is right after the George Floyd situation.
28:10: You have Michael Tracy here. He said, I'm telling you, this is someone who's secular, secular journalist.
28:17: I'm telling you, every protest I've been to so far perfectly mirrors an outdoor evangelical Christian worship service.
28:24: This is someone who is not a Christian, who's coming at this from a secular journalist's standpoint.
28:29: They say, I'm just telling you what I'm watching. All these people with their hands raised, playing music. I mean, you should have seen
28:34: George Floyd's, where he died. It was a shrine, and there was music, and there was, it was like, it was like a holy site for the
28:43: Catholic Church. You have the Democrats in Congress taking a knee with the scarves that they specifically bought, right?
28:52: Have a moment of silence for George Floyd. Ironically, that scarf apparently belonged to a tribe of slavers, not the ones that actually sold slaves, but who cares?
29:05: So, so this, this is what, I mean, we remember this. This is not distant memory. This happened just recently, and this kind of stuff continues to happen.
29:12: It's religious. Now, this is, this current incarnation is motivated by critical race theory primarily.
29:20: Now, there's, there's other incarnations. We remember the Me Too movement from years ago, and that wasn't, that was critical theory.
29:26: It wasn't critical race theory. It was gender studies, feminism, that kind of thing. But critical race theory, what we're seeing right now, has a few, has a few problems, and these are the problems that it's going to create in our society, and we see it already creating.
29:39: It caters to low expectations, so it overlooks the destruction, platforms criminals as virtuous, blames the system for individual transgressions, caters to low expectations, right?
29:49: No responsibility, personal responsibility is gone. It perpetuates racism by promoting the myth that whites have special power.
29:58: That's why I say this whole movement is racist to its core, because it assumes that whites, because of the nature of where they were born and their social location, have some kind of power over all the minorities.
30:11: I mean, that sounds like white supremacy to me, which is why white supremacists, actual white supremacists, often agree now with critical race theorists.
30:21: When a critical race theorist says, well, you shouldn't adopt a minority child, because you won't be able to give it the kind of upbringing that it should have, white supremacists say, yeah, amen.
30:31: That's what we believe. We've been saying that since Hitler, right, before that. So, they believe that race is, culture and race are the same thing, and it's all connected to some kind of power dynamic, and white supremacists believe something similar.
30:48: It disparages law and order, because now there is no law and order. It's, law and order is a part of the white systemic society, and so it must be deconstructed as well, and it disparages cohesive identity.
31:03: You wonder why so many people are having identity crises right now. They don't know who they are. They don't even know if they're a man or a woman half the time.
31:10: Well, the reason for that, well, there's a couple reasons, is because the breakdown of the family. So, there's no strong family identity.
31:16: The breakdown of region, because people are moving everywhere. They don't have an actual region they can call their own, where they can look at the landmarks and say, my great -grandfather carved something in that tree.
31:24: You know, they moved around. They're stripped of local identity, but the third thing, and maybe the most important thing, is because now they're being told that they are just the result of forces outside of their control that have put them in a place where their identity is that of oppressor, oppressor, and it reduces man down to a mathematical number, basically.
31:47: They're just, they scale on a chart of oppressed to oppressor, and they're somewhere in there, and that's who they are.
31:54: And people are striving to break out of that, to break free from that mindset, so they can exert some kind of an identity that they can call their own, to say that I'm unique,
32:06: I'm special, I'm different. We have that as Christians. We know that's being created in the image of God and having unique personality and unique giftings and unique abilities the
32:16: Lord has let us have. Even disabilities are from the Lord, because he created the deaf and the mute.
32:21: All the things that make you you and you unique, we can account for in Christianity, but in this theory, no.
32:28: So people are trying to come up with ways that they're unique. I'm a white, homosexual, gluten -free introvert, or introversion's now becoming like a, have you ever seen those posts on social media about how life is so hard for introverts?
32:45: I mean, extroverts just take all the wind out of our sails. We can't get a job. We just wanna hide in our house, and extroverts don't understand.
32:53: They need to understand from an introvert perspective. I mean, this is because people are trying to find out who they are.
32:58: Why do you think Enneagrams are so popular right now? Why do you think the Myers -Briggs test is so popular? Why do you think people are trying to figure out who they are?
33:06: They're being reduced down to nothing. So this is the effect that this kind of thinking is having on our culture, and I feel the worst way for people that don't have family stability, don't have a local region that they grew up in, don't have a religion, don't have
33:21: Christianity specifically to tell them who they are, and this is all the junk that they've been getting, because especially if they're a minority of some kind, or they think they may have homosexual tendencies or something, the culture will just come in, reinforce that to death, and tell you that you're not responsible, that you're a victim, and it destroys any kind of dignity, and it's disgusting.
33:44: Our compassion should go out to people who have that destruction within them. Here are some evangelicals who have joined the
33:53: Black Lives Matter movement on some level. I could have given you a lot more. Here's David Platt supporting the
33:58: Christian response to racial injustice, and I saw the pictures from it. It's all Black Lives Matter.
34:04: George Floyd, I can't breathe. Ed Stetzer, head of the Billy Graham Institute at Wheaton College, also the head now of the
34:11: Resolutions Committee for the Southern Baptist Convention, went out, marched with them as well in Chicago.
34:17: Thabiti Annabouile, formerly Nine Marks, pastor in Washington, same thing. This is the narrative that they're supporting.
34:28: Now, does this do damage to the church? We just saw what it does to the culture. What does it do to the church? Here's Daniel Yang.
34:34: Daniel Yang is the director, I believe, of Send Institute. He says, you need the
34:40: Bible to point out morally wrong structures in the church. You need CRT to point out it's morally wrong for world leaders to black and brown face.
34:48: CRT is critical race theory. So he's undermining the sufficiency of scripture because he's saying that, well, the
34:55: Bible can go this far, but you actually need CRT to actually make sure that, to add to what the
35:04: Bible's saying, to supplement it. It destroys body fellowship. Here's a picture of an interview
35:10: I did with a guy. I won't say his name because he wanted it kept, but he was in a church in the area that I went to school, and a professor from that school, from Southeastern, was a pastor at his church.
35:25: Told him, your last name is the same as a member of the congregation who's black.
35:30: You have the same last name as them. You need to go apologize to them for your generational sin because your family owned their family at some point.
35:37: Now, he looked in his, he was beside himself. I can't believe I would have done this.
35:43: He looked up his heritage, his line. There's no slave owners. And he started to realize, wait a minute.
35:50: This person knew nothing about me and just assumed this. And it destroyed the church.
35:56: The church no longer exists. He goes to another church. He was black, he was involved in ministry.
36:02: He was blacklisted pretty much after he decided I'm not going to go along with this. And there was no problem between him and the black family.
36:09: They had each other over all the time. They had a good time. There was no issue. And all of a sudden, there's an issue.
36:16: Changing, it changes leadership qualifications. That was a picture of FBC Naples, First Baptist Church in Naples, Florida.
36:22: Big conservative area. Big Republican donor area. Big church, claims 10 ,000 people, or did, until they called a pastor who was a woke pastor.
36:35: Congregation did not want to vote for this pastor, at least enough of them to keep him from getting the nomination or the job.
36:42: What ended up happening was those who were the ringleaders against this pastor, because he wanted to change the church.
36:49: He liked woke church, he liked Kamala Harris, he was woke. They ended up writing a formal letter calling those people racists.
36:57: Excommunicated them from the church, even tried to hurt some of their businesses, and put a restraining order on them to never come on church property.
37:05: All because they opposed the social justice agenda in their church. And one of the reasons was because this man was not qualified.
37:12: Not only was he woke, but he did not meet the minimum qualifications to become a pastor, but that did not matter. You are oppressed and you have the right agenda, then you do meet the qualifications.
37:24: And this is changing leadership qualifications in churches, businesses. It's a race to the bottom to make sure that we don't actually have people that know what they're doing, but people who have been systemically oppressed and need to be propped up.
37:37: It also reorientates the mission of the church. This is a friend of mine also from, he doesn't mind his name,
37:43: Seth Richardson. He's an evangelist in the Raleigh -Durham area. He actually went to a church that I used to attend, and he was involved in evangelism there.
37:51: And he was told by, at the time, the director of evangelism that, or the ministry outreach,
37:59: I don't remember the exact name they had for it. You can watch the interview and he tells you more. But this person essentially said we, he got involved with some, like,
38:08: Eric Mason and D .A. Horton and some woke methodology, and he went to this conference and he got a book called
38:14: Gospel by D .A. Horton, and it talks about a concept called theobonics. Theobonics is communicating the gospel using eubonics.
38:26: But the way that you start is, and it's the way that they implemented it, at least, was to start by going up to people, specifically people in urban areas, and telling them, basically, you know, we understand your gripe with the police because we're
38:40: Christians and God's not okay with what's going on. He told me they never got to the gospel.
38:46: It was, that was their way of doing outreach. And he said it was a, you know, Durham's a college town. There's ghetto, but there's also college. He said it was only, like, they wanted to use one lure to catch fish.
38:54: They didn't care about the white liberals at the college there. It was all geared towards, we gotta go use this lure to catch people of this particular mindset, and with the assumption that they're just, they're gonna relate because they hate the police and we're gonna tell them we don't like the police either or what they're doing.
39:11: And this is, I mean, it's a racist assumption, to be honest with you, but it subverts the gospel and the mission of the church. That's not what the church is supposed to do.
39:17: It's not sharing the gospel. This is what it does to the church. And here are a bunch of examples, and I'm not gonna read through all of them because of time, of how it does damage to the gospel directly.
39:30: We hear the word gospel issue. This is a just gospel conference, gospel above all, and somehow smuggling into the gospel itself, racial, gender, social justice, climate justice, things that have no, the gospel is the good news that Jesus came and what he did for sinful individuals.
39:55: It's not the good news that if you check your privilege, somehow people, I mean, there's no social justice in that.
40:01: It's not law. Justice is in the category of law, not the category of grace or gospel, but there's a conflating of those things.
40:09: Here's a good example for you. Walter Strickland, who's a professor at Southeastern where I went. He says, Christ said it to himself, to his disciples that a summary of the gospel is not to bifurcate loving
40:18: God and loving neighbor, but it is to love God and neighbor. Dr. Cone, James Cone, a liberation theologian, allow me to see a new vista, a new space, a new avenue to allow the gospel to be made manifest.
40:29: So I sort of look at what the gospel is doing as a more broad reality now, not that I've switched the spiritual for the physical or the social, but both.
40:36: What's he saying? Number one, hope you caught it.
40:42: The gospel is not loving God and loving neighbor. That's the law. The law is to love
40:48: God and love neighbor. And we can't do it, so we're guilty and we need the gospel. But who is the one that helped him see that as that being the gospel?
40:57: Dr. James Cone, a heretic, a rank heretic, liberation theologian, different gospel.
41:03: And it's a gospel that he had this awakening on. Now he's teaching at a Southern Baptist seminary. I can give you a lot of examples of that.
41:11: Now here's the question that often comes up. John, this is just pragmatic, isn't it? I mean,
41:17: I hear that all the time with more conservative pastors, right? It's just pragmatism. It's just what
41:22: Seeker Sensitive tried to do. It's just what Charles Finney was doing. It's just people taking their cues from the world.
41:27: Is there some truth to that? Yeah, but that is not the whole story. Here's an example of that. If we want to get this next generation who are dissatisfied by what they see in the church, then the church has to change.
41:38: That's pragmatism, right? So there is some of that. Those who desire to make a good showing in the flesh try to compel you to be circumcised.
41:45: They wanna make a good showing. Simply that they will not be persecuted for the cross of Christ, and that's out of fear.
41:51: It's pragmatism. John Calvin talked about that as well. Should have remained fixed on Christ, but people try to find new and strange inventions.
41:59: But I'd like to suggest this is way more than pragmatic. This is ideological, and it's happened before in different forms.
42:07: We've had the social gospel, which we talked about, Rauschenbusch. We've had liberation theology, communism, imported into Catholicism in South American countries.
42:16: Jesus came to free the oppressed, to identify with the oppressed, to start a revolution. We have progressive evangelicalism, which
42:23: I wrote a whole book about called Social Justice Goes to Church, and that's the new left ideology added to evangelical
42:28: Christianity, and I explain how that ends up becoming a heresy, and we have an offshoot from that.
42:35: What we have today is a continuation of that. We have the woke church, social justice theory added to evangelical Christianity.
42:41: So when people start saying this is just the social gospel, it's not just the social gospel. That's part of it, yes. There is a social gospel, but people who can say orthodox things over here are saying heretical things over here.
42:54: The social gospel, it's all heretical. Jesus, you know, it's all about salvation of society. The modern crop says it's about salvation of the individual and salvation of society, so they add to the gospel.
43:06: That's the difference between the social gospel and what we're seeing today. Here's the social justice philosophy, and this is what
43:12: I'm gonna be taking you through in the next two sessions. And I've divided it up, and this is as simple as a nugget as I knew how to make it, because I know there's a lot of info.
43:22: We're not gonna be able to remember all of it, but hopefully you can remember this chart, and then everything that I talk about after this, you'll be able to put it in this category.
43:31: We have philosophical branches. We have epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, and these are basically what many people refer to as a worldview in Christian apologetics world.
43:41: You have these three things kind of make up a worldview. Epistemology, how do you know truth? How do you know what is true, right?
43:48: Metaphysics, what is true? What is the nature of reality? Ethics, what is right or wrong?
43:54: Or value theory, sometimes people call it. What is, you know, extends into what is beautiful, what is ugly, those kinds of things.
44:00: Social justice has standpoint epistemology for its epistemology. It's a postmodern epistemology.
44:08: It means that your social location determines how you see the world. There is no objectivity.
44:14: You are determined by forces outside of your control to have a certain kind of lens that you see everything through.
44:21: This false teaching, in the early church, there's a parallel that's similar. It's called Gnosticism. Bodhi Bhakham calls this ethnic
44:28: Gnosticism when it's applied to like the Black Lives Matter narrative. Gnosticism just means you have a secret knowledge.
44:35: Because of your experience, or your oppression, or some kind of external thing, you have a way of knowing what truth really is more than someone who doesn't have that experience.
44:47: So if you're oppressed, if you live in inner city ghetto, let's say, then you are going to know a lot more than someone who's living in some rich, white,
44:58: Norman Rockwell kind of Massachusetts town and has a lot of money. That's standpoint epistemology.
45:05: Metaphysics. Their metaphysics is egalitarianism, equity, diversity, and inclusion, and the opposite of that, right?
45:13: The inequalities we see around us, the disparities. So we live in a world that basically consists of disparities and those who want to rectify those disparities, which is what
45:25: Rousseau wanted to do, which is create this egalitarian society. And there are some false teachings in the early
45:33: Christian church that parallel this, Pelagianism and Marcionism. So Pelagianism, the idea that man's essentially good.
45:41: You know, why would you ever assume that people deserve to be quote -unquote equal as far as their outcomes are concerned?
45:48: Well, you assume that because underlying that is an idea, an assumption that, well, man actually, there's a goodness there.
45:55: It's society that corrupts. It's something external that comes and corrupts them. There's a way to somehow cast off not just society itself, but the social forces that interact to challenge your mind and to make you think certain thoughts and all of that.
46:14: There's, we can try to get past all of that and cut through it, get rid of it to create some kind of utopia.
46:23: So Pelagianism, I would say, is certainly the idea that man is good, that there's no fallen nature that is common to all of man is part of this.
46:33: Marcionism is the idea that we can get rid of the Old Testament basically. And I'm oversimplifying these ideas, but the
46:39: Old Testament, the justice that God lays down in the Old Testament is no longer binding. And you see this with people in the church who promote social justice.
46:48: Obviously, they don't, some of the Old Testament laws, man, those fly in the face of social justice, big time.
46:55: I mean, the Bible's gonna have to be canceled eventually because of that. By the way, it's the same thing the Nazis did because the
47:01: Old Testament was a Jewish book. The German Christian movement said, let's get rid of the Old Testament. So different reasons, but similar in a way because in both cases, they're saying that the
47:12: Old Testament was used by a certain class of people for oppression. And most
47:17: Christians wouldn't knowingly say that. No one wants to get rid of the Old Testament, right? But you start finding it out when you bring up principles from the
47:25: Old Testament. God's given us a whole book on how to run a government. And I'm not saying it's a, you can just implement it perfectly in any society, but it's the principles, it's his character, right?
47:36: That he's given us. And he's given examples of that in the law. And Marcion thought that the
47:42: Old Testament law was basically created by a meany God. He wasn't like the good loving
47:47: God of the New Testament. And the good loving God of the New Testament that Marcion created is the same good and loving
47:53: God that the social justice advocates want to talk about today. It's the only one they seem capable of talking about.
48:01: In the ethics realm, we have Marxism. Marxism is the ethic, redistribution of privilege, resources, et cetera.
48:07: And this mirrors Phariseeism and the Galatian heresy. Subverting the law of God for the sake of tradition and adding to the gospel directly.
48:15: So we're gonna talk about all of these. But what do you need to know to fight social justice in the church? Two things, a basic knowledge of the gospel and a basic knowledge of the errors of Marxism and postmodernism.
48:24: If you have that, you don't need me, you don't need an expert telling you, you can do this yourself, which is what
48:29: I wanna help people with. So we're gonna start out by talking about the standpoint epistemology, which is the word that I just brought up.
48:42: The Gnosticism, the epistemological Gnosticism that exists in society and is coming into the church.
48:50: Let's read a few verses on truth. John 4, 24, and you don't have to turn there, I'm just gonna read them for you. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
48:58: John 8, 32, you know the truth, you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. John 14, six, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
49:05: John 16, 14, the spirit will guide you into all truth. John 17, 17, your word is truth.
49:10: That's just the book of John. You think truth is important? Yes, very important to God. And truth is the perspective of God.
49:19: It's not just that which corresponds to reality, it's that which corresponds to the God who created reality himself.
49:27: And 2 Timothy 3 says all scripture is inspired by God and that's why it's profitable for what?
49:32: Teaching, reproof, correction, for training in righteousness so that who? The white person, the black person, the homosexual, the woman, the introvert, no, man of God, may be adequate, equipped for every good work.
49:46: This is accessible truth. It's not truth that's accessible to one group more than another group.
49:51: It's truth that's accessible for the approved workman who does not need to be ashamed, who wants to rightly divide the word of truth. It takes some tools to get there, but that's what truth is.
50:01: Truth is objective. It's built into reality itself. This is standpoint epistemology, and you'll have to excuse, my wife is a great artist, but she didn't draw these,
50:11: I did. So I'm gonna take red and blue as my examples here.
50:18: Red team, blue team, right? We have red's reality, and red's reality is their experience.
50:24: They have glasses that show them what reality is to them. And so in red's world, all of experience looks pretty red because they have these tinted glasses that make everything red.
50:32: And they were born with them, and they can't get rid of them. Well, blue's got the same thing. Blue has blue glasses.
50:38: Everything looks like it's blue. So when it looks at things like libraries and school and sports and anything, they're seeing a shade of blue.
50:49: They're seeing all those things through their perspective. Standpoint epistemology says red's experience is superior, let's say, to blue's experience because the sociologists have told us so.
51:01: So they have the God view. They're able to adjudicate between these two perspectives. So if you noticed,
51:07: I put red and blue in boxes. They can't escape their box, but who can escape the box? The sociologists can escape the box.
51:14: They're the only ones that can escape the box. So you are trapped in your white privilege or your oppressed view of some kind, but the sociologists are not.
51:24: They don't have the same kind of trapping. This is the thing that they don't want you to know. They are able to transcend those boxes, to compare them to each other, to make the determination that actually one of the perspectives is giving you more truth than another perspective.
51:39: So what does that make them? God. That makes them God in this scenario because we know that there is a
51:46: God who created reality, who sees all things, who knows the truth. Sociologists, they're not taking
51:52: God into account in any of this. God is absent. It is them who can adjudicate between these perspectives.
51:59: So what do you have? Actually, the way reality really is, is it's all colored red. If red is the oppressed perspective that the sociologists have privileged because even though blue is seeing things in his box in a blue way, he's actually living in a red world.
52:14: He just doesn't realize it because he's trapped. So what needs to happen? Sociologists have actually privileged red and basically taken him outside the box and used him and said, red's not really in the box.
52:26: Red's just reality, the way red sees things. Blue though is still in the, blue's trapped. And the only way to make sure that blue understands anything is if he puts on red's glasses.
52:39: So blue needs to get a pair of glasses that give a red tint and then try his best to see the world through red.
52:45: That's the listening. Don't talk, blue. You don't understand injustice. You gotta shut up.
52:52: You just gotta listen to what red says. And if you can put on those red glasses, then you'll be able to know the truth of reality.
53:01: Now, what does Christianity teach? Christianity teaches there's God's view, there's natural revelation, and there's special revelation that we've been given.
53:12: And the job of both red and blue is to put on God's glasses, to view things through the lens of reality.
53:20: Now, God has given those to us, some of that to us, in the form of natural revelation.
53:27: We are born as knowers. We know certain things. Romans 1 talks about this. And so both red and blue should be striving towards something called objective truth in common.
53:39: It doesn't matter where they were born or who they are. Truth is out there and they can discover it. They can know it.
53:46: And it doesn't matter that one's red and one's blue. All right? Because God has given us tools to understand what truth is.
53:53: Does that make sense? A standpoint of epistemology. Here's what's being said in the quote -unquote
53:59: Christian world, evangelical world. Matthew Hall, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
54:06: Those evangelical voices that call for a retreat from political engagement usually speak from a privileged position, race, class, gender.
54:15: Hmm. So it is a disqualification of a certain view of politics, not because the view is wrong in and of itself, but because it comes from people who have privilege in race, class, and gender.
54:32: Isn't that something? This is the provost of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. If Al Mohler goes, this is the guy who's probably gonna take over.
54:40: The flagship church, flagship seminary for the Southern Baptist Convention. Said this in 2016.
54:47: Malcolm Yarnell. This is a professor at, I believe it's New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
54:53: Here's an example of what I meant at the Southern Baptist Convention in 2019 when I advocated that we strive to hear the female voice.
55:02: While all the male disciples were arguing about their roles of power and prestige, this lone female disciple perceived what
55:08: Jesus really needed. What Mary did was beautiful when she brings her alabaster jar.
55:15: Now, when you read that passage, do you get the sense that God's trying to tell us we just need a female perspective?
55:21: Or was there something else going on? Maybe Mary realized something, not because of the nature of her being a female, but because of the nature of her realizing who
55:29: Jesus was. This is a professor teaching theology to seminary students.
55:37: Here's Matt Chandler, he's a popular internet preacher. There were some lenses put over my eyes in which
55:43: I saw the world through those lenses, not knowing what those lenses are. So if I can kind of be straight about what
55:49: I'm talking about, I grew up with this invisible bag of privilege. Matt Chandler. We see this all around us in ways that are not as obvious as that, though.
56:01: Those are the obvious ways. We can see that standpoint epistemology. Here's some ways it's not obvious. Rachel Den Hollander, who's written a book called
56:10: What Is a Girl Worth? She's a lawyer, she advocates for sexual abuse victims.
56:15: She was an abuse victim herself. And if you remember a few years ago when
56:20: Justice Kavanaugh was being confirmed, there were advertisements taken out in major newspapers that said, believe women.
56:26: That was it, just believe women, as if that's supposed to be meaningful in some way. You should believe a victim, not because of the proof that the victim has, but because of the nature of the fact that it's a victim.
56:36: There's a woman. Rachel Den Hollander, she's a big name in the Southern Baptist Convention. She says that, please start asking why.
56:47: Why don't officers, detectives believe victims and act on evidence like it matters? What is going on that causes investigators and prosecutors to treat victims this way?
56:55: Find the why. Then we can start making some progress. So there's something biased behind investigators, why they won't believe women.
57:03: So she's actually poisoning the well. I'm so sorry,
57:08: Sandy. I believe you and stand with you to be treated the way your church is heartbreaking and so wrong. She doesn't know the situation.
57:14: I've read the threads, so she doesn't know the situation going on here. She's just believing someone because they said they were abused, and the list goes on.
57:21: I believe you too, to someone who's a sexual abuse survivor. And there's many examples of this, just believing people because of their social location.
57:35: This is the Caring Well Initiative in the Southern Baptist Convention. There's Russell Moore on stage at a conference with Rachel Denhollander.
57:42: And what should be, what's missing from this? So I've watched some of these. What's missing?
57:48: The authority of scripture. How about people who know the scripture to come up and explain what scripture says about abuse, about sexual immorality?
57:58: Now, they would say they start off with the assumption that sexual immorality is wrong, but who are they going to to find out what to do about it?
58:04: Victims. Victims are the experts that will tell the pastors what to do, not the word of God, but the victims.
58:12: This is what's called an epistemic island. These people are, they're the knowers because they're on their own island of being a victim, and they will dispel the truth to those who care to listen.
58:23: Here's some other examples. Parkland victims' parents digitally recreate their son's likeness for gun control PSA. I saw the advertisement.
58:29: This is recent. They're helping the Biden campaign because their son was a victim of the
58:35: Parkland shooting. So they recreated a digital, this is disgusting, actually, a digital copy, in a sense, of their son using deepfake technology, and it's their son creating a message that we need to get rid of guns, so we've got to vote accordingly.
58:52: Now, why would, who would want to do something that sick? Someone who thinks a victim of gun violence is the one who should control what happens with gun legislation.
59:02: Not experts who've studied what gun violence can do and compared different areas where guns are. No, someone who was a victim of it is the one who should show us the way.
59:11: Here's another one. It's at Liberty University recently, in their Office of Spiritual Development. This was convocation.
59:18: David Nasser, who is basically the campus pastor, for lack of a better term, in the Office of Spiritual Development, he hosted a lament session where he had two students come in.
59:29: Now, these are students. They're there to learn. They're not professors who are there to teach. They're students there to learn, okay? That's important.
59:36: To teach the campus about systemic racism and racism on the campus of Liberty University and the importance of listening, especially if you're a majority culture of some kind and making sure that you are, you know, walking on eggshells, really, to make sure that you're not offending someone.
59:54: Now, of course, as Christians, we don't want to offend people unnecessarily. That is definitely true, but we know that from what?
01:00:02: The scripture. Now, it's fine if you want to platform someone who's a minority.
01:00:08: There's nothing wrong with that if they know the scripture, if they've studied the issue, if they can provide light on something that we have not studied, but to platform two students just because of the color of their skin is standpoint epistemology.
01:00:24: It is the outworking of that. They're the ones that will show us the way because of their social location, not because of any study they've done.
01:00:32: So you can see what happens. Here's the impact of standpoint epistemology. It erodes biblical sufficiency.
01:00:37: It downplays Christian identity because it starts to create priorities that it's not about being a
01:00:44: Christian and what Christ wants. It's about your social location, and that will tell you what's right and wrong.
01:00:50: It has been basically the underlying idea that's created LGBTQ plus orientations.
01:00:57: I feel that I'm attracted to someone else. I feel that I'm a man in a woman's body. Well, that's your social location.
01:01:04: That's your experience. Who am I to question it? Subversion of due process. Due process is wrong because it doesn't take into account systemic inequities, generational sin, et cetera.
01:01:15: It's created revisionist history, memory studies. We need to go back into the past and find out what the victims think about what happened.
01:01:22: It's created generational guilt, and here's an example of that. Here's Herschel York, again, a professor at the
01:01:29: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, promoting the idea of generational guilt and trying to use Daniel and Nehemiah to justify it.
01:01:38: And I will point out Ezekiel 18, 20 says, it's the person who sins that will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father's iniquity nor the father bear the punishment for the son's iniquity.
01:01:47: That's what the scripture says about this. And he's trying to say that because Daniel and Nehemiah made apologies and said things about their ancestors or their culture being wicked, that means that there's some kind of stain that that whole group has on them.
01:02:08: They're all guilty of something. And that can go three generations back.
01:02:13: I mean, he doesn't specify how far back, but the reality is, and this is a great comment back, is that in both cases, the prophets are not holding them guilty for their father's sins.
01:02:23: They're counting them guilty of their own sin. They're saying we stand in the same line as our fathers, our father sins, and we're doing the same thing.
01:02:32: It was their habit, it's our habit. We, they broke the covenant, we're breaking the covenant. We're not confessing their father's sin.
01:02:38: They're saying we're guilty of these things. It's a current action going on. So there's an example for you.
01:02:45: Here's another thing I wanted to show you, an example of how standpoint epistemology essentially comes from postmodernism.
01:02:53: And it is a deconstructing kind of tool that's used. And this is where this is going.
01:03:00: Here's a very woke, I forget her name, it is, she's known more by her
01:03:07: Twitter handle, Sista Theology. Anyway, Presbyterian. She says, some of y 'all are decolonizing your faith to the point that you're decolonizing your way out of the faith.
01:03:17: She recognizes, even though she's on board with social justice, that this whole idea of trying to decolonize is another way of deconstructionism and to take out all the colonial ideas.
01:03:28: So when you're looking at the Bible, you're not looking at through this oppressed lens. She's saying, some of you are leaving the faith because of this.
01:03:35: And I know people, I've heard the stories of people who have done that. The woke church is the last step before someone leaves completely.
01:03:43: Why would you wanna be part of a racist, sexist, homophobic organization that has such a horrible history and has repressed everyone?
01:03:50: Who wants to be part of that? Here's Joshua Harris. And he says that the word he uses, the information, let's see here.
01:04:02: He announced that he's not a Christian anymore. He said the popular phrase for this is deconstruction. The biblical phrase is falling away.
01:04:10: He recognizes that he left the faith because it was deconstructed for him. And by the way, that was that seminary.
01:04:19: So here's the response to standpoint epistemology since we only have two minutes. Being part of a minority group does not necessarily mean one experiences oppression or disadvantage.
01:04:29: Experiencing oppression or disadvantage does not mean one is more qualified to speak about injustice. God gave an objective standard for adjudicating justice from his perspective.
01:04:38: We can think of examples in scripture. Moses, Esther, Daniel, Ruth, we can think of examples from our culture.
01:04:44: Barack Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ted Cruz, Mark Cuban, sports figures, people who are, according to sociologists, oppressed.
01:04:52: And yet they're multimillionaires claiming they're oppressed. They're presidents claiming they're oppressed. I remember I saw at the funeral for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the rabbi gets up there and says, you know, she could have had so much if she was a man.
01:05:09: What, the Supreme Court? Like, where do you go from this? That's the highest you can get. But her point was that, well, that lawyer clubs and stuff were reserved for men and Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't fit into that.
01:05:24: Well, apparently she made it because she was a member of the Supreme Court. Barack Obama, same thing, right?
01:05:31: So we see examples of this. Being part of a minority group does not mean one experiences oppression or disadvantage.
01:05:37: Now, it could mean that in certainty, that could be a result, you know, that you could be oppressed on the basis of that, but not necessarily.
01:05:46: Experiencing oppression or disadvantage does not mean one is more qualified to speak about injustice. God's justice is universally accessible.
01:05:53: Proverbs 29, the righteous is concerned for the rights of the poor. The wicked does not understand such concern. So who is it?
01:06:00: Is it black and white? Is it straight and gay? No, it's actually righteous and unrighteous.
01:06:05: The righteous are the ones who understand justice. You, Ezra, according to the wisdom of your God, which is in your hand, appoint magistrates and judges that they may judge all the people who are in the province beyond the river, even all those who know the laws of your
01:06:17: God. Those who know the law are the ones who know about justice and are qualified to speak about it.
01:06:23: You shall select out of the people, able men who fear God. Fearing God is the beginning of wisdom.
01:06:29: It's how you know justice. And God's justice is known by the righteous. It's universally accessible.
01:06:35: It is known by the righteous. The same law shall apply to the native as to the stranger who sojourns among you.
01:06:42: It doesn't say that the sojourner, I mean, he's got a different set of rules that apply to him. No, same rules.
01:06:49: Many nations will come and say, come, let us go to the mountain of the Lord in the house of God of Jacob that he may teach us the ways to think, the paths, the law.
01:06:57: So all cultures can actually understand and grasp the law of God.
01:07:04: Romans 1, of course, says, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven, and it's all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth, because that which is known about God is evident within them.
01:07:12: They know on a root level. It doesn't say that they know because they're white, or they know because they're straight, or they're male, or any of that.
01:07:21: It says they know, all people. God gave an objective standard for adjudicating justice, and back to 2
01:07:26: Timothy 3 .16. All scripture is inspired by God, is profitable, so the man of God, the man of God may use it.
01:07:38: So it's not specific to certain social locations. Now, here's some questions to ask.
01:07:45: To wrap this up, two questions for people who are advocating this. Why should a person's external identity factors or personal experience alone qualify them more than someone else to speak authoritatively on law, justice, history, et cetera?
01:07:57: Most people haven't thought of it. They're not thinking through their own worldview, their own philosophy. So that's the question
01:08:03: I would ask. Well, on what basis do you claim that someone who has an experience, this would be like saying that I experienced surgery, so I should write the medical textbook surgeons use while they're in medical school, to train for surgery?
01:08:16: How about a surgeon operating, not someone who went through a surgery, right? Going through a surgery doesn't mean you're an expert.
01:08:24: So I'm gonna go through the next two aspects of this, the metaphysics and the ethical theory in the next session.