A Review of The Very Good Gospel By Lisa Sharon Harper: Part II

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris for part two of hopefully a two -part series, because I really don't want to go much farther with this.

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But we're talking about a book by Lisa Sharon Harper called The Very Good Gospel. So if you haven't seen the first episode, you might want to go watch that.

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It's about an hour long. This is, we're going to get into more of the weeds in this particular episode.

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And I want to start off just with some review because we talked about Lisa Sharon Harper's conception of the gospel.

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And the reason we did this book is because I think it gets to the heart of one of the main issues.

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If not the issue, it's the fundamental issue, at least, that the social justice activists are promoting.

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And it's bad enough that it's a different view of truth, a different view of reality, a different view of ethics.

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But when you also see that there's a different gospel being promoted, to me, that's a prime motivation for getting involved in stopping this thing.

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And in Lisa Sharon Harper's book, The Good Gospel, I think we see what that looks like in a synchrotized form, in a more honest way.

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This is where I think formerly conservative evangelicals are going. They're going towards Lisa Sharon Harper's position.

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In fact, she's been active and motivating, and according to her, evangelicals, a word she uses for marching against racial violence, really with BLM, that kind of thing.

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And so she's, there is some of, what, of an overlap here. She does have some influence, and it was someone who was a supporter of this particular podcast who reached out and said, look, this lady is becoming more popular, this leader, and would you please do a review of this book?

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So we were doing that, and one of the things we talked about was this idea that there's a tension between the gospel of grace, you see that term in Acts 20, 24, and then the gospel of the kingdom, which we see in Matthew 4, 9, 24.

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In fact, in the Great Commission, the gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed to all the nations. And one of the things

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I asked was, think to yourself, are there two gospels promoted in the

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New Testament? Are there two different gospels? Is it, you know, does Paul have one, and then Jesus has another? Is the gospel of the kingdom different than the gospel that the apostles proclaimed?

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What about John the Baptist? He came preaching the gospel. Was that a different gospel? Paul says someone who preaches a different gospel ought to be condemned.

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That puts Paul and Jesus in an awkward spot. If they're preaching different gospels. So what's the reconciliation here?

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Or is it just that they're preaching the same gospel, the gospel of the kingdom? Because Jesus doesn't always say he's preaching the gospel of the kingdom.

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Many times he'll just say that, I mean, he even says in like Mark 8, he who loses his life for my sake and the gospel.

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He doesn't say, he doesn't qualify it with the kingdom, but is Jesus' gospel and the gospel of the kingdom, is that somehow some fundamentally different thing than the gospel promoted by the apostle

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Paul or John or Peter? So this is a question that I think probably should be answered.

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And it is my thesis that it's the same gospel. It's been the same gospel.

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There's no conflict. And if there was, we'd have a real problem that Paul is essentially condemning any kind of a different gospel.

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If Jesus is promoting a different gospel, we have a real problem. So what is the gospel? Well, one of the things

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I want to, and I can give you many passages on this, but one of the things that I want to focus on for this is this idea of the gospel of the kingdom.

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Because I write about this quite a bit. If I have the book, let's see. I do. I write about this quite a bit in this book.

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There we go. Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict. You can go to worldviewconversation .com and get yourself a copy if you're interested in that kind of thing.

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I have a whole chapter called the Social Justice Gospel. And there's a section in that called the whole gospel on page 46 of the book.

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And if you go to that page, what I'm talking about is what Lisa Sharon Harper talks about when she refers to the thick gospel.

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So she says thin gospel versus thick gospel. Some say the gospel of the kingdom or the gospel of grace versus the gospel of the kingdom.

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Some say the incomplete gospel or the gospel of salvation by grace versus the whole gospel or the complete gospel.

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There's different terms that are used. But if you go to the section on this and I have a whole section on the social gospel reborn.

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And so the whole gospel, I give you a whole list of names of different theologians and thinkers who have promoted this idea that evangelicals have missed the boat.

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That there's really not, that they didn't get the gospel right. They have part of the gospel, but they don't have the whole gospel.

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And I make the point in this, and I'll read from my own book. I say in Paul's letter to the

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Galatians, he stated that it was the gospel, which has come to you just as in the world.

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Also, it is constantly bearing fruit and increasing. In the second epistle to the Corinthians, Paul wrote that if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature.

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The old things passed away. Behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ.

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The apostle Peter called Christians to obedience in light of their receiving the gospel, not as a way of determining whether the gospel they received was inadequate or false.

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Conflating the gospel with the fruit of the gospel, like cider, which is one of the people I critique, has become a standard way for social justice evangelicals to frame their agenda.

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Failure to measure up to an often extra biblical and progressive expectations is grounds for failing the test of orthodox belief.

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So we do believe, Christians do believe, that the gospel produces fruits, that in light of a changed life, in light of a life impacted by the gospel, there is going to be a changed life based on that, and you're going to obey the ethics of Christ.

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But the gospel is the power of God to salvation for those who believe. It's that Jesus Christ died, rose from the dead, conquered death, and in so doing, he accomplished the satisfaction of God's wrath upon sinful human beings, right?

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This is the good news that we can be actually, there is a way that's been made for us to become transported from the domain of darkness into the glorious domain of Christ.

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And so we are in the kingdom of God as a result of this good news, this gospel. And I'll maintain that that's what the gospel of the kingdom is about.

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In Luke 17, 19, Jesus said that the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.

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In fact, he also says that his kingdom is not of this world, if it were, that his servants would be fighting.

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What is he talking about when he says this? Because we know there's gonna be one day that his kingdom is realized in a way that it's not being realized right now, even though he's in full control.

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And there's, in this institution of the church, we have a spiritual domain. We have believers in the

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Lord Jesus Christ who have the Holy Spirit living within them. And there's a spiritual kingdom that is being set, that has been set up.

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And you are already transferred from the domain of darkness into the domain of light just by nature of being a child of God.

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And that's a wonderful thing, that's good news. And then you get to enjoy all the fruit of that, all the things attached to that, all the things that Ephesians chapter one talks about.

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And it's not just that he's justified us, but look, we're seated in heavenly places with Christ and all the rest.

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So that's what I'm seeing. When I read about the gospel of the kingdom, even

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John the Baptist, going back to the very beginning, he said, repent and believe in the gospel, right? First usage in the

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New Testament of this term. We're talking about the good news that one can be made right with God.

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And specifically, it's the life of Jesus, what Jesus has done in accomplishing the mission to seek and save the lost, satisfy the father's wrath.

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And it's all about God at the end. It's all about God glorifying himself. Now, I wanna read for you something from John Owen.

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John Owen, Puritan theologian, says this about the gospel. He says, strictly speaking, the gospel is strictly, according to the signification of the word, good tidings, for the good tidings are of the accomplishment of the promise by the sending of Jesus Christ.

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He said, that's strictly what the gospel is, okay? The accomplishment of the promise by the sending of Jesus Christ. He then says, now this is broadly speaking, the gospel is taken more largely for all things that were annexed to the accomplishment of the promise, the revelation of the truths made there with all the institutions and ordinances of worship that accompanied it, the whole doctrine and worship of the gospel.

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That's why we say there's the gospel of Mark, there's the gospel of Luke, gospel of John, gospel of Matthew.

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These are different gospels. These stories are good news because of this message that's contained in it.

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And gospel truth, you ever heard someone say gospel truth? We're saying that in the book that contains the gospel, there's the truth that's the significance of that truth or the reality, the veracity of that truth is so true that it's attached to the gospel.

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It's just like the gospel true, this is true. So the gospel becomes so fundamental, so significant. It's the thing that Mark's that makes

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Christians unique. It's the thing that it's the core teaching of Christianity. And so some of the times the teachings surrounding that, especially in relationship to the life of Jesus are just shorthand referred to as the gospel.

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Mark 1 .1, the beginning of the gospel. This is the beginning of the good news. I'm gonna tell you the life of Christ, okay?

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Now, but theologically, the gospel is what John Owen says it is here. It's good tidings of the accomplishment of the promise by the sending of Jesus Christ.

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What was that? Well, that was redemption from sin. That was the salvation of souls that were at enmity with the

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Lord. And Christ said, it is finished at the end, it was finished. There's nothing left to do.

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There's nothing, it's always about God's work. It's always something that you're never gonna find.

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And this is the key thing. Listen to this here, please. Listen to this. This is the key thing. You're never gonna find in scripture anywhere that an apostle or Jesus or a prophet or anyone says, well, you know what?

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If you're in error, you don't have the full gospel until you do this social activist thing.

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Until you accomplish this work, then you can't have the gospel. Until you, or I should say, you don't have the full teaching of the gospel or something.

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You're never gonna find man's ability to fulfill the law or do good works somehow incorporated into, fused into, grafted into the gospel message, the good news.

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The good news, and hear me out here, is what God has done. In every case, it's something

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God's doing. It's something God's accomplishing. It's something God has accomplished. It's something that's a reality. It's something that you get to be part of even though you don't deserve to be.

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And so that's what sets these things apart. And as long as you keep that in mind, I think that that's gonna be the most helpful thing, that, okay, good news.

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Is it good news that I can, if I try really hard, maybe we can stop the racial disparities that exist by marching with BLM and supporting them?

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Is that good news? No, and you may think because it's a pipe dream.

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No, it's not because it's a pipe dream. That may be part of it, but it's actually not good news.

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It's because it's law, it's works.

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It's something that we can never actually achieve. And any standard that we give to ourselves, we won't be able to achieve it, any moral standard.

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It'll always condemn us. The law condemns. And so if we just did this, then we could stop global warming, right?

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We could stop or pick something on, pick an issue even on the right. And I'll even pick abortion, which is to me the biggest issue, ethically speaking, in the

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United States, because it's a travesty that babies are being murdered in the thousands every day.

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We'll think about this for a minute. So if the gospel becomes, let's say, an issue on the right like that, ending abortion, and if we go and we were co -belligerents with all the other pro -lifers and abortion abolitionists, and if we do this thing and we get abortion stopped, whether that's on the state level or the federal level, then that's the good news of the gospel.

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It may be good news. It may be a good thing to do. It may be the outworking of Christian ethics. It may be obedience to Christ.

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It may be obeying his commands, but it's not the gospel, and you'll never be able to 100 % be the best activist you can be for it.

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You'll just never be able to. You'll never be able to do all the things that you could possibly do to end abortion, right?

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We've all failed, if that's the case. We're all going to fall short of the standard if it's based on us and our efforts.

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And that's the thing about the gospel that's so beautiful. It's what Jesus Christ has done. It's his efforts. It's his accomplishment, and he allows us to be part of it.

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He gives us something we don't deserve. That's the whole point. I don't belong in this kingdom that Jesus is setting up, and yet the good news is he transports me to it.

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Guess how he does it? Because of his death and his resurrection and conquering death.

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That's how I'm transported into this. That's how I become part of, that's how

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I become in a right relationship with his father. So I just wanted to share with you a few thoughts on that before we get into the rest of it.

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And again, Galatians is the go -to book, I think, on this whole thing, where you have the

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Judaizers trying to come in and add in circumcision as a requirement to be a

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Christian and as part of the gospel somehow, and you don't have the gospel unless you're circumcised.

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And Paul said that is a false gospel, may it never be, anathema. To those who teach that, he even went after Peter for confusing the issue.

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And so that's, I think, essential reading for this whole discussion.

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Now, let's get into the specifics of what Lisa Sharon Harper thinks the gospel is. We talked about, we went over thick gospel, thin gospel.

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We talked about the quest for utopia. Let's talk about the big bad boy, the villain, all right?

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Western culture is the problem. That's right. We have believed a lie whose roots run deep in Western thought.

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It has shaped Western worldview structures, legal paradigms, and the church. If the world must rely on Western culture to fix the earth, then we are doomed.

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The Western march towards so -called civilization is what introduced colonization, monocropping, deforestation, and inequitable protection of people, even as it exploited the land.

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The development, the developed world must humble itself and turn toward the ones Jesus would call the least of these, women, indigenous people, and small family farmers.

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From these people, we can glean the wisdom God has given them through the land. It's kind of a weird quote at the end there.

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And then we buy into Western pride when we separate ourselves from the rest of creation, in essence, claiming to be non -creatures.

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So you find this throughout, that the Western culture is the problem. Western civilization is the problem.

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And of course, this is the civilization most shaped by Christianity over hundreds of years that apparently is the source of the problems that we're facing today.

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And it's a barrier for the thick gospel. It's a barrier for the redemption that we need to bring about through our social activism.

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And of course, more specifically, it's seen in the

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United States of America. America's Christian hypocrites. So here's some quotes about America.

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For an enslaved person, the differences between being a slave and being a white person were obvious. Whites had freedom of movement and thought, a declaration of their independence, any constitution that affirmed their equality.

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And in addition to all of that, white folks had shoes. So they had money, they had documents supporting their rights.

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She says that dozens of paintings in this, this is a museum she was at the,

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I think it was at the King Center, lined the walls and displayed between the paintings was actual currency used by the

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Confederacy. The Confederate States of America put pictures of happy, fully clothed slaves wearing shoes on their money because they knew that the currency traveled around the world.

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It was Southern propaganda in the era before television tweets and Facebook, which to me is, this is a bit comical to me.

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She, her reading of history is a very, when it comes to this, very neo -abolitionist, but very, you're gonna see it in all these other areas, a very

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Marxist reading. She says, she talks about, I'm gonna skip ahead of some of this. She talks about a gold rush in 1828 that displaced

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Cherokee peoples from their lands. And some of that is true. The President Andrew Jackson signed the

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Indian Removal Act. And part of the problem with all this was you had a decentralized, well, you had people, you couldn't control the influx of people that would go into certain areas as pioneers and stuff.

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And she says again, she reflected on, let's see, this Confederate currency exhibit.

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And the thought hit her that this is the Bible Belt. These things happened at the hands of people who claimed to believe in Jesus and the power of the cross for salvation.

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How could they believe the gospel and do this? And I think that's one of the central questions. That's, and we'll get to some more slides here, but I wanna take a break here.

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This is one of the central questions that is motivating a lot of this. If you take the

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Marxist reading of history and neo -Marxist, whatever, if you take the

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Howard Zinn interpretation and all those who've come from that, and you just think

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America's this awful bad place. And then you realize that, wait a minute, these were primarily people who claimed to be

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Christians. And you think, where was the church in all this? The church had a responsibility, the church failed.

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Then there's a lot of guilt. There's a lot of guilt that comes about through this, that our denomination is terrible, that our

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Christianity itself was terrible until 0 .2 seconds ago when we realized how terrible it was, and some people just leave the church.

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Why would I wanna be part of that organization? And so the way to preserve the church has largely been instead of challenging the

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Marxist narrative which is what I advocate and have advocated, it's not challenging it.

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It's instead just trying to accept it and then paint all those people like they were fake

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Christians. They all had to be fake Christians who did that. Or try to say, well, they were lacking something.

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They didn't have the full gospel or the gospel wasn't enough and they needed this other thing, the social justice thing we can give you now, right?

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These are the ways that people try to deal with this. I remember in class once, this was at Southeastern, I remember a professor,

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I think it was like spiritual disciplines class or something like that. There was a whole clip of, it was

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Al Mohler, I think, on Larry King with Rabbi Shmuley.

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And it was a segment where Al Mohler's on the defense in a way,

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Rabbi Shmuley's trying to blame Christians for the Holocaust. And we had to have a class discussion on it.

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And I remember a guy in back of me just saying that, well, he should have just apologized for the

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Holocaust and the Crusades, just apologize. I remember the professor was really kind of liking that, like approved of that.

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And he said, yeah, I think today, and this was a few years ago, I think that would happen. It was an earlier clip. It was like from 10 years before.

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So I think today that would happen, as if that was a good thing. And I remember I raised my hand and I said, look, I think we need to have a better, more nuanced and accurate depiction of history.

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And we need to fight back against these simplistic Marxist narratives that just aren't accurate. And we need to pass that down to our kids so they're not taken in by these things and they're prepared for them when they hear them.

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Well, that was not met with the same approval. And this is one of the things that I think is somewhat confusing to me, has always been confusing to me in this whole movement is, if we have intellectuals that we're training up at these institutions, why not start producing material that helps to counteract some of this narrative?

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Or at least put it in context to relay the complexity of various situations.

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Instead of this black and white, simplistic, hero villain, white hat, black hat understanding of history, where it's always the

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Western Europeans are always the bad guys. And it's indigenous peoples or the slaves who came here from Africa, or depending on what area you're talking about, the suffragettes, or it's these other classes that are always the pure as a driven snow good.

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And I think I've tried to at least open the door to challenging some of these things. And there's many who

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I know who have challenged these kinds of things and are trying to, but by and large, the intellectual class isn't doing this kind of work for some reason,

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I don't know why exactly that's not happening, because it would probably be the most helpful thing they can do when it comes to this, because this is how

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Marxism has advanced. Whether it was economic Marxism, classical Marxism, or today's neo -Marxism, that's how it advanced, it's through stories.

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And critical race theorists are very explicit about this. You tell stories, stories that tug on your emotions. And then those stories get you to assign and categorize, assign value, categorize people according to oppressor oppressed, and you start changing the way that you view things and the way you vote.

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And it's very manipulative and it's very well done. And there's now billions of dollars being poured into doing this kind of thing.

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And so it's meta, it's a melodrama, and there's a meta narrative that's used.

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And so with some of this stuff that we've just brought up, you know, it takes a long time to untie a knot, but not very long to tie one.

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So you have a lot of this stuff. I could probably go through each one and be like, okay, these issues are more complicated than they're being presented here.

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For instance, let's see, the paintings on the currency of the Confederacy, right? That this is just propaganda.

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This is horrible thing that they did. Well, what's the source for that? There is no source for it, right? There's no primary source that she's citing here.

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It's just that that's what it was. It was just propaganda. Well, it was a reflection of the planter class, the upper planter class that existed at that time in the world that they would have known.

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And, you know, perhaps it could be that they're trying to show people that, look, we have been painted in a bad way.

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But that money was not really being used outside the South much. It would have been used inside the

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South. And the reality is all the information that we have, the objective primary source information, demonstrates, guess what?

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Yeah, a lot of these slaves, they were wearing clothes. They were wearing shoes. They did have, their lives, and there were horrible situations.

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And I've done podcasts on this, so I don't need to reinvent the wheel, but there were horrible situations. But if we go to the slave narratives, if we go to the

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Census Bureau data that we have, if we go to what foreign observers have said about the slave conditions and stuff, actually the depictions on the money aren't necessarily inaccurate.

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And so the assumption behind all this is that it was all a big,

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I don't know, I think the term that was used in, I don't know if she used this,

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I think it was in a different book I was reading, the term was used, it was a big concentration camp. That's the assumption. It was just the slaves lived on big concentration camps, and the

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Christian masters didn't abide by any of the teaching that the Bible says about slavery. They were just monsters who would just rape their slaves and whip their slaves and abuse them.

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And that's just the situation. And anything that deviates from that, any narrative that deviates from that is just, we gotta call that guy an evil slavery apologist or something like that, because, and that's, unfortunately, that's what has to be pushed back on.

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You have to say, wait, hold on. There were Christians. There were a lot of Christians, actually, who didn't put up with that kind of thing, who weren't doing that, who weren't engaged in that.

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And the data we have seems to indicate that. And you could read even some of the good secondary sources. Eugene Genovese would be a good secondary source.

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Fogel and Ingerman would be another one. I have a few books on my shelf, actually, on this topic that are pretty good.

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And so here's, the issue is, we could get into a whole discussion about just that one thing and show that, look, this is a simplistic narrative.

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This just isn't accurate. Look at the times. Look how this developed. It did so organically. There wasn't a body that came together to vote.

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Let's have slavery. This was trying to be, there were many antislavery societies that promoted the idea of gradual emancipation.

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And Christians were behind these things. I could, I mean, even the Confederate Constitution outlaws the international slave trade.

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How does that fit into the narrative? Well, it's more complicated. And you don't have to think, and that's the problem is people, well, you must think slavery's good.

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You must think that, no, that's not, no, obviously, no, I don't. And no one who just accurately depicts the facts that we have from history and tries to come up with a paradigm that makes sense of all the information is doing that.

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All they're doing is they're saying, look, you're painting with a broad stroke that's not accurate. And it's a couple shades too dark here.

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This is not exactly what you're making it seem. And the thing is they do this with all sorts of things.

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They do this with the divine rate of kings. They do this with arranged marriages. They do this with the women and the rights or privileges that they had in society, their political mobility.

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They do this with just, the truth is with just so many things. And every time it's like, you just have to accept that narrative and not realize that there's different times, different ways people looked at things based on a lot of economic and cultural factors that don't exist now that did exist then.

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And some of these issues weren't as easy to get immediately do away with as we would think.

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And there's all these assumptions we have, these modern state assumptions. Like, well, can't the government just, like there wasn't a government that was centralized.

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They couldn't have just done something the way you're thinking. They had to take into account all kinds of other effects that their decisions would cause.

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So there were gradual ways of approaching some of these things. That is always missed just about every time.

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And conservatives by and large also tend to miss these things. But these are the things that you have to kind of challenge to some extent.

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That look, America has sinful things attached to it. Sure, the people in the

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United States definitely are sinners. Sure, there's people who claim the name of Christ and did sinful things.

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That shouldn't shock us. Sure, there's a lot of people who claim to be Christians who weren't Christians. But it's not the case that all these gospel believing,

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Bible practicing Christians were just totally satisfied with like raping and abusing their slaves and abusing their women if they were males and just stealing all the land.

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That's a whole nother complicated topic too. It is. I mean, before even the

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Europeans got here, what were Native American tribes doing with one another? Selling each other, a lot of them.

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Engaging in slavery, making war on one another. When the colonists got here, different groups did different things.

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But there was a lot of bartering and buying land and good relationships. And then other groups would come in and have bad relationships.

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And there would be frontier, people on the frontier that would be ruthlessly attacked.

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And there would be, I'm just saying, there's a lot of nuance in this whole thing. And to me, one of the biggest tragedies,

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I was just on the Navajo reservation in Arizona is what happened after the war between the states, when the federal government really broke some promises and did some horrible things out

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West. And the consequences of that are still around today. I don't shy away from that.

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But I don't lay that at the feet of Christianity either. I don't think it's, well, all these people that believed in Jesus and were really just trying to live out their faith consistently, that they were either a bunch of ignoramuses because they didn't understand what the

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Bible taught. And now we are so enlightened, we do. I mean, please, some of these people, a lot of the intellectuals at that time in their teenage years would read

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Latin and Greek and sometimes Hebrew. And I'm not gonna say, oh, they're just morally all so deficient.

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They would be horrified at some of the things that we put up with. Our entertainment choices, the places we frequent and shop, and the things we buy and the lifestyles we have.

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And there would be many things that they would be very horrified about and compared to the times in which they lived.

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And there are some things that are just, that are cultural and circumstantial.

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It doesn't mean that there's not a right or a wrong. There is in every time period, and that's consistent. And that's something that's objective.

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But there are different customs that arise. There are different situations that arise. And there are ways of dealing with certain sins that are different.

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And some ways are not as possible now or possible then as they are now and vice versa.

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So anyway, things are more complicated. And that's the only thing that I, that's the main thing that I've tried to communicate about history when

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I talk to people about this, who have these very overly simplistic narratives about things. And it's not all as it seems.

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There were good Christians. There were Christian heroes. There were, look, it was Christianity that ended up actually eradicating what was a universal human institution.

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Slavery was. And it was Christians who ended up eradicating that in the Western world. And so anyway, she doesn't give that.

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That credit, of course, is not given. It's the Western world is all at fault. The Western world are the big meanies.

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They're the bad guys. And even in any of these metrics, she talks about environmentalism later on.

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Like, look, the Chinese are polluting way more than the United States. But it's the

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Western world. It's always the Western world. It's the Western mindset. And that's one of the issues with this, that you know, that's the

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Marxist thing. Because you know, like, it's not, it's hypocritical. It's assigning a blacker -than -black, like, really evil categorization to this group that we're all supposed to hate,

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Westerners, white people, Americans, right? And then it doesn't, it's not consistently, it's not consistent in applying that standard to other people groups.

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And that's one of the ways you can tell there's, that narrative is going on. And so, what's the way to solve this?

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What's, what about America's sins? Well, liberation theology. Jesus allowed the dominion of human empire to take its best shot, and he was killed, then he rose again, and God won.

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God beat the power of human empire, not with a sword, but with the power of the resurrection. Well, we're gonna be celebrating that this

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Sunday. The power of the resurrection is the, it was the defeat of death, not the defeat of the

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Romans. It was the defeat of death. This is a liberation theology reading of that.

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Now, of course, America's sins remain with us. She says, meanwhile, terrorist rampages in Paris and San Bernardino, California took place less than three weeks apart in late 2015.

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ISIL claimed responsibility for the Paris and San Bernardino massacre. Some European countries, most affected by the refugee crisis, continue to welcome refugees fleeing

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ISIL, but many rejected them. And 31 governors of states in the

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United States declared they would not accept refugees. And she says, on the domestic front in 2015, 40 % of unarmed people killed by police were black men, yet black men make up only 6 % of the national population.

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What's she getting at? And there'll be more examples I give later. She's getting at the fact that nothing has really changed, that all these things from the past that were bad haven't really stopped, that America still,

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America has this original sin flowing from Western civilization. What's the thing, that's the barrier preventing

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Christ's kingdom from being set up here now, the very good gospel, this utopia, it's

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America. We can't usher it in because it's, America's preventing this from happening, and it's because of the

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Western culture that America has. And so we have to do something,

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Christians have to do something about this. And so she presents herself as personally a victim of America's sin, and she gives some interesting, these are autobiographical, she says, like the typical teen from an 80s

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John Hughes movie, I wore tight jeans, donned black eyeliner, straightened my hair, took my first sips of alcohol, and dreamed of the day when my crush would ask me out.

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He never did, not in that Southern white town. Yes, Cape May is

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South of the Mason -Dixon line. I chased love as if it would fill the abyss in my soul, but I had a strike against me,

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I was the only black person in my white Southern semi -rural circle of friends. Glances turned to laughter, turned to friendship, turned to flirting, turned to friends hanging out on boardwalks, turned to bottle spun, and pointing at white boys who turned tail to date their kind.

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So there is a bitterness, unfortunately, and I think you're gonna find this with a lot of social justice activists.

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If you really peel back the onion layers, what's going on under the hood? There's a personal thing going on, and they're mad at mom or dad.

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It ain't something that happened 50 or 300 years ago, it's mom and dad. They're upset because they didn't get what they wanted.

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They wanted, they had an expectation, and it wasn't met. And I think

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Cape May, if I'm not mistaken, I think Cape May is in Delaware, or oh, New Jersey? I think

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Cape May is in New Jersey. Wait a minute, this makes no sense. I'm looking it up now. I already looked it up at the time, but that was months ago when

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I was putting this together. I slowly put this together. Yeah, okay.

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Well, I'm coming up here with New Jersey. So she's claiming, growing up,

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I guess, this is in Cape May, New Jersey, the southern tip of New Jersey, that that was a southern white town that she wasn't able to,

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I guess, have the boyfriend she wanted because he was white and discriminated against her. That's, well, anyone from Cape May, please put in the info section whether that is a southern white town.

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I'd be shocked about that, that its character would be a southern white town, but maybe there's parts of New Jersey, I'm just not aware of.

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So she says, this Christmas, it was just me and mom, and neither of us felt like cooking. We went to several movies over the course of her week -long visit, but I felt the emptiness and the loneliness of the changes brought by our broken family.

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All things being equal, I could have focused on my mom's two failed marriages and blamed her for failing to demonstrate what healthy love looks like.

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I might have blamed both my father and my stepfather for choosing infidelity over family, and I suppose part of me does still linger there, but this isn't fiction, and all things are not equal for me.

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I'm a black woman in the United States of America. That means my mother and father and their mothers and fathers and my brothers and uncles and aunts and ancestors back to the other side of the

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Atlantic all navigated family systems that were severely hindered by outside forces, slavery, Jim Crow, housing discrimination, education discrimination, employment discrimination, and much more.

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The impacts of inside and outside forces play a significant role in shaping family structure. Over the two years after that Christmas spent with my mother,

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I gained 50 pounds. I threw myself into work. I lived outside of myself for everyone but me.

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There are mornings when I wake up and my first thought is of my estranged family, and I weep. Now, this is sad, guys.

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This breaks my heart to some extent, and I just hate to see someone like this looking for the answers in social justice because they're not gonna find them.

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It's deceitful. It's not gonna give you that. What you want, what she needs, and what she wants is her mom and dad to be together.

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She wants to be able to be married and have children and enjoy those joys. I mean, you can see that, these natural longings because of a broken family, and who's she blaming for it?

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She's a victim of America's sin. It's slavery going back years, apparently. That's the reason her mom and her dad,

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I guess, had failed marriages. One of the things social justice does is it takes away personal responsibility.

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Look, there's a lot of groups that can claim hardship and barriers and suffering, and I can claim that.

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Actually, every person can claim that at some point in human history, their ancestors went through something, and that, well, that's just, you could say that's just the hangup that I have, and why am

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I, but claiming that your parents, the reason that they're divorced, the reason that, she says,

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I might have blamed both my father and my stepfather for choosing infidelity over family. Yeah, right, that would make sense, and I suppose part of me does still linger there, but this isn't fiction, and then she says, and all things are not equal for me.

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I'm a black woman in the United States of America. That means my mother and father and their mothers and fathers and et cetera are, they're victims.

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This is so telling to me, and this, you think about what Jesus said, that evil comes from inside a man, that it's what corrupts the heart.

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It's not from outside a man, it's from inside, and that's what

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I'm seeing here with this particular, with the way that she's reading not just the history of the

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United States, but she's reading her own history, her own life history with this, it's the systemic stuff, it's this other people, really that's what it is, it's other people are to blame for the sin of my parents and the situation

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I'm in, and gaining 50 pounds and these kinds of things, these all, this is part of some systemic injustice against me and my family, and it's sad that these things are happening, but that's the result of living in a sin -cursed world.

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It's true, and blaming other people or things that happened hundreds of years ago are not going to change the scenarios now, they're not gonna change situations.

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We have to take personal responsibility for actual sin, and that's what's not happening here. So she's a victim of America's sin, she brings in other victims of cultural sin, she uses a

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Samaritan woman as one, she says, what was the Samaritan woman trying to avoid? The backstory provided in John four explains that the woman had previously had five husbands and that the man she was with at the time was not her husband.

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She had given herself to five men and five men had thrown her out. How empty must she have felt? How used, how disappointed, how unworthy of love?

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Five times the woman trusted a man to care and provide for her in a world in which men had multiple wives and concubines, but women could only have one husband.

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Five times she had a home, food and protection, five times she was thrown away. There were the chances that the man she was with at the moment would follow suit.

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What were the chances? Well, see, this is a reading of that story in which the woman, this is a me too reading of that story, the woman keeps getting thrown out of houses where she had husbands.

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How about the idea that maybe she was an adulterous woman and Jesus knew her sin?

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That's not, that doesn't even come into, so you see the personal responsibility, the idea that there could have been personal responsibility here, no, she's just the victim of the society that she lived in.

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Just like Lisa Sharon Harper says she's the victim of American society. Tamar, another example from the Bible. His father,

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King David, chose to protect the perpetuator, his firstborn son rather than the victim, his only daughter. Here the text reveals the deep -seated cultural bias toward maleness and confirms the depth of male bias within the culture.

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Yeah, well, so she's really David, King David did what he did because of a male culture that existed around him.

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It wasn't King David's personal sin as much as it was, he was, King David, maybe you could say

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King David was the victim. King David was the victim of this horrible male -dominated culture, I don't know. But that's why he didn't protect

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Tamar when she was raped. Well, there's a lot of messed up stuff that happens in life in general, but also in the

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Old Testament. And think about the David who had Uriah killed. I mean, is that a male bias to kill someone else?

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I mean, another man. So it's, she's imposing things that just aren't, and they're not necessary to be imposed.

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Where do you get from the text that that's David's bias? It's a cultural bias towards men that makes him protect his evil son.

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It could just be a bias towards his son. So basically what you're seeing is there's a systemic, this kind of background oppressive force, this sin -producing force that exists, this hegemony, to take

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Antonio Gramsci's word for it, that exists, and that's what's causing all these problems. It's causing things like weight gain.

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It's causing divorce. It's causing adultery. It's causing the protection of, in this case, of someone who raped someone else.

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It's causing the, it's women being exploited. It's causing all these problems.

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And America's just chalked through with it. Western culture is chalked through.

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These are the big boogeymen. These are the problems. And those are what needs to be destroyed because that's where the sin is. That's where the root of it is.

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We need to destroy these things. That's gonna be the logical conclusion. You buy into that analysis, you're gonna buy into that conclusion.

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And that's somehow gonna be part of the gospel, to destroy Western culture, to deconstruct, to rip down America. Here's how this works.

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The divided gospel. And I think what I'm gonna do, actually, is because I've gone way, I did not wanna make this three episodes, but that's what

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I'm gonna be doing. So in the next episode, we are gonna go into functionally how this works.

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So we've talked about the critique. We've talked about the strategy by which Lisa Sharon Harper uses to deceive

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Christians. Really, that's what she's doing, whether she knows it or not, but to manipulate

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Christians into buying into the solution she wants to give them through her twisting of the gospel.

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So we talked about that, right? And then we're going to, next time, which is the last time, we're gonna talk about how this kind of works on the ground, practically.

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We're gonna apply it to different situations. And I'll take you through the rest of the book. And really, you'll gain a window into how social justice thinking exists and works in evangelicalism in general.

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So hope that was helpful for some of you. God bless. And for those who are celebrating,

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I think I'm recording this on the 15th, but I'll probably release it on the 16th.

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So for those who are going to church tomorrow, God bless. Enjoy your time worshiping our great