Tim Keller's Outrageous Claim

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On this episode of Coffee with a Calvinist, Pastor Keith responds to a claim about white privilege made by well-known Pastor Tim Keller.

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This program is dedicated to helping you better understand the Word of God and the doctrines of grace.
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The Bible tells us, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who is no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to study along.
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Here's your host with today's lesson, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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And welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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Today is September the 23rd, 2020.
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And if you're following along in our daily Bible reading, you're going to be reading today from Second Timothy chapter three.
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That Bible reading is available at our website, our church website, sgfcjacks.org.
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You can go to posts and under posts, you will find the list for the 2020 reading plan.
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We're reading through the New Testament one chapter a day, every weekday.
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This is probably the easiest reading plan that you can follow.
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It takes you only through a chapter a day and you can commit to that.
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And having done that, you will have read the whole New Testament in 2020.
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Well today we are going to be listening to a claim from a pastor who many of you may be aware of.
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Some of you may even be very fond of.
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And I want to clarify, even from the beginning, that I am in no way saying that everything that this person has ever said is wrong.
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I'm in no way impugning everything that this person stands for or has written or taught.
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I have read some of his writings.
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I have, over the years, certainly heard some of his messages.
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And in general, things have always seemed to be fairly reasonable that I've heard him say.
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But very recently, Pastor Tim Keller, who is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, where he started in 1989 with his wife Kathy and their three young sons, and now has led that congregation to over 5,000 in weekly attendance.
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So he has a very large church there in New York.
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And many, like I said, many of you have heard of him.
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And very recently it came to light that he made a statement.
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Now this was not a statement that he made in a sermon, but this was a statement that he made apparently in some form of a conference.
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I'm not going to show a video.
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I'm just going to play the audio.
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But just know that on the stage that he's sitting on, and if you were to go back and look up the video, he is sitting on the stage with two other individuals.
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I have no idea who they are.
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But this is a short clip of what he said, and I think it's important because it is indicative of what I consider to be a much larger problem in the church today, in evangelicalism today.
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I'm not going to preface it.
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I'm just going to say I have a problem with what he says.
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I'll let you listen to it.
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And then I'm going to make some comments.
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A friend of mine recently, who's a pastor, was talking to a Norwegian man who had just moved into his community and went to his church.
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And at one point he heard the pastor talking about the fact that we are all complicit in creating this narrative that black people are dangerous, etc.
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And so we're complicit in this.
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Afterwards, the Norwegian came up and said, no, no, no, I'm Norwegian.
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No, had nothing to do with it.
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And my pastor friend said, studies have shown, have pretty much proven, that if you have white skin it's worth a million dollars over a lifetime, over somebody who doesn't have white skin.
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And that's because of historical forces that have come about.
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And at this point, you know, you could go out of several ways.
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One is, I mentioned, if you have that asset of white skin right now, historical asset, then you actually have to say, I didn't deserve this.
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And also, I'm to some degree, I'm the product of, I'm standing on the shoulders of other people who got that through injustice.
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So the Bible actually says, yes, you do, you do, you are involved in injustice.
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And even if you didn't actually do it, therefore you have a responsibility.
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Not just to say, well, you know, maybe if I get around to it, maybe we could do something about the poor people out there.
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No, you're part of the problem.
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If you do actually let your understanding and responsibility be shaped by the Bible instead of American individualism.
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Asians, I think I would say the same thing, in a way I would say the Norwegians.
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The fact is that Asians and Latinos and African Americans, because of the background, because of the history difference, you actually are coming in at different levels.
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OK, that ends, it ends rather abruptly.
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The YouTube video ends rather abruptly.
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So he goes into another conversation.
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But and I want to be fair, there's a larger context to this that obviously we don't have time to get into.
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But the important part is, is obviously what you heard.
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Pastor Keller has made the statement that ultimately, if you have white skin, that you are inherently guilty of injustice and that and he uses the phrase biblically biblical in that to say that the Bible says that you are guilty.
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The Bible says that you because if you have white skin, you'll make you more, you'll make a million dollars more in a lifetime than someone who doesn't have white skin.
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And the reason why you have that benefit is ultimately because you have white skin.
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And does that doesn't apply to black people.
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It doesn't apply to Asians.
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It doesn't apply to Latinos.
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It only applies to white people.
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And one of the things that I want to point out just from the get go is that this is this is part of a larger movement.
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And if you've listened to the program, you've heard me talk about it in the in weeks previous.
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This is part of a larger movement that is pressing upon our culture and our society, a form of what I believe is cultural Marxism.
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And that term is important because it essentially is it's an attempt to divide.
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It's an attempt to separate between those who have privilege and those who do not.
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And ultimately, it's it's advantage versus disadvantage.
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And I am saddened by the fact that I'm not surprised that this is in the academy.
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I'm not surprised that this is in colleges.
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I'm not surprised that this is in the universities.
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And just remember that when you're sending your kids off to universities, when you're sending your kids off to colleges, they're being they are being inundated with this type of thinking.
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This type of cultural Marxism is the rule of the jungle.
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And it is the standard and it is being force fed.
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And don't kid yourself if you think that it's not, you know, I but what saddens me is that we're not talking about and a Yale professor, we're talking about a church pastor.
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And so we're dealing with a pastor who believes these things, who is teaching these things.
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And Keller was quoting another pastor.
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So this is not just him who's regurgitating this, but some, you know, someone else has said this and he's and he's saying studies have shown.
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I want to say this.
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Anytime you hear someone say.
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Anytime you hear someone begin a sentence with studies have shown.
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Always remember that is that is often a way to try to cite some type of authoritative source.
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But you're not actually citing a source.
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You're not saying the study that was done at Oxford or Cambridge, you're not saying the study that was done at UC Berkeley or was done at North Carolina University or anything like that.
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You just say studies have shown.
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And I'm sure that there are studies out there that show that if you are if you have white skin, then there is certain advantages to that, particularly in the United States.
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See, there's there's a lot to the a statement that could be questioned.
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Well, is that is white skin an advantage in the United States as opposed to other places? Is this study being done? What is what is the.
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What's the scope of the study? What's the you know, because I know this.
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I know many of my family members will never make a million dollars in their whole lifetime.
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So the idea that that their whiteness is going to average out to more than a million dollars over a lifetime.
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No, I don't necessarily think so.
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I have I have several family members that you know, that I can think of that will probably never make a million dollars.
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And if they do, it will be over a long period of very hard work.
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It won't be because someone gave them a check because of the color of their skin.
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And and the argument, I'm not trying to be to sound like I'm being too sarcastic, but really, that's the point, right, is this level of this level of discourse almost needs ridicule because this is a ridiculous claim.
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This is an outrageous claim and not not not necessarily the claim about the the money, but the claim that the biblical response is that we need to all feel a sense of guilt for our.
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For the fact that we we didn't come about this whiteness with we didn't come about this because we chose this, we were born this way, we were born white, we were born automatically privileged.
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And therefore, we need to carry the burden of guilt with us and we need to make sure that we are doing everything we can to right the wrongs, to to satisfy the justice that has been or satisfy the injustice that has been done allegedly by all of our ancestors.
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And so I when I was thinking about, well, what should I say to respond to this? The first thing is I think it's an outrageous claim.
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I think many people who've heard it have already said this is a outrageous claim.
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But I want to point you all to a particular document that is helpful in regard to this.
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Several years ago, a group of pastors came together and they wrote a statement on the subject of social justice and the gospel.
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And it's just called that the Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel.
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I haven't mentioned it on the program before that I can remember, but I did sign this statement very early because it came out and it came across my desk.
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One of my fellow friends and pastors sent it to me, asked me to read it.
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And if I endorsed it, would I sign it? And I did because I did endorse what it said.
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And I want to look at this statement because this statement is making a point about what is wrong in the churches.
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Because what we're seeing in the churches is we are seeing intersectionality, white privilege and ultimately cultural Marxism being preached as this is what the Bible is trying to satisfy.
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And what I think we're seeing is we're seeing a turning away from the biblical gospel and turning to the gospel of liberation theology.
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Liberation theology is not biblical theology.
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It is a perversion of biblical theology that, again, is very Marxist in its approach.
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It's all about trying to liberate the oppressed and to overcome the oppressors.
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And it sees everyone in the categories of the oppressed and the oppressor, everyone in the category of the advantaged and the disadvantaged.
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And I'm going to mention a name.
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I've mentioned him on the program before.
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He's not a Christian, but Jordan Peterson has spoken a lot about this subject.
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He is a psychologist.
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He is a professor from Canada.
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I don't agree with everything Jordan Peterson says, and I certainly don't endorse everything that he says.
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But there are times when I think he says some really intuitive things.
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I think he says some very interesting things.
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And when it comes to this, he said, he said, it's interesting that they choose certain things to be the things where the advantages are, such as sex and race and sexual orientation and gender issues.
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Those are the things that become the issues where the intersectionality really matters.
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Whereas there are many other things that matter as well.
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For instance, being part of a majority.
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If you are a one of the things that you often hear as well, white children or children grow up in America and they see white pictures of white people in their textbooks or they see pictures of white people in the newspaper, they see pictures of white people here or there.
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And so that's automatically bad for people who aren't white because they don't they don't feel like they have representation.
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And so we say this is not a matter of white privilege.
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This is majority privilege because in America, it's still a majority white nation.
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And if you if you were to go to China, it would be and you open a newspaper and you saw that it was a Chinese people on the front page of the newspaper.
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And if you went to the textbooks and you open it up and there were Chinese pictures of Chinese people in textbooks, you wouldn't be offended because you would understand that's not that's not a that's not a Chinese privilege thing.
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That's a it's an issue of of majority.
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And there are other there are other things, many things like that where they were where you'll hear the arguments.
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And I think Jordan Peterson does a good job of dismantling each one and saying each one of the arguments for white privilege are actually there.
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They're they're overstating the problem.
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They're there.
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They're miscommunicating the issue.
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And ultimately, they're creating a sense of guilt and a problem for the for the the the people, the in this case, white people, that creating a sense of guilt and problem for them because they're considered the oppressors.
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And the idea is we need to bring the oppressors down, lift the oppressed up.
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And of course, they would say, and that's biblical because that's biblical justice.
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And now I want to go back to the statement on social justice again.
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I would think particularly Pastor Tom Askell, he was one of the men most responsible for putting together the statement on social justice.
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But there were others.
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I believe Votie Baucom and James White were a part of this.
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But I want to I want to just simply read if you if you go, I would encourage you to read the whole thing.
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And again, you can you can even sign on.
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I believe you can still sign if you affirm it.
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But when it did come out, a lot of people signed in with very ugly things.
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There was a lot of hate towards this document.
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And but I want to I just want to read to you a couple of things that it says, because it makes biblical statements.
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And I think that they're true statements.
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And the first one.
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Is is just in regard to the subject of justice, what is justice? And the statement says this, we affirm that since he is holy, righteous and just, God requires those who bear his image to live justly in the world.
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This includes showing appropriate respect to every person and giving to each one what he or she is due.
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We affirm that societies must establish laws to correct injustices that have been imposed through cultural prejudice.
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OK, that's good.
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We believe that.
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But we deny and this is the denial.
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We deny that true justice can be culturally defined or that standards of justice that are merely socially constructed can be imposed with the same authority as those that are derived from Scripture.
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We further deny that Christians can live justly in the world under any principles other than the biblical standard of righteousness.
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Relativism, socially constructed standards of truth or morality and notions of virtue and vice that are constantly in flux cannot result in authentic justice.
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Again, it's making the point that a lot of what is called justice today is not true righteousness, but it is a moral relativistic view of trying to overcome inequalities that in one sense will always exist.
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For instance, we talk about privilege.
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There are privileges that go beyond being white or black.
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There are privileges such as there are privileges.
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I'm I will I have certain advantages and I have certain disadvantages.
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One of the advantages of being a woman is that my wife will probably outlive me, not just because I'm I just happen to be heavier than her, but because more than likely because of statistics, statistics show women live about eight years longer than men on average.
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So it's very likely that my wife will outlive me.
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And so there's a certain advantage to being a woman in that regard.
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And so we can begin to pick out advantages and disadvantages.
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I have friends that are much more athletic than I am and they have advantages and I have disadvantages.
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I have I have had certain health issues that other friends have not have and therefore I have a disadvantage and they have an advantage.
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I live in Florida and I would say right now I have a lot more advantages than my friends in California who are living in a very leftist controlled area.
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And so we could go down the list.
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And ultimately it comes back.
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It comes back to an issue of righteousness.
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It's not who has necessarily who has more or who has less.
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It or because again, even if we all started out equally, we don't always, we don't all have equal aptitude.
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We don't have all equal work ethic.
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We don't all have equal abilities.
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And so the idea of absolute equality is not what the Bible is referring to when it talks about justice.
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Justice is righteousness, not a socially constructed a Marxist utopia where everyone is the same because it's never going to be that everyone is the same.
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And that's not biblical justice and that's not what that, that, that's one thing.
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And then another thing that the document says, I want to go a couple over here.
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I want to look at what it says about sin.
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This says, we affirm that all people are connected to Adam, both naturally and federally.
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Therefore, because of original sin, everyone is born under the curse of God's law and all break his commandments through sin.
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There is no difference in the condition of sinners due to age, ethnicity, or sex.
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All are depraved and all their faculties and all stand condemned before God's law.
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All human relationship systems and institutions have been affected by sin.
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That's important.
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But now the denial, even more important, we deny that other than the previously stated connection to Adam, any person is morally culpable for another person's sin.
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Although families, groups, and nations can sin collectively, and cultures can be predisposed to particular sins, subsequent generations share the collective guilt of their ancestors only if they approve of and embrace or attempt to justify those sins.
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Before God, each person must repent and confess his own or her own sins in order to receive forgiveness.
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We further deny that one's ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular sin.
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I'm going to say that again.
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We deny that one's ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular sin.
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You see, right now, there are people who say, if you're white, you're racist.
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And ultimately that is not what Keller said, but that is the deduction because he says, you are benefiting from your white ancestors who did injustice, which like he can see all of our ancestors and know that every one of our ancestors was.
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And that again, isn't that a broad brush to paint with? To say all every white person has always been a part of injustice.
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What about those who were active in freeing the slaves? What about those who were active in fighting for the end of slavery? What about those who were active in the abolitionist movement to abolish slavery? This is, this is absolutely outrageous to make this statement and to try to bring about some type of reconciliation by heaping up guilt.
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Again, we deny that one's ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular sin.
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This is important to understand.
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And again, I think this document that has been written is, is based firmly on biblical, on a biblical foundation.
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Every one of these statements has biblical verses that can be looked up and I would encourage you to do that.
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Go and look up the statement on social justice and the gospel.
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It is available as statement on socialjustice.com.
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You can find it there.
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You can find it through the founders websites.
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If you just look up the, and I think it's also referred to as the Dallas statement on social justice.
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So you look up that on Google, you can find it, you can read it.
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If you have questions about it, please take a moment and send me those questions.
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So this has been my opportunity to respond to what I consider was an outrageous claim by Pastor Keller.
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This is not an attempt to attack him personally.
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I hope that that's been understood.
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As I said, I do think that he has made many positive contributions in the past to the gospel, but I think like many people, he is, he has bought into a lie and we need to continue to stand up for him.
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Stand against that lie and stand for the truth.
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Well, this has been coffee with a Calvinist.
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Thank you for listening today.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I have been your Calvinist.
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May God bless you.
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Thank you for joining in for today's episode of coffee with a Calvinist.
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Keep in mind, we have a new lesson available every weekday morning at 6 30 AM on YouTube and Facebook.
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Thank you for listening.
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May God bless you.