TGC on Economic Disparities, Social Justice 1977, and Understanding CRT

Welcome to Conversations That Matter Podcast. My name is Jon Harris and there's been a lot going on this week in regards to the social justice movement, not only in evangelicalism but more broadly speaking in,

I guess, Christendom. I mean, I don't know what you would refer to Union Seminary as where this past week someone in chapel apologized to plants, but I think it's safe to say, just a wild guess, it's probably not within the boundary of biblical

Christianity, right? You've actually left Christianity at that point and you are practicing a different religion, but that is what happened.

And there's two ways to react. One is you could do the Babylon Bee thing and write an article that says that the plants did not accept the apology and started eating the students, which was funny.

Or you could say this is where the social justice movement will get you. And so we better be careful.

Nip this in the bud. Let's stop it now so that in these orthodox circles where we're involved, a lot of those who listen to my podcast and myself, we do not get to the point of apologizing to plants.

Can we agree on that? Yeah, I think that would be good. Some other things that happened this week, one that was encouraging, some that are kind of crazy, half crazy, not as crazy as apologizing to plants.

But on Tuesday, John MacArthur made a speech, a sermon he presented to the master's seminary faculty and students.

And what he said was that he's come to the end of his life and he looks back and he realizes there's many men who he's done ministry with who cannot stand where he stands.

And so they parted ways. And he uses as an example, the woke movement.

He doesn't call it that, but he talks about Christian leaders who would identify with the Me Too. He insinuates sexual identities, ethnic identities, and he says that's not in keeping with the truth.

And the reason I'm bringing this up is because it's encouraging to finally hear someone who's in the upper echelons of evangelical leadership not going along with the error.

And I think we need to support this as much as we possibly can. There's been some speculation about the

Shepherds Conference, which MacArthur hosts at Grace Community Church, and also the

Together for the Gospel Conference, because typically Mark Dever, Al Mohler, Lincoln Duncan are at the

Shepherds Conference. And it's announced a year in advance, usually, especially with Al Mohler, that he's going to be there. I've been to many

Shepherds Conferences and that's usually how it goes. They waited months. And when they did announce the list of speakers, they were not on it, those three.

At the Together for the Gospel Conference next year in 2020, MacArthur is not on the list of speakers.

And if I'm not mistaken, he generally speaks. And so functionally, it seems like there's some kind of a rift.

And I'm not speculating or trying to, I mean, these men may be fine personally with each other, but functionally speaking,

I'm not the only one to observe that something's changed. And I would encourage you, number one, listen to John MacArthur's lecture, if you can find it, from last

Tuesday. I think I found it on the YouTube channel for the Master's Seminary. But also, if you're going to go to like T4G or G3, maybe reconsider this year.

Maybe go to the Shepherds Conference. And I've been there many times. It is a different feel than a convention center.

Because you're on a church campus. My uncle actually goes to that church. You can say hi to him. He volunteers. They don't pay these guys.

They volunteer their services to help serve pastors and they treat them right. And the

In -N -Out Burger is worth it, by the way. Those in California know what I'm talking about. But you can go to the Shepherds Conference and support a man who has,

I think, taken a lot of personal hits for his stands. And he's standing strong against the social justice movement, as far as I can tell.

And I know there's some who have criticized that he hasn't gotten far enough. You know what? He's an elderly man and he has done a lot.

And he said in this speech last Tuesday that the error is inside the church in ways that he's never seen.

It reminds me of last year when he had said that the social justice movement was a threat to the gospel greater than any of the other threats he'd been involved with, essentially.

So go support him if you can. Speaking of social justice movement, a seminary

I graduated from keeps saying crazy stuff. And I wasn't surprised by this.

I put some of this information out there, but apparently some people were surprised, probably because they saw it in video. But there was a panel discussion where some of the professors at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary advocated for perspectivalism, standpoint epistemology, the hermeneutic that basically says you need to read the

Bible through the lens of the poor, the oppressed, sojourner, so forth. And it destroys the idea of objective truth, but that's what's being promoted.

And it's been promoted there for a long time, meaning a few years. So long in the scheme of things,

I guess, with how fast things seem to be changing. And I'm not going to talk about it, really.

I think next week, if I have time, I'm going to talk about it. Because there were a few other things that were brought up to my attention on the same day, coming from Southeastern, that were all not good.

But I think I'm just going to leave that there. Some other people have talked about it. I've said a lot about Southeastern in the past.

They have a PR problem, and I think they know it. And I'm sure their professors are probably trying to avoid talking about this.

I'm sure the school administration is probably trying to avoid putting things out there that are quote -unquote woke.

But once you have a movement like this, going for as many years as you do, and you don't fire any of the professors, and they still believe these things, stuff is going to just leak out.

And you can't help that. So, that was Southeastern. Now, I'm going to bring up another thing.

This is, I'm going to use this to launch a discussion that I think is going to be really helpful. Because we are in an interesting time right now, in this whole debate.

We went from criticizing social justice, conservatives, to now shifting to criticizing critical race theory and intersectionality.

I want to show you an article. This is, that is not the article I wanted to show you. The article I wanted to show you is from the

Gospel Coalition. And it is called, A Book on Dignity for All Has Much to Teach Us.

Sorry, Has Much to Teach the Church. That would be us, right? By Justin Lowness. And this came out yesterday from the

Gospel Coalition. And I know the guys there are very sensitive of being called Marxist, so forth and so on. But yes, this has

Marxist underpinnings in it. Marxist assumptions. And just, I'll say this briefly. It doesn't mean it's

Marxist if you just say there are have and have -nots. Of course, even scripture talks about sometimes rich men, poor men.

Yeah, okay, there's classes. But it's when you create a paradigm and explain everything else through that idea that there are haves and have -nots, that it becomes

Marxism. Or at least Marxist assumptions. Tim Keller has Marxist assumptions. I, some guys on my side would disagree with me, but I wouldn't say he's a full -fledged

Marxist. He's not Joseph Stalin coming into the church. And that's one of the things that I know the other side tries to say that we're saying.

They try to sort of broad brush us and maybe some guys on my side don't help themselves, but they try to, so we are saying that we're communists.

We're not communists. We just think, and you know, fill in the blank with some kind of social justice crusade. And you don't have to be a full -fledged, dyed -in -the -wool

Marxist to the T to be dangerous and to be advocating a false gospel, which Marxism is and a dangerous ideology.

So this has Marxist underpinnings in it, and I'm going to get into it, all right? So don't shoot at me if you're from the social justice side watching this.

Just wait until I parse this out for you. But this article came out, and I wanted to,

I'm going to circle back right now and just talk about these two terms, critical race theory, intersectionality, and then social justice.

Originally, in this whole controversy, we were talking about social justice, right?

The Dallas Statement on Social Justice. Now we are talking, since Resolution 9 this summer, about critical race theory and intersectionality.

There are good and bad things about this. The good thing, first, is we can further define what we are talking about.

So we can point to something and say, well, that sounds like what a critical race theorist would say, and we would be right about that.

And so I think it has given us language and definition. The bad side. Marxism and critical race theory and intersectionality are part of that umbrella.

They come from a Marxist tradition. Marxism morphs. Marxism changes.

These are in flux. Critical race theory is not a blueprint for a house.

It's not like a paradigm that you can, like, you can't approach it like an engineer and just read all the authors and then systematize what this is.

It's not really up for that. I mean, I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but just realize it will morph, change, new terms, different concepts.

And think about it this way. The left loves to take, like, one month it will be reparations for African Americans.

The next month it will be men treating women poorly. The next month it will be we need to read the

Bible through the lens of the oppressed. The next month it will be we need to treat immigrants right. The next month it will be, well, we need to soft pedal homosexuality.

And then it will circle back to reparations or something. And that's just how the left works.

They trot something out there. It gets shot at from the conservative side. They kind of, like, bring it back in and then they trot something else out there.

And they push farther each time. They use different words. I'm going to use this word as an example.

The word woke. That was made fun of by so many conservatives because it was incorrect grammatically that you don't hear people saying it as much anymore.

It got demonized. So now, I'm not sure what the next word is going to be. Maybe an awareness.

Social awareness. They're going to come up with something that is the same concept but a different term.

And that's how Marxists worked. They are subversive. From the 1930s through, well, really more than 1950s.

I'm thinking of going back to when the film industry was regulated.

But going from McCarthyism, right, in the 1950s through 1989 when the Soviet Union fell, there was a sense in which conservatives were kept together because they were against Soviet Union Marxism.

And if you were a libertarian, if you were a social conservative, that's what held you together is, well, we're for the Constitution, freedom, individual rights, free market, so forth.

And we are in a tent like that right now in the social justice movement.

We have people from different theological persuasions. They're concerned about this movement for different reasons. But the label is important because identifying the enemy essentially and the ideology is important.

And so, when we shift from being concerned about social justice to being concerned about critical race theory and intersectionality, we have narrowed what we can talk about.

And that article from the Gospel Coalition doesn't really make the cut. It's within social justice parameters, but it's kind of,

I mean, there's stuff about structural injustice against races, so it's sort of in there. But mostly, it's a class thing.

And so, we need to think about this,

I think, a little more. To go back to the political fight during the

Red Scare and the Cold War, if you could label someone a

Marxist, Soviet sympathizer, Bolshevik, whatever, then they had to defend themselves.

If you had some evidence that someone may have been associated with a communist group, then they had to provide evidence and alibis and so forth to show that they were not, because that was recognized as an enemy.

And we recognized at the time, Marxism is subversive. These guys do not get together and say, let's have a revolution.

They're Gramsci Marxists. They're more progressive. They go into fields like education, religion, institutions,

Boy Scouts, whatever. And they take these institutions over from the inside. That's how Marxists work.

Trevor Loudon can give you a whole lecture on this. I had him on the show a few weeks ago and he knows all about Marxism.

Now, they do the same thing with the terms they use, their ideologies. They are after one thing.

This is the question you have to ask. Don't ask what it means or what they are trying to communicate before you ask the question, what are they endeavoring to do?

I'm going to say the same thing about the article in the Gospel Coalition that I'm about to talk about. What is the telos of the argument?

What are they trying to get you to do? What's the purpose? What are they against? That will help you understand what they mean when they use the terms that they use, like systemic this or privilege that.

That will be the key. I think people on our side are having a hard time with some of this.

There's a few errors, two that I can think of right now that I want to address.

One is, and these are really smart men that are doing some of this, but they are trying to look at critical race theory and intersectionality and they're saying, got it.

That's the problem and I'm going to systematize these things. I'm going to read all the material and understand these things so that I can then prove that evangelicals are flirting with these ideas.

I'm going to show quotes side by side. Critical theorist, evangelical speaker, look, they agree. Not against doing that, that's good, but there's more to it than that.

Critical race theory and intersectionality are morphed versions of Marxism. There's postmodernism in there, but they're morphed versions of Marxism.

Ecclesiastes says there's no new idea under the sun. These things have a history and I'm going to prove that to you in a moment.

The goal is to rip down Western civilization. When they talk about de -centering whiteness, that's what they're talking about.

Whiteness is conceptual to them. It's Western civilization. It's the systems that come from that. Economic, political, the constitution would be part of that.

Religious, we need to rip down all these things that are benefiting some and not benefiting others.

If you don't start with the assumption that Marxism by nature is not only subversive but is, along with postmodernism especially, destructive and deconstructive, to use the postmodern lingo, then you're going to have a hard time fighting this because you have to be ready for the morphing of terms, the changing of the strategy, and you have to be able to defend what they are attacking.

They are attacking Western civilization. Defend Western civilization and the

Bible that helped shape it. Some of these guys have an axe to grind with things going back 2 ,000 years or more.

In some cases, the Greeks and the Romans, they want to fight with some symbolic logic even.

You have to defend what they are attacking. Realize that that is the goal. You can't just attack their terms or their flavor of the month because the flavor will change next month and their terms will change.

Defend what they are attacking. Realize that that's what's going on. I know that there are some out there who would say, you're saying that their motives are wrong.

I am. If you're flirting with these ideas, either you're ignorant and you are going along because it sounds good, that's a lot of the followers of this, or if you're in leadership and you're actually a smart person, more than likely, you probably agree

Western civilization needs to be ripped down. That's what these things are for. It's a tool of deconstruction.

It's like a sledgehammer, critical race theory intersectionality. It is not a blueprint for how to build a house.

There's no uniform paradigm you can look at and say, oh, that's what critical race theory is. It will change once you define it into something else.

Different authors are going to disagree with each other. There are a few key things that I think hold critical race theory together, but it is a chemical that is in flux and it could explode and change into something else because the goal isn't to build a building called critical race theory.

The goal is to take a tool called critical race theory and knock down a building that already exists. So that being said, let us get into the article from the

Gospel Coalition and I'm going to illustrate some of this for you and show why our strategy should be different and what kinds of things we should notice because I don't think we're noticing all of these things.

All right, so first of all, let me go back to the beginning here. I made a chart and if you are a

Patreon supporter of mine, you can actually get this chart. You can become a supporter and I will send,

I always send out the, I have been doing it now for a few months, the PowerPoint presentations I use. But in this one, we've got two things.

We have the Gospel Coalition article from yesterday that I just mentioned, which is supporting a book actually by an

Elizabeth Warren supporter about inequitable wealth distribution and poverty in America, so forth and so on.

It's a Marxist thing. It's totally Marxist. And then Ron Sider's book in 1977,

Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. And I think that subtitle is like going from affluence to helping others or something like that.

Generosity. So here's what I want to prove to you when I go through this.

Notice the dates together for the gospel articles yesterday. Rich Christians in an

Age of Hunger was from 1977. Now the social justice debate, many of us think, is new.

It's not. It's not. It has a history and if you come to the Stand Against Marxism conference,

I will explain this to you in further detail out in Iowa on October 18th and 19th.

But I'm giving you a sneak peek right now. There is a disparity in wealth distribution.

There's a disparity in wealth distribution. That is a problem. Notice the Gospel Coalition. An increasing large portion of wealth in the

United States belongs to a small number of people. Ron Sider. The rich too often benefit much more than the poor when the country experiences economic growth.

So this is just assumed to be a problem. Now from a Christian perspective, that's not always a problem.

Imagine you had a world in which everyone got out of the poverty we're talking about, abject poverty.

Everyone had a good diet, they had a good, some kind of a job, whatever. Imagine you're a good world where everyone has stuff, but then there are some super rich people who just,

I mean, they got trillions. Is that a bad thing? I think these guys would say, yeah. Yeah, the problem is the disparity.

But they're not looking at the condition that people are living in. They're looking at the status people have in comparison to others.

So yeah, we're opening up the door to coveting. That's what's going on here. But that's what they attack without really attacking it.

They just assume that everyone's going to agree that, isn't it horrible that someone might have more money than someone else? Now, and then they move to, well, the reason for this is there's a structural injustice.

Gospel Coalition says, it's the clear -eyed picture of racial injustice that still pervades America and the ways its evil seeps into and drives other class and cultural issues.

Ron Sider says in 1977, in the United States, the connections between racist, religious, and ethnic hostility on the one hand and poverty, hunger, and even starvation on the other are painfully clear.

Painfully clear. Now, there's some quotes that I didn't include in this, but Ron Sider actually uses the term structural over a hundred times and systemic over 50.

And he says, within the industrialized nations, the agony caused by broken homes, sexual promiscuity, marital breakdown, domestic violence, and divorce, okay, all things the

Bible condemns, right? Probably equals the pain caused by structural injustice. That's quite a statement, taking actual sins and then comparing it to this structure.

So if there's structural injustice, well, what is this? What produces the structural injustice?

Well, it winds up in a situation in which there's unmerited privilege. So you have Americans, according to the

Gospel Coalition, that their chances for financial stability depend more and more on being born and raised in a certain set of circumstances.

And we're supposed to think that's unfair. Read between the lines here, guys. Why would you write a sentence like that?

Well, why would you bring up this stuff unless, I mean, the Gospel Coalition article constantly says we're not recommending a solution to any of this.

Well, why would you bring it up? Why would you bring it up? You've got to be thinking this way when you're dealing with Marxists.

Ron Sider, God wants every person and family to have a quality of economic opportunity. Okay, that's good.

Well, what does that mean? Land, money, and education. Well, who's supposed to divvy that out?

Who's supposed, what if your parents squandered all your savings and you were raised in poverty and they had no land? So the government is the only institution

I can think of that would have to redistribute something. I mean, what? The solutions are embedded in the problems they are raising.

Now, the villainization comes in next. There's the evil haves, those evil rich people that have money.

People in the front row, that's what the Gospel Coalition is using. They're not saying, remember the terminology changes.

There's people in the front row, people in the back row instead of haves and have nots. Ron Sider, it's 1977. They still use have and have nots.

But in the Gospel Coalition article from yesterday, people in the front row can be poor in other ways, lack of humility, meaningful relationships, generosity, and so on.

So notice this, if you're poor, you might lack material means, but if you're rich, you lack humility, meaningful relationships, generosity, and so on.

So you lack character qualities. Don't miss this guys. This is a villainization of a class of people based on assumptions about structural injustice.

Ron Sider, the rich often neglect or oppose justice because it demands that they end their oppression and share with the poor.

Now this is true in some cases, right? There's biblical examples of the rich people doing that. We're going to turn to James in a minute.

I'm going to talk about this, but making a blanket statement like this, and he's making it globally.

Rich Christians in the Age of Hunger is global. This is not very helpful. It's not very helpful at all.

You're talking about an audience that is looking at the whole entire world, and you're generalizing the rich.

And then here's the problem. Here's the main problem when it comes to the church. We have segregated churches. The Gospel Coalition, the increasing educational and economic segregation of American life is mirrored in the church.

Ron Sider, we have failed to comprehend the concept that the church worldwide is one body. The division between the haves and the have -nots in the body of Christ is a major hindrance to world evangelism.

And two things that I noticed too, in the Gospel Coalition article, they attack merit.

They talk about a meritocracy being at the helm of American society and how that's bad. They talk about those who are at the front row, they live by credential value, so you're welcomed into a community because you have gifts, abilities, degrees, accomplishments, so you do work.

And that's somehow not good. That's wrong, because the world is competitive and rewarding, but also insecure, so that's bad.

Bad world when it's based on a meritocracy. In Sider's book, he attacks science, and he makes a statement that's technically true.

He says, a social structure built on the heretical ideas that the scientific method is the only way to reach truth and value, and the material things are all -important, will eventually self -destruct.

He's right. The problem is, why is he writing it? What's his purpose in writing that sentence?

I mean, is it to demonize material things and objectivity?

Because if you read the rest of the book, it sounds sort of like what he's doing. And so you have to take all their ideas together.

They're writing, you know, these aren't just standalone ideas, and I've realized I've taken these quotes out to show you something, but there's a package deal here, and they're trying to get the church on board with this class warfare idea.

You know, the Together for the Gospel, I'm sorry, not Together for Gospel, Gospel Coalition article says, the result is accidental elitism within the body of Christ, where childlike faith isn't quite enough to burnish your identity in Christ, and where we start believing that the loving the

Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength means having a graduate level understanding of scripture and theology.

And it says that every church that wants to fix the poor is wrong. So what they're assuming so much, they're saying, if you're a church that wants to, you're not being personal enough, but you're trying to address the poor, it's wrong if you just want to fix them.

You know, getting into the motives there, they're saying that, you know, theology really, you know, isn't enough, and this is one thing you hear a lot, it's like, we can't just be so theological, we need to be more action -oriented

Christians. And this is how this stuff progresses. Now, I haven't shown you the main ingredient that will bring everything together and make sense yet, but I just want to say, before we get there, that one of these articles is from yesterday, and one of these books is from 1977, and they're saying the same thing.

The terminology's a little different, but they're saying the same thing. This is not new.

This has a history, all right? This social justice stuff didn't pop out of nowhere.

I have a belief, and I've been tracking it down, that a lot of the guys pushing this now, they've been wanting to push this for a long time, and they were influenced by Sider's work in 77, and by the

Chicago Declaration of 73, and by many others of the thoughtful evangelical class who despise the religious right.

And this kind of, you know, this percolated in seminaries and educational institutions, and now it's like, since Trump's election, it's like, go.

Now is the time to bring this to the layman in your church. Now, here's what makes sense of all of this.

It's the purpose behind it. The call to action. In the Gospel Coalition article, some churches are acknowledging faulty social systems that have conspired to break and shame their neighbors.

So what do you need to do after reading this article? You need to acknowledge the faulty social systems.

Well, does it end there? I mean, that's where the article ends, but if you're going to acknowledge that, what do you do?

What do you do when you acknowledge a sin in Christianity? You repent of it, right? You change your ways. You go the opposite direction.

So if there's a problem within a free market system, and there's inequities, even though no laws were brought up that cause these inequities, even though they can't point to anything, they just assume a disparity means an equity of some kind, the rules need to be changed.

That is the takeaway, guys. If you don't see this, then, and if you think, oh, you're making a brother in Christ sound like he's saying what he's not actually saying, this is where the problem lies.

You have to understand where Marxists, how Marxists operate.

They're bringing you, this is what the Gospel Coalition does, before I get to the next quote, I just got to say this. This is what the

Gospel Coalition does. They bring you to the edge of a cliff and they say, we're not going to jump off. So capitalism, it's bad.

There's losers in this. And then they get you to the edge of the cliff and you're like, well, are you advocating socialism?

And they'll say, well, no, no, no, we're not doing that. We're just saying that things are unequal. Okay. I mean, they do the same thing with sexual orientation and homosexuality.

They say, sexual orientation is fixed. Reparative therapy is wrong. Jesus may not take that away from you.

And they bring you up to the cliff of accepting homosexuality. And then they say, but don't do homosexual acts.

That's wrong. This is the same game they play with everything. And it's, it's just, it's really frustrating for someone who wants to be on solid ground and just fight a war of ideas.

You got to understand this isn't a war of ideas in every sense. This is also a war of labels.

It's also a war of emotion. It's also, it's progressive. These things are not revolution now.

It's progressive. It's warming people up to the idea of overturning the free market.

And I'm just showing you, they take you to the precipice of the cliff, and then they say they're not going to jump.

Now, what does Ron Sider say? Christians informed by the biblical understanding of economic justice will search for effective structures in the larger society that enables every family to have the basic capital needed to earn a living.

So what he's saying is that we need to change the structures that we have.

What's the structure we have? Now, I would argue we, we've kind of left capitalism.

We have a mixed market economy, but we are in transition. We're moving away from capitalism and free market,

I should say. They want to move farther away from that. They're blaming that idea of the free market.

And with this, because they don't identify a law. They don't say, well, here's an unjust law that needs to be changed.

Notice how that never happens. Instead, it's, we have a structure that needs to be disassembled.

It's the revolution in increments. So that is important in understanding

Marxism. Now they twist scriptures like crazy. Both these men do, especially the

Old Testament. And I've talked about this before, that you assume a Marxist conception, go back into the

Old Testament, and then just read all the passages about justice. And when God opposes the rich or says something good about the poor, and then just fit that into your paradigm.

I don't have time to go through all that. We could do like five episodes on it, but I want to go to one passage just because I do want to bring the

Bible up in some of this. Let's go to James real quick. And then I'm going to get to critical race theory and intersectionality and show you how this fits into everything.

But James, your gold and your silver have rusted. It's talking about the rich. And their rust will be a witness against you and will consume your flesh like fire.

It is the last days, and you have stored up your treasure. Behold, the pay of the laborers who mowed your fields and which has been withheld by you cries out against you.

And the outcry of those who did the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of the Sabaoth. You have lived luxuriously on the earth and led a life of wanton pleasure.

And you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and put to death the righteous man. He does not resist you.

It's talking about the rich. James chapter five, verses three through six. Both of the articles bring

James up. They run to James two, but I wanted to talk about James five as well.

If you recall, if you've read the Bible, you probably remember this, but in James chapter two, the rich are those who are given favoritism.

When they come in to the church, they're given a nice seat, and they show by their nice clothes that they're rich, and the poor person's kind of kicked to the back or, you know, the unfavorable seat.

And James says, what are you doing? The rich people are the ones that take you to court. They blaspheme God. Why would you do this?

And the sin is favoritism. He doesn't say that they should redistribute their riches or they benefited from an unjust system, and we need to rethink this.

He doesn't say any of that, what these guys are saying. Just note that. What he says is don't show them favoritism in your church.

You know why? Because the church is the place where you can be an impoverished man, and you can be an elder and have spiritual authority over someone who's a multimillionaire.

That's what the church is like. We live by, it's a different kingdom. We are living in terms of eternity.

We're looking for the city of the newer Jerusalem, and we know that we don't get to take any of this stuff with us.

That doesn't mean material things are bad. They're good. They're blessings from God. I pointed that out in my last podcast episode.

Job was blessed. Jesus even had, you know, Joseph of Arimathea was a rich man, one of Jesus's followers.

Riches aren't bad. Enjoying things is actually good. You can worship and enjoy things, but these people in the book of James were, they were showing favoritism, and that was the sin.

Now I want to address something else, because I think we can very clearly see this has, they're not supporting, you know,

James is not supporting what the Gospel Coalition is trying to do, but James does seem to be demonizing the rich, doesn't he?

Well, I want you to notice a few characteristics of the rich. The passage I just read you from James 5, and the passage from James 2, what does it tell us about the rich?

They take you to court. They blaspheme the name of the Lord. They steal.

They kill. They murder. And then there's sort of, these are all bad things, right?

They're breaking God's law in all these cases. And then there's the things that the social justicians love to harp on.

And here's what it says. You have lived luxuriously on the earth and led a life of wanton pleasure.

You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. Does this mean they're just enjoying stuff? I want to suggest to you that it's more than that.

It's idolizing. It's an excess. It's enjoying stuff, but enjoying it as an end in and of itself.

And doing so without regard to those who are put here on this earth for us to serve.

And I made, I tweeted out actually this week, if you're going to stand against socialism, you should be given to charity or doing something to alleviate some of the issues with the poor and so forth.

Because, and this, you know, I got a little bit of a kickback, I'm just going to talk about this for a moment, from some conservatives.

I did not mean to say that you can criticize socialism all day and not give a penny to the poor.

And you're right. But what I'm saying is that as Christians, we should be helping those who are in need.

But the way that we do it is in the church by practicing one another's, right? And I think the way it works is family, church, and there's, you know,

Good Samaritan would be someone that you come across, your proximity expands. Ron Sider tries to say you have this global responsibility.

And in one sense, I guess, yes, I mean, I think you should. It's a good thing to do, but you don't, it's not like someone in India, you owe someone in India, necessarily.

You're given some general principles to practice the one another's, right? And we do that in our sphere of life more than anywhere else.

That's the examples you find in scripture. And of course, yes, Paul was given money from churches, send money and so forth. So yeah, that happens.

But your greatest responsibility is those who are close to you. And in the

Old Testament, you see, this wasn't enforceable by the government. They didn't like punish people for not doing it, but you were supposed to leave the edges of your fields uncut.

You, you were supposed to let people go and glean and people had to work for it. And, and I think there's a principle there that God, you know, he says, if you don't work, you don't eat.

So you need to work. But we do have a responsibility if we're earning money to try to help whatever that looks like.

Hiring someone is part of that, I think, so they can work, earn a living. If you have money and own a business,

I think giving money is part of that. But, but we have a responsibility.

It's the only point that I wanted to make in that tweet. Now back to James, what are the rich doing here?

They're living a life of wanton pleasure and they're breaking the commands of God all over the place.

Very clearly, if they're stealing from the poor and killing the poor, the rich, in the context of this book, context of James, right?

This isn't like a general statement about all rich people everywhere. It can't be, it's impossible for it to be. But if the rich people being spoken about in James, if that's what they're doing, then clearly they are like directly breaking the commands of God to oppress the poor.

It's not a systemic thing. They are directly breaking the commands of God and they are doing so to fulfill selfish urges that they have.

And again, it's not wrong to have pleasure. It's not wrong to have stuff. But if that's what you live for and you're willing to break the commands of God to get it, that's wrong.

And I want to point out that in 2 Peter 2, the Greek, the same term, it's the noun form for living luxuriously, but it's translated to revel and it talks about false teachers.

They're reveling. It's the same thing as living luxuriously. It's, it's, they're up to no good.

So, you know, pleasure can be a bad thing if it's disordered pleasure, if it's towards the wrong things. And that's, I think, the insinuation here in James.

You know, they're not enjoying necessarily good things the way God intended. They're, they're doing bad things and getting enjoyment from it.

Again, the wanton pleasure, the term for that, the Greek term is used in 1 Timothy 5, and it says if someone's a widow indeed, you can help them.

But if not, they, let's see, she gives herself, those who are not widows indeed, to wanton pleasure.

And, and so this is someone that is giving instructions to Timothy.

It's someone you don't help. Don't, don't give them charity. They are giving themselves, they're breaking, somehow they're, they're dishonoring

God. They're breaking the command of God. And then in the Septuagint in Ezekiel 16, the

Hebrew word that is, there's a Hebrew word translated as the same Greek term for wanton pleasure, and that's careless ease is how it's in the

New American Standard Bible. So careless ease. Now, and it says it's talking about someone who did not help the poor and needy.

They lived in abundant food and careless ease. So we have a responsibility. I think that's clear.

And that there's nothing socialistic about that. In fact, just the opposite. We have a responsibility, not the government, not, not all these other entities.

It's us, right? So I, I would say the message of James is actually the exact opposite of what these guys want to make it sound like, but they're interested in vilifying the rich because it's one chain in the link that they're trying to make.

Now that we, we covered James, I want to now dive into, bring this all together. And I want to dive into critical race theory and intersectionality.

Let's do this. I read Delgado's critical race theory a while ago, and I made some notes on it.

Critical race theory is very broad. And I'm going to just read you a few quotes here from the book.

It says the CRT movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in study and transforming the relationship between race, racism, and power.

Seems innocent enough, right? But the power, that's Marxism. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies take, but places them in a broader perspective.

Listen to that word, a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting group, and self -interest and emotions and unconsciousness.

This is a broad thing. Now, a moment ago I said, oh, it's narrowing it.

Yeah. Yeah. Because the terminology, critical race theory and intersectionality is hard to define.

And people that are trying to define it have, have an uphill battle because they're having to narrow it down to these, these, you know, these definitions that are very narrow.

I'm going to show you that in a minute, but the implications, the, the area in which it is being applied is very broad.

All these different disciplines, right? It's, it's, it's broad in that sense.

Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stretches incrementalism, critical race theory, it, here, here's, think about Western civilization for a moment.

Critical race theory questions the very foundational, foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, enlightenment, rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

This is what it's designed to take down. That's why it exists. It is a bullet in a gun shooting at something.

It is not, like I said, you know, before, but I can't stress it enough. It is not the blueprint for a house.

It is a hammer to destroy the house that's already there. And then there's a definition of intersectionality, which

I would agree with. Now, it informs, it's informed,

I should say, by these four fields, according to Delgado. Critical legal studies, feminism, conventional civil rights thought, and ethnic studies.

And I'm not going to read you the quotes. You can freeze frame it if you want to read these quotes from Delgado, but there are streams running into critical race theory.

All right? So, so sometimes, you know, you can look at something, like you can even look at the

Cider book, right? Talks about the structural racism and so forth. And you can look at that and say, well, that's critical race theory.

Well, it was in 1977. Probably wasn't critical race theory. At least 80s, 90s critical race theory.

But these ideas existed before that. And that's what I'm trying to get you to understand is that, and some of you may understand that.

I'm not like frustrated with you. I'm just saying it's hard, it's hard for me to understand some of this stuff.

And I am, or it was, and I am studying as much as I can to understand it.

But I have to repeat to myself that there's no new idea under the sun.

These things have a history. They go back. And so we're not combating this new thing.

We're combating a trick the devil's played for a long time. So in one sense, critical race theory has been around for a long time, since ancient times, really.

We can reduce these things to actually biblical categories. Yeah, coveting's been around a long time.

Wanting other people's stuff? Yeah, it's been around a long time. And that's what, you know, that's one aspect of critical race theory.

They're trying to knock down supposedly a system that privileges people with stuff that isn't rightfully theirs.

So it's old. It's old. And we need to recognize what's behind it.

And moving on, these are the fields that inform critical race theory. And this is, these are the key ingredients.

Now, if you want to make a statement, something like critical race theory says this, or intersectionality says this, we have to be careful.

But I think that people should know what we're talking about when we say that. We're saying that there actually are some key ingredients to critical race theory.

Here's what Delgado says they are. Racism is ordinary, not aberrational. Okay, so everything's racist. The racism is just common.

It's everywhere. Our system is the second part. Our system of white over color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group.

So there's psychological, godless, things informing this as well, ideas. And so there's psychological purpose that whites have to do what they're doing.

But whites are actually, you know, whiteness is not a actual ethnicity.

It is a system of thought. Social construction thesis says that races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient.

That's the postmodernism, guys, coming right in. That's why this stuff can change. And then the fourth ingredient, voices of color thesis, which means there's unique perspectives, also postmodernism, that this is what happened at Southeastern earlier this week.

There's unique perspectives that we need to look at. They have, is ethnic Gnosticism in Bodie -Bockham's terminology.

They have unique perspective on oppression because they've lived it and they can inform us in the church and in the government of what to do about it.

And we should just let them make the rules and they have a greater say and we just need to listen. That's where that comes from. That's critical race theory.

Now, these things can change over time. Like I said, but this is, according to Delgado, this is what critical race theory is.

If you want to boil it down, these are the four ingredients. And I think that if we're going to talk about this, we need to make sure that we're talking about one of those four ingredients, you know, if it's critical race theory, right?

But just understand that this fits into the broader social justice umbrella. So it's all moving in the same direction, trying to accomplish the same kinds of things.

And this is just one tool in their arsenal. Now, what are some other aspects of this?

Why is critical race theory evolving? Well, it's postmodern. It draws from Foucault, Derrida, it's reactionary.

So it's trying to combat settler forms of racism. So if they locate forms of racism in different institutions or different ways, then they're going to combat it differently.

So it changes based on that. It advances through storytelling. And this is where you see this a lot.

A .D. Robles has a really good, I think, graphic he put out recently, where he talks about how you start with a story and then by the end of it, you have the person convinced that it's systemic, that this is just happening everywhere.

But you start with a sad story, a victim story. This is what gets a lot of people in, compassionate people, legitimately compassionate people.

I mean, they know how to work it. You get the emotions going that look at this person who was oppressed and the next thing you know, you want to throw out the constitution.

That's how they do it. It's popular. It advances through storytelling. Also, critical race theory is in process because they're inventing a language.

They're inventing a language. This is how liberals work. They fight the battle of labels and language, not the battle of ideas.

If we fight the battle of ideas only, we will lose. They are, again,

I've said this a million times, they are giving us a tool of deconstruction. And this is what they say, compare this language to Resolution 9.

Direct quote from Delgado, CRT has become an indispensable tool. That's what it is.

And here's some of the new words that Delgado talks about, microaggression, interest convergence, intersectionality, white privilege, nativism.

I mean, Tim Keller loves to use the term nativism. So does Bruce Ashford. So does J .D. Greer. I mean, you hear the people using these words, but these words can change very, very quickly.

So that's the end of my slideshow. I wanted to just briefly close with this just to wrap everything up together.

These ideologies, they are a false gospel. I didn't get into it as much in this video, but in other videos

I have, they are a false gospel. And they are trying to knock something down, and that is their purpose.

If I haven't emphasized that enough. And in fighting this battle, you have to realize that they will shift words, terms, issues, all to get at the enemy, which is

Western civilization, which is ultimately really biblical Christianity. And there are ignorant people within this who are orthodox in other areas, but are inconsistent.

And there are people who are smart that know what this is, and they're letting it happen. The fact that anyone who even agreed with, you know, 10 % of this and taught it, lacks that much discernment to teach even just one of these concepts.

Is that a seminary teaching still should be frightening. Now, I realize there are people who are ignorant that realize

I was wrong, but there needs to be a public profession of that if you've been publicly professing error for so long.

But we don't see that. And you know, this is the problem we have in the

Southern Baptist Convention right now, but in general, in Christianity, if we're going to fight this stuff, we have to make a positive case also for the things that we love.

And we love in the American context, especially we love the constitution, even though it's not a perfect document.

And here's where the Christianity comes out. We love the principles behind it. We love that power is divided so that one person doesn't have all the power so that there's checks and there's balances.

That comes from the idea of human depravity, why we have that. We love the free market, private property, the idea that the government is limited in its function and there's federated power.

I mean, I could go on and on and on, but there are a lot of things in just, that's just the political system.

I haven't even really talked about other institutions. There are things that we love and we need to fight for those things and support those things with our families.

Some of you, what you're doing right now is the best thing you could be doing. Some of you are farmers, some of you are blue collar work men and whatever trade you're in, you're listening to this as you're driving and you're doing the best thing you possibly can do for your family right now by just inculcating them, by educating them, by nurturing them in the values that not only are biblical, but actually have been valued by our forefathers.

And you know what, pietas, that Greek conception of honoring your elders,

I mean, it's a biblical concept, honoring your father and your mother. You carry on the traditions that have been passed down to you.

And that is the best thing that you can do. And that is the best defense that many of us can make and should make.

And that's what God expects, I think. So that being said, I want to leave this on an up note.

That was kind of an up note, but I've said this before, but I want to invite all of you who are out there to come on October 18th to the

Stand Against Marxism conference in Iowa. I should be there. And well, I should be there because I'm speaking.

I have to be there. I will be there. And I look forward to meeting some of you who have told me that you're going to come.

I'm excited about that. In other news, I have some exciting things coming up, some promotions, some things, if you're going to become a

Patreon supporter of mine, some things that you'll get this month, I'm going to remind you once again, you can get your, the social justice coalition, social gospel.

See, I got it wrong. The social gospel coalition t -shirt. I, I've ordered a number of them for some of my

Patreon supporters. It does take a few weeks to get them and send them out because I'm having them custom made, but I did just receive this week a package for some of the initial supporters on Patreon.

And if you want to become a supporter of mine, I will send one to you. You just gotta send me an email at my email address, jonathanharris1989 at gmail .com.

And let me know what size you are and become a supporter on Patreon. I will send that to you.