Something Disturbing is Happening | Voddie Baucham

I wrote Fault Lines because of my love for the church. We're doing this project because of love for the church.

I honestly believe that the critical social justice movement represents a threat, an existential threat, not a threat to Christianity per se, because Christianity can't be threatened.

God is on His throne. He will protect His bride. However, it represents a threat to unity within the body.

If we gotta act like that the disadvantages between us are cultural and are not systemic, then we can't be together.

Critical race theorists want to deliver us from the basement low ambitions of a thin, emaciated view of equality.

It represents a threat to the clarity of the message that we communicate.

Whiteness becomes the standard by which all good theology is judged.

Whiteness is rooted in plunder, in theft, in slavery, genocide of Native Americans sitting on stolen land.

So that if it's right theology, it's written by a white scholar who is contextualizing that theology for white audiences.

The gospel will always be the gospel. However, we are not always faithful in the way that we communicate the gospel.

Because silence is too high a price to pay to be unified when our necks are under a police name.

Anti -racists fundamentally reject Savior theology.

That goes right in line with racist ideas and racist theology.

And we're not always faithful in the way that we apply the gospel. When you sign up for this congregation, you're signing up to be part of racial justice.

And if that's not for you, then this church is not for you. The solution is fundamentally, yes, the gospel, the cross, the resurrection, but also dethroning white supremacy in all of the forms in which it shows up in Christian spaces.

So the goal here is to fight for faithfulness, to fight for the truth of that gospel, to fight for the bride of Christ, to fight for unity in the bride of Christ.

It's a breakthrough if you can get white people to acknowledge that our race privileges us in this society.

That is like the second coming. Virtually no white man thinks they are guilty.

You have to push and push and push to the point where, hey, wait a minute, I think you're pushing an agenda.

Well, you're finally listening. My psychosocial development was inculcated in the water of white supremacy.

I have grown up with this invisible kind of bag of privilege.

I am a racist. A system in which whiteness and white people are central and seen as inherently superior to people of color.

I'm going to struggle with racism and white supremacy until the day I die and get my glorified body.

What I'm talking about right now is white privilege. Because I'm immersed in a culture where I benefit from racism all the time.

Nothing makes Anglos more angry than the idea of white privilege. The Bible is very clear about the issue of justice.

What does the Lord require of you? Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your

God. We know this from Micah 6 .8. And so justice is not optional for the people of God.

That's why it's so critical that we understand what justice is. One of the dangers of the social justice movement is that it uses terminology that on the surface sounds like it ought to be what we as Christians are about.

Social justice. Am I against justice? Of course not.

I'm for justice. Anti -racism. Am I pro -racism? Of course not. So what we need to do is get behind these terms.

Get behind these words and look at two things. Number one, look at what people mean when they use them in this cultural moment.

And number two, evaluate that in light of what the Bible says about the same issues.

So for example, when we talk about justice from a biblical perspective, justice means the righteous application, the impartial application of the law of God in a given circumstance.

We're told that we're not to be impartial to the poor or to the rich. We have to apply

God's law equally across the board. Social justice means something very different.

And so if we're going to have conversations about justice, if we're going to have conversations about contemporary issues of our day, we're going to have to do so in light of what the word of God has to teach about all of these issues and while evaluating the cultural moment.

You know, I've come a long way on a lot of these issues. I am a guy who had as probably the biggest hero of my life,

Malcolm X. I am a guy who was always very

Afrocentric, very, you could say, social justice oriented.

As a believer, I came to a crossroads and I recognized that for the most part,

I identified a lot more with my blackness than I did with my Christianity. For the most part, it was much more important to me that I was black than it was that I was a

Christian. Over time, I had to come to grips with the fact that in Christ, at the foot of the cross, there is no male or female, there is no

Jew or Greek, slave or free. Over time,

I had to come to grips with the fact that Christ died not only to reconcile us vertically to the

Father, but to reconcile us horizontally with one another and that I am a member of the body of Christ and that nothing supersedes that.

Nothing is more important than that. It is that realization and my desire to see that unity manifested within the body of Christ.

If you're doing this study with a group, my hope is that this would be a place where you can be open, where you can be honest.

A place where you can evaluate the narratives that are flying all around you.

And a place where you can judge those things, not according to your feelings, but according to the truth of the scriptures, according to what thus saith the

Lord. I do believe that justice is incredibly important, but justice is only important to the degree that it is the justice that God demands.

To that end, we have to be right about what the word justice means and about what