Just Church (4)

Chapter 2: From Among Your Own Selves

“I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore, be on the alert …”

The verse above is from Paul’s “swan song” to the Ephesian elders. He knows his ministry with them is done, and he’s concerned that they might not be ready. He knows trouble is coming, and it’s coming from two directions. One they’ll probably expect, the other not so much.

Wolves Among the Flock

There will be merciless, God-hating persecutors — “wolves” — who will come in among the flock and do them harm. Paul says they need to be aware of them, and not to be surprised if such persecution comes. But there’s another danger for which they really need to be on the alert: the danger of people rising up “from among your own selves”. These are people who only appear to be Christians — but equally, may be people who genuinely are, but who have been poisoned, corrupted or misled in some way. Either way, they will be “speaking distorted things”, things that are nearly Christian but are twisted in some way so that they really are not.

Oppression from without is one thing: the church can rally around each other and deal with it. It’s no strange thing to Christians, as Peter says. But it’s quite different when the danger is coming from those who appear to be our own. It’s much harder to call out false teaching when doing so is undiplomatic, or stands to be seen as hurtful to somebody one would rather regard as a brother or sister. That’s why Paul has to make a special point of saying to them, “You still have to be on guard for this.” They’d likely to be very slow even to give themselves permission.

Sick Sheep

In the last chapter [parts two and three of our online serialization] we cast an imaginary scenario in which a particular person, one I have called “the nice lady”, appears among the Christians and turns out to be source of some confusion and trouble. Very likely such people will not come into the church from the outside. They could, of course: they could come in the form of a raging ideologue from the world. But in the cases the church has seen so far, and in most she’s likely to see, the proponent of Social Justice is more likely to emerge from within the congregation itself.

This emergence is unlikely to be sudden or obvious. More likely, the nice lady is an existing member, maybe one who has been helpful in past, has sat on church committees or been active in other ways. She may have special initiative, or talents the church has used in past. Perhaps she’s taught Sunday School, or helped with the youth, or coordinated social programs, or raised funds for missions … but she’s never been particularly known for her grasp of scripture, and up to now, it hasn’t been the habit of the church to look to her for leadership. Still, she’s a nice person — “one of us”, as we say.

Very possibly the errors in her thinking are unknown even to her. She hasn’t set out to introduce any foreign doctrine into the church, and would be horrified even to think of such a thing; rather, she’s just been expressing an earnest concern for fairness and opportunity for some group she perceives as undervalued or unserved by the present situation at church. She might not even know what Social Justice ideology is. But she’s been soaking in it. She’s picked it up from her business environment, or from the courses she’s been taking or teaching, or from the books she’s been reading, or even from her conversations on the internet. Somewhere along the line, though, she took on the patter of the propagandists to whom she’s been exposed — the things they talk about, the language they use, their tone of righteous indignation, and their mannerisms — and she’s begun unconsciously to model them in her own speech and behavior.

Using Her Gift

Perhaps it came as a surprise to her when first she voiced her concerns to the committee or at the annual meeting. Nobody ever listened to her that way before — she felt the committee or congregation pause and, for the first time, take her really seriously as a leader. They were listening, attentive, no longer sure that maybe she didn’t know something more than they did; and she liked that feeling. It made her feel important. She wasn’t even aware she was parroting lines she had been taught in her worldly pursuits — they seemed to her to be her own ideas — but it was also confirming to know she had heard them spoken before, in outside contexts. It made them seem more certainly true. At work she always seemed to be behind the curve, not on the cutting edge of such topics; but at church she’s the voice of knowledge, of sophistication, of new things. And that’s been very pleasant to her.

So she’s pushing the envelope on these things. She likes her new position as advocate for the misunderstood, the unfortunate, the marginalized and oppressed. She feels as if she’s found a position, a new calling, a new status. She’s “using her gift”, she feels, and she’s happy as a result. That happiness is another confirmation to her that she’s right. She believes she’s finally hitting her stride, “doing the Lord’s work”. And nobody has a right to dampen that, she feels.

She makes progress by stirring things up, by unsettling the status quo, and by getting things done for the causes she now advocates. So, letting things get fixed and settled really isn’t in her natural interests. It’s the next cause that will count, not so much the previous one: there needs to be a steady supply of new injustices to point out, or causes for which to contend, so that she continues to have a leading role in the church.

She means well; of that much she is certain. But for all that, she’s become a source of agitation and discontent rather than a voice for peace and fellowship. But the fact that she seems to mean well and doesn’t seem to be intentional or malevolent in any way makes it much harder for the leaders, teachers and elders to deal with her; for it is easier to call out a wolf than to be caught appearing severe with a lamb. There’s much less political fallout when the person you’re guarding against is overtly malicious than when she seems innocent of her error. Yet every time leaders in the church defer to her it reinforces her belief in her own rightness. How can she doubt it when so many good people keep giving way before her?

Where It Comes From

How has she become like this? What has influenced her? How has she been poisoned with bad doctrine, especially if she is well intentioned?

As with most bad doctrine, her infection with Social Justice thinking has been produced by the outside world. She’s picked it up because of her daily routine, the environment in which she works, the media, her online activities or her private reading. It’s out there right now, and it’s out there in abundance. Anybody who lives and moves in the Western world is going to be exposed to it in some degree; and in certain environments there’s going to be a lot of it. It’s almost impossible nowadays to keep one’s thinking completely free of its gravitational pull. And if you aren’t alert to it, or don’t know what it really is, you can be completely convinced by it before you know it.

You can even think it’s “Christian”.

But it’s not.

Suspicious Trends

Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had already been wondering about the world lately. There are some pretty extraordinary things going on, aren’t there? There have been riots, beatings and the burning of buildings in major cities, demonstrations against free speech, stolen elections alleged, BLM and trans rights in the headlines all the time, rampant migration, border collapse and environmental doomsaying, unprecedented political polarization, accusations of Critical Race Theory in public schooling, fake news, supply-chain problems, rising oil prices, global multinationals getting ever bigger, and even talk of cabals of politicians secretly negotiating for world domination … If it seems like an unusual time of upheaval and confusion to you, I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

But would it surprise you to think that there is actually some common thread running through such diverse things? Perhaps. But if you’ve been really paying attention, you will notice that the rhetoric around all these things does repeat certain words, ideas and patterns of thought. They’re not all actually unrelated. There is something underneath them all that is driving them in a common direction, even though that direction often only seems to be toward disorder, destruction and chaos.

To understand what’s going on, I think we need to start with the long view. Let’s take a look at human nature first, especially as the word of God reveals it. There are certain things we can expect of unregenerate man; and contrary to the popular “progressive” myths, human beings really don’t get any better or do any differently as time passes, in some ways. Human nature remains what it is, what God says it is, and what it has been from long ago.

The Roots

I’m going to start a long way back, because we need to get grounded in a realistic anthropology here, a realistic view of what human beings are like, especially when they don’t know God. The fallen nature explains a lot. But having set that as basic context, I’m going to jump forward relatively rapidly, because I want to make it easy for you to connect the dots and to arrive at an explanation for our particular ideological delusions in the modern world — and those that are now beginning to penetrate the church as well, through the activity of the “nice” people I have been talking about earlier.

So, we go way back, and we ask the question, “How do human beings act when they reject God as the leader of their social projects?” And we find the answer in Genesis 11, in the first nine verses. It’s the famous story of the Tower of Babel. It happens because of two things: firstly, that enough human beings have been produced that they could potentially begin to spread out and populate the earth; and secondly, because these same human beings are led by people who have rejected the one true God as the center of their ambitions.

So, early man lands on the plains of Shinar. There is an abundance of people, all speaking the same language; and God has intended that they should spread out across the earth, inhabit it, and turn the world to godly uses and to his glory. But their leaders speak to them and say, “There’s a problem here: we’re all spreading out and becoming in danger of losing touch with each other.” So they say, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let’s make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of all the earth.” Then they start taking what they have — bricks and mortar — and setting up a tower to serve as their civilizational centerpiece so that they can all remain together.

You know how the rest of the story goes: God comes down and confuses their language and scatters them over the face of the earth. And so we have the birth of different nations and cultures, a permanent rupture in the unity of humankind that will persist until the Lord returns.

But it’s an odd story, isn’t it? I know it struck me that way when first I heard it many years ago. Why was it so important to stay together? What can you really do with bricks and mortar? And why didn’t God want them to succeed? It all seemed rather strange and mythical to me; and though I took it at face value, I also stored away questions about it in my mind, and it wasn’t until years later that I began to see the story’s application.

We’ll get into it in a little more detail next week.