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We’re in the final half of our final chapter in our thinking about Social Justice and the church. Last week, we were working through what the promoter of that ideology is likely to have caused, and what alternatives we have for dealing with her going forward.

It’s natural to think the thing to do is to “forgive and forget”, as the old axiom goes: we simply note the fault, say, “We forgive you”, and reinvite the contentious “nice lady” into the congregation without further delay. But this would be exceedingly dangerous, even disastrous; for unless her repentance is full, honest and genuine, then the deep motivations that led her to campaign for Social Justice ideology and to trade on the church to do it will remain. So we need to take full and fair inventory of what her faults and motives have really been, assess how complete her awareness of her sin is, and make sure she’s really been freed from what led her into it in the first place.

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Chapter 7: What to Do With ‘The Nice Lady’

“See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.”

Bitterness.

The word literally means “acidity”, and refers in scripture to wicked covetousness or wicked resentment. It is associated with cursing and anger. A related adjective is used in James 3:14 of wicked jealousy. What’s clear is it speaks of bitter hatred against others felt to be justified by their advantages.

The result? The defilement of many. That means their being stained so as to be rendered unfit for sacred service. This angry, resentful spirit between Christians can defile them in their relationship with God. The writer to the Hebrews says we are vigilantly to watch over the congregation, and make sure this doesn’t happen.

Because it can. So easily. Especially today.

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We pick up this week in the middle of a list of choices the church has to make today. On the one hand, there are the values scripture lays out for church life; on the other, the things Social Justice today instructs us to value instead. The goal is simply to see the alternatives before us.

We began with the choice between a heavenly and a worldly “kingdom”. Then there was the choice between advocating salvation or system-blaming. Whether we should live by contentment or resentment came next, and then the choice between having confident faith in God and taking self-willed, self-confident action against the world. Finally, we considered the tension between individual responsibility to God and the attraction of surrender to a thoughtless collective — a theme continued in our first item below.

We're going to complete that list of contrasts today, and then draw some conclusions.

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Last week, we left off with these questions: if the morals of a social justice advocate seem to us, at first inspection, to be good, well-intended and earnest, can there still be a serious problem with her methods? And to follow this up, is it possible that by allying ourselves with her, could we be opening the door to something that should make us, as Christians, rightly hesitant?

Chapter 6: Two Directions (continued)

Those are good questions. They deserve an answer. So what I propose to do here is to speak to how the fundamental values of Social Justice ideology are different from the values the Bible lays out for the church. To make the contrast perfectly clear, I have chosen to put the values in pairs. In each case, there’s a choice to be made about what kind of church we may think we should have.

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Chapter 6: Two Directions

“Have I become your enemy by telling you the truth? They eagerly seek you, not in a commendable way, but they want to shut you out so that you will seek them.”

So you’ve had this nice person start to speak up in your church.

This hasn’t happened before. You are, perhaps, an elder, or a leader, or a pastor, or a committee chair, or just a sincere and involved member of the congregation.

Changing Demographics

You are aware that your church is a bit traditional. Maybe it’s one of the more Scots-English or North American patterns set in the 1800s such as a gospel hall or chapel; or maybe it’s one of those post-hippie era evangelical churches, or a “community church”, or even a modern megachurch of some kind. The important thing is that whichever it is, it’s probably based on a pattern set by some sort of Anglo-American heritage.

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For the last two weeks, we've been working on a direct contrast between the church as Christ intended it to be and the church as Social Justice ideology aims to make it. And we've seen that they're not even close to the same thing. This week, let's complete that line of thought.

Chapter 5: A Higher Vision (continued)

What is the Church?

The church is a community of peace.

It’s where every person understands that his or her unique circumstances in life are given by God. It’s a grateful community.

The Church and Activism

But it’s also an active community. The disparities and injustices that persist in this world are not to be left alone. As much as we can, we are to lift up one another, and the lofty are to lower themselves, so that every person achieves the maximum that he or she can, in terms of conquering the challenges and fulfilling the opportunities God has given to him or her. We are to help one another, not live as monads, individuals uninterested in each other’s welfare. It’s a sharing community, a compassionate community, a merciful community.

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We’re continuing our exploration of what Social Justice ideology does to the church. We began by looking at the scriptural pattern for fellowship, a higher vision for the church. We’ve now shifted to looking at the counter-offer, the kind of dynamic Social Justice produces.

It’s not a pretty picture. Instead of the “fruit of the Spirit” (love, joy, peace, self-control and such), we find that Social Justice thinking opens up a Pandora’s Box of nasty character qualities that issue in a suspicious, mutually-hostile and unloving environment. When we last left off, we’d just introduced the realization that advancing this program inevitably means resorting to the use of some sort of compulsion or force. Let’s build on that.

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When we left off last week, I was laying out for you the plan for fellowship that we find in the Bible. Our purpose was to get a clear sense of what God is aiming at in creating the church, and how we are to respond to that vision. A key element of this was the Christian response to guilt. We noted that Christians are uniquely vulnerable to the recognition of sin in human nature, including their own, but they aren’t to wallow in misery and self-abasement as a result, but rather to use their realization of their own fallibility as an incentive for humility, obedience, compassion, restoration, gratitude and new unity — a “repentance without regret”, remember?

Chapter 5: A Higher Vision (continued)

A Healthy Reminder

Am I only telling you what you already know? Surely you’ve read these passages, no? But it’s still good for us to remind ourselves of who we are and what we’re aiming for, because we can forget; especially since the world is so busy trying to produce its own kind of unity, but without Christ. The calls for unity from the world cannot fail to penetrate the ears of the church; and if we are going to be fortified against those false doctrines, as Paul hoped, then we are going to have to keep the biblical pattern before us with perfect clarity. As we wade into some of the more sordid details of the world’s errors and illusions (as we shall do later in this chapter), it is going to prove positive, encouraging and healthy for us to take a firm mental grip on God’s pattern for unity.

The contrasts will prove stark.

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Chapter 5: A Higher Vision

“… we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of people, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head, that is, Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.”

Ephesians gives us a picture of a congregation unified by a single reality: the dynamic attachment of the entire body to Christ, who is the Head of the Church, through whom life flows to the Body. All members “abide” in the same “Vine”, in constant connection with him; and for that reason, all in connection with each other, too. As you can see, all are growing, becoming mature, walking in the truth, using their gifts and helping one another. This also fortifies them against all winds of bad doctrine, so their unity is not only dynamic but durable as well. This is church unity as God intended it to be.

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Last week we were working our way through the topic of guilt. In relation to the church and Social Justice today, it’s a very important topic. Social Justice advocates weaponize it against sincere and well-meaning people in order to get their way. This is quite demonic: taking character dispositions that are perfectly Christian (humility, longing for justice, willingness to accept responsibility for sin and desire to make things right) and turning them into a miserable, guilt-ridden self-reproachment. Rather than expressing a healthy conscience that induces righteous behavior, such false self-reproach is today used by Social Justice advocates to inject into us an unrealistic sense of personal responsibility for all the world’s ills, present and historical, and a misguided desire to alleviate false guilt.

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This week, we’re continuing our discussion of guilt. It’s a key tool being used today by the Woke Left to bludgeon Christians into cooperation with the leftist agenda, and bring that agenda into the church. The Christian recognition of human guilt is leveraged to induce a heightened and unwarranted anxiety about us becoming seen as narrow, discriminatory, unfair, or racially insensitive. In this state, we become vulnerable to the recommendations of seemingly-nice false teachers who claim to lead the way to greater justice and fairness in church life.

Let’s unpack those tactics. We might ask, “Why is guilt such an effective weapon against society in the present moment?” and “How is it even more effective as a weapon against the church?” That’s what we’ll cover this week: and next week, we’ll complete the picture by showing how the kind of guilt we are being invited to experience today is unlike godly guilt and repentance, so we can recognize it for what it is — a strategy of the enemy intended to disorient, fragment and demoralize our people, and thus to render them pliable to an ungodly agenda.

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Chapter 4: What Social Justice Does to the Fellowship

I once knew a woman who was raised in a very abusive home.

Her father was so violent and unpredictable in his temper that she never knew when she would be bullied and struck, or for what. Life was a continual “walking on eggshells”, and as she grew up she began to adopt various strategies for survival. As time passed these strategies became ingrained in her personality.

Her father died in her early adult years, and she escaped. Eventually she married a large, kind-hearted man with a particularly generous and even disposition. Never in their years of married life would he raise a hand to her in violence. Nevertheless, the scars of the past ran deep. How deep they ran she did not even know.

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• Justice must be achieved in the present world.
• Racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, colonialism, ableism, and other such forms of prejudice are our real problem.
• It’s the whole social system at fault, but the church and you are guilty too.
• Guilt is collective, and you can’t escape your social location and your social guilt.
• Everybody’s guilty, and nobody can repent enough.
• To envy anybody who seems privileged is noble, and to resent their advantages is virtuous.

So the present system, whatever it is, and all authority must fall. You can only lift the burden of some of your guilt by joining in an unrelenting war against authority and the existing order — by becoming an “ally” of “the oppressed”.

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Last week, we left off halfway through listing the things Social Justice types tend to believe. We had seen that they think justice is a thing that has to happen in this world, now; that the real problem of humanity is not sin but discrimination; and that this discrimination happens primarily through systems and institutions, so that everybody who is in those systems is guilty of the sin of “complicity” with racism, sexism, exclusion, or whatever new pejorative label the Left can come up with, even if they personally have never hurt anyone and hold no unkind attitudes at all. We saw that they view everybody as fated to be mere products of his or her particular social location in race, culture, sex, faith, sexual practice, disability ... or any other divisive category they can invent.

These are also things we’ve all seen in the secular world in the last few years — in education, in the mass media, in politics, in entertainment and the commercial world. But that’s not the complete list, of course. There are several other things Social Justice enthusiasts believe with equal fervency, and so we continue listing them this week.

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Chapter 3: The “Nice” Lady

“… and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh, it is a very nice word, indeed! — it does for everything.”

(Henry Tilney, in Jane Austen’s novel,
Northanger Abbey, 1817)

The word “nice” is tricky. Like so many of our English words, it has had some different shades of meaning, which have switched as time passed. The quotation with which this chapter starts relates to this: through her character, Jane Austen is making fun of the different ways that single word can be taken.

In its present use, it most often means the sort of thing you probably thought of when I first talked about the nice lady — pleasant, friendly, kind, and so on. It will probably come as a real surprise to most people that when the word “nice” was originally coined, it meant “ignorant”.

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And so we arrive at the present moment.

We've been talking about history — about that old nonsense created by Karl Marx, and then picked up in the middle of the last century by a group of rabid ideologues now known as “The Frankfurt School”. But what’s all this got to do with us? Why should we care? Didn’t all that end with the Berlin Wall? Whom do we, in the West, ever meet who preens himself as a Marxist? So why bother ourselves with dead men and dead beliefs?

Well, because sometimes things don’t quite die. Bad ideas have a horrible way of persisting, and even of being resurrected in new forms. This happened with Marxism, which has now reappeared under the cloak of humanist, racial, environmental and sexual-equality concerns, in what we now know as the “Social Justice” movement. So our subject today is this final switcheroo, when the old dogmas of Marxism got converted into their current form, and managed to seize so much of the public agenda, and even to make serious inroads among professing Christians.

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When we left off last week, we were talking about the roots of the Social Justice movement. We traced things back to a philosopher named Hegel, who passed on some basic ideas to another guy, Karl Marx. Marx might well be the most evil character in all of history, judging by the number of people dispossessed, starved, tortured and killed as result of his ideology. (Let nobody tell you that ideas do not have consequences.)

But Marx died way back in 1883, and went to his own consequences. So we might well wonder why we would be thinking about him now. How did some old atheist guy with a bad idea end up causing problems for the Church a century and a half or so after he was dead? Good question. It deserves an answer. So here we go.

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In our last instalment of this book, we left off talking about ideologies ... secular ideologies, and particularly the kind of beliefs that have given rise to the Social Justice ideology that’s nowadays making heavy inroads in many local churches. Though the love of a humanistic ideology goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel, there are a few new twists in present case. Some of these twists were introduced by a guy named G.W.F. Hegel, who believed that all history is like a great “god” with its own will, direction and trajectory, and that by releasing the power of this great “History” by busting the shackles of the status quo, we would have inevitable moral and social progress.

We left off last time with Hegel’s much more famous disciple, Karl Marx, who was going to take things to a whole new level, and eventually was to become the true father of the modern Social Justice movement ... even for those who’ve never yet heard of Karl Marx. (So toxic are bad ideas that they often continue to infect us long after their founders are pushing up daisies.)

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Last week, we started to work on the question of how it has come to be that the church is being invaded from inside by the “nice lady” types, Christians who claim to be helping us move toward a better, godlier more Christian way of doing church, but who are actually directing us to something very different. We ended up talking about the Tower of Babel incident from Genesis.

Even back in that very first book of the Bible, the natural human inclination toward this kind of strange ideology is spelled out. Nothing unexpected, nothing new, nothing out of keeping with human nature from the dawn of time is really involved here. So in a sense, we should have seen it coming: but we don’t, because every time it recurs it seems to be clothed in different language and circumstances.

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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.

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In our last segment of this serialization, we were looking at how a new belief system is currently penetrating evangelical congregations. We saw that it begins with someone, or some group of people, who seems very, very nice ... well-intended, kind, and focused on making sure everybody is welcomed and included, and nobody is made to feel pushed to the margins, especially because of things like “race” and “gender”. It all sounds, at first, like a matter of simple Christian fairness, so it seems hard even to express a hesitancy about it.

However, as this new push for inclusion continues, it becomes apparent that more and more serious changes are involved. Every part of church life is starting to morph, and new people are becoming the voices that are heard first in important church decisions. Should you be concerned? You don’t know. Aspects of the new spirit that is coming over your congregation seem harmonious with Christian kindness; but if you’re attuned to the spirit of things, you’ll also notice a kind of hardness creeping in, a sort of coldness and unkindness to anybody who implies any problems with the new program might exist. And maybe you wonder if it’s all so thoroughly loving and Christ-like as it was first presented to be.

But even if you don’t have those intuitions of concern, you will notice practical changes are going on. Some seem necessary. Others ... you’re not so sure. And this is where we pick our story up.

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Chapter 1: In the Side Door

“For certain people have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into indecent behavior and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”

One day soon, a very nice person will appear in your church.

It could be a person from a visible minority group, somebody disabled, somebody with a distinctive skin color, or somebody who doesn’t look any different from most of the congregation. It could be a man or a woman; and while it is more likely to be a young-to-middle-aged person, it could conceivably be somebody older as well. Likely, but not certainly, it will be a formally-educated person, somebody with a university degree, perhaps; but not necessarily. They may appear singly or in a group of some kind.

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Tom here. A Christian author IC knows recently gave ComingUntrue permission to do an online serialization of his yet-unpublished manuscript. IC has graciously volunteered his usual Thursday blog spot to promote it, which we will be doing over the next few months. The book is called Just Church, the graphic to the right is not the official cover, and I’ll be quiet now and let author introduce his own subject.

Introduction

“I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel, which is not another; but there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.”

There are certainly a great number of such warnings in scripture.

Do you think they’re telling the truth? I do.