Occasional Comments on Selected FeATURES OF tHE STATEMENT ON SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE GOSPEL

We affirm that the Bible is God’s Word, breathed out by him. It is inerrant, infallible, and the final authority for determining what is true (what we must believe) and what is right (how we must live). All truth claims and ethical standards must be tested by God’s final Word, which is Scripture alone.

We deny that Christian belief, character, or conduct can be dictated by any other authority, and we deny that the postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory are consistent with biblical teaching. We further deny that competency to teach on any biblical issue comes from any qualification for spiritual people other than clear understanding and simple communication of what is revealed in Scripture.

I hear in the denial of the consistency of intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory with biblical teaching a refusal to hear a word of judgment from other sources that we have not heard clearly from scripture itself. I call this the “Balaam’s Ass” principle.

We deny that true justice can be culturally defined or that standards of justice that are merely socially constructed can be imposed with the same authority as those that are derived from Scripture. We further deny that Christians can live justly in the world under any principles other than the biblical standard of righteousness. Relativism, socially-constructed standards of truth or morality, and notions of virtue and vice that are constantly in flux cannot result in authentic justice.

Does the first sentence suggest theocracy? What standards of justice are not “socially constructed”? Is there such a thing? Is not the church the place where we (and the world) are to look for “authentic justice”? Is not the justice we have and participate in the world always “more or less” just?

We deny that, other than the previously stated connection to Adam, any person is morally culpable for another person’s sin. Although families, groups, and nations can sin collectively, and cultures can be predisposed to particular sins, subsequent generations share the collective guilt of their ancestors only if they approve and embrace (or attempt to justify) those sins. Before God each person must repent and confess his or her own sins in order to receive forgiveness. We further deny that one’s ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular sin.

So we are only guilty of racism if we act in or approve of racist ways? Solidarity in sin does not equal complicity in that sin? This seems to deny  the solidarity the previous paragraph affirmed. In Adam we lived in a sin-stained world. The turn to a voluntaristic notion of personal repentance and confession seems odd in such a strongly reformed statement.

We deny that anything else, whether works to be performed or opinions to be held, can be added to the gospel without perverting it into another gospel. This also means that implications and applications of the gospel, such as the obligation to live justly in the world, though legitimate and important in their own right, are not definitional components of the gospel.

The life God intends us to live, which Christ died to enable us to live, are not matters added to the gospel but ingredient to it. The good news is that Christ has won the victory and set us free to become who we were always intended to be, both here and now as well as then and there.

We Deny that political or social activism should be viewed as integral components of the gospel or primary to the mission of the church. Though believers can and should utilize all lawful means that God has providentially established to have some effect on the laws of a society, we deny that these activities are either evidence of saving faith or constitute a central part of the church’s mission given to her by Jesus Christ, her head. We deny that laws or regulations possess any inherent power to change sinful hearts.

WRONG on all counts! Reprehensible!