MacArthur on the Social Justice Threat (Part 2)

Hasn’t even gotten to the point of defining the problem as he sees it.

It seems he is trying to frame the historical context… It feels like one of those click-bait links on the internet. It tells you some story by giving you a picture and half a sentence on each slide.

Doing this demonstrates that he’s not singling out SJWs any worse than anyone else; he’s an equal opportunity offender. Still irritating, though.

[Bert Perry]

Hasn’t even gotten to the point of defining the problem as he sees it.

I hear he’s kinda busy dealing with some other, pressing matters……

Actually, this is part 2 of his series, https://www.gty.org/library/blog/B180822 while the link above is part 1.

and John is in full meddling mode. He went after worship and music, as well as the general approach to ministry that is all too common today, which is to attract the lost by looking a whole lot like the world. For a year or two, I have been reading Thom Rainer’s blog (Thom is the president of Lifeway Christian Stores, btw, and is a big guy in the Southern Baptist Convention). It is full tilt pragmatism, with just enough gospel to keep it honest. The people love it over there. There are some good things to learn there, but the pragmatism is thick and cannot be challenged. I bring that up to show the extent of pragmatism in the church. It isn’t just Hybels’ family tree.

While he hasn’t taken aim directly at social justice yet, it is clear he intends to place it in the broader trend of taking things from the world and applying them to the church. I agree with rejecting this, but you have to be clear about what you mean, and most people don’t listen! For example, women are spiritually equal to men. Women are to be treated respectfully by all. All sexual abuse is to be taken seriously, etc. However, the #metoo movement is a purely worldly phenomenon. The same goes with BLM and recent trends in racism, as well as immigration.

He starts, really, with a slippery slope (fallacy) argument, that if we adopt the world’s methods in worship, we will then adopt the world’s message. Obviously that’s what happened when Luther adapted secular songs for the great hymns of that faith, and it’s what happened when William Booth did the same….oh, wait, the LCMS/LCWS are still faithful, and the Salvation Army is still faithful…..

Hopefully this gets better, but it’s really mostly about guilt by association and slippery slope. I do indeed have some objections to great portions of SJW activity, but overall I’m a lot more sanguine about the matter because the Biblical bounds are generally pretty clear. Want to tell me that we ought to take allegations of sexual assault seriously? I’m in. Want to tell me that we ought to simply accent homosexuality? Um, can you google “e coli infection” and get back to me afterwards?

I would concur with Larry that Mac has other things on his mind, obviously. That noted, one of the things you do when you’ve got pressing issues is to lay off the others. Mac needs some friends to tell him “take a break from other stuff, we’ve got some big deals here that need our attention.”

In response to MacArthur’s part 2 (or part 3 on Sharper Iron), I do agree that there are some evangelicals who have gone down the slippery slope of compromise and have embraced a pragmatic view that if you don’t accept the LGBTQ movement with open arms or other social justice issues then the church will somehow die. However, those who are propagating that message come from the progressive evangelical arm and I would even say that many of them weren’t really evangelicals in the first place.

Here is an article from John Pavlowitz that fits MacArthur’s narrative to a T. https://johnpavlovitz.com/2017/06/04/the-christians-making-atheists/?ut…

Pavlotwitz grew up Roman Catholic, switched to United Methodist after marrying his wife, attended Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and then became one of the pastors at Good Shepherd United Methodist Church in Charlotte, NC, and was eventually fired from there for writing articles that didn’t fit their view of Christianity. Was he really an evangelical in the first place? If so, was he already connected to bastions of progressive evangelicalism (Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary-Brian McClaren is a regular lecturer there).

When I was an adjunct professor at Cornerstone University a decade ago, several of my students who had more progressive leanings were reared in Mainline churches, became Christians in more conservative evangelical youth groups that they attended for a year or 2 and then went to college at Cornerstone U Their faith was a mile wide and an inch thick without much exposure to discipleship. While at Cornerstone, they would attend a progressive evangelical church like Mars Hill Bible Church-when Rob Bell, Shane Hipps, and Kent Dobson were pastors (all of which became heretics) and they had already drank the progressive evangelical Kool-aid where disciple=social justice which replaced the true gospel of Jesus with the social gospel. I also know a few of my students that were discipled in toxic fundamentalist and evangelical churches that ended up progressive evangelical and followed this tragectory from the true gospel to the social gospel. One of my students who used to be an evangelical youth pastor of a Nazarene Church (the church were he grew up in that was toxic in several areas) ended up at Mars Hill Bible church, embraced a very politically left Christian faith (very similar to Sojourners), moved to both Tennessee and Florida in the Bible Belt. When the majority of evangelical churches in the south were not the type of social justice Christians that he was (voting how he voted) and embracing the LGBTQ agenda, he became disallusioned with the Christian Faith, divorced his wife and now is an agnotistic.

Slippery slopes can happen, but the problem is when a person like MacArthur seems to overgeneralize the slippery slope argument to everyone.