[light music]
[applause]
>> Well, thank you Dr. Taylor.
Hey, thank you for coming out.
This is awesome.
We had a great time
this morning in chapel.
We've got a lot of great feedback
and we want to just
continue the conversation.
For those of you who weren't chapel,
we're gonna kinda bring you
up to speed very quickly
and then we want to jump right in
and we've devoted a
bunch of time at the end
to get your questions, your
thoughts and your opinions.
>> One quick thing, I want to remind
those who worked there
at chapel this morning
about what the point of duologue is.
What really the idea behind it is
and it really isn't about
changing each other's opinion.
What we'd like to do is model
the kind of conversation
that allows you to understand
someone else's opinions
more deeply and hopefully
even refine their opinions,
make their opinion stronger and better
and at the same time, give
you a better understanding
of how a different set
of opinions might emerge
from a shared set of
common core convictions
in the gospel of Christ,
in our confessional beliefs
and see that those can bear
different fruit and different minds.
So that's part of the
things that we'll be doing
as we look at this.
Our two key participants
are, as you've already seen
Thaddeus Williams and Brad Christerson.
Let me just give you a brief
introduction to Thaddeus.
He's a colleague of mine
in the Biblical Studies
and Theology Department.
Many of you who are students here
may well know him as a professor
from Theo one or Theo two
and that's one of the places
he has the privilege of kind of fulfilling
part of his life passion to
be a person who helps in large
and lead people's concept of godly,
do greater enjoyment of
God as a result of that.
He's not only taught
here, but he's also taught
at a variety of other settings,
both Christian and non Christian,
nationally and internationally.
He's commonly involved in
speaking retreats and churches
and other things like that
all across the country
and it's a privilege
for us to have him here.
He's published several books,
but the thing that has
gotten us interested
in having him here tonight
is his most recent work,
The Justice Revolution,
Loving The Oppressed
Without Losing The Gospel.
And so he has been doing a lot
of thinking about this issue
of the Gospel and social justice,
which is really the focus
for our duologue tonight.
So we thought it'd be great to have Thad
to be one of our participants.
>> My pleasure to introduce
Dr. Brad Christerson.
My students are laughing.
My students are laughing at me right now
because I do not own a smartphone.
So I'm really a fish out of water
and had to put your code in already once.
>> Richard: I'm just
waiting for it to blink out
and having to reenter the code
and his whole introduction
will just go right out
the door, but go ahead.
>> And when machines take over the world.
I'm going to be okay.
Dr. Brad Christerson has
an MBA and pHD in sociology
from the University of
California at Santa Barbara.
He's been at Biola for 21 years.
That's amazing.
He teaches courses in
global poverty and inequity,
race and ethnicity in urban society.
He also is a prolific author.
He's written The Rise
of Network Christianity,
Growing Up in America, The Power of Race
in the Lives of Teens
and Against All Odds.
I had one person come
up to me in the chapels
saying I was deeply offended
that you associated that
with the Detroit lions
football team against all odds,
but it's actually called The
Struggle for Racial Integration
in Religious Schools
and at Dr. Christerson
is also part of a wonderful organization
called Matthew Twenty Five
that helps at risk immigrants
in our country and help them.
So he's not only a
scholar but an activist.
We're absolutely thrilled
to have both of you with us.
So why are you please come up and join us.
[applause]
>> Can I just start out
by saying my students
are getting extra credit.
Here's your sign up sheet.
I bribed my students to come.
[laughs]
>> Mine are getting
slightly more extra credit.
[laughs]
[applause]
>> So you all heard a
really quick synopsis
of the things that we heard
in chapel this morning.
I've asked both Thaddeus and Brad
to just give kind of the
one minute elevator speech
of kind of the distilled essence
of what they said in their lighting mini,
kind of a 10 minute
ted talk that they gave
about their perspective on
the Gospel of Social Justice.
So let me turn it over
first to Brad then to Thad
just give us kind of a one minute shot
of what you'd like to say.
>> All right, well, I talked
about how like anything
when we talk about social justice
we have to route our ideas and scripture
and especially the life
and teachings of Jesus.
And I talked about how Jesus' main message
was the him breaking of the Kingdom of God
into this broken world.
And I made the case that
this New Kingdom of God
that broke in has three aspects.
One is the forgiveness
of sins and eternal life
and a restored relationship
with God through Jesus.
The second one is that Jesus
built a loving community
where people cared for each other,
sacrifice for each other
and everyone was included
and particularly the poor
and the marginalized were cared for.
And then third, that
he actually confronted
systems of injustice and that those,
when those three aspects,
when the people of God
do those three things,
the kingdom expands and
the world gets better.
>> Okay, great.
Thad, how about you?
>> So I was talking
about how important it is
to get the order right
that we're talking about
the Gospel and social justice.
And I borrowed this
principle from CS Lewis
and you will have gave me guff about it
because he said calvanists aren't allowed
to cite CS Lewis, which
is a whole other duologue
we're going to have to have.
But the basic principle
that Louis articulates
in the weight of glory is that
if you put a first thing first,
the second thing we'll often
get thrown in as a bonus.
You make a second thing first.
You not only lose the real first thing,
you lose the second thing too.
And so if you make your first thing,
everybody has to like me,
nobody's gonna like you.
If you make your first thing being happy,
you're going to end up miserable.
If a church makes its
first thing being relevant,
they're going to end up irrelevant,
and so I applied that principle
to how we ask this question.
If we keep the Gospel, and I defined it
from 1st Corinthians 15 where
Paul says, this is the Gospel.
What I pass on you of first importance
about the death and resurrection of Jesus.
If we keep that the first thing,
then social justice follows and
becomes something beautiful.
What I'm concerned about in
2018 in the church in America
is that we've flipped those
so that social justice
becomes something else altogether.
More colored by what the culture says
than how scripture defines justice.
>> Hold that mic just a
little closer to your mouth
and the speaker will be happier.
>> Sure.
>> So quick question for both of you guys.
I mentioned this at the end of chapel
and I want to follow up on
now and deliver the goods.
I just like to know how
you can possibly defend
having two white males
talk about social justice.
[laughs]
[applause]
So what did you feel?
Thad I'll let you go first
since Brad went first last time.
>> Yeah, that is a great question
and I guess the first thing I'd say
is there's a kernel of
truth to the concern
that if you're talking about
things like oppression,
wouldn't it be worth hearing from people
who are actually oppressed?
Right?
And on that score I would say amen.
The Bible calls us to
grieve with those who grieve
and you aren't going to be able
to grieve with grieving people
if you've got your fingers
in your ears, right?
So I would say listening to the oppressed
is a very important part
of the conversation.
So this night isn't the end all be all
of how to think about justice.
There's bigger conversations
with people who have experienced
a heck of a lot more
oppression than I ever have.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing I would
say is ideas and truth
don't have melanin and they don't have
an X or Y chromosome.
And what I mean by that is
the laws of aeronautics.
If you took off from LAX right now,
and you fly over the ocean,
if you pass over a continent
that doesn't believe
in those laws of aeronautics,
your plane isn't gonna
plummet to the ground, right?
The laws are facts that are independent
of whether we believe them or not
and the skin color, the gender
of the people who articulate them,
and I think that's an important point
because you can take everything
I'm going to say tonight
and everything I said this morning
and take those syllables
out of Thad's mouth
and put them in the mouth
of somebody like Rosaria Butterfield
or somebody like a Sydney Callahan,
the great pro life feminist
or somebody like Tom Sowell
or Trillia Newbell.
You can take a complete different gender,
completely different ethnicity
and make all the same points
because we need to be thinking
in terms of is this idea
faithful to scripture?
Is this idea objectively true
Rather than playing a game of,
I'm going to write off what's being said
purely based off the gender or appearance
of the person making the point.
>> How about you Brad?
>> Yeah, so I would say that, well...
So I'm a big sports junkie
and I listen to sports radio
on the way to work all the time
and when they have analysts,
sports analysts on there,
they always have people who have actually
played professional sports, right?
Everyone's like this is just a person
who's good at broadcasting
that they throw in there.
I feel like the conversation
is going to be limited
if people haven't actually experienced
what you're talking about,
what you're analyzing.
And to me the conversation
about social justice
is about systems that disadvantaged people
and systems that oppress people.
And if the two of us
have never experienced
systemic injustice, we're
going to miss some things.
And it's not to say that we can't have
valid things to say about it
and we can talk about our experiences
of being advantaged by
systems and that's valuable.
So it's not like nothing we
say here is valid or valuable
but in order to get at the
truth and I agree with Thad,
our goal is to seek the truth,
but we can't seek the truth
if we don't have all the
perspectives in the room.
And so it would be better
if this conversation
had more perspectives
and actually have people
who have faced the things
that we're talking about.
>> Yeah I teach in our
communication department
and we borrow from a man
named Dwight Conquergood
who was trying to help us.
How do you talk about diverse topics
in today's cultural setting?
And he came up with two
variants, interesting terms.
One is when he called the
curator's exhibitionism.
Which means I'm a white male,
I can talk about anything.
I got a pHD, I can
address any social issue,
I can step right in.
It doesn't matter if I'm female.
It doesn't matter if I'm
oppressed, doesn't matter.
I can step right in.
He said that's an exhibitionist,
but on the flip side
he said there's what he
calls the skeptics cop out,
which is listen, I'm not female.
I'm not going to talk
about any gender inequity.
I'm a white male, I'm
never gonna talk about
those who are oppressed.
He said that's a cop out.
So those of you who are in positions
where you can study things
and talk about things,
it's your duty to talk about them.
Now, I would agree it'd be
better if I was a person
who had personally
experienced certain things.
I get migraines and my neurologist,
I sound really bad in mind
and I said to my neurologist,
"By the way, what do you
do with your migraines?"
And she looked at me and she
said, "Oh, I don't get them."
And I must say there was just a moment
I looked at her like, wow.
But she said, but I've
studied it all my life
and I've talked to a
thousand migraine sufferers.
I think I have an insight into it.
So what we want to do is
not do the skeptics cop out,
which is we couldn't get
the diversity we wanted
thus we won't talk about it and just know
we continue to do our due
diligence to make things diverse,
which sometimes is a struggle here,
but so we're doing the best that we can,
but the opinions of these
two gentlemen scholars
is something that we
really do need to listen to
as we seek to bring in
a diversity of voices.
>> And one quick thought on that as well.
The interesting thing about the duologue
isn't necessarily gain all of the insight
to be had about that particular topic.
It's actually the key thing here
is to get two people
who share a common set
of core beliefs and commitments,
but who disagree on some important areas
of personal conviction.
That's the real qualification here
and we're modeling and affect how to have
those sorts of difficult conversations
that is somewhat independent
of just an investigation
of social justice because
that isn't exactly
what the duologue is for.
It isn't, YouTube primer
on issues of social justice
regardless of question modeling.
How do we manage and navigate
deeply felt areas of disagreement.
And Tim, one of the things
that you often talk about
is the importance of
where these ideas come.
So let me turn it back to
you and you can pursue that.
>> What we wanted to do is
kind of help you understand
the personal journey and
these two individuals.
The Harvard negotiation project says
the biggest problem we
make in communication.
We only share conclusions with each other.
We don't share how we
arrived at the conclusion.
So what we would like to do
is just take a few minutes to
kind of bring us up to speed
on your journey, not just as academics
but also as individuals.
Why is this issue important enough
that you would agree to do
this in front of an audience?
Talk about social justice.
So Thaddeus why don't you go first
and just bring us up to speed
personally and academically.
>> Sure.
Well, for me, I spent most of
my childhood in potato fields
and an orange orchards
and strawberry fields,
working with people who
lived in abject poverty
because my mom had this amazing ministry
called Sunshine Outreach
and it was headquartered
down south in Orange County.
And so spending so much time
breaking out of the suburban bubble
and working hand in hand with people
who were in deep poverty
and in dire straits,
had a big shaping impact on me.
And so we would load up a giant camper
and head down south of the border often
and hang out and got to know
families south of the border
where my earliest memories are
playing marbles in the dirt
with kids who literally those marbles
were their only toys and then coming back
to my little cushy suburban
Orange County existence
and seeing that stark contrast.
So thanks to my parents,
the need for justice
and seeing huge inequalities
with something implanted in me early on.
And it was never implanted is
like this versus the Gospel.
It was just an extension of loving Jesus.
That went to the next level
when I was an undergraduate here
back in the early 60s.
[laughs]
>> You look Great.
>> Thank you.
It's a little botox.
>> For Migraines, I'm sure.
>> So it's my sophomore year,
the summer between
sophomore and junior year
and went over to SMU and
applied to go to Nepal
and we spent six weeks,
traveled around Katmandu,
traveled around Pokera, got
to hike through the Himalayas
and spent time with Daletes,
the untouchable class.
You had the caste system there for so long
that the overwhelming
majority of the population
was living in abject poverty.
And I'll never forget me and
five other Biola students
pulling up to this little village
and seeing people working the rice fields
and the pastor we were with
said, hey, FYI, those are slaves
like modern victims of human trafficking.
And I can't even like put words to it.
There's just a darkness that I felt.
You could almost touch
like sense the evil.
The injustice was palpable.
So that was a big part of
me caring about justice.
And then the more I studied theology,
the more I came to see that the Gospel
is the most precious news
that has ever been announced
in the history of the human race.
And we have to get that right.
If we lose the Gospel, the
church has no reason to exist.
We're just a social club at that point.
And so the more I saw the
headlines in the last few years
started to emerge and
this term, social justice
is all over the place.
You can't scroll through
your Facebook newsfeed
without seeing it 50
different times pop up.
And so the Holy Spirit really
laid heavy on my heart.
The need to speak into this theologically.
So we have clarity.
What is social justice
if we're shaping our
worldview by scripture
verses the kind of things
that are being called social
justice in the 21st century
and the need for crystal
clear view on that.
>> And the name of your
book that you're writing.
You're in the process is called?
>> It's tentatively
called Justice Revolution,
Loving the Oppressed
Without Losing the Gospel.
>> Great.
>> There's my shameless commercial.
>> I did it for you.
I absolutely did it.
>> Alright so for me, I grew
up in Littleton, Colorado.
Anybody here from Colorado?
Represent.
>> Yeah.
Colorado state.
[mumbles]
Brad? I went skydiving on my honeymoon
in Littleton, Colorado.
I did.
I felt compelled to say that.
I'm so sorry.
My bad, go ahead.
>> Skydived into a suburb.
So anyway, I grew up in
Colorado in 70s and 80s
and it was a very sort of homogenous
White middle class community.
Both my parents had college degrees.
Three out of my four uncles
were college professors.
So I grew up with a lot of advantages.
I went to schools that
prepared me well for college.
My parents expected me to go to college
and it wasn't a matter
of if you go to college,
it's when you go to college.
So all these things
were just built into me.
I had a lot of support from my teachers.
They believed in me
and encouraged me a lot
and I wasn't actually that
motivated of a student.
I played a lot of video
games, I went skiing a lot,
I goofed around with my friends a lot.
But somehow I got into
the two major university.
I had a 2.7 GPA in high school,
got into the two major universities,
Colorado State in CU Boulder
without having done a whole lot
in terms of homework.
And so all that to say I grew up
with a lot of advantages.
I grew up a Christian as well.
I grew up in a Presbyterian church.
Both my parents were believers
and I had a really awesome youth group,
youth pastor that really
challenged me to live out my faith
and so I went to Colorado State University
because that's where all
my friends were going,
had nothing to do with
what I was going to study
or anything so I started out in
and then I continued
doing Christian ministry
or Christian clubs on campus.
Really kept growing in
my faith individually.
And it wasn't until I
changed my major to sociology
in my junior well actually social science,
but I took my first
sociology class junior year
that my world exploded.
Because for the first time I realized
that not everybody had
the same life that I had
in terms of growing up
because we tend to do that as humans.
Right?
We generalize from our own experience
and my attitude whenever
I would hear about poverty
was because I thought,
everybody pretty much
has the same experience.
Well, they must be trying
very hard because look at me.
I'm going to college and not
trying that hard actually.
So to learn that one out of
eight people in the world
actually don't have enough food to eat.
The fact that in my own
city, the way policing works
and another thing about my high school
there was just sort of
a lot of substance abuse
at my high school and everybody knew
who the drug dealers were
and I never heard of somebody
getting arrested for drugs.
But knowing, learning my sociology class,
how policing works and if I was
in a different neighborhood,
there'd be a lot of
people getting arrested.
Learning about people growing
up in poverty in my own city
that just didn't have any of
the opportunities that I had
and so for one I think
it just blew me away
that I didn't know about this.
It took my junior year in college
to learn about the injustice
that were happening
in my own city.
And secondly, I grew up in
the church my whole life.
Nobody ever gave a sermon about justice
and nobody ever talked about injustice
and that really led me
to a crisis of faith
because I saw the suffering
and it took my non Christian professors,
some of whom were actually antichristian
to expose this world to me.
Again it seemed like they cared
more about this broken world
than the people I grew up in church with.
And so that led me to a crisis of faith.
I always knew God was there
and I wasn't going to abandon that belief,
but the church as I had
experienced seemed irrelevant
because if the church
either A, doesn't know about
the brokenness and the suffering
and injustice in the world,
that's a problem.
Or B, if they know and they
don't want to talk about it
or care, that's a big problem.
And so I was introduced to thankfully,
some authors from the
evangelical tradition
like Ron Sider and Tony
Campolo that taught me, no.
Actually God does care about this
and actually it's
throughout the scriptures.
And so it sort of blew me away
that I'd been going to Bible
studies in my whole life
and somehow I missed this and somehow
my pastors were missing this.
And so it sort of became
this question in my life.
How do we wrestle with what scripture says
to do as God's people in this broken
and suffering unjust world?
>> So great sermon, interesting to see
where influences that lead
to the perspectives we have.
You guys have now, we spent
three or four hours together
one evening talking
about your perspectives.
You've heard each other give ted talks,
some things here and now.
We noticed this morning
there were a lot of things
that you said that you
agreed with each other about.
On the other hand, I
know there's some things
that you have some more
fundamental disagreements about.
Now what I'd like to do
is give you each of you
about five minutes and if you
start to go to eight or 10,
I may do this funny thing with my hands
to say, okay, let's
tighten it up a little bit.
But just take a few and say, okay,
I've heard what for
example, Thad has said,
but here's some concerns
I might have about that,
or here's some questions I have
about the position that you're coming,
and then we'll flip it
around the other way.
>> You want me to go?
>> Yeah, you can go first if you'd like.
>> Yeah, I guess one of my
concerns is when we say Gospel,
the Gospel simply means good news, right?
If we take a biblical
command like do justice,
we talked about that this morning.
That's not a suggestion.
That is a command.
It's an essential if we're living
under the whole counsel of God.
Good news isn't a command, right?
If I tell my daughter
like, eat your broccoli.
It's not good news.
I'm giving her a command, right?
Even if I give a command,
like, love your neighbor.
That's not good news.
There's a difference in other words,
between an imperative statement, a command
and an indicative
statement, like good news.
Like your broccoli's been
eaten would be good news.
You get ice cream for
dessert is good news.
And so for me, that's huge
that the gospel is an announcement.
It's an indicative, it's
not a command to do justice.
That command follows
from once we've been
transformed by the Gospel.
But I think this is where, again,
we need that razor sharp precision.
And here's what I would want
to hear your take on Brad,
is when I look at the book of Galatians,
Paul just comes out kind
of guns blazing, right?
He's saying there's this different gospel,
it's a different Jesus.
It's a counterfeit Christ.
If an angel from heaven
preached a different Gospel,
let them be eternally cursed.
So he's just railing against
what in the first century
was the Judaizer Harrison.
That if you are going to be saved,
the good news isn't the announcement
of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
So you're saved by grace
alone, through faith, alone,
by grace alone, through
faith alone in Christ alone
rather the Gospel is Jesus,
plus dietary restrictions.
Eat this, don't eat that.
The Gospel is Jesus,
plus go get circumcised.
And the minute you add that
plus sign to the Gospel,
according to Paul is the
minute you have what he calls
a different gospel.
And so I guess that's one of my concerns
when I hear some of the
language that's thrown out.
I'm not accusing you of
being adaptable heretic
or anything like that.
Just so we're clear, just so
you're feeling the love here.
But I think we do get
really sloppy with our language sometimes.
So if we say social
justice is "Gospel issue,"
what do we really mean?
Do we mean that unless
you're doing social justice,
you aren't saved?
Do we mean that if I have
60 seconds in an elevator
to share the gospel, I have
to talk about immigration
and racism and institutions
need to be reformed?
What do I actually mean
when I say social justice
is a gospel issue?
And on the most charitable
read of that I can give,
and correct me if I'm wrong,
you're saying that if
you're really transformed
by the Gospel, then that
should manifest itself
in a life that cares about
the poor and marginalized
versus what I don't think you're saying
and hope you're not saying
is the Gospel is salvation
through the blood of Jesus,
plus all of your efforts
to reform broken systems.
And so that to me is no small issue
and let me just set it
in a quick 60 second.
Give me 60 seconds to take you through
2000 years of church history
on this and why it matters.
>> Wow.
>> Time is clicking, is talking here.
Here we go.
First Century Jesus versus
the Pharisees on the Gospel.
The Pharisees are adding a mile long list
of do's and don'ts.
Fast forward, late first century,
Paul is now going toe to
toe with the Judaizers
who were adding to the Gospel.
Fast forward to the fourth century.
This guy, Pelagius comes around,
a British monk and he's saying,
now we have the power to more or less
save ourselves by making good choices
and doing good for our neighbors.
And Augustine rises up and declares no.
The good news is that you're
saved by grace and grace alone.
The finished work of Jesus plus nothing.
Fast forward to the 16th century.
The Catholic Church at
the time is preaching.
Here's you know, a mile
long list of do's and don'ts
that you need to keep in
order to earn your salvation
and God raises up guys like
Luther and Tim's favorite,
John Calvin and all these guys
that come around and preach.
[laughs]
And preach.
>> Time's up.
[laughs]
>> This is rigged.
This is rigged.
And what are the protestants recovering?
This sense that we learn
from scripture alone
that you're saved by grace
alone, through faith alone
in Christ alone, so God and
God alone gets the glory.
And so what you see is this
pattern through church history
where we keep sliding from the good news
into trying to add something to it
and God continually
raises up a new generation
to say, hey, let's be crystal clear
on the good news of
salvation by grace alone,
through faith alone and Christ alone.
And so when I see a
generation that I'm encouraged
by here at Biola that
cares about justice issues,
there is a concern that, well,
let's just not repeat
the mistakes of the past
where we are now saying
salvation, the Gospel
equals Jesus plus all this stuff we do
to fix society's broken structures.
>> Great, thank you.
So let's do this.
Let's not waste that.
That was so rich.
Let's have you respond real
quickly to what Thaddeus said
and then you'll get to see your concern
and you'll get to respond.
But let's not lose your train of thought.
>> Thad: As long as you don't cut him off.
[laughs]
>> I liked this wreck.
I like this.
It doesn't work but I like it.
Good Brad.
>> All right, so first of all,
I'd just like to let the
air out of the balloon
and say that I believe that salvation,
if we're talking about eternal life
and relationship with God, is
by faith alone, not by works
and there's no way we can
do enough social justice
to be righteous enough
to earn our salvation.
So having said that, what is the Gospel
I think is a question.
And to me, the primary message of Jesus,
his whole central message was
the expansion of the Kingdom of God.
Now the Kingdom of God breaking
in is what he preached.
He preached the forgiveness
of sins, eternal life,
the free gift, which is central
to the expansion of that kingdom
and that's by grace alone.
But the kingdom is the good
news that he talked about.
And so the word Gospel
just means good news
and in the Roman Empire where he lived,
people would understand that
as a term that the Romans,
when they would conquer a
territory somewhere else,
they would come in and blow a trumpet,
stand up in the court yard and say,
good to hear the good news.
We just conquered the island of Crete
or something like that.
And the people in those areas
would probably go, yeah.
That's not good news for us.
I mean, good for you maybe,
but it doesn't help us.
We're being oppressed by you.
And Jesus is basically
saying, no, this new kingdom
that's coming in and it's
good news for the poor
and it's the good news for the people
that are being oppressed
by this other government.
There's new good news
that A, you have salvation
and you have eternal life
and a restored relationship with God
but also I'm bringing in this new kingdom
where loving your neighbor
is the primary principle
rather than oppression and most people
in his neighborhood knew oppression.
And so the gospel of the kingdom,
the good news of the Kingdom
of coming here is yes,
a free gift of salvation and eternal life
and restoration of our
relationship with God,
but it's more than that.
It's reconciliation with
the oppressor and oppressed
through changing systems,
through enemy love,
through loving our neighbor as ourselves.
It's restoring systems like government
to their original purpose
and that's never going to be perfect
and that's never gonna...
That full reconciliation
isn't going to happen
until Jesus comes back.
But it's a fuller bodied project
than just getting our salvation,
getting eternal life worked out
and even our personal relationship
with God here and now.
And that's central.
And I agree that if we
lose that, we're done
because that's the center
of the whole thing.
But it's bigger.
And I guess the Gospel
that I heard growing up
was a truncated gospel.
It was connect with God,
develop this great relationship
with God, which was awesome.
That changed my life,
but it didn't do anything
for my neighbors.
It didn't do anything for
me as a privileged person
to be reconciled with the people
that aren't as privileged as me
and it didn't give me anything
to do while I'm here on earth
other than connect with God
and then tell other people about God.
There's a whole project of the kingdom
that's left out of that,
that truncated form.
I would argue.
>> That's great.
So we'll give you a second to respond.
Why don't you say what your concern is
then Thaddeus can respond
to what you perceive
the concern is.
>> Yeah well, I guess my
concern is that by saying
the Gospel which you define
as forgiveness of sins
and restored relationship
with God and eternal life
is the first thing and
everything else is secondary
and makes it pretty easy to
just forget about the rest.
And I guess that's what
I experienced growing up
and I see it in a lot of the church
and it actually hurts the
reputation of the church and God
because it looks like we
don't care about people.
It looks like we don't care about justice.
And we ended up actually reinforcing
these structures of oppression
because we don't challenge them.
And especially for people
who have benefited from them,
we just sort of stay silent about it.
And that's what I see in our culture today
is forget those Christians,
they don't care about the poor,
they don't care about women's rights,
they don't care about mass incarceration
or families getting
separated at the border.
They just want to get people saved.
So for their eternal life.
So there's a danger in
neglecting all of that stuff too
that I hope you agree with.
But by defining it that way,
I think it means this is the main thing
and if we get around to
doing this other stuff
then that's a bonus.
But it's not really essential.
>> Yeah I 100% agree
that a individualistic...
Jesus died so I get to float
off to the clouds when I die.
Is it inadequate Gospel,
a truncated gospel?
I 100% agree with that.
I guess the difference for me
where we're maybe talking
past each other a little bit
is you know, you use that
language of truncated Gospel
or incomplete Gospel.
If we look at Acts two,
Peter stands up on Pentecost
and preaches the gospel
and I reread it a couple times this week
and I'm looking for anywhere in there
where he's pointing to the systems
that were all around in the Roman Empire.
I mean there's a historian
named Margaret Cullingray
who did the math on it
and she calculated it.
Roughly two thirds of the
Roman Empire were slaves.
You're either born into
slavery or fell into debt
and went into slavery or some other means
but two thirds that's
mindblowing statistic.
And so this is happening in the context
when Jesus is announcing the kingdom,
and I don't hear him say,
well, we need to take
down the Roman systems
that are oppressing two thirds
of the entire Roman empire.
Now, I'm not saying that
wouldn't be an implication
of his teachings, but when
I hear him talk kingdom,
I don't see him saying, here's
the system and the Gospel.
The good news is go change that system
and so back to Acts two.
When Peter's Preaching the Gospel,
it's the same as it is
in 1st Corinthians 15.
It's the death and resurrection of Jesus.
You can be saved by grace
through the death and
resurrection of Jesus.
So I guess my question back to you is,
do you believe Peter's sermon in Acts two
which makes no reference to any systems
or reforming any systems
is in your words a truncated Gospel?
>> Well, I just think we're
talking past each other
because we're defining terms differently.
I'd say that the center
of the kingdom is that
and it is good news.
It is Gospel that we have
the forgiveness of sin
with death of Jesus, but
Paul also talked about
reconciling Greek and Jew for example
and in Ephesians two, he talks about
by faith we've been saved by grace
but then he goes on and he continues
and said one of the reasons
for the death of Christ
is to reconcile Greek and Jew
and eliminate the wall of hostility.
And then you see in Paul
he talks about in Christ,
there's neither Greek
nor Jew, slave nor free,
male nor female.
So that all has implications
for social systems
and I think Paul's method of social change
isn't to sort of burn it all
down and then start over.
It's again what Jesus did is
he started this new society
that's overlaid onto the Roman empire
and the injustices there and
it has this kingdom grows,
then you end up challenging the systems
which is what happened
with slavery for example.
When Paul talks to slave
owners and slaves--
>> Let me give a short thing
here because two reasons.
Number one is that we've
got a lot of other questions
and you guys will have time to do that.
So we're going to put
up here the text number
that you can text
questions that you have too
and we have Brian Church and I don't know,
whoever else will be doing
a little bit of processing
those kinds of things,
but we'll be able to pick those up
and we'll start doing that
in about 10 or 15 minutes.
So I wanted to get your
wheels turning on that
so you know where--
>> Let me give you a number
for people on the sides.
The number is 562, 562-203 arminianism.
[laughs]
No, 562-203.
>> That's your phone number.
[laughs]
>> 1120.
562-203-1120.
We should not have sat next to each other.
>> We should not have done that.
>> Can I interject a question real quick
that I had this morning?
So Brad, you started your Ted talk
by mentioning when Jesus
gives his opening pitch,
can you refresh our
memory of what that was?
And I wanted to get your response on that
because of what you think
Jesus is doing there
and how that fits in
with your interpretation
of what the central
characteristic of the Gospel is.
So Brad just bring up to speed real quick
and then I'd love to
get Thaddeus' thought.
>> So Jesus makes his kickoff speech.
The first speech he makes
when he launched his ministry,
he stands up and reads
from the book of Isaiah,
he said, the spirit of the Lord is upon me
to preach good news to the
poor, sight for the blind,
freedom for the prisoners
and freedom for the oppressed
or something like that.
Yeah that inbreaking of the
kingdom has social consequences
and that is part of the
good news of the kingdom,
I would say.
>> Sure, a couple thoughts.
So if you read on just
a few sentences later,
the same scene, Jesus in the temple,
unrolls the Isaiah 60 scroll
and applies it to himself.
He says in the same conversation
in front of the same crowd,
he says, this text is fulfilled
today in your presence.
So here's the question I gotta ask is
something we all need to be careful of
is that we aren't wearing
our goggles to the text
and reading our own worldviews
and our own presuppositions to the text,
but as much as possible to
shatter our presuppositions
and let the text speak for itself.
And so I just wonder if we
aren't wearing a set of goggles
that says, well, I hear the word poor,
I automatically assume material poverty
or I hear the word captive
and I automatically assume
somebody who's literally
an economic bondage
in the slave system.
And the reason I think there's
more going on in that text
than just saying it's social systems
is if he's saying this is
fulfilled today in your presence,
what social system did he?
What inequity did he resolve that day?
What captive?
What literal physical slave
did he liberate that day?
What poor person did he
reverse their poverty somehow?
What Roman government did he challenge
with its unjust two thirds
of the population in slavery?
And to take the thought a step further,
if you read on what he
did the rest of that day,
he's setting people free from oppression
like demonic oppression.
If you read on he's telling stories
about God healing people's bodies
and then he's going and
he's healing bodies.
He's setting people free from
the oppression of illness
and disease and demons and all that evil.
And so the breaking into the kingdom,
I want to be careful that
we just don't read in
all kinds of well he's
clearly just talking about
structural injustice in the
way that we might talk about
in the 21st century, I think
is the scope of his liberation
that he's unleashing is deeply spiritual
and it has multiple facets to it.
>> One of the things that
people bring up a lot
and I've heard this mentioned on campus,
is a connection between modern
social justice perspective
and Neo Marxism.
There's in the common
response I hear to that
is simply dude, if I got
some flag in my backyard
with a hammer and sickle
honor that I don't know about,
I mean why in the world
are you accusing me
of being a Marxist just because
I'm an advocate for social justice?
So Thad, again, I'm going to
do the squeezy thing here,
but in a short period of time,
can you explain why people say that,
bring up this Neo marxists connection
and if that is the thing
that you have concern about
at all or if you think
that's a strong arm.
And then, depending on what he says,
Brad, you may want to say a
few words in response to that.
>> How much time we got?
>> Short.
>> Marxism as a system has
certain built in presuppositions
that at the end of the day
are fundamentally incompatible
with the biblical view of the world.
For example, for Marx and
I'll get to neo Marxism,
the ideas that you
don't have a sin nature,
you aren't fallen, you aren't dead in sin,
you don't need a savior,
you don't need regeneration
from the Holy Spirit.
The source of all evil is inequity.
Economic disparities,
the difference between
the haves and the have nots.
That's the underlying problems.
So if we change the structures,
if we overthrow the capitalist structures
that create inequality,
then we can create utopia.
We can create heaven on earth.
And of course the 20th century experiments
and trying to equalize rich and poor
had a death toll over 100 million.
And so Marxism had to pivot in the 1960s
and this happened to
be called neo Marxism,
the newest version of it
with what's called the Frankfurt school.
Guys like Herbert Marcuse and others.
And their pivot was to do this.
Marx said, we don't have a sin nature.
The real problem is economic disparity
between the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat.
Well, we can't play that game anymore
because the body count was too darn high
in the 20th century.
So we need to redefine justice here.
So instead of just the
economics haves and have nots,
let's play this identity politics game
where we can now make
everything about the oppressor
versus the oppressed.
And so that's just a quick snapshot
of what people mean when they talk about
cultural or neo Marxism.
It's where everything is seen
through the grid of the
oppressor versus oppressed.
And if I could just have
30 more seconds on that.
What that looks like in our culture
and where it actually is entering
into a lot of Christian
conversations about this,
is what I call the tribes mentality.
Tribes for those of you
who have me in class.
You know, I'm all about
the acrostics, right?
So tribes, you see everything
through these lenses.
T, you're just a theocrat.
Somebody's trying to
push your Christianity
through the force of law
down everybody's throats.
R is racism.
I, it's you're an Islamophobe.
B, you're a bigot.
E, you're an elitist capitalist
or S you're or sexist.
And that's a neo Marxist
way of viewing the world
where that becomes the grid
through which you
interpret all of reality.
And when we're seeing the
world only in those categories,
oppressor, oppressed
and one of those ways,
we end up hurting a lot of people
that we're actually trying to help.
>> So Brad, what were
your thoughts behind that?
>> Oh that's a lot to respond to.
I would just say just to
bring it back to Jesus.
I mean, instead of, I guess what I see
is people sort of talking
about some of the justice work
that believers do and saying,
well, somehow tainting now
with the neo Marxists label
and instead of deciding
whether something's
neo Marxist or not, I
think we ought to decide
whether it's biblical or not.
And sometimes Jesus would
have Jesus addressed racism.
Paul addressed racism,
economic inequality.
And so, we can argue about how to do that
in ways that are biblical.
Jesus liberated women.
One of the things he did
was when he intervened
when the woman was being
stoned for adultery
is confronting that injustice
of blaming women for sexual sin.
So anyway, we have these inequalities
that Jesus and Paul addressed
and so when we address those,
we need to do those in a biblical way,
but I don't know how helpful it is
to try to figure out if
they're a neo Marxist or not.
Let's look at what Jesus and Paul did
and see if what we're doing
is consistent with that.
>> Yeah, I would say it
is important to determine.
Well, let me clarify one thing.
If somebody calls you or calls Christians
trying to help people be
aware of the neo Marxism,
that doesn't necessarily
mean you're sitting down
with Marx in front of
you and Herbert Marcuse
on the other hand.
You're just deliberately
like directly using that
as your divine authoritative
source of revelation
or anything like that.
It means there's a flavor
of the way justice is being defined
in a lot of Christian circles
that is basically the same
stuff they were saying
even if you haven't read them directly--
>> Can you define that
because I hear that, but I've never heard
anybody actually specify
what's Neo Marxists
about what Christians are doing right now.
>> Sure.
The identity game where as we--
>> Can you explain the identity game
because that's another thing
that gets thrown out there
but nobody ever defines it.
>> Sure, sure.
It's the idea that when
I look at a person,
if I'm looking through
neo Marxists lenses,
I don't see the individual before me.
I see an avatar or a cipher
or an exemplar of the entire people group
that they represent and this is on campus.
This is a real thing here
where if you look at somebody
because it's so in the air, we breathe now
in the culture, cultural Marxism
has become that pervasive.
It's in the media.
It's everywhere.
10 years ago we wouldn't
have had to start a duologue
with a question like,
how come you're white
and you're talking about this.
[applause]
There's a racial, yes
Jesus talks about racism
and he's against racism, but he topples it
in a way that is diametrically opposed
to the way a neo Marxists
would make race a fundamental
category of identity
and then pit everybody against each other
in a Marxist class struggle.
Jesus brings reconciliation
by transcending race,
by giving our deepest identity in Christ
so that now our race isn't erased
but actually enhances something
beautiful and cherished
in a unified community.
That's the opposite of
Marxist class struggle
and Neo Marxist's classroom.
>> I guess I would just...
I mean, if there are
people looking at someone
and only seeing their race,
I would be against that.
I don't know that I see that.
I don't know that I see
what you're describing
on this campus that if I
look at someone who's White
oh, that's a white person.
I'm not gonna listen to them.
What I see is people understanding
that if we talk about race,
it's a difficult topic
and a lot of times white
people dismiss the pain
and the experience of oppression
that people experience
and the inequalities that they experience.
And so there's a reluctance sometimes
to have those discussions
dominated by white people
and so that's something
different than saying,
I don't like white people
because they're the oppressor
and I don't want to talk to them
and I only see them because they're White.
I think it's a little bit of a caricature
of what's actually happening here.
>> Let me just push back a little bit.
What I was talking about,
the neo Marxist idea.
You asked me specifically,
what does that mean?
How do you see it here?
And my answer is when you don't see
the actual image bearer
of God in front of you
with their unique story,
their unique traumas,
their unique issues, their unique gifts,
their unique beauties, like
you begin classifying them.
The minute you do that,
you lose the actual human
being you're talking to
and you're making all
kinds of assumptions.
In other words, I liked how you said,
let's bring it back to Jesus.
Let's bring it back to Jesus.
He always deals with
people as individuals.
He's in their story.
And so take my old neighbor
who's a White dude.
If we're looking through
cultural Marxists lenses,
he's got a big house, he's
got a 2,800 square foot house,
has got a Mercedes, and
people would just look at that
and we would be trained
to think, oh, privilege.
The assumption is he's an Avatar
of an entire privileged people group.
If you talk to him, he
spent his entire childhood
hiding in the forest of the Soviet Union
because his family loved Jesus
and the government was out to kill them.
He experienced systemic
oppression from a communist
atheist government his entire
life and had to come here
and scrounge from nothing.
But there's assumptions
that are made all the time.
And that's just one final point
and I'll quit hogging the mic here.
But the categories that are given to us
that I laid out where
it's either theocracy
or racism or sexism.
These are the categories of oppression
that are all over our radar.
The problem is, I was
talking to a student today
who is deeply oppressed by
issues that I won't go into
but doesn't fit into any of those boxes.
There are people in this room
who have all different skin tones
and because we're raised
in a fallen world,
we've all experienced oppression.
If you were raised in a two-parent home,
you have an enormous privilege
over people who weren't.
If you endured abuse as a child,
you have levels of oppression
that will haunt you
for a long time and can
experience healing through Jesus.
So what I'm saying is the
neo Marxist categories
tend to be these three or four categories
and then when you tell people
an entire people group,
well therefore you don't
understand suffering.
I've talked to people across the board,
all different skin colors
because we're in a fallen world,
we all got damaged and when
we can have that conversation
versus being in the victim
Olympics we get a lot further.
>> Okay, I got to respond to that.
I'm sorry.
>> Oh yeah go respond.
>> As Dr. Christerson is
going to give his response,
please text in questions.
Feel free to go do that,
but yeah, go ahead.
>> I hope you would
agree that racism exists.
>> Thad: Absolutely, and it's horrible
and wrong and unbiblical.
>> When you say you look at a person,
when we, I guess, who are interested
in issues of social
justice, we look at people
and we only look at their skin color.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah I don't.
I don't know people that do that I guess.
That only look at people
at their skin color.
We all have multiple identities, right?
But if you're not willing
to see a person of color
say an African-American person,
as an African-American person,
you're denying their identity.
That's who they are.
That's who God made them.
[applause]
And their experiences in their culture--
>> And I would never deny that identity.
>> Well, you're talking about, well,
we got to look at people as individuals.
You can't look at their race,
you can't look at their skin color.
That's who they are and
their experiences are--
>> No, no, no, no.
>> Largely affected by this thing.
Well, that's what I heard you say.
>> I'm saying you see that person
in all their unique God
given beauty and diversity
and their skin.
Everything that God
built into that person,
you see, you appreciate
as an image bearer of God.
What I'm arguing against
is looking at the outside,
judging the book by the cover
and saying you therefore
have all the qualities
for better or worse of
this entire people group.
That's the kind of thing
where you have privilege
because of the melanin in your skin
or you have experienced
X, Y, and Z because of.
You can't let people be
avatars of their people group.
You have to love them as individuals
and all their distincts.
>> I Totally agree with that.
I totally agree with that.
Okay.
[laughs]
[applause]
But let me address one more thing.
When you talk about the victim Olympics,
that completely dismisses people
who have experienced pain and suffering.
>> That's not my intention.
>> Well when you use those terms,
that's what people here.
I'm just telling you.
>> If anybody in the room I heard that,
I apologize from the core of my being.
That's not my intention.
>> So let's pick up.
There's one of the questions here
that we've had texted in the picks up
on something closely related to the theme
you guys are talking about
and you may want to pick up.
I know there's things you'd love to say
and this may attach here too.
We've talked a little bit about
this issue of group identity
or identity politics and things like that.
Brad has earlier mentioned issues related
to systemic structures of injustice.
I think I've also heard that
it's somewhat in this vein
is the idea of generational
issues as this a person said,
what are your thoughts on
"generational repentance."
The idea that we must repent for the sins
of supposedly ancestors who may have done
racial oppressive acts
towards one another.
I've heard this stated
in a variety of ways
about it feels like our
thoughts about racism
are fundamentally backwards looking.
I want to look back at
what happened before,
I'm being called to repent,
but these aren't things that I did.
These are things different generation did.
So somewhat similar to systemic
issue we have a generation.
Why don't you talk a
little bit about that?
>> Yeah, if I could just
say that I don't hear
African-American folks
talking about slavery
and wanting to have us
apologize for slavery
but they're talking
about is the injustices
that they face right now and
they may be related to slavery
and they're related to the history,
that whole history.
They're talking about getting stopped
by the police on the way home.
And so they're talking
about being isolated
and not maybe getting
promoted at their job
because they're not in the social networks
of the people that are.
So there's all kinds of issues
and I don't know why that's a perception
that somehow we're getting
that somehow our jobs to
apologize for things we didn't do.
I believe that it's all of our jobs,
no matter what our background is,
to seek equality for people
so people can have equal opportunities
to thrive now in the here and now.
Now that's related to the
ideas that came out of slavery,
we need to talk about that, but yeah.
I don't see a backward
looking from at least
most of the people of
color that I interact with.
It's about the here and now.
>> So we've gotten a
tremendous amount of questions.
Thank you so much for doing that.
So let's popcorn these.
Let's just popcorn these
and not have both of you
respond to a question, but we'll just.
So that is here's one
that specifically to you.
How does one practically
put the Gospel first
while still acting toward
change in our society?
What does that look like?
>> That's a great question.
Let me tell you what it
looks like in my life.
I know my own tendencies
to try to justify myself.
I know that because I
still have this thing
called the Sarcs, the
sin nature, the flesh
that there's a part of me that
resists the gospel every day
and can so easily lose sight of it
and slide back into some kind of
works-based salvation system.
And so for me, putting the Gospel first
means I have to preach
it to myself every day
and when I'm driving up
the freeway to class,
what am I doing?
A lot of the time I'm
preaching the Gospel to myself
and so I'll just run through
the ABCs of the atonement.
Jesus, you're my atoner.
B, you're my battlefield hero.
C, you're my chain breaker.
D, you're my defense attorney
pleading not guilty sentence.
E, you're my eternal priests.
F, you are the forsaken son in my place.
>> Crostics gone wild.
This is crazy.
[laughs]
>> I found that when I'm
not preaching the Gospel
on the closest mission
field to me, my own heart,
then I don't preach it to anybody else.
We're all evangelists for
whatever you're enjoying.
If you discover that show on Netflix,
you got to check out Ozark or whatever.
It's amazing and you get
people turned on to shows
because you enjoy them and
when you're enjoying God,
like preaching the Gospel to yourself
and just receiving all
of that grace daily,
you're enjoying God and so you can't help
but talk to people about it.
So as the overflow of that,
as the gospel comes to transform you
and you come to see yourself
as saved by the grace of God,
it becomes really difficult to
see somebody who's oppressed,
Somebody who's suffering,
somebody who's an outsider,
somebody who's marginalized and not have
a spontaneous like magnetic pull
to show the grace of God into their life.
And if I can, I know.
>> I have one for Brad, that
I think it's just great.
Brad, how do we know when we
made another gospel or God
out of social justice?
What are the telltale signs
that maybe that's happening?
>> Well maybe you're not
talking to the God anymore
or maybe you're not communicating with Him
and reading his word and you're too busy
trying to change the systems to do that.
And maybe you're not in
a worshiping community,
maybe you're not building
the community of love
that Jesus talked about
when he talked about
the kingdom coming in.
People who worship
together serve each other,
take care of each other.
If your life becomes consumed
with the one part of the kingdom coming in
and you forget the others.
And that's true of the others too.
If you're consumed with any of them
and you forget about God
and in your personal
relationship with Him,
then yeah, I think that
sort of can block out
God in your life.
>> Let me pick up certainly
a problem that both of you
may want to respond to.
You've both talked about in different ways
the fact that you do value social justice
and concerns for these things
with the differences you mentioned.
I wonder if you could tell me
how biblical social activism
might look different than contemporary
secular social activism because I think
this is one of the concerns people have
is that there's a flavor
difference seems like.
Do you perceive that to be the case Brad
or are they really just
more or less the same thing
and likewise for Thad?
>> No, I think that
the difference would be
and some non-Christian
folks are trying this
and adopting this is
Jesus's idea of enemy love.
That your desire is not
to defeat your opponent
or the people that are opposing you
and sort of banish them or relegate them
to some inferior status.
Now your desires to be
reconciled to them ultimately
by that means confronting them
and you see that through
a whole line of believers
from the Mennonites to Tolstoy
to Gandhi actually adopted
even though he's not a Christian.
He did a great job of taking
the sermon on the mount
and applying it to social justice
and then Dr. King, Cesar Chavez.
That's a different way of doing things
when you're actually...
So I'm involved with a group of activists
that we actually feel like
we're ministering to the people
that we're challenging because basically,
we're recognizing, hey you're
in a dangerous position
before God because of
the stuff you're doing
by oppressing people.
We want to help you seek justice
and we are concerned about your soul
and we want to love you as a person
and that's a different feel
than if you don't have that.
It's more about, hey, let's
just defeat the people.
>> In that sense loving
them doesn't let them
continue to do acts of oppression.
>> Not at all.
In fact, loving them means
trying to get them in
right relationship with God
which includes how
they're treating people.
>> Treating others.
>> I agree completely and
I love that you point out
enemy love as a mark of justice
if we're doing it Jesus' way
and that's such a brilliant insight
because it really, for
me when you said that
just a light bulb went off of like, yes,
that's what a lot of the things
being called social justice
nowadays are lacking.
They're the exact opposite where you have
I was just reading Christina Fair
from Georgetown University
tweeted yesterday
that every White male should be murdered
while feminists look on laughing.
They should be castrated and
their carcasses, fed to pigs.
>> Don't read into that.
[laughs]
>> This is a tenured
professor at Georgetown
and Georgetown came out and said,
defended her right to
express her viewpoint.
Now that's the kind of
stuff or Antifa that goes up
and makes those strangers who
disagree with them politically
or movements that had and they charter,
they're defining mission,
the dismantling of the nuclear family.
There's all kinds of stuff
being called social justice.
If you read the UN Charter,
social justice is equal to
government, centrally controlled,
redistribution of wealth.
If you look in Venezuela,
what is social justice?
It equals socialism.
There's all kinds of ways that
term is being thrown around
that we need to be super careful
if we're going to retain the
term as a body of believers.
If we're defining stuff,
we're just causing all kinds
of unnecessary confusion.
And I think to Brad's
point earlier about, look,
people are calling me in all
kinds of like Marxists names
and everything and I don't
really believe any of that stuff.
I think we'd have a lot
more unity on campus
if we just took the time to say,
when I talk about social
justice, this is what I mean.
I don't mean all this stuff over here.
I think we'd realize there's a
lot more unity on this campus
than we realize right now.
>> Here's a question and let me throw it
out to you Thaddeus.
>> Can I just real quick respond to that?
>> Of course.
>> We need to be careful as Christians
that not taking the most
extreme example of something
and sort of making that
the typical position.
And so we get mad about
when people do that to us
as believers, right?
When people say, look at
those Westboro Baptist Church.
Look at those Christians.
Look how lame, look how horrible they are.
Let's not do that to our...
Let's not just look on certain websites
and get the most crazy
example and then say, yeah,
that's what social justice is.
Because the activists and the sociologists
that I hang out with wouldn't have taken
any of those position.
>> One of our core values
here at Ohio University
is that we don't want to
just keep this on campus.
We went to engage broader culture.
That's what we hope that all of us,
regardless what area we go into,
what career we're going to,
we want to be God's spokespeople.
So a person makes an interesting comment.
I just want to get your
quick take on it Thaddeus.
Would it be appropriate to the admissions
specifically focused around social justice
as the way to bring the
Gospel first to people
in both relationships?
>> Yeah, I wouldn't see
anything wrong with that.
When I went to Nepal, it's so
backwards the way we did it.
We hiked through the Himalayas
and we went trekking in a couple of days
and the mission strategy went like this.
Like we'll hire some porters
to carry everything up,
all of our junk.
They're going to carry
our giant heavy backpacks
and then as we're hiking up the mountain,
we'll talk to them about Jesus.
That's exactly backwards.
What we should have done is paid them,
carried our own stuff and
walked up the mountain
telling them about Jesus
and so there's certainly
this pattern all over getting
back to Jesus in the gospels
where he's healing physical needs.
He's valuing people that society devalues.
He's hearing the marginalized
and he's giving them a
deep sense of you're loved
by the infinite creator.
That's all part of him
getting to the good news
of his death and resurrection.
>> So one thing that concerns me
is that there seems to
be among certain pockets
this idea to get rid of
the term social justice.
I've heard, let's replace
it with Biblical justice.
Mike, I guess my concern with that
that I would like to at both respond to
is there there's good
impulses in culture today
to do the things, even
if they're borrowing
from neo Marxists roots,
there's good inclinations today.
We would say that's God's common grace
to address racism, poverty, oppression,
and for us as Christians to say, hey,
let's form loose connections with you
and tackle these things and as we do that,
we can give you a biblical motivation
for why we're doing it
and present the Gospel.
I'm afraid that if we get rid
of the term social justice,
then again and call it biblical justice,
again, it seems like we're out of step
with the rest of the world
and now we come across
ever so slightly as being
against social justice.
So how can we use the good
social justice impulses
in culture today to
actually form connections
so that we can actually do
both proclamation and social justice?
Could you see avenues we
could form partnerships
with even Georgetown,
UCLA, everybody, Berkeley?
>> Absolutely and that's
actually the one thing
we have in common with a lot of people
in our culture right now.
Is at least if we're reading the gospels,
the concern for the poor,
concern for justice,
concern to address
unequal and unjust systems
and there's a lot of people
that are concerned about that,
that think Christians are on
a completely different page
and so in the work that some
of the activist work I do,
that's where, I meet, you
know, I work at Biola,
I go to church, I don't
hardly meet any people
that are already believers,
but doing activist works,
yeah, you form bonds
with people and you go,
yeah, represent Christ in those areas.
And people realize that, oh yeah,
there's different kind
of Christians out there
because what their view
is for a lot of people,
Christians are synonymous
with the very things
that they're trying to address.
>> Tim: Trying to eliminate.
>> Can I weigh in on
that question real quick?
>> Sure, absolutely.
>> A beautiful example of that,
if we hopped into big
time machine together
and time warp back to the second century,
this massive play just
ravages the Roman empire,
wipes out by some estimates,
a third of the empire drops
dead from this plague.
Our brothers and sisters
in the second century
who realized Jesus had taken
their sin plague upon himself
because they understood the gospel.
They didn't just say, well,
let's just twiddle our thumbs
because I get to go to heaven when I die.
When they saw people plagued,
dropping dead like flies,
they ran to their bedsides
and dignified them
and took care of them and clothed them,
and more often than not got plagued too
and died right alongside of them.
Now, here's the key is it wasn't
you must first accept a
Judeo, Christian, sexual ethic
or we're not going to help you, right?
It wasn't you must first accept
a robust Christian worldview
and our definition of the
Gospel and agree with us
on social issues and politics,
or we won't help you.
They lead with love, right?
And now Rodney Stark, the great historian,
wrote The Rise of
Christianity and he says,
what was it that took
this small little band,
this motley crew?
>> He was a sociologist.
>> There you go.
[laughs]
And one of my favorites.
>> I was waiting for that.
>> Stark is my second
favorite sociologist.
[laughs]
And Stark's wrestling with this question.
How did Christianity blow up
and become this global phenomenon?
In his answer after he weighs
all the different historical possibilities
he lands on they just flat out
outloved everybody in society.
The non-Christians of the
second century thought
this life is all I got.
I die and the worms eat meat at the end.
So if a mule hops over here coughing
and I don't believe in an afterlife,
I'm running for the hills.
But if I believe Jesus took
my plague upon himself,
I'm running towards Tim in
spite of his arminianism.
[laughs]
>> I didn't say a word.
I did not say that.
>> Let it go you guys.
Let it go.
>> We got our next duologue.
>> 30 because I got to finish this.
>> Make it 15 and you got a deal.
>> Here's the punchline to it.
10 seconds.
Fast forward to the 1980s, a
mysterious plague breaks out.
People are dropping dead.
That's just proportionately
affecting the homosexual community
and everybody's freaking out.
Why are their immune system shutting down?
And my question is, where
was the church in the 1980s
and the answer is on
to make our guts twist.
The church in America in the 1980s
was right where the non church
was in the second century,
running for the hills,
away from the plague
and often turning and
shouting over our shoulders.
That's God's wrath come to get you.
And that's some of the stuff
behind the whole social
justice conversation,
there's some sorrys that needed to be said
if we're going to be
able to make progress.
>> Good, let me just--
[applause]
Well said.
Hey, let me just make a plug
for a book that has really
impacted a lot of us
and that's Rodney Stark's
book, The Rise of Christianity
is one of the most influential books
I think I've read in the last 15 years.
It's just a beautiful
book about a sociologist
asking the question,
what causes the church
to grow like it did.
From a sociological standpoint.
It's beautifully written.
It's well done.
So yeah, just a great book.
>> Kind of like the rise
of network Christianity.
>> Yes, by Brad Christerson.
Yes, The Rise of Network Christianity.
>> Let me pick up a question here
that actually has
represented several questions
I saw as I was looking through these
but kind of more attention,
more biblical issues
and clarifying some thinking about this.
Here's the question.
Weren't the Jews of Jesus' time mistaken
in thinking that the Messiah
was going to be a hero
who had freedom from Roman oppression?
If we think the Gospel
centered around social justice,
aren't we just repeating their mistake?
>> Well that's a really good question.
[laughs]
Very good question.
That was the best question so far.
Not that I'm dissing the other questions.
They're all great questions.
So this gets at a Jesus and Paul's view
of how social change happens.
It's not burned down the structures.
It's not taken over
through military force.
It's to build a community
and it's like a mustard seed.
You start small and you start
living in these communities
where you're serving the poor
and you're treating
everybody like a brother,
whether they're outcasts or
not, male, female, Greek, Jew.
And then that starts to spread.
And that starts affecting how
people in government work.
They look on that and go, wow,
that's something different.
Women well, they're actually
treating them as equals.
So they're not treating like property
and over time, over the
centuries that works its way
like leveling the dough and
that actually changes systems
and Rodney Stark's book talks about that.
So just because we're not raising an army
and overthrowing the government,
overthrowing capitalism,
does it mean we're not
doing structural work.
It's just bottom up, it takes a long time
and it starts small.
It starts in these small
loving Christian community.
>> So in that sense of
prime mistake they had
wasn't so much that the
Romans might be displaced,
that they would be
displaced by military action
or direct force being applied.
>> By violence, yeah.
>> Did you have another question?
>> I didn't, go ahead.
>> So one of the other things
that we have talked about
before, maybe yeah.
In fact, as I look at that, let me think.
Okay.
Let me just ask you
guys, I'll give you each
a shot to answer this question.
Is there something, Brad, that
you would just feel better
if Thad would say the
following about these things.
[laughs]
Are there things that I
just wish he would say
or perhaps the opposite.
I wish you'd stop saying,
but whatever would be.
What might you want to say on that?
>> Well, if I could wish
for Thad to say anything,
it would be that reforming
unjust social systems
is part of our role as the body of Christ.
>> And what would you say to that Thad?
>> I'd say Amen.
>> Why do we even have this conversation?
[laughs]
>> Alright, good night everybody.
Thank you.
>> But I'd say amen with a caveat.
>> You're done, you're already done.
>> My 32nd caveat.
>> 32nd or last caveat?
>> Which systems and are we going about it
loving God with our minds and
loving the poor and oppressed
by loving God with our
minds by being very clear
about what the actual facts at hand are.
My church did this thing
called shoeless Sunday
where we'd all show up in new shoes
and then we'd all leave in our socks
and they pack up in a big crate,
all of these brand new shoes
and ship them off to Nigeria
until we found out what
was actually happening.
This crate comes
parachuting into a village
and you just instantly
put all the shoemakers
in 100 mile radius out of business
and set them economically back 10 years
and so we had to realize
just because we're trying
to fix a broken system,
doesn't mean we're fixing the system
unless we're being really smart
and using our God given minds
to get at the actual roots of injustice.
>> Great.
Thad are there things that
you might look at Brad
and say, Brad, I'd feel just
a little more comfortable
if you'd say or stop saying?
>> Oh man.
>> Marx was wrong.
[laughs]
I'm just playing.
What I would love to hear Brad say is that
the good news is that we're
saved by God's grace alone,
through faith, alone in Christ
alone, for God's glory alone
and the way Luther famously put it,
you're saved by faith alone,
but saving faith is never alone.
Meaning you're saved by
trusting Jesus alone.
But if it's a real saving faith,
it will be followed through with action
on behalf of the poor and needy.
That's the distinction
I'm not hearing said
that what saves as the faith alone,
but the effect of that is the action.
>> I would wholeheartedly
say what Luther just said.
We're saved by grace
alone, by blood of Christ.
But.
>> Caveat.
>> You have a caveat now?
>> 30 seconds or less go for it man.
>> The caveat is just Luther
is that when you are saved,
the outflowing of that is work for justice
for the poor and the oppressed.
>> Let me just...
>> We`re all Lutheran.
[laughs]
>> Let me just say a bunch of questions
had to do with the fact that a desire
for wishing that the
panel was more diverse.
Hear us when we say that we recognize that
and instead of postponing
this conversation
until we can cultivate.
It is hard to find, to be honest
faculty who are willing to do
what these two participants did,
which is to risk talking
about a very sensitive issue.
And so we recognize the diversity issue.
We're not unaware of that,
but rather than postpone the endeavor
to talk about the issue, we just felt like
let's get the conversation going now
and we can make change.
We plan on doing this every semester.
The president initiated this a year ago.
He just felt like let's
have these conversations
and even model how Christians
can have conversations,
be convicted and yet
disagree with each other.
So let's give our participants
are round of applause.
[applause]
>> I'm sorry I jumped the gun.
My bad.
>> We are ramping up on this book.
Let me just pick up on that theme.
One of the other things we're saying
is the only thing we're
doing is not duologue.
So one of the important
things for us as faculty
that we're having these conversations,
we do some of these things in the context
we call table talk and
so our next table talk
will be end of October and
it will be a batch of people
have been burned with
social justice reading group
who'll be in effect
facilitating that conversation
which includes people of
various ethnicities and genders
and all starts to me is a much
broader, more diverse group.
We have had the previous table,
a previous duologue we
had included Joy Qualls.
You'll be meeting in just a second again.
So let me encourage you to remember
that this isn't the be all and end all
of this whole conversation
just as Tim mentioned
and we understand there's a whole lot more
that needs to be said,
but it is always a problem
when you say because
we can't do everything,
we won't do anything.
And so we'd like to do something
and that's I think what we've taken
the opportunity here at night.
And I am really grateful
for you guys coming out
and I'll see you guys being here.
So I'll just turn it over to Joy.
Did you want to introduce Joy?
>> Well I'd love to introduce my chair.
So the very first one
we did was last year.
Again, politics was a huge issue.
It was a real risk to
get two faculty members
to get up and talk about
their views of politics
and how it interacted with faith
and so we were absolutely
thrilled with our participants
and Dr. Joy Qualls is the chair
of the communication department.
Did a phenomenal job.
We wanted her to come up, add
a just couple quick comments
about the importance of communication.
Then close with some prayer.
So Dr. Qual.
[applause]
>> Thank you gentlemen for wow,
that's really loud in
here all of a sudden.
Thank you so much for doing this tonight.
One of the things that we talk about
in the communication studies department
is that words don't mean people mean
and that meaning comes from the things
that are inside of us, out of
the heart, the mouth speaks
and I think you got to hear the hearts
of some people who really
care about these subjects.
The other thing I want to mention is that
not only are these events
not isolated incidents
and there's other things
happening on campus,
but there are places where
these things are being taught
on our campus and the
communication studies department
just happens to be one of them
and there are many places that we partner
with other departments in the
way that they're doing this.
And so this is something you can study.
This is something that you
can make a career out of.
And I think that the culture
that we're living in,
the whole time we were talking about this
and the subject of culture
kept coming back up.
I was trained back to
that verse in Romans 8:19
that said, the earth is literally groaning
for the sons and daughters
of God to reveal themselves.
And our world is groaning for
the sons and daughters of God
to reveal themselves.
And if we don't get this right,
we will stand before
God and be accountable
for this moment that we're living in.
And so I encourage you
to study these things.
I encourage you to seek
out not only the faculty
that are up here, but the departments
where these things are being done
because we have a job before us.
A calling, a holy calling,
and if we don't step up,
the rocks themselves will cry out
and I would rather be the one
kneeling at the throne of God
than the rocks outside.
[light music]
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