Piper, "Final Salvation" and Reformed Baptists

Sometimes blogging is idyllic, like drifting down a river on a raft, and sometimes it’s consuming, like the burden of prophecy that the Old Testament saints were forced to carry (Amos 3:8), and woe to me, Piper’s latest comments about the necessity of good works in salvation has taken me out of the former state of mind and put me into the latter. Fortunately my task is made easier by the fact that there’s already been a great deal said about the topic, (much of it written by Brad Mason), but seeing as there still seems to be something missing, I intend to supply the deficiency in this post.

In saying that however I want to make it clear that I have no interest echoing what some others have said when they’ve gone on record with, “Piper is saying things which aren’t Reformed!” because Piper isn’t Reformed. He holds to no confession and therefore it shouldn’t surprise us when he says something Roman Catholic like 'we're saved by final justification.' So I won’t say that. Instead, my point comes from the alarmingly stout defense I’ve been seeing the Reformed Baptists putting up on behalf of the following statement:

But what about being saved by faith alone? You’re not. You’re justified through faith alone. Final salvation comes through justification and salvation – both initiated and sustained by God’s grace.

When I asked my Reformed Baptist friends what final salvation meant they told me that because union with Christ brings with it every saving blessing (including final perseverance), there’s a difference between salvation which is begun by monergistic regeneration and a salvation involving personal effort. Hence the distinction between initial and final salvation.

Now I may not have the sharpest intellect, out there but that hasn’t stopped me from figuring out over the course of my life that certain follow-on words can, by their proximity to the initial words, cancel out their meaning entirely. If you apologize to your spouse and use the word but then the apology no longer counts—everything before the but gets erased. “I’m sorry, but this is your fault” is equivalent to “this is your fault” not “I’m sorry.” The Scriptures even use this principle to glorious effect when they say things like “With man it is impossible to be saved” or “you were dead in your sins and trespasses,” and then turn around and negate the whole thing with a “but God.”

Salvation operates on that same cancellation principle. If you believe you’re saved by the work of Christ alone plus anything else then you’re no longer saved by Christ alone. If you believe in worshiping Jesus plus Baal then eventually Elijah is going to show up on Mt. Carmel and rebuke you for not worshiping Jesus at all. The Apostle Paul once viewed salvation as God’s work plus his own work, but after coming face to face with the living God he realized that those things of his didn’t add to the sum total, they subtracted from it. Whatever he thought was credit he found to be debit. We can’t be saved by faith plus works because works is a negative quantity, and whenever you add it to faith the result is something less than faith. The only way to make the equation balance is to reduce the human works to zero. Mix chocolate ice cream with dog poop and you get something less than chocolate ice cream. Grace plus works is simply works sans grace.

You can see where this is going. Adding the phrase final salvation to the equation doesn’t actually add anything to salvation, it only cancels out initial part of it—and this by definition. Because either initial salvation was the real, indestructible, once-for-all eternal life Jesus promised or it wasn’t. Either we really have passed from death to life when God declared us to be righteous now and forever or we didn’t receive the declaration and the jury is still out. To take a human example, either your marriage vows made at the altar were valid or they weren’t. Either you’re pregnant or you’re not. If you defend the idea of a final salvation then you have necessarily abandoned the idea of an initial salvation altogether. Only one of those words can be attached to salvation and you have to decide which one it is.

Therefore the Desiring God press release is inane on the face of it. It's not merely unhelpful, it's incoherent.

Now having said that I do praise Piper for making it clear just how offensive and stupid the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone really is. Putting it this way really does help to show that the thing is frankly ludicrous. Or perhaps the correct word is ridiculous in that it’s worthy of ridicule. It’s clearly a doctrine for children and the incompetent, for helpless beggars who can’t seem to manage the first tenant of holiness for themselves.
“You mean to tell me I’m given eternal life as soon as I believe, and will pass from condemnation into son-ship with only a hearty trust in God?”
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. As it is written, “Then said they unto Him, ‘what shall we do, that we might work the works of God?’ Jesus answered and said unto them, ‘This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom he hath sent.’” (John 6:28-29) and “the just shall live by faith.” (Incidentally that one got said four times in Scripture, and I’m big believer that if God said it even once we should be paying attention, if He said it four times then there’s no excuse for not believing it.)
Salvation is by faith alone because only by faith alone can the wretched, helpless tax collector who has nothing to offer be saved. That man goes down to his house justified, and as the Scripture says, justified means “peace with God” (Rom 5:1), not "potential peace."
“Well I don’t like that,” says the Pharisee. “I like the idea of a final salvation better than an initial one. I think the idea of initial salvation is stupid given that if we don’t kill our sin we won’t get into heaven.”
Yes, justification by faith alone is a stupid doctrine. It’s exactly as humiliating and stupid as the idea of the perfect God coming to trade places with sinful man. But beyond that, “by grace” necessarily means that the laborers who worked the heat of the day will grumble and complain about how unfair it is that everyone gets the same wages.

Post Script: I considered myself a Reformed Baptist (LBCF 1689) for about a decade and loved the label before converting to simply Reformed, but now I’m thinking it’s better to just say Baptist and leave it at that. Unless by final salvation they mean glorification, they've drifted way, way off course from both their own confession and the Reformation itself. But if they did mean that, it would be prudent to simply stick with the old word, since like wine, the old is better.

[Update 10-19-2017 - I've been told by a few people that it's unclear of which LBCF baptists I'm speaking of in this post, and that it's unfair to paint with too broad a brush. Very true. Suffice it to say I was speaking of my Reformed Baptist friends whom I know personally, who live in this area with me, and whom I've talked to about this, and was not speaking about every Reformed Baptist generally. If you're reading this and you stand by your confession (and takes seriously its implications) then you should know all this wasn't about or against you.

And while I'm being open minded and charitable, you should also probably be aware that the Reformed Baptist community where I live feels a debt of gratitude to Piper for converting a number of Russian Christians to the doctrines of grace thanks to a big conference he did here a number of years back. The impact of his winsome sermons have had a number of positive benefits, which the region is still feeling, and it's likely made the community here want to defend Piper more here than in, say, Utica. Saul was loved by the men of Gibeah and they judged him less for the great good he did them.]

Grace as the One Ring

The story of Absalom, Tamar, and Amnon as recorded in 2 Samuel 13 is one of the saddest, lowest points in the Bible—and that’s saying something. It records how the crown prince executes a premeditated plot to rape his half-sister (and because we hate those we are cruel to, because we find it easier to falsely blame others than admit we're evil) Amnon afterwards scorns her.

King David is furious at hearing this (2 Samuel 13:21), but rather than obey the law and banish Amnon as written in Lev 20:17, he instead chooses to sit back and do absolutely nothing at all. Why? Because there were no witnesses and every crime must be settled by a corroboration of the truth rather than a single source? Unlikely, the royal investigation uncovered Jonadab’s involvement at a minimum, and Tamar would easily have been able to provide the necessary circumstantial evidence to settle the matter. I think it’s more likely that David did nothing because he was too ashamed from his recent affair with Uriah’s wife to come down hard on his wayward son. He himself had been shown grace after committing adultery with Bathsheeba, so who was he to pronounce a harsh sentence upon a lesser crime? Thus, instead of being obedient to the law, David gives grace. But God is not mocked, and Deut 27:22 pronounced a curse upon Amnon for his behavior which eventually resulted in his brother Absalom killing him, despite David's grace.

If this was indeed the motivation for David’s behavior (and it seems likely it was) then the lesson is that grace is not to be used by man. That’s a tough thing to come to grips with, and yet, as C.S. Lewis has observed before, this is also the kind of thing that is too hot to hold and yet not too hot to drink. In this way it is similar to God’s sovereignty, or human depravity. In the abstract these doctrines are cruel and painful, and we by nature recoil from them, but when they're accepted and internalized they liberate us with the glorious freedom of God’s God-ness, and we'll defend them ferociously as bedrock truth.

On the surface the idea that grace isn't ours to disperse sounds not only wrong but completely unbiblical. As it is written, "love keeps no records of wrongs" and "blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy." But after some consideration it becomes evident there is no contradiction between God's command to show grace and the warning about doing it on your own terms. Those verses come after 2 Samuel, which means we ought to first learn the horrible lesson that even showing something as maximally wonderful as grace to our own flesh and blood can condemn them to eternal perdition when it is done in opposition to Scripture.

We have to accept the truth that the requirements for dispensing grace are higher than any man has any access to, for man is but a creature, and a fallen one at that. When God gave grace to David it resulted in his repentance because God is all wise, and knows the ends from the beginning. But because David isn’t omniscient the grace shown to Amnon only sped him on towards his inevitable destruction. Grace didn’t cure the sin, it only fed it and caused it to metastasize until the sin was fully grown, at which point it brought forth death. The problem is that men are so thoroughly ruined and infected by sin that nothing they touch is immune from corruption—nothing. Not even something so lofty and pure as forgiveness can escape the misery brought on by our sinfulness, for in our hands even God’s means of our salvation becomes lethal. In this grace may be likened to the Ring of Power from the Lord of the Rings which was beyond the power of man to control. Recall the scene at the council of Elrond when Aragorn’s explains why they can’t just put on the ring and destroy Sauron with it: “You cannot wield it! None of us can!”
Or if you would prefer a less fictitious comparison, grace is as out of reach for us to do good with as is communism, or legalized theft.

Grace belongs to God, and to God alone. We are not strong enough, or wise enough, or smart enough, or moral enough to use it properly. If we try we will instead only bring down devastation. We are weak, our appetites are fallen, and we are infested with sin, making us as not to be trusted with such a royal tool as greedy Isildur himself was with the ring. (Perhaps this is why Jesus did not entrust Himself to us, knowing what is in the heart of a man, John 2:24). If this is still too difficult to accept then consider that it's the same lesson as why we are not permitted to make life or death decisions on our own; why we’re not allowed to commit suicide, for example.

Take as an example King Saul, who when he realized the Philistines were about to capture and humiliate him, chose instead to fall on his sword and take his own life rather than be paraded about as a captive while the uncircumcised crowed their victory over him. Saul’s fear of pain drives him to do an irreversibly foolish thing, and so he dies a lost man. But what if God wanted Saul to be captured and humiliated? What if living in a cage and being poked at was the one thing that would drive him to repentance like it did the wicked king Manasseh many years later? What if by killing himself to avoid an imagined pain Saul deprived himself of reconciliation with the One True God? Instead of having courage Saul swallowed the lie that he had the authority to make life and death decisions over himself, and played at being God to his destruction. We must therefore learn from Saul that God puts boundaries on things not because He hates us, but because He knows what’s best for us. Just as parents don't ask their crawling babies to attend to the fire heating the house, or recommend they use a chainsaw to cut down a tree, God doesn't want us to get in over our heads by using His tools. He is God; we are not.

The lesson then is that it is our duty to trust God and obey the law, and it’s His job to be God. God has not given us sufficient light to see further than His commandments, and it is only the law which acts as a light to our feet and a guide to our path, so it is only by the light of the law that we must live. When God says to give grace, we must give grace. When He says to discipline, we must discipline. Where the law directs us, we must go. When the laws says to do, we must do. And then, once we’ve learned obedience in all things, we will not have a problem loving our brother or showing mercy as instructed. We will play the notes as they are written down for us and not insist that with the improvisation of a sledgehammer to the keys we can improve the score.

In light of the loving instructions showered down upon us for our good we must learn the lesson of Saul and David and lay down the notion that we are like God, able to fathom His ways. We ought to instead accept the daily provision He has set out for us and be grateful that His eye is on us for our good. As the preacher has taught us: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” Ecc 12:13

Social Justice Index

In September 2018 John MacArthur began a series of blog posts and sermons on how the modern social justice movement is nothing but historic liberalism. See his work here, here, here, here, and here.

In response our beloved blog site With Heart And Mouth split and collapsed.

I wrote a piece offering some initial thoughts and shelved the topic for awhile. And then after some careful consideration and a large break I decided to examine more closely the claim that social justice is liberalism. I disagree with John on a number of key points, and he tends to compress issues somewhat unfairly. But he's our modern day Spurgeon, and his point deserved due regard. 

My thinking through the issue here.

A follow on post

Screwtape I
Screwtape II
Screwtape III
Screwtape IV
Screwtape V
Screwtape VI

Concluding thoughts

Social Justice & Screwtape VI

My Dear Wormwood.

Based on the information in your last report (which I cross checked thoroughly) I have put you in for a commendation with the Lowerarchs. Globhiss let your patient become a formidable Christian in one of the most noxious and fearsome Churches we know of, then foolishly allowed him to catechize his children in the true knowledge of the Enemy. Small wonder we sent Globhiss to the House of Corrections and reassigned the patient to you. 

Lesser tempters would have complained that taking over in such a situation was unfair, but through the focused, sleepless application of force and careful obedience to your betters you have brought him back to us. Your patient now constantly insinuates that the genuine Christians around him are racists. His wife is estranged from him while yet living with him, his children despise what he has become, and he sees none of it, instead believing he is suffering for the sake of the Enemy’s Kingdom. I can see his end now, standing before his judge, outraged. “Did I not do many wonderful things in your name!? Did I not write many articles? Was I not entirely devoted to your cause?” The Enemy will say, “Depart from me, I never knew you” and will hand him over to us. He will observe how his hard work won him hell, he will realize what we’ve done to him, and then we will feast on him.

There is yet much to be done, to be sure. We must get him out of that church still, for it is an ever present danger to us. But insofar as it is possible, you have immunized him to it, as we immunized the Babylonian Exiles to the preaching of Ezekiel. He believes that our social fashions are imperatives that confer moral progress. He smiles at fellow church goers in person and denounces them as villains online. He follows our fads built on anti-Christian premises zealously. He is continually goaded into saying ever increasingly foolish things by extremists, but retains enough intelligence to create ambiguity and plausible deniability by them. We very nearly annihilated his own denomination with liberalism years ago and yet he is blind to what we do to it today. Oh it is a marvelous thing you’ve done to him Wormwood, be proud of yourself.

Do not be surprised if you are reassigned shortly. A future repentance may yet mar all, but the ever growing size required of it and the unconscious bias against it he’s built up makes repentance increasingly unlikely. Your patient can be managed by another tempter now Wormwood, you are too valuable to waste on him further.

Your Affectionate and Increasingly Proud Uncle,

Screwtape

Social Justice & Screwtape V

My Dear Wormwood.

In your last letter you speak of nothing but enjoying the fruits of your work. Fool! Do not let your guard down yet! How many souls have slipped through the fingers of young tempters because they had not kept their head after an initial promising success? Have you already forgotten your training on human pleasure and pain at the college? You must see to it he experiences neither.

In the first place we don’t want the vermin to be happy, as this is what the Enemy desires. He has a bourgeois mind Wormwood, He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working, Everything has to be twisted before it's any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.

In the second place suffering has a way of bringing clarity to a human mind, which means under no circumstances are you to let your patient experience real suffering. The safest road to our father’s house is the one without milestones or markers, the gradual, broad road of assurance—and there is no greater alarm bell than suffering. If your patient believes he is struggling on behalf of those who are oppressed by society and sharing their burden, while at the same time living a life of indulgence and sloth, then he will count his false suffering as genuine and you will win your man. If at any point however he has to endure real suffering that cannot be cured with medicine he may repent and we will lose him.

Neither pain nor pleasure Wormwood. It is difficult, but thanks to decades of materialism we have taught the humans who have never suffered to fear suffering as the greatest evil, and at the same time ignore others who are very near to them and suffering deeply, so it is possible. And when combined with the fashion of intersectionality we can induce immorality unimagined 80 years ago. We make parents sacrifice to give their children luxury and privilege, then make the children viciously denounce them to the watching world since growing up without privilege gives them credibility and popularity. Thus they betray the love and devotion of their family for strangers, while still taking their parents money and affection for granted. And why does this work? Because the pleasure of having affirmation online is no real pleasure at all, and the pain of betraying parents is muted by the child not having to pay the price of alienation.

Do you see how this works? Your patients pleasure should come from performing the habits we’ve trained into him—since that gives no real pleasure at all—and his pain should come from his imagined suffering he identifies with. Every moment you keep that up is a moment he grows closer to us without realizing it.

Your Affectionate Uncle,

Screwtape

Next: Part VI

Social Justice & Screwtape IV

My Dear Wormwood.

So, a great number of your patient’s online friends has abandoned him because he has become intolerable to them have they? Excellent. Encourage him to believe they have left because he is righteous and they are wicked, rather than because he often behaves in a way the Enemy disapproves of—this is your chance to make him upset at the indifference and hard heartedness of his fellow Christians. But take care not to let him get angry or bitter at himself, for he must be angry against society on behalf of those who have no voice. He must conceive of himself as both a noble advocate and a selfless guardian, without which the helpless will suffer.

This calls for a deft touch Wormwood. Normally men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury, or by feeling that a legitimate claim had been denied to them. The more claims on life, therefore, they could be induced to make, the more often they would feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. But though our efforts we have now produced a class of men who are perpetually aggravated on behalf of those who are not outraged in the least. The poorest member of your patient’s society possess comfort and wealth unimagined by earlier generations, (as does your patient) and yet he is more agitated and miserable than ever.

Because we have made anger fashionable your patient will of his own volition announce his anger to appear virtuous to his remaining friends, and I cannot overstate what a useful behavior this is for us. Fashions distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere "understanding". Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritansm; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make freedom the prime bogey. In your case your patient must fear the apathy of his age. He must blame poverty for its immorality and regard hard work and tenacity as its chief virtues.

Do your best to conform your patient’s thinking to the fashionable outrage of the age Wormwood. It is one of our most useful tools.

Your affectionate Uncle,

Screwtape

Next: Part V

Social Justice & Screwtape III

My Dear Wormwood.

You complained in your last letter that I have oversimplified the process by which your man can be made to create a counterfeit Jesus. Your training at the academy must have been deficient if you believe that. Lowerarchs than you and I have already laid the ground work, all we must do is finish what they have started.

Understand that the Enemy loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions: “Is it righteous? Is it prudent? Is it possible?” Now if we can instead keep men asking, "Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive? Is this the way that History is going?" then they will quickly neglect the Enemy’s plan for themselves. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke. This will throw them into chaos, and while their minds are buzzing with fear we can produce behavior in our favor. In your case, stridency, anger, and snark are the best course of action while online.

Later, when his conscience awakens (and it will awaken Wormwood, the Enemy will see to it) you must work hard to soothe it. Assure your patient that he has done what is right, and that you are pleased with Him for his faithfulness. Because he does not believe in us he will instead believe that voice belongs to the Enemy, and thus the behavior will be repeated. And that’s it Wormwood, that’s all you must do to win your man. Do this and you will strengthen the cultural Jesus he already believes in, reducing the actual one to irrelevancy. The weeds have already been sown Wormwood, your job is to provide them the space for to grow by validating him.

And now I trust you see the genius in our work. In the last generation we broadly promoted the construction of a liberal and humanitarian Jesus to the exclusion of His wrath; today your man has been preconditioned to believe in a cultural Jesus who approves of strict judgment, powerful exclusivity, and pure holiness for true believers. The advantages of these constructions, which we change every thirty years or so, are manifold.
In the first place they all tend to direct men's devotion to something which does not exist, for each cultural Jesus is absurdly unhistorical. The Scriptures say what they say and cannot be added to; therefore each new cultural Jesus has to be gotten by suppressing His characteristics at one point and exaggerating at another.
In the second place, all such constructions place the importance of their cultural Jesus in some peculiar theory He is supposed to have promulgated. He has to be a "great man" in the modern sense of the word—one standing at the terminus of some centrifugal and unbalanced line of thought (such as racial reconciliation)—and without their realization he becomes a crank vending a panacea. We thus distract men's minds from Who He is, and what He did.
Our third aim is, by these constructions, to destroy the devotional life. For the real presence of the Enemy, otherwise experienced by men in prayer and sacrament, we substitute a merely probable, remote, shadowy, and uncouth figure, one who spoke a strange language and died a long time ago. Such an object cannot in fact be worshipped, and instead produces the best kind of idolatry. Instead of the Creator adored by its creature, you soon have merely a leader acclaimed by a partisan, and finally a distinguished character approved by a judicious historian.
And lastly, we make men reduce the Enemy as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything. In your case, as a means to a better society. The thing to do is to get your man at first to value Social Justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce a desirable result, never realizing the Enemy he adores is a figment of his own imagination.

Reduce the Enemy as a means to and end and you’ve earned your man, and I assure you it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. You see the little rift? "Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason." That's the game.

Your Affectionate Uncle,

Screwtape

Next: Part IV

Social Justice & Screwtape II

My Dear Wormwood.

Now that you’ve decided on Social Justice as the course for your man the task is straightforward. Let him begin by treating Social Justice as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the cause, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favor of the Cause. Once you have made the Cause an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what else he’s involved in. Provided that meetings, blogs, policies, movements, causes, and articles matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more "religious" (on those terms) he becomes the more secure he is. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.

Stoke the fire of this as often as you can. We want to keep all Christians in a state of mind I call Christianity And. You know—Christianity and Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Racial Reconciliation. Substitute for the faith itself some fashion with a Christian coloring. This has the happy effect of quietly corrupting your man while removing the Enemy from His own religion. You may wonder if this is possible since His very name is on the title, but it is Wormwood, it is! Once you create a Jesus who approves of your man’s Cause his fleshly desires (and not the Enemy’s instructions) those desires become supreme. Encourage him to clear away the accretions and perversions of the historic faith and draw near to the Jesus he imagines. This should not be difficult since it’s the historic faith which is racist and at fault, after all.

This new Jesus has the ill effect of feeding his vanity in every circumstance. He can be taught to enjoy praying beside the orthodox on Sunday as he remembers that the conservative could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited yesterday; and contrariwise, he can be taught to enjoy the sharp and cruel statements with his sophisticated friends all the more because he visits a world to which they cannot travel. You see the idea—the liberal friends touch him on one side and the conservative on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of shame, a continual undercurrent of self-satisfaction.

A little time spent signaling his identity to each group and it won’t be long until the man cannot bring himself to say anything which is not calculated to mock, grieve, puzzle, or humiliate the group he is not with. He will then cease to regard either group as a possible source of knowledge as the very idea of having modify his innermost thoughts or behavior is rejected as unutterably foolish. Further along he will cease to believe altogether, even as he confesses it with his mouth.

Your Affectionate Uncle,

Screwtape

Next: Part III

Social Justice & Screwtape I

My Dear Wormwood.

I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he spends a good deal of his time on twitter arguing with strangers. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier when humans knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.

But no more. What the immediacy of the internet and other such weapons we have largely done away with the idea of argument as inquiry and replaced it with argument as cheerleading. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to disregard actual reasoning in favor of emotions to be praised by others. He doesn't think of Christian doctrines as primarily true or false, but as academic or practical, outworn or contemporary, progress or regress. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him cowed. Make him think Social Justice is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

Remember too that your man does not need to be a slave to the twitter platform—it is only the exclusivity which twitter provides that matters. Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tends to develop inside itself a greenhouse of mutual admiration, and towards the outer world, a great deal of pride and hatred which is entertained without shame because the cause is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal. The longer your man fights for the cause against the world the more extremist he will become.

And once he becomes a fanatic you will find him very willing to antagonize and look down on those who don’t share his views. He will quite naturally view them as hidebound and reactionary, and will view himself as virtuous. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know on the internet who share his views. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. He will demand apologies on behalf of Native Americans who don’t care that a sports team is named after them; he will gladly agitate for reparations as a white bystander. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don't, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real center, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father's house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there.

Your Affectionate Uncle,

Screwtape

Next: Part II

5 Point Social Justice Warrior (Continued)

The Mistake of the Mega Church

I spent almost a decade in a mega church (and left when it joined the Willow Creek association because that’s a bridge too far) and it was very good to me and mine. But there was always something that bothered me in the back of my mind that I couldn’t put my finger on. The music was good, the child programs were awesome, the ministers were great, the preaching was encouraging, and they never said anything I disagreed with—even when Pastor Derek was on rotation. The church was in the business of helping people get their finances in order, the local college students brought into community, the children taught their AWANA verses, and was especially in the business of worshipping loudly and warmly on Sunday morning. So what was I so uneasy about? It took me the better part of a decade to realize it wasn’t anything they were saying, it was what they weren’t saying. They weren’t preaching Christ and Him crucified. Oh they’d talk about the Scriptures sure, but they didn’t delve deeply into them. They didn’t totally submit to them, but instead pulled one or two verses out of context and talked about them on a Sunday. I learned after a long time that often it’s not what is being said that’s the problem, it’s what’s not being said. 

There’s No Christ There

This is the main problem I’ve seen with the Social Justice Warrior crowd: they never seem to be talking about Christ. I can’t recall a time I’ve heard them explain the need for Christ’s resurrection, or magnify His forgiving graces, and consequently it seems to me as though Christ is afterthought to their paradigm. Not that there’s no Bible mind you—there’s usually a quote from Amos about our need to do justice, or the command from Micah to walk humbly—but more often I see how anger and intolerance is a useful tool for societal reconstruction. The old timey talk of bleeding sacrifices and miserable sinners going on to heaven because their sins against a Holy God have been paid for is conspicuously absent, and that bothers me tremendously.

Now I recognize that this is an argument from silence, and that arguments from silence are rather weak things. But I stand by this as the most important critique that I can offer, and I believe this is the reason MacArthur may be right about the charge of liberalism. Liberalism turns you away from Christ by pressing the immediacy of the here-and-now over the there-and-then, and the SJW agenda turns your eyes toward the current problems and not the once-for-all solution of your misery offered by Christ. I don’t learn from the SJW that I have personally offended a holy God, that He sent His only son to bear the wrath due me, and that if I believe in Him I will be saved. And because I don’t hear that I suspect this is plain old liberalism. 

A Point of Clarification

Don’t hear me saying something I’m not. I’m not saying that everyone in the SJW movement has no faith or that the movement itself is nothing more than a wild herd of godless heathen rampaging across an otherwise acceptable society. Not a bit. I’m wise enough to know that personal preference is not the same thing as salvation, and that God is a very big God. A man may be an odious SJW who cruelly lashes out at people sympathetic to him may still be more securely saved than I. People in the Roman Catholic church can be saved, as can the people in the Churches of Christ, or the godless liberal mega churches, because faith like a mustard seed is all it takes, and a small faith is not the same as no faith.

Secondly, I’m not saying that the issues raised by the SJW crowd are not Biblical issues. Justice is absolutely a Biblical issue, and Christian’s who won’t practice it are in trouble with their God. As it is written, “If a man say, “I love God,” and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.” (1 John 4:20-21). Building a more just society is a worthy goal, and those who through patient endurance bring it to pass are doing what is commendable. 

A Restatement

What I am saying is that the SJW movement has displaced Christ as the top priority in daily living. True Christianity first magnifies Christ, then builds its society. First we internalize the indicative then we obey the imperative. Social justice is at the periphery, not the center, of the Christian message. It’s not what Peter announced at the day of Pentecost. It’s not what Philip said to the Ethiopian official, nor what Paul said to the Philippian jailor. If we put something that belongs downstream from the cross in place of the fountainhead (the cross itself) then we will inevitably wind up with a Christless Christianity (read: liberalism).

What I’m saying is that the social justice movement looks like the modern American megachurch that has good commendable goals and completely ignores the beating heart of Christianity. Social Justice, like the megachurch has largely compromised with the world to win people, and like liberalism in every age is now finding out that Satan never keeps his end of the bargain. Before we do anything else we need to own the fact that Christianity is a stupid, foolish religion that says the almighty omnipotent God sent His Son to die for sinners because there was no way for them to earn God’s favor otherwise. It has a limited appeal and we need to accept that and own it. We need to keep our eyes on Christ first, last, and always if we’re going to make it out of here alive. 

What I'm saying is that I'm barely hanging on here, and need to be filled moment to moment with the truth of who Christ is and what He's done or I will be lost. I'm a leaky bucket. Insofar as I'm full of Christ I can do the things that justice requires of me toward society, but take Him away and I can do nothing but become furious that I haven't gotten my way.

Now, as I was thinking about how the social justice movement tends to push Christ to the periphery I remembered C.S. Lewis writing something about this in The Screwtape Letters. As it turns out, he wrote a lot about it, indeed it composes nearly the whole book. So I’ve taken the best quotes, dialed them in, and used them as the source for the next few posts. It says what I’ve said, but because it's Lewis it makes a great deal more sense.        

Next: Screwtape Letters On Social Justice Part 1

5 Point Social Justice Warrior

Some Up-Front, Honest Caveats

It is hard for me to write on social justice, mostly because I’m not a good writer. I’m slow, I sit at the screen staring at nothing for far too long, and I am not a wordsmith either by vocation or inclination. Strike one. I also use my blog as a scratch-pad to develop my ideas (and clarify my thinking), and as a result good writing is nothing more than an accidental byproduct of my panning for gold—strike two.
Strike three is that I’m getting wiser as I age, and wise people don’t feel the need to say everything they think. The more I observe the damaging second order effects from bad decisions the more I want to make no remark at all, which itself may be a bad decision. I was maximally impulsive as a Pelagian, attempted restraint as a Baptist, and am now among theological heavyweights that cause me to think I’d better not say anything at all so people don’t realize I’m out of my depth on pretty much everything.

Additionally, with each theological improvement I have undergone a change in values and thinking that has upgraded my ability to handle complex ideas and ability to draw Scriptural conclusions. When you’re in the small walled garden of Pelagianism the truth can be small and therefore comfortable, and so long as everyone else says the same things life is pleasant. But what I once thought was error (such as infant baptism) I have now come to see simply as my own childishness, and the things I once ridiculed I now value. Own a mistake or two and pretty soon you're leery of making a definitive value judgment that will later turn out to be wrong.

So for these reasons I’ve wanted to ignore the issue and pretend it’s a debate that’s not happening. On the other hand men I respect say this is a gospel issue, and more than anything I want to be faithful to Christ. That means it’s time to roll up my sleeves and deal with this nagging sense of unease the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) ideas makes me feel. Is it Biblical or am I merely a child in this arena? If it is Biblical, then how Biblical? That’s what I’m going to work out, and the place where I’m going to start is the claim that social justice is a re-tread of Liberalism. 

A Very Brief History of Theological Liberalism

In the early 1900s—for whatever reason—it was decided that miracles were stupid and nobody should believe in them (and no, don’t take that at face value, I actually do understand the Transcendentalism movement giving way to the Romantic notion of man as the rational creature etc. etc, I just don’t think the elimination of Christianity necessarily follows). Europeans decided in large numbers that supernaturalism was an evangelical hindrance that needed to be discarded rather than an essential component of the faith to be defended, and in response God sent a World War on them. Their tinkering hadn’t added sophistication to the Scriptures, it removed the heart out of it, for rather than create something that could win people to Christ the liberals had simply poured strychnine into the medicine and salted the ground. Their God was now a God without wrath, bringing men without sin, into a kingdom without judgment, by ministrations of Christ without a cross. Once they all agreed that Christianity must compromise it was all over, take as proof the beautiful empty cathedrals of Europe.

America weathered the collapse pretty well because we’re an industrious and happy people, not a brooding and intellectual one, so it wasn’t until Norman Vincent Peal championed a sunny and optimistic heresy about the power positive thinking that we bought into the great lie of liberalism en masse. Although liberalism wore a different skin for us, the substance was the same, for when Christians struck a compromise with the spirit of the age to win people over, the spirit of the age paid them back by emptying their churches. The mainline protestant churches that accepted the bargain have now nearly finished dying. Liberalism has a short half-life.

Skip ahead to the 1990s and Liberalism looks like Rick Warren lecturing us on how to have our best life now. Christianity is a God who’s cool with everything, a religion without sin (we call them slips or oopsies), a bloodless journey through magical rainbow clouds until our sanctuaries are peopled and we all have houses full of material wealth. Christ Himself is less a person who died to save us and more of a way to add value to our lives. There’s no need to meet with a bleeding savior, no discussion about how God had put on human flesh, there’s only seven tips for highly effective people to apply the latest psychology breakthroughs to their work sphere.

The next iteration was even emptier brand of moral therapeutic deism championed by Joel Osteen, and I don't think anything else needs to be said about that. Then came the openly blasphemous name-it-and-claim-it word-of-faith movement to pile on, and nothing more needs to be said about that being rank infidelity either. But the more interesting thing was the pushback against these seeker sensitive movements that demanded a more sacrificial commitment to faith called the Emergent Church. The Emergents were dedicated to authenticity, openness, and correcting the previous errors, but they had no interest in orthodoxy, and while it looked really strong and attractive on the surface their brand of Christianity wouldn’t last the decade. In the beginning Donald Miller and Rob Bell spoke out against dogmatic doctrines that straightjacketed true faith, and a young Barak Obama delighted America with his practical exposition of the beatitudes. Today none of them are Christian. Worse, I personally witnessed the apostasy first hand when God forced them to choose between orthodoxy and the emergent distinctives. For this I will never forgive Liberalism. 

Don’t conflate with Post-Millennialism

Liberalism insists that it is no more or less than progress, that as things go on we’re progressing and getting closer to the truth, thus making liberalism an inevitability. Our doctrine is getting better, our understanding of Scripture is getting sharper, and as time has gone on we’ve gotten better at stripping away the dross of our faith. And really, apart from the idea that liberalism is progress, the claim is true. God has been walking us forward into His kingdom, and He’s used a wide variety of ideas, cultures, and peoples to get us here. This is a good thing. Because of this diversity God’s glory is going to be sung by 13^th century Hungarian peasants and 21^st century Wall Street bankers together, each emphasizing a particular aspect of His greatness. It’s a coming to fruition of what He promised in Daniel when the rock that struck the feet of the statue grew until it filled the whole earth. So there’s no reason to be pessimistic or inherently biased against progress, as the Lord God superintends all that takes place.

But there is a good reason to be suspicious that that same seed of unbelief is hiding under the guise of progress, and there is absolutely every reason to think Liberalism is even now lurking among us; as it does in every age. With every new cultural trend comes the same commitment to watering down the faith, almost as if every time God sows a seed Satan is there to throw in weeds with it. It behoove us then to know what liberalism looks like.

Which Brings us to The Present Time

American popular culture views the world through the lens of two categories: Progress & Regress. Either we progress into a more compassionate, hopeful, or tolerant society, or we stand against it and attempt to turn the clock back to a more unjust age. We used to keep slaves, then we abused people with slavish working conditions, then we began to treat them humanely by calling for an end to sweatshops. First we learned to love foreigners, then we learned to love divorced people, then homosexuals, then everyone. The arc of history bends toward justice and all that. The social justice movement, or the Woke movement, or however you want to call it, is driven by this Progress/Regress model that I’m convinced is itself a corruption of Biblical post-millennialism. And according to John MacArthur this is the same liberalism in a new mask, putting its head up for another go-round; the same plague that wiped out huge swathes of Christianity from before. It’s the original lie. It’s the serpent’s smooth words, “You shall be improved by this act of disobedience.” It’s the Sadducees wanting to compromise with the Greeks and Romans and succeeding at taking total control of the Temple. But Jesus rebuked them with the words “You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.”

Now, that took a long time to say very little, but I believe I’m ready to build on that foundation and make some real forward progress in the next post.