The fatal flaw of the social justice movement is that it embraces words and ideas foreign to Scripture. This is nothing new. It is the Devil’s standard procedure in the war against the sufficiency of Scripture. Every skirmish over the sufficiency of Scripture has been fought over adding to or subtracting from the Word of God. And, we must be clear about how serious this is. Every addition or subtraction compromises the gospel and redefines the church. Further, the purity or the pollution of the gospel and the church are in play by the words which conform us.
I’ve seen several of these skirmishes in my lifetime. All of them were fomented by importing foreign words provided by unbelievers. Luther stated it this way, “I have observed this, that all heresies and errors have originated, not from the simple words of Scripture, as is so universally asserted, but from neglecting the simple words of Scripture.”1
God gave us words to define things, but ungodly cultures always want us to stop using biblical words and replace them with their alternative language. This is syncretism. It has always been the greatest danger to the church. Today, alternative language regarding social justice and sexuality are the hottest public battlefronts in the church.
Apostasy always shows up in the words we use to describe things. Periods of apostasy and revival have one single common hinge point. They hinge upon the answer to the question, “Will we use the words of God to preach the gospel and equip the saints?” The importance of this cannot be underestimated, for the sufficiency of Scripture is nothing less than the sufficiency of Christ.
Here is a brief historical review of the skirmishes in the war against the sufficiency of Scripture in modern times. They have been engaged by intrusions from psychology, the social gospel, evolution, the seeker-sensitive church movement, the emergent church movement. Today, the skirmishes are being engaged through the modern social justice movement and recent battles associated with the sexual revolution.
When the words of Sigmund Freud, Carl Rodgers, and Carl Jung began to be used in the church, she received pagan understandings of human personalities and cures. These words re-defined human nature and re-fashioned the ways people could be healed of their psychological maladies. It was a rejection of the sufficiency of Scripture. The biblical counseling movement confronted this intrusion, and many returned to biblical language to describe human problems and cures.
In the twentieth century, the church began to use the language of social gospel practitioners, like Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jim Wallace. When this happened, the church was plunged into unbiblical thinking about justice, race, rights, work, poverty, ethnicity and relationships in the church. The tragic result is that the mainline denominations lost the gospel and found women’s rights, gay rights, affirmative action, environmentalism, and abortion. They rejected the sufficiency of Scripture.
Throughout the twentieth century, many in the mainstream church adopted the understanding and language of evolutionists, like Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. When I was a young pastor in Southern California, many in that area were afraid to identify with six-day creationism. They rejected the sufficiency of Scripture. But that changed dramatically as the modern creationism movement refuted the language and propositions of the evolutionists. The church rose up to defend the biblical language of origins.
During the final quarter of the twentieth century, the church began to use the foreign language of corporate business models. This departure from biblical language and categories defined the seeker sensitive movement. She embraced secular concepts of church leadership, church functionality, and church practices. Pragmatists like Bill Hybels, Robert Schuller, and Rick Warren adopted the ideas of business gurus, like Peter Drucker and reshaped church growth methods. Many of the people in the movement eventually left their Bibles behind and many of them moved outside of the pale of the true church. It was the words they used that took them there.
As the seeker sensitive movement began to wane, the emergent church movement waxed. The church began to use the language of postmodernism, spirituality, mysticism and the new age philosophies. Personalities like Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, and Thomas Merton created an alternative “church,” accommodating to postmodern cultures, revising the church and the gospel itself. They used a version of “humility,” to downplay historical doctrinal positions, even re-defined hell. Underneath it all, they rejected the sufficiency of Scripture. They argued that changes in the culture required changes in the church. All of these changes were managed by rejecting biblical words and replacing them with culturally adaptable alternatives.
Suddenly, in the last few years, conservative evangelicals began to exalt the underlying concepts of identity politics and critical race theory, women’s empowerment, reparations, and systemic racism. This was the language of James Cone and feminist, Kimberle Crenshaw, liberation theology and Marxist theorists. Instead of holding fast to the words of the Bible, Christians suggested that these secular writers discovered important concepts that would be a blessing to the church because of their insight into the social problems. This is nothing new or complex. It is a simple rejection of the words of the Bible to describe and govern.
When the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of sodomite marriage, in June 2015, a tidal wave launched. Churches began to accommodate. They started to accept things which were heretofore completely unthinkable. They introduced new replacement words we had never heard before. They rejected the sufficiency of Scripture. Now we are using terms like SSA (“same-sex attraction”), instead of the biblical words like “vile passions” (Rom. 1:26), “abomination” (Lev. 20:13), “against nature” (Rom. 1:26-27), “perverted persons” (1 Kings 14:24, 2 Kings 23:7), and sodomy (Gen. 19:19, Jude 6-7).” Even today, evangelicals are quite comfortable using the acronym, LGBTQ. Every single letter in LGBTQ represents replacement terminologies. Where did these terms come from? They came from the radicalism of the sexual revolution. These words effectively minimize and mainstream the sins, by toning them down. These words mislead the mind, defile the conscience and contort the biblical understanding of what they stand for. Today, you cannot even communicate about these issues in public without referring to these words because no one will understand what you are talking about if you only use the biblical words.
When we use the language of the sexual revolution and social justice revolutionaries to define ourselves, we are doing the same thing the church has always done when it is on the trajectory of apostasy. If those who embrace these ideas and use these words to define themselves do not return and repent, many of them will end up in the same place the church ended up when it embraced psychology, the social gospel, feminism, evolution, the seeker-sensitive church, and the emergent church. I expect that the same fate will befall some of those people who are now promoting the language of the modern social justice movement.
When you reject biblical language and import unbiblical language, you get a house of inventions and a worldly church. Eventually, a church ceases to be a true church.
God has been very clear with us, “Do not add or subtract”2, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God”3, “Woe to those who seek counsel but not of me”4, “Woe to you who go down to Egypt for advice.”5
We live in a time when we need to remember the warning of the Apostle Peter, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ” (Col. 2:8).
The words we use always determine the trajectory. And we must realize that to preserve the words of God is our only means of preserving the purity of the Gospel and the true church. This is why the fatal flaw of the social justice movement is the rejection of the sufficient words of Scripture.
1. History of Interpretation: Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford, 1885, By Frederick William Farrar, p327 2. Deut. 4:2, Prov. 30:6, Rev. 22:18-21 3. Deut. 8:3, Matt. 4:4 4. Isa 30:1 5. Isa 31:32