In Scott Brown's sermon, 'The Fatal Flaw of the Social Justice Movement - Part 2,' he argues that the social justice movement's key failure is its reliance on language and concepts foreign to Scripture. Brown claims that this movement introduces ideas that unnecessarily and unbiblically divide the church, contrary to the doctrine of unity advocated in Romans 16. He emphasizes the sufficiency of Scripture, warning against adding or subtracting from it, and illustrates this through historical examples where the church embraced secular ideologies, such as psychology, the social gospel, evolutionism, and movements like the seeker-sensitive and emergent church movements. These shifts, according to Brown, represent a rejection of biblical language and lead to apostasy. The sermon criticizes the adoption of modern ideologies like intersectionality and critical race theory, viewing them as divisive. Brown underscores the importance of adhering to biblical terminology to maintain the church's integrity, warning that failure to do so results in a worldly church devoid of true doctrine.

Please open your Bibles to Romans chapter 16. We're continuing our series having just barely begun it on this matter of social justice. Last week we introduced the idea by making the proposition that the new social justice is injustice. Two, just very quick reminder examples, reproductive justice is the proposition that it's just to kill a baby. Sexual justice is the proposition that everyone must celebrate homosexuality and transgenderism.

This is the new injustice under the name of justice. We could give many examples to it. And I would like to introduce the time today by just taking a few minutes before Robert comes up. I'd like to talk about what is the fatal flaw of the social justice movement. And the fatal flaw of the social justice movement is that it embraces words and ideas that are foreign to Scripture to describe relationships.

This is nothing new. The devil's standard procedure in harming the church is against the sufficiency of Scripture. The words that are being used and the meanings of those words and the applications of those words are unnecessarily dividing the Church of Jesus Christ, unbiblically dividing the Church of Jesus Christ. Robert is going to come and talk about intersectionality and critical race theory just by brief introduction because there's much more that will need to be said about it but I've drawn your attention to Romans 16 17 because this is really what we're doing in this series is the thing that is described in Romans 16 and 17. Now I urge you, brethren, note those who cause divisions and offenses, contrary to the doctrine which you learned, and avoid them.

For those who are such do not serve our Lord Jesus Christ but their own belly and by smooth words and flattering speech deceive the hearts of the simple And what Robert and I want to try to communicate today is that these words, like intersectionality and critical race theory, are words that by definition unnecessarily and they unbiblically divide the body of Christ. They're divisive. They actually lead to racism and divisions in the church that that God has really covered with his word because God God does By his word destroy division and racism in the Church of Jesus Christ. So now every skirmish over the sufficiency of Scripture is about either adding or subtracting from the Word of God. And I think we need to be very clear how serious it is to add or subtract from the Word of God.

Now, I've seen several of these skirmishes over the sufficiency of Scripture in my lifetime, and all of them have been fomented by exactly the same thing. They were they were fomented by unbelievers language of unbelievers in psychology and various other disciplines That find their way particularly in the universities Luther stated it this way. He said, 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. It's important that we understand this because God gave us words to define things. Ungodly cultures always want us to stop using the biblical words.

They don't like them. They're actually offensive. And the church is always in greatest danger when it abandons the biblical words, because those are the words of God. Those are the words that are designed to correct us and refresh us and heal us and save us. So we must preserve the words.

And today, alternative language regarding social justice and sexuality, you know, are the hottest public battle fronts in the church. It's a battle about words. Apostasy always shows up in the words that we use to describe the things that we are doing. And periods of apostasy and revival have one single common hinge point. They hinge on the answer to the question, what we use, will we use the words of God or will we not?

The importance of this cannot be underestimated, for the sufficiency of Scripture is nothing less than the sufficiency of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ wrote every word of the Old Testament and the New Testament, and every word is holy, just, and true. So, I'll just give you a brief historical sketch of some of the skirmishes against the sufficiency of Scripture in modern times. And these have been engaged by intrusions of psychology, the social gospel, evolution, the language of the secret sensitive church movement, the emergent church movement. And today these skirmishes are being fought through the modern social justice movement and the recent battles associated with the sexual revolution.

So that's what we're talking about here. Now, let's talk about psychology. When the words of Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers and Carl Young began to be used in the church. The church actually embraced the understandings of human personality and human cures. And these words redefined human nature.

They refashioned the ways people would be healed of their psychological maladies. It was a rejection of the sufficiency of Scripture. What happened in the in the 70s is the biblical counseling movement rose up and confronted this intrusion and Many returned to the use of Scripture to describe human problems, human sinfulness, and human cures. It was a blessed movement. It was a movement of the sufficiency of Scripture.

The social gospel movement in the 20th century, during that time the Church began to use the language of social gospel practitioners like Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King and Jim Wallace and Franklin Roosevelt during the 20th century. And when this happened, the church followed along, plunged into unbiblical thinking about justice and race and rights and work and poverty and ethnicity and relationships in the church. And the tragic Result of this is that the mainline denominations they bought at hook line and sinker and they they found women's rights They found gay rights. They found affirmative action. They found environmentalism and they found abortion because they rejected the sufficiency of Scripture.

Let's talk about evolution. During the 20th century, many of the mainstream churches adopted the understanding and the language of the evolutionists like Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Even when I was a young pastor in Southern California, many pastors, conservative pastors, were afraid to admit that they were six-day creationists. Because the broader church culture had rejected the sufficiency of scripture on creationism, and but that changed dramatically. There was a creationism movement that rose up in the late 70s and the early 80s, it happened in Southern California and spread and and it's a completely different landscape today.

But the church rose up to defend the biblical language about origins. Let's talk about the seeker sensitive movement. During the final quarter of the 20th century, the church began to use the foreign language of corporate business models. The departure from biblical language and categories defined the seeker-sensitive movement. I know this quite well, was involved in it personally as an elder in a church.

And the church embraced popular concepts on church leadership, on church functionality, church practices. It was led by pragmatists like Bill Hybels and Robert Shuler and Rick Warren. They adopted the ideas of the business gurus like Peter Drucker, and they really reshaped modern church growth methods. Many of the people in the movement eventually left their Bibles behind. And they moved outside of the pale of the church, and it was the words that took them there.

They embraced the words of corporate America and productivity, and they lost the gospel, and they're in decline. Then you have the Emergent Church that came right after it. As the Seeker Sensitive Movement began to wane, the Emergent Church Movement waxed, and the church began to use the language of postmodernism, spirituality, mysticism, and New Age philosophies. And personalities like Brian McLaren and Rob Bell and Thomas Merton, a Roman Catholic mystic which I used to read in college, created really an alternative church accommodating to postmodern culture. It was really an attempt for acceptability, which was exactly the same thing as the secret sensitive movement.

It was an attempt to fit in. And the Emergent Church movement, they kind of used a version of humility to use to downplay historical doctrinal positions. They even redefined the doctrine of hell. And underneath it all was a rejection of the sufficiency of Scripture. And they argued that the changes in the culture required changes in the church.

And all these changes were managed on one hinge point—the rejection of biblical terminology to describe the church and to create culturally adaptable alternatives. So suddenly in the last few years, I'm just going to call it the modern social justice movement, conservative evangelicals have begun to exalt really the underlying concepts of identity politics and critical race theory, women's empowerment, reparations, systemic racism. These are things that really have arisen from Marxist ideologies and they really are being embraced. This was the language of a very popular mainline religious leader James Cohn, which we'll hear more about later, and a third-wave feminist, Kimberlé Crenshaw. They really embraced liberation theology and Marxist ideology to build their social structure.

And instead of holding fast to the Word of God, they suggested that these secular writers discovered important concepts that would be a blessing to the church because of their insight into social problems. And this is nothing new, it's not complex, it's just a simple rejection of the Word of God. And you know, We've seen in just the last five years a massive uptick in the LGBTQ movement when the Supreme Court in the United States ruled in favor of sodomite marriage in 2015. A tidal wave was launched and the churches began to accommodate. And they started to accept things that were completely unthinkable before, and they introduced replacement words, words we'd never heard before.

They rejected the sufficiency of Scripture. And now we're using terms like SSA, same-sex attraction, instead of the biblical words like vile passions, abomination, against nature. This is very simple. This is just a rejection of biblical language. And even today, evangelicals are comfortable just using the acronym LGBTQ+.

Every single letter in the LGBTQ acronym represents replacement terminologies, replacement words to describe. We use that terminology because we all know what it means. But let's be very clear. When we talk about sexuality and use replacement words, we're drifting. We're drifting away from biblical propositions.

When we use the language of the sexual revolution and the social justice revolutionaries to define ourselves, we're doing the same thing that the Church has always done when it is on a trajectory of apostasy. And that's, I think, why we're having this series. These are very critical matters. If those who embrace ideas which are contrary to Scripture and they use these words to define themselves and if they do not return and repent many of them will end up in the same place the Church ended up when embrace when it embraced psychology when it embraced the social gospel when it embraced Feminism when it embraced evolutionism when it embraced the sacred seeker sensitive movement when it embraced the emergent church movement. It's a trajectory of unbelief.

And so it's very important that we understand that. When we reject biblical language and import unbiblical language, you get a house of inventions. You get a worldly church. And eventually a church ceases to be a true church because it's abandoned the words. And that's why God has been very clear with us.

Do not add or subtract there in the last chapter of the book of Revelation. Jesus said, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Woe to those who seek counsel, but not of me. Woe to you who go down to Egypt for advice, " says Jeremiah the prophet. So we live in a time when we need to remember the warning of the apostle Peter in Colossians 2.8.

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." So all this to say, it's critical that we cleave to the words of God to describe the social structure of the church and really of everything in the world. And Robert is going to come now and he's going to introduce ideas of intersectionality and critical race theory.