I am James Hong and welcome to the Surpassing Value Podcast. The fuel and desire for this podcast was born out of a compulsion to flesh out what's been going on in the midst of an ocean of megaphones that may not actually withstand the test of scrutiny. As a signpost theologian, I will do my best to filter out the impurities and point people in the right direction.

In episode 5, I explored the topic of social justice and entitled that episode Social Justice Chapter 1. At the time I put the working draft together for that episode, I didn't think I'd have a chapter 2. At around the time I finished recording chapter 1, I felt convinced that there was much left unsaid and undealt with.

Although that sentiment is arguably true for every topic I've addressed so far, it would only be true if we were thinking about it in a very strict sense, but I'm not talking about it in a strict sense, rather I'm thinking about it in a very podcast-y sense. So that's how this episode was birthed, and also the reason why in the beginning of this episode I want to recommend some resources as any competent signpost theologian would do, and as you know, I am aspiring to be a competent signpost theologian.

None of the topics I cover do I cover exhaustively, so if you want further follow-up for this topic, here are some resources. Professor Vodie Bauckham's sermons/lectures on these issues are a must. I've alluded to them before, but if you were to input his name into any search engine and include the words "ethnic Gnosticism", "racial reconciliation", or "cultural Marxism", they are very helpful, Vodie is spelled V-O-D-D-I-E, last name is Bauckham, B-A-U-C-H-A-M, just input his name and "ethnic Gnosticism" or "racial reconciliation" or "cultural Marxism" and you'll see his one-hour sermons/lectures.

Neil Shenvey, N-E-I-L Shenvey, S-H-E-N-V-E-Y, I've already endorsed him, but he has written extensively about critical race theory and I heard today actually that he is going to be coming out with a book scheduled for 2022 concerning apologetics. If you go to his website, Neil Shenvey Apologetics, you will find a treasure trove of resources as it relates to critical race theory, social justice, and other topics.

I've mentioned repeatedly the Just Thinking Podcast and I will do so again with Daryl Bernard Harrison and Virgil Walker. The Bar Podcast Network, Just Thinking is a part of the Bar Podcast Network and that is headed up by Dwayne Atkinson. The Center for Biblical Unity has been doing great work in this area.

They are headed up by Monique Dusson and Krista Bontrager. Edwin Ramirez over at the Proverbial Life Podcast is another notable one along with Jamal Bandy, he is over at Prescribed Truth. I really also like Ali Beth Stuckey over at Relatable. If you are more of a blog person, there is a ton, but I think Samuel Tse, S-E-Y, Samuel Tse, he has done some really extensive good work on cultural race issues, pro-life issues.

He speaks with clarity, with candor, and with conviction. He is interesting because he is actually a Ghanaian-Canadian, he is not an American dude, he is a Ghanaian-Canadian. He immigrated over from Ghana, he is currently out in Toronto, and he writes from a very witty perspective, almost GK Chesterton-like, and what I mean by that is he is able to take vast avenues of thought, shrink them, and still hold their meaning.

So that is a very high compliment to say he is very GK Chesterton-like, I don't say that lightly. I have a lot more, that's already a lot right there, but I have much more that I can point you towards. Feel free to reach out to me at thesurpassingvalue@gmail.com. Initially for this episode, I was going to amalgamate two books.

That was going to be the structure of this episode. Those two books were Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth by Thaddeus Williams, and the other book was By What Standard, and that has contributing authors, Tom Askell, Vodie Bauckham, Mark Koppinger, Jared Longshore, Tom Nettles, and Chad Vegas. However, as I was putting this episode together, there was no way I could amalgamate those two books because this episode would have been way too long.

I would have had to have done two separate episodes, maybe even a chapter three, which is possible. At this point, I don't plan on it. So for the remainder of this episode, what I'm going to do is essentially do a book review on Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth, which is a book that's due out December 22nd.

By the time this episode hits, it might already be out. It'll probably be past December 22nd. I am recording this on December 3rd. Now, By What Standard, by those contributing authors, in my opinion, acts as a very nice complement to Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth. I think you can read those two books together, and there isn't too much that's qualitatively duplicative.

You would benefit tremendously from those two books. If you could only read two books on this ginormous issue, those would be the two books that I would recommend. To a lesser degree, I would recommend Why Social Justice Is Not Biblical Justice by Scott Allen. I say to a lesser degree.

I don't mean to cast a negative shadow on the book at all. I'm only saying that because I understand that we all have a limited amount of time, and realistically, we do need to triage what we read. Another book I would recommend is Political Visions and Illusions by David Koizis.

That's another good one if you want to understand in a very non-partisan way the worldviews behind socialism, capitalism, conservatism, liberalism, and other worldviews. This book gives a fair treatment into the ideas behind various political philosophies, as opposed to just virtue signaling and anti-intellectualism, veiled insulting, and cherry-picking that is very prevalent on social media and amongst other self-professing Christians.

I think this is a good spot to emphasize a reminder because I am proffering all these resources. So, as I proffer all these resources, I wanted to emphasize a reminder to the listener, and this comes from Ecclesiastes 12, 11-14. Ecclesiastes 12, 11-14 says this, "The words of the wise are like goats, and masters of these collections are like driven nails; they are given by one shepherd.

But beyond this, my son, be warned, the writing of many books is endless, and excessive study is wearying to the body." The conclusion, when everything has been heard, is fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.

Emphasizing verse 12 here, "But beyond this, my son, be warned, the writing of many books is endless, and excessive study is wearying to the body." Verse 13, "The conclusion," after he says this, "The conclusion, when everything has been heard, is fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person." In your own personal life, there is only one book that will actually feed your soul.

There is only one book that you prioritize as the crown jewel that dictates how you view everything else. No other book is truth absolutely. This includes even the writings of other hallowed and sacred theologians. There is only one book that is all you need for life and godliness. This ties in with the doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture, which I do plan on covering in some future episode.

But for now, I want to remind you that I'm giving you these resources not because I feel that it is necessary for your life per se that you read up on them. I'm giving them to you because if you are interested in the topic and you want the falsehood to be unveiled, then those resources are available for you.

At the same time, I am hoping that you are able to philosophically and theologically triage in your own personal life what is necessary versus what is important versus what is frivolous. Do not sacrifice the necessary or the important for the frivolous. If anything is going to be taken out, take out the frivolous and then you can have the important but you never sacrifice what is necessary.

For the rest of the episode, I'm going to be conducting a book review for confronting injustice without compromising truth. Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth by Thaddeus Williams. I was very fortunate to be part of the launch team prior to the book being available to the public and I have to say that this book exceeded my expectations.

Professor Williams states in the preface that it took him four years to write the book and I could easily see why it took him four years to write the book. The book is not only well written but it is easily digestible, it is heartfelt, it is charitable without skipping on intellectual rigor.

The other exceedingly high compliment I would give it is that I came out of reading this book thinking that the author completed this gargantuan task of tackling social justice in the angle of the thoroughness of covering that subject. I find that no less than remarkable. As a disclaimer, as I conduct this book review for the rest of the episode, I'm going to be taking quotes from the book.

I'm not going to be saying quote each time because I will be saying it way too many times. I typically do that in other episodes. If I'm quoting someone, I'll say quote. For the rest of this episode, I'm not going to be doing that because I will be doing that every other second.

It's a book review. It's all his work. The entirety of it. I'm bringing it to you because this is a book review. On to the book review itself. The foreword of this book is written by a former civil rights activist named John Perkins. John Perkins is one of the few living civil rights activists who was active during the civil rights movement and is still alive.

So if you don't know who he is, insert him into a search engine and you'll quickly find out who he is. John Perkins writes in the foreword, "I was born on a Mississippi cotton plantation in 1930. My mother died of nutrition deficiency when I was just 7 months old.

My big brother, a WWII veteran, was gunned down by a town marshal when I was 17 years old. As a civil rights activist, I was jailed and beaten nearly to death by police. They tortured me without mercy, stuck a fork up my nose and down my throat, then made me mop up my own blood.

I have known injustice. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to answer hate with hate." He goes on later in the foreword, "We are in the midst of a great upheaval. There is much confusion, much anger, much injustice. Sadly, many Christian brothers and sisters are trying to fight this fight with man-made solutions.

These solutions promise justice but deliver division and idolatry. They become false gospels. Thankfully, in these trying times, new conversations are happening and the right questions are beginning to be asked." Professor Thaddeus Williams then begins the book by asking the question, "What is social justice?" What is social justice? Every age of church history has its controversies and now the society and the church has our own.

He writes that in this century, you could learn about social justice auditing a college course, joining an activist chapter in our coffee shops, ads for soda, shoes in the Super Bowl, movies, Twitter feeds, national media, and our pulpits. It is absolutely ubiquitous and it's everywhere. While pinning today's situation, the author goes on to note that justice isn't optional for Christians.

It is not optional for Christians. Indeed, the author rightly states that to seek justice is a clarion call of scripture and those who plug their ears to that call are simply not living by the standard of scripture. The Bible's call to seek justice, though, is not a call to superficial, knee-jerk activism.

We are not to seek justice but to truly seek justice, presupposing that there are untrue ways to seek justice. We are to hold fast to what is good and test everything. To aid in how the reader should think about the term social justice, the author, Professor Thaddeus Williams, proposes to frame the dialectic, we know that word by now, into two positions he calls social justice A and social justice B.

Social justice A would encapsulate efforts to abolish human trafficking, work with the inner city poor, invest in microloans to help the destitute in the developing world, build hospitals, upend racism, protect the unborn. Social justice B would be defined as a sort of thing that has taken an extremely charged political meaning and has become a waving banner over movements like Antifa, the waving banner of a disproportionate ratio of professors and universities around the nation where the oppressor vs.

oppressed narrative of deconstructionism is taken as objective. Movements with the stated mission where they are trying to disrupt a western prescribed nuclear family structure, and movements on college campuses that have resorted to violence to silence opposing voices. Using social justice A and social justice B, he calls upon Christians to not look down on those who call for biblical discernment but rather to not be naive to the meanings that have been baked into many minds with the word combination of social and justice.

The author goes on to state that the problem is not necessarily the quest for social justice but what happens when that quest is undertaken from a framework that is not compatible with the scriptures. Many Christians accept conclusions that are generated from worldviews that are wired with very different presuppositions about reality than those we find in scripture.

We shirk God's commands and hurt his image bearers when we unwittingly allow unbiblical worldview assumptions to shape our approach to justice. Before beginning the book, he lists four disclaimers and they are the following. Number one, social justice A, the kind of justice that flows from scripture, is not synonymous with the republican party or its policies.

Number two, he is not building a straw man of social justice B, and his portrayal is indeed representative of social justice B. Number three, this book should not be used as a billy club to bash brothers or sisters that we disagree with. Number four, the book takes aim at ideas and not people and it takes aim at those ideas because they hurt people we are called to love.

After reading this portion of the book, my appetite to finish the rest of the book was increased dramatically. You can tell he's not only hitting the right points, but he understands the knee-jerk reaction to reject what Christians might believe to be merely republicanism or merely competing theories. Here are the 12 questions that he asks in the book.

These are the 12 questions. He divides it into four parts, and so each of the four parts has kind of a grouping to it. Part one is this, Jehovah or Jezebel, three questions about social justice and worship. Part one, Jehovah or Jezebel, three questions about social justice and worship.

Number one, the God question. Does our vision of social justice take seriously the Godhood of God? Does our vision of social justice take seriously the Godhood of God? Number two, the Imago question. Does our vision of social justice acknowledge the image of God in everyone, regardless of size, shade, sex, or status?

Number three is the idolatry question. Does our vision of social justice make a false God out of the self, the state, or social acceptance? Number two, unity or uproar, three questions about social justice and community. Fourth question is the collective question. Does our vision of social justice take any group identity more seriously than our identities in Adam and in Christ?

Number five, the splintering question. Does our vision of social justice embrace divisive propaganda? Number six, the fruit question. Does our vision of social justice replace love, peace, and patience with suspicion, division, and rage? Part three, sinners or systems, three questions about social justice and salvation. Number seven is a disparity question.

Does our vision of social justice prefer damning stories to undamning facts? Number eight, the color question. Does our vision of social justice promote racial strife? Number nine, the gospel question. Does our vision of social justice distort the best news in history? Last part, part four, truth or tribes thinking, three questions about social justice and salvation.

Truth or tribes thinking, three questions about social justice and knowledge. Number 10, the tunnel vision question. Does our vision of social justice make one way of seeing something the only way of seeing everything? Does our vision of social justice make one way of seeing something the only way of seeing everything?

Number 11 is a suffering question. Does our vision of social justice turn the lived experience of hurting people into more pain? Does our vision of social justice turn the lived experience of hurting people into more pain? The last question, number 12, the standpoint question. Does our vision of social justice turn the quest for truth into an identity game?

Does our vision of social justice turn the quest for truth into an identity game? The book also lists a pretty robust appendix section that tackles various questions that are intriguing and relevant to many, such as abortion and the right to life, capitalism and socialism, defining sexuality, fragility and anti-fragility, and an appendix entitled — a portion of the appendix entitled Good News to the Poor.

At the end of each chapter for the 12 questions, he includes a short, often personal story related to the topic of social justice. There are 12 chapters, so there are 12 other contributing authors. This group is eclectic in nature, and they include people who came out of the woke movement or are otherwise related to the topic of social justice.

Many of them are active on social media. I've already recommended a couple of them to you, Jamal Bandy, Samuel Tse, Monique Dusson are also contributing authors. They're active on social media, they're also active in the celestial blogosphere. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to pose some of the questions, six of the 12, and I'll give you a little snippet from the book of how we answered it.

Number one, the God question. This is the first question. Does our vision of social justice take seriously the Godhood of God? The God question. Does our vision of social justice take seriously the Godhood of God? He says this. Professor Thaddeus Williams, the author, states, "Paul knows that the human tree is so hopelessly sick that whatever soil you plant in it, toxic fruit will form.

No amount of political revolution, social engineering, or policy tweaking will stop envy, strife, deceit, and maliciousness from sprouting out of our sick hearts. Why were all the utopias of the modern era doomed to fail? Because the evil did not originate in politics, society, or the economy. It is expressed there, but evil originates in human hearts that exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things, and the sun and water and gold and sex and power." The Imago question.

Does our vision of social justice acknowledge the image of God in everyone, regardless of size, shade, sex, or status? There's a snippet from that chapter. The author states, "There is a tendency today to reduce people not to bodies but to ideologies. We don't see a human being so much as we see social justice sylphics to our left and neo-Nazis to our right, or we see and treat people on the basis of their skin color or gender or whom they want to sleep with.

That is why giving God his due is so important to real justice." The Idolatry question. Does our vision of social justice make a false God out of the self, the state, or social acceptance? The author states in part, "The question is, who has the right, the trustworthiness, the goodness, and the authority to render their verdict about who we really are?" Social Justice B answers, "We do." Herein lies one of the deepest problems with idolizing the self as sovereign.

The omnipotence-demanding task of constructing an entire person's nature is forced onto our all-too-shaky, infinite soldiers. Tragically, we buckle under the impossible weight. That was question number three. Now I'm going to tackle question number six from the book. Question number six is the fruit question. Does our vision of social justice replace love, peace, and patience with suspicion, division, and rage?

Does our vision of social justice replace love, peace, and patience with suspicion, division, and rage? The author states, "The kingdoms of the world play the self-defeating game of tribalizing, retaliation, and escalation, running up body counts in the name of justice. The kingdom Jesus invites us into does not play by those rules." Corrie ten Boom showed her citizenship in Jesus' kingdom rather than the world's kingdoms when she extended forgiveness to the Nazi.

The kingdoms of the world play the self-defeating game of tribalizing, retaliation, and escalation, running up body counts in the name of justice. The kingdom Jesus invites us into does not play by those rules. Corrie ten Boom showed her citizenship in Jesus' kingdom rather than the world's kingdoms when she extended forgiveness to the Nazi.

If you don't know that story, look up Corrie ten Boom. The disparity question #7. Does our vision of social justice prefer damning stories to undamning facts? The author states, "The point is not that there is no such thing as racism or sexism or other vicious 'isms' wreaking havoc on earth.

Sinful 'isms' inflict hurt on some people groups that other people groups never have to cope with. The point is that shouting 'systemic injustice' at every unequal outcome is too easy. In a world unlike ours with zero racism or sexism or any other evil 'ism,' there would still be vast inequalities based on things as boring and undamning as geography, age, birthdays, birth order, shopping, habits, desire to lay bricks, and so much more.

When we automatically assume damning explanations for unequal outcomes, we not only lock ourselves in a prison of never-ending rage, but also dull our sense to the point that we will be useless for the sacred task of recognizing and resisting the real racism, real sexism, and other real vicious 'isms' around us." The last question I'll tackle here, the gospel question, that's number 9, the gospel question.

Does our vision of social justice distort the best news in history? Does our vision of social justice distort the best news in history? The Bible also commands that we tell the truth, that we give generously, that we love our neighbor and so on. None of these commands are optional, yet none of these commands is the gospel.

We should not confuse any of these commands with the first thing. If we do, then we will not only lose the gospel, but also find ourselves adhering to these commands in a way that obliterates their essence. Without the gospel first, we become graceless in our truth-telling, cheerless in our giving, and our neighborly love turns into self-righteous showmanship.

Likewise, when the gospel is not our first thing, social justice becomes something else entirely. So those are 6 questions out of the 12 in the book, and I've used 6 snippets from the book to address those 6 questions that the author asks. As you could probably tell from those snippets, the author's insight is astute, insightful, and thoroughly grounded in proper theology and reality.

He really did go into great pains into interpreting reality correctly so that when he did apply Biblical truth, we get a corresponding result that is right on the mark. Interpreting reality correctly does seem to be a lost art, a lacking skill that very, very few have at the moment.

To emphasize its importance, I want to quote to you from 1 Chronicles 12.32. 1 Chronicles 12.42 says this in part, "From the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times with knowledge of what Israel should do." Here, when you think about what it takes to build a proper kingdom, society, nation, church, you have to have men who understand the times.

That is another way of saying interpreting reality correctly, because if you don't, it is very easy to take truth and misapply it. When someone is diagnosed with cancer, I'm not going to give them a Band-Aid. If someone needs a Band-Aid, we are not going to say, "You should go and get radiation therapy." You can see how and why men who understand the times is so very important.

If you are interested in this subject, I hope this episode whetted your appetite for the book. I took the bulk of this episode to do a book review, because as I said in the beginning, I found it remarkable that the author covered this subject in a very thorough manner that was also very charitable.

That was very impressing to me, which is why I'm saying the same thing yet again at the end of the episode. Being a self-described signpost theologian, this is one of those moments where I'm absolutely pointing those who are interested in that direction. Thanks for making it to the end.

I'll continue to try to make the journey worth it. To Him be honor, glory, and eternal dominion. James Hong out. (upbeat music)