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 this episode, I wanted to discuss Voddiebockum's latest book, which dropped on April 6th of 2021. That book is called Fault Lines, The Social Justice Movement, and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe, which is an 11-chapter book. In the book, Voddie is wading into some controversial territory because he gives his perspective unabashedly on what the social justice movement is doing within what was previously accepted as conservative evangelical circles.

He does also name names, but he does so reluctantly and charitably. And he's doing that because he doesn't want anybody to be dancing around who is being spoken of and what is being said and he wants to bring clarity to the subject. He doesn't do it for the sake of publicly shaming anyone.

At the same time, when you are a public figure and you make far-reaching statements, it is fair if your statements are examined under the lens of scripture and plain reason to see if they pass the test of scrutiny. And he does this that in hopes he might win over his brothers and sisters.

So before I begin this episode, let me tell you right now that there are going to be a lot of quotes from the book. I'm doing that so that I can give you a huge sampling of what exactly this book is about. But let me say that this book, at least in my opinion, does seem to go pretty hand in hand with another book I previously mentioned.

And that was another book I was also on the launch team for. That book was called Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth by Thaddeus Williams. Now in that book, Professor Thaddeus Williams, he doesn't go so far as to name names, which is why I think that this book is a nice compliment to Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth.

And although there is some overlap, the overlap is a lot more minimal than I thought it would be. In episode 10, which I recorded a while back, hasn't been published yet, but I use the same format as I'll do in this episode. So with that said, let me begin this episode by quoting to you a portion from the introduction of Vodi's book.

Vodi writes, "Why are people and groups like Thabiti Anwabili, Tim Keller, Russell Moore, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Nine Marks, the Gospel Coalition, and Together for the Gospel, T4G, being identified with critical social justice on one side of the fault, and people like John MacArthur, Tom Askell, Owen Strayen, Douglas Wilson, and the late R.

C. Sproul being identified on the other? There are groups and ministries that have embraced CRT, and those are problematic. But there is a larger group that is sympathetic to it because of their desire to fight what they see as a problem of racial injustice. Most of the groups I will mention in this book fall into the latter category.

It is not a stretch to say we are seeing seismic shifts in the evangelical landscape. But is it an exaggeration to call this a coming catastrophe? I don't think so. John MacArthur calls it the greatest threat to the gospel in his lifetime, and he had a front row seat to the debates over both inerrancy and lordship salvation.

What do I, MacArthur, and myriad other pastors and leaders see on the horizon that leads to such drastic statements? Before he gets into the main substance of the book, he gives a sort of mini autobiography. That starts with chapter 1. In chapter 1, entitled "A Black Man," he writes this, "I was born on the San Andreas Fault.

More specifically, I was born in Los Angeles, California on March 11, 1969. This was the end of the Great Migration between 1915 and 1970 that saw somewhere between 5 and 10 million blacks leave the South in search of a better life. This migration took place along very specific routes to the North and West and landed large swaths of the black population in cities like New York, Boston, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, and other major urban areas." In chapter 2, he continues to make a case for his mini-autobiography by speaking about his life as a black Christian, and that chapter is aptly entitled "A Black Christian." Vouille writes, "There is a major debate among black evangelicals as to whether, in discussing and applying our faith in the midst of the current cultural crisis, the priority should be on our blackness or our Christianity.

In other words, are we Christians or black people first? This may seem strange to non-black Christians; however, I assure you, it is a real issue and is relevant to the topic of this book. I have wrestled with this question since coming to faith, and I have fallen on both sides of it at different times, all of which I will detail in this chapter.

The question of the proper order of faith and ethnicity is critical to understanding the various positions people take in the broader social justice debate, one with which all people must wrestle, regardless of their ethnicity; however, for black Christians, this concept has often been difficult to embrace for several reasons." He goes on to explain these reasons, one of which include the fact that black nationalists have often argued that Christianity is the "white man's religion" and used it to encourage slaves to be docile.

He'll spend the next portion of the chapter talking about his conversion experience, which came in October of 1987 on the campus of New Mexico State University, where he was the starting tight-end. A guy named Steve Morgan, who was involved in a campus ministry, reached out to him and they began talking about the Bible, which eventually led to Vody repenting and believing in the gospel message.

That was his first year in college. In his third year, he would go back to California because his cousin Jamal was murdered, which caused him to think deeply about how differently their paths diverged. Vody then goes on to talk about how early on in his faith, he approached Christianity with an extremely Afrocentric approach.

Vody writes, "It also reminded me how Afrocentric I was at that time. There I stood, an HBU ministry student who would go on to win the prestigious Riverside Scholarship (a full scholarship to the Southern Baptist Seminary of my choice) for being an outstanding theology student, and I was wearing a t-shirt featuring MLK Jr., Malcolm X, and Elijah Muhammad.

I assure you, it doesn't get more Afrocentric than that. Nor did my Afrocentrism stop at wearing t-shirts. Not only was I a member of Omega Psi Phi, a black fraternity known for having its members brand a Greek letter on their arms, but I also helped get it back onto the NMSU New Mexico State University campus after it had been suspended.

I had married a woman from a historically black college, and was one of the founders of the Black Student Fellowship at HBU. At that point in my life, I was most certainly more black than Christian." He goes on to talk about how his star began to rise within the SPC, but as he began to take unpopular positions, he also experienced pushback.

He began to see what the social justice ideology was doing way back before the events of this past year, and he saw how detrimental it could and would be for evangelicalism. Because of that, for Voti, being silent was not an option. I want to stop here really quickly because already in chapters 1 and 2, you have Voti laying the foundation for why he writes the book and why he has the credentials to talk about how when you place ethnicity over your identity in Christ, how that becomes extremely problematic and eventually leads to a completely different gospel.

It is not neutral. It's not benign, and it's not neutral in nature. It is placing ethnicity over your identity in Christ is completely malignant to your faith and to the gospel message. We see something happening with Asians right now, something almost parallel. And so I think for that reason, this book has at least become, to me, an important book to read.

I'm not saying it's like some kind of emergency and everyone needs to stop and read this book, but there is much to be gleaned on a personal level if you begin to buy into this whole narrative of what I see as causing Asians to become disgruntled and just kind of have their eyes taken off the gospel message and then ultimately led to a completely different direction than what is the actual gospel.

But on with the book. In chapter 3, entitled Seeking True Justice, he talks about false social justice narratives and doesn't shy away from naming key figures such as Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James. He goes on to talk about what the actual cost of these false narratives are and provides actual academic research to back up his claims, including diving deep into statistics regarding policing in the US.

He talks about George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Michael Brown, and Breonna Taylor while dealing with objections. In chapter 4, entitled A New Religion, he talks about the religious nature of CRT, aka anti-racism, aka the ideology behind the social justice movement. In chapter 4, Voti writes, "The anti-racist movement has many of the hallmarks of a cult, including staying close enough to the Bible to avoid immediate detection and hiding the fact that it has a new theology and a new glossary of terms that diverge ever so slightly from Christian orthodoxy, at least at first.

In classic cult fashion, they borrow from the familiar and accept it, then infuse it with new meaning. This allows the cult to appeal to the faithful within the dominant orthodox religions from which it draws its converts. This new cult has created a new lexicon that has served as a scaffolding to support what has become an entire body of divinity.

In the same manner, this new body of divinity comes complete with its own cosmology. CRT has original sin racism, law is anti-racism, gospel is racial reconciliation, martyrs are Saints Trayvon, Mike, George, Breonna, etc., the priests are the oppressed minorities, the means of atonement, reparations, new birth is wokeness, liturgy is lament, the canon is the social justice science, the theologians are D'Angelo, Kendi, Brown, Crenshaw, McIntosh, etc., and the catechism would be "say their names." We'll examine some of these topics in this chapter and a few later on.

In chapter 5, entitled "A New Priesthood," he talks about ethnic Gnosticism which was a term he came up with to describe what's been going on in the culture. In chapter 5 he writes this, "It would be more accurate, though, in light of the broader assumptions of the critical social justice movement to use the term "minority Gnosticism," since the same argument is applied to all oppressed minorities.

In fact, it is their oppressed status that, according to CSJ, gives these groups their special knowledge. This is a central tenet of critical race theory. The voice of color thesis, writes Richard Delgado, holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, American Indian, Asian, and Latino writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know.

Thus, according to CRT, minority status brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism. This makes sense since critical race theory builds on the insights of two previous movements, critical legal studies and radical feminism, to both of which it owes a large debt. Specifically, the debt CRT owes to radical feminism is the towering influence of standpoint epistemology, the hallmark of ethnic Gnosticism." He goes on to state how in ethnic Gnosticism, one of the planks is that the narrative trumps truth.

In chapter 6, entitled "A New Canon," he talks about how very subtly the Bible's sufficiency is being pepped away at, and giving a case study, Voughty writes this, "At the 2018 Together for the Gospel conference, David Platt, then head of the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board, delivered a message from Amos 5, then repented in tears for his white privilege, silence, and inaction.

Those inclined toward CSJ found it inspiring, but to others, Platt's message represented a fault line. It was an exercise in eisegesis. In other words, instead of being faithful to the text of Amos 5, he read foreign ideas into the text to make the Bible serve his agenda. The most aggravating aspect of Platt's message, wrote one blogger, was his flagrant misuse of Amos 5.

One pastor summed it up well, "MLK said men should not be judged by the color of their skin, T4G said pastors should be judged by the color of their congregations." A Christianity Today writer tried to reduce the criticism to some kind of white fragility, but that was both inaccurate and disingenuous.

In fact, many of those who agreed with Platt's sentiment acknowledged that his sermon fell short of exegetical standards. At least two high-level evangelical leaders, one closely associated with the conference, said as much to me personally. Another of course will go on record. Moreover, the message fell short of Platt's own standard.

He has a Ph.D. in preaching and served as a professor of preaching and apologetics at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. So if anybody knows better than to misuse scripture like that, it is David Platt. The obvious question then is why someone of his caliber would preach a sermon that led one preaching professor to tell me privately, "If he had done that in my class, I would have given him a D." The answer is simple.

David Platt loves Jesus, loves people, and is passionate about reconciliation. I know this because I know and love David Platt. I also know he started reading and being influenced by the "woke" canon. Consequently, he began to reach beyond the Bible to find God's truth regarding race. How did he get to that point?

According to an article on the Gospel Coalition's website, Nine Marks founder Mark Devers suggested Platt read Divided by Faith, Evangelical Religion, and the Problem of Race in America by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, a book Devers has publicly praised saying, "This won't be the most exciting book you read this year, but it may have the most exciting results in your life." Platt's message was dripping with the book's influence, especially his emphasis on the concept of America's being racialized, which is the book's main theme.

Ironically, the book does not make Christianity Today's list, however, it is arguably the most frequently referenced and recommended race resource among Evangelicalism's Big Three, also known as the Gospel Coalition, Nine Marks, and Together for the Gospel." "I am a debater, I always have been. But in the current climate, debate is becoming a lost art, partly because of a general decline in the study of logic and rhetoric, but mostly because of the general feminization of culture and its consequent disdain for open, verbal combat.

Gone are the days of Luther and Erasmus slugging it out over the question of original sin. Today, both men would be accused of being petty, for daring to split hairs over such theological minutia; mean-spirited, for daring to speak so forcefully in favor of their own position and against the others; and downright un-Christ-like, for throwing around the word heresy.

I have often said, 'The eleventh commandment is, 'Thou shalt be nice.' And we don't believe the other ten. One of the negative results of this is no longer being able to deal with ideas without attacking the people who hold them. Disagreements quickly deteriorate into arguments and worse. Consequently, taking a position on an issue carries the automatic assumption that one is utterly opposed to not only the opposing view, but to all who hold it.

Therefore, we don't debate ideas at all, but go straight for personal attacks and character assassination. And this debate is no different. To the anti-critical social justice camp, those on the side of CSJ are all cultural Marxists. Conversely, to the social justice camp, those who oppose their cause are all racists.

Even fellow black people like me, who according to their definition of racism, can't be racist. But I digress. The result is a standstill, a demilitarized zone that exists, not because hostilities have ceased, but because we all tacitly believe there is no solution." In the same chapter, Votie writes about the Dallas Statement, which was a joint statement by John MacArthur, Votie Bauckham, Daryl Harrison, and many others.

It's also known as the Statement on Social Justice. Votie writes this, "Documents like the Dallas Statement are never meant to be a final word. The Bible is the final word. Nor did we believe our statement would be beyond reproach. Tom Askell, the principal architect of the first draft of the Dallas Statement, captured the sentiment perfectly when he wrote, "The statement makes no claim of any ecclesiastical authority.

It is issued for the purpose of calling attention to and clarifying concerns. We have spoken on these issues with no disrespect or loss of love for our brothers and sisters who disagree with what we have written. Rather, our hope is that this statement might actually provoke the kind of brotherly dialogue that can promote unity in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom we all love and trust." But that is not what happened.

In fact, there has been very little formal pushback or dialogue. Most of our friends at NYMARCS, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the Gospel Coalition, Together for the Gospel, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Presbyterian Church of America, all of whom had historically embraced us as ministry partners and been willing to critique us as brothers, didn't write a single word one way or the other.

Tim Geller did offer a comment. When asked about the Dallas Statement, his response said more about its philosophical presuppositions than it did about the document. The statement can't be judged based upon whether or not the words are right, he said, but by the consequences those words might eventually bring out.

By contrast, when John MacArthur, the lightning rider with whom most people associate the Dallas Statement, decided to hold services at his church in Southern California last summer in defiance of Governor Gavin Newsom's order to keep churches from meeting during the coronavirus pandemic, NYMARCS fired off a missive addressing MacArthur's decision from a biblical, theological, and historical perspective.

But the Dallas Statement didn't warrant a drop of ink. Did these groups fail to address the statement because it was correct? If so, why didn't they join us in signing it? Was it because, as more than one of the leaders of the aforementioned ministry stated, the group lacked any names with gravitas, therefore implying the statement was insignificant?

If MacArthur, who called the meeting, lacks gravitas, then there's no need to warn people to be cautious about following his lead. No, there was a much bigger issue at play, a fault line that everybody knew was there and that nobody wanted to acknowledge." Vody then goes on to talk about Resolution 9, which was when the SPC adopted CRT as an analytical tool, which occurred under the leadership of JD Greer.

In chapter 8, entitled "The Damage," Vody goes on to talk about the devastation this worldview or rival religion has caused. Vody states in summary that what ends up happening is real problems end up not getting addressed because they do not line up with the false narrative. In chapter 9, entitled "Aftershock," he further goes on to give examples of how this worldview has drastically changed the tone of some of the celebrity pastors.

He deals at length with statements from Tim Keller, David Platt, Mark Dever, and Jonathan Lehman within the context of abortion and so-called one-issue voting. In chapter 10, entitled "Restoration and Mitigation," Vody encourages the reader to contend Christianly. He writes, "Many modern Christians are uncomfortable with war language. Perhaps it is because of the aforementioned Eleventh Commandment, 'Thou shalt be nice.' As a result, anything that looks or sounds remotely aggressive, confrontational, or masculine is deemed less than Christian.

But the Bible is replete with war language, and actual war. And that language is appropriate here because we are at war. But we must not rely on ordinary tactics. For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.

To destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. And take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience when your obedience is complete. As we wage this war, the Apostle's words will be our guide, and the kingdom of God, His rule and reign in our lives, and our world, will be our goal.

But first, we must understand why we are at war. Spoiler alert, we didn't start it." The scripture reference that Vody quoted was 2 Corinthians 10, 3-6. So for those of you who are maybe starting to get nervous at this point, he makes it a point to show the reader that our war is spiritual, and our weapons are also spiritual, and we fight for the truth of the gospel and biblical justice.

While not making light of the fact that we must destroy arguments and speculations, taking every thought captive, and confront lies while holding on to the truth. We must listen with discernment, but we must also correct. In the closing chapter entitled "Solid Ground," Vody states this, "I hope this book helps better equip you to be a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

I also hope to embolden you to pull back the curtain and expose the wizard. Call out the boy who cried wolf, proclaim that the emperor has no clothes, and any other metaphor you can think of for shedding light on these fault lines. Not so you can defeat your brethren in an argument, but so you can engage them with the hopes of winning them.

Love your brothers and sisters enough to contend with them and for them." Well that does it for my preview or review of the book. And my goal here wasn't to just give you a summary of the book, but a huge sampling, which is why I felt giving you these lengthy quotes was the way to go.

But before I sign off, I want to share just a little bit of my heart here. The reason I'm concerned about this movement is because it is taking well-meaning Christians on a road that is completely antithetical to the gospel. And I completely understand that it is difficult because we have friends, all of us do, from all different areas, or according to Vodi, differing sides of the fault line.

But if you believe this ideology is as sinful as Vodi claims, then going along with this pseudo-gospel is not helping anyone at all. Moreover, I am personally convinced that this ideology is a wolf in sheep's clothing and the vast majority of celebrity pastors flatly do not care enough to speak out about it particularly based on Vodi's credible claims that many did not want to go on record condemning much of the CRT language coming out from big evangelicalism.

Like Vodi, I agree, being silent is not an option. 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 H. Hamauer