Phil Johnson on what to do when your church goes woke

welcome to reform Jellicle where they reformed and evangelicals meet my name is Matt Williams Oh co-hosted by the responsible latina what did you call yourself today reasonable and the reasonable Latino 80 Robles and we are joined by the birthday boy Phil Johnson Phil Johnson how are you doing today I'm as good as you can be at my age we're just talking about that I was like I can't believe you're on our show for your birthday and he said you just stop celebrating him at his age to be my age you mourn your birthday's you don't celebrate them any anything that would distract me from the fact that I just added another year to the count is welcome alright so we'll move right along then Phil Johnson is the executive director of grace to you you want to talk a little bit about what that exactly means and what your job role is sure grace to you is the media ministry of john macarthur started out as a cassette tape ministry back in the late 1960s 1969 so we celebrated our 50th anniversary last year and over the years the ministry grew into a radio ministry and you know books we have all sorts of media basically that's what we do is produce or find ways to use mass media to expand the scope of John MacArthur's teaching ministry yeah well thank you I've been there now for nearly 40 years working with John for 40 years I started out moody press in Chicago and they were publishing some of his books and I was his editor and we got together and it's like a you know perfect perfect job for me it's what I was born to do so I've had a blessed life and a great great career that's I remember when I became a Christian you know flicking the channel on Christian radio is always a little risky but but I always knew that when I heard MacArthur's voice I was like okay this guy didn't even know who he was at the time this guy is good and then I found out who he was it's just really really grateful have that because like I said the channels of Christian radio scary stuff indeed definitely I was at a g3 this for the first time ever actually this last time and it was amazing how much of a presence the John MacArthur team had so I guess that's all credit to you well not entirely if they do all the work I sometimes get the credit but I'm kind of a figurehead really there other people do all the hands-on work and I do what I can to just keep up with my email okay I bet couldn't even imagine that so thanks for responding to my email I would say so I wanted to have you on because we have been getting tons of questions concerns a lot of people that are depressed quite frankly with just how the woke social justice movement is not just in the world and the riots on the streets but how fast it's come into the church and it feels like it was creeping in and just the velocity of the adoption of it in our churches has really picked up in the last couple weeks with people's pastors elders and just other people in the church and they just don't know what to do and I have seen a lot of your comments on Twitter and your engagement and seeing some of the sermons that you've posted on YouTube and stuff and I just thought you would be like the perfect person to come on and kind of walk through this with us this a lot of people are just really uncertain about what to do in these times so thanks for that yeah thank you it is difficult and you know I think this thing sort of broke into the evangelical consciousness maybe two years ago when the statement on social justice was was released but that was by no means the beginning of the problem social justice of course as a religious issue goes back to the beginning of the 20th century with some of the work of Walter Rauschenbusch and and you know liberals who adopted social religion the social gospel they called it and it destroyed most of the mainline denominations I grew up in a Church that belong to one of those denominations Methodist Church that was heavily invested in the 1960s in the issue of social justice and I watched it destroy that church and so that's pretty deeply ingrained in my my mind when I noticed when I first noticed that even evangelicals or people who self-identified as if angelical they were mostly seeker-sensitive people or emergent church people sometime in the late 1990s I think and it was it was it came along with the rise of the emerging church movement and this was a major theme for emergence social justice it was all they had to talk about that even seemed like morality or religion or whatever and that movement of course imploded and melted down thankfully it was a bad movement and they were known for you know questioning every foundational doctrine of Christianity they attacked the LIA doctrine of the atonement there wasn't really any Cardinal truth from Scripture that they didn't attack but social justice was the plank in their platform that seemed to have the most appeal and then people who would argue vehemently against their corruptions of the atonement would leave the social justice issue alone because it's as you see what's going on today it's it's almost impossible to argue against what they're saying in favor of what they call social justice without being labeled a racist or a hater or all sorts of things and very very few people have the courage to speak up and say anything about it well now we've got a generation of people coming into leadership in the evangelical movement who absorbed a lot of that rhetoric from the emerging church movement well whereas the movement melted down the idea didn't die and it was adopted by a lot of people and and not only that when the movement died some of the emergence I'm thinking people like Ed Stetzer who was constantly championing the emerging church he simply drifts over more into the evangelical mainstream and brings along with him all of the social justice rhetoric and and all that you know so that's my view of how it got into the evangelical movement it it it sort of bled in from emergent and even large organizations like together for the gospel the gospel coalition which were founded ostensibly around 2005 or they're about to answer the emergent challenge to to defend the doctrine of the atonement or the cardinal principles of gospel truth I mean that's built into their name the gospel coalition together for the gospel that was supposed to be the center of their message the thing that anchored them all together and now even those are organizations have begun to so division by moving away from the gospel to a message that centered more on you know social justice they borrowed and I think to a large degree unwittingly I don't think this is a deliberate scheme but they borrowed the message and the language and the rhetoric from emergence because you could see how popular it was ultimately it seems and here's a theme that goes right along with the spirit of our age if we want to win the world by winning their affections this is a great cause to take up and so it sort of bled and almost uncritically with very little opposition into the of angelical mainstream and by that I mean these large groups like together for the gospel gospel coalition big Eva so big Eva adopted it as a cause and when they celebrated the you know the anniversary of Martin Luther King what was that now four years ago three years ago yeah three or four they planted the flag and have not backed off since and the problem is once you adopt this agenda there is no way to back away from it there are just no way to do it because you will be branded a traitor a compromiser of a racist and all of that stubborn as you see even as you see on the news every night even those who bow the knee I mean literally all their knees to this movement they could stand up five minutes later and get beat half to death because they disagreed I mean this happened with the the mayor of Minneapolis yes aligned with these people and then they asked him one yes-or-no question are you in favor of defunding dis dismantling the police department and when he said no they put him on a walk of shame that really looked like Communist China to me yes anyway it definitely did so it's just it's disturbing to watch because like I said it came on all of a sudden for many people that came out of nowhere I think we actually tried groups of us tried to warn people a couple years ago with the statement on social justice that this is a threat to the unity of the church and the clarity of the gospel I think you're about to see that play out in living color yeah why do you think that it was able to just infiltrate so easily with no pushback it seems well well as I said it's been around a long time and and that rhetoric has been floating around the fringes of the Vidal local movement for decades now and nobody nobody has I mean nobody of any significance as as really aggressively mounted any kind of apologetic against it and so you've got generate two generations maybe of people currently in leadership among evangelicals who really don't see anything wrong with it because they've never actually learned the history of social gospel and they don't see the the threat that it poses how they don't see I don't know but I think there are a lot of people even even starting with a basic idea like unity they equate unity with majority opinion that's not what unity is about the unity Christ prayed for is it the unity that's anchored in the truth starting with the the gospel itself and the further we move away from that the the more we spoil the spiritual unity that's supposed to you know anchor the church plus and I said this in a tweet the other day just before you contacted me I wondered if this tweet was what sort of prompted you to to contact me about this lok ism is a religion it's a cultish religion it's a it's a horrible religion but it is a religious credo and and people who latch on to it honestly believe even the evangelicals who more or less you know blended it with with what they believe is their commitment to the gospel they're letting it overwhelm the gospel but they're attached to it because they believe it in the same way people believe or religions just it's a it's a kind of blind faith where data doesn't matter reality doesn't matter it's a it's a superstitious religion yeah yeah it definitely is which just makes it even more shocking to me that it's been in the church for so long and people are so comfortable with blending it in it really just reminds me of the Old Testament where people would worship God but then they also have these idols that they would worship and there's like the struggle of getting rid of this idols getting rid of the high places because of the judgment that would come from it I mean I don't know what else do equate it with yeah that's exactly right and and if you read you know just the scriptures if that's all you had you have a several centuries of religious history here that prove that there is this inexorable tendency even among people of faith people who genuinely believed in the real God there's still a tendency that we need to fight against and mortify to blend what God has revealed to us with the religious ideas that surround us from the culture and all that and so syncretism was it was a perpetual plague in Israel you see even in the early church the New Testament only gives less than a hundred years of history for the for the church and yet especially if you read crusts letters to the churches in Revelation syncretism was already a significant problem in in the first century church and that's what you're seeing today you're seeing a church that's been schooled with the idea that you know in order to win the world we have to attract them it's not the message where the power of conversion lies not the gospel isn't the power of God to salvation it's our likeability our our ability to communicate and contextualize everything so it sounds like stuff the world already agrees that's how we win them and so they're looking for ways to to do that and here's this religion that because we're all sort of steeped in postmodern values it sounds like a really good thing and all that but it's it's a false religion being syncretized mm-hmm yeah you said that it goes back to the 60s which honestly I haven't heard I'm only thirty but but what like from a comparative perspective is it the similar thought actions as the sixties is there difference between it or is it just to you the same exact thing just been living through the church all this time in many ways it is the same exact same thing the the major difference I see is that it was not independent evangelical churches and conservative Reformed churches to bought into the social gospel in the 20th century and you know by the time I came along and was conscious the early 1960s the church I was in was already heavily invested in the social gospel and and all of that so it looks the same but what what's shocking and different is you got people who profess faith in the authority and inerrancy of Scripture and the truth of the gospel and yet they're wanting to to blend this with what they believe with what they say they believe from Scripture it's so that that's the major difference is that now it's evangelical churches it's some of the most conservative churches even that are being affected and infected by this and why they don't connect the history of what happened just a generation - ago with the dangers surrounding this I don't know but if you even suggest this is dangerous I mean that's what the statement on social justice was supposed to do to say look there are dangers surrounding this move and you know let's think through this biblically just making that suggestion will will inflame anger like you can't imagine among fellow believers who will accuse you of all sorts of sinister motives up to and including racial you know ethnic hatred so it's it's not a popular thing it's not a popular argument to make and therefore there's very little defense against it I mean even look at someone like al mohler who who we know is seems to be politically conservative but on this issue he even though he denies that he's silent on it he's been remarkably and stunningly silent on it he's got a new book out called The Gathering Storm that I just scanned the table of contents but looks to me like he he just omits this issue and yet this is where the storm is going okay I know the irony of that yeah he seems like I don't know him at all but just from his writings and is what he's talked about publicly it seems like he's playing more of a political game and trying to be on both sides of it no go ahead well I I just wanted to jump in here because this is I think you hit the nail on the head of what makes this different from before cuz I've read books from the from the 70s and and 80s that we're addressing this issue and it's remarkable that the books written then could they just as well apply today but but that is what makes it different because the people that are saying this stuff now they believe in the inerrancy of Scripture they believe all of these conservative doctrines that's why it's so difficult I think for a lot of people and I don't know about you Phil but people reach out to me and say well what do I do I mean these these guys I've been going to this church for a while it's a good church they preached the gospel but now they're recommending I read this book on white fragility by this lady like like what do I do about this is this a dividing line should I leave my church for it and that's kind of why what I wanted to but you know potentially ask somebody on this show is just is it that serious cuz it certainly sounds like you're saying it's pretty serious I think it's very serious I never encourage people to leave their church quickly I think it's best to stay and fight but there's a heavy price to pay if you do that and the time may come when you know the the gospel is so compromised by this and and the speed with which it's gaining traction makes me think that could come very quickly where ya faithful people are going to have to bail out of some of these churches there were you know Angelica was really needed in my view to get out of the mainstream denominations by the middle part of the 20th century a lot of people tried to hang on and thought they could make a difference but they didn't really I don't I don't know of a single mainstream denomination that bought into liberalism that actually moved back in a more faithful direction you might say well the SBC was the exception to that seems to me the final chapter on the SBC is yet to be written indeed you know they made him a move in the right direction but it's it really looks to me like there's a danger that all the ground that was gained in the conservative resurgence is going to be sacrificed and that's a mirror of what's happened to the larger evangelical movement I did a message 20 years ago called are we losing the battle for the Bible the battle for the Bible was the name of the book that was written in 1970s to combat the attack that was taking place in seminaries like fuller seminary against biblical inerrancy and the authority of Scripture and evangelical leaders got together in the late 70s early 80s and formed a group called the Council on biblical inerrancy and they defended biblical inerrancy so successfully that by the time they finished their work and and shut that organization down it seemed most evangelicals most evangelical is with any influence and reputation the ones who actually pastored churches as opposed to those who taught in academic institutions they all affirms the belittle inerrancy and yet despite the fact that they had fought this war and really won a great victory in favor of biblical inerrancy it was just a matter of four or five years before the influence is like you know Rick Warren and and Willow Creek Church in Chicago pushing this attraction alai dia of evangelism they had fought for the inerrancy and authority of Scripture but now suddenly churches were saying that's not yet let's not be too biblical let's let's contextualize let's do sermons on you know the latest popular movies us try to reach people where they're at and so within a decade after winning the war for Biblical Authority biblical inerrancy most M angelical churches were kind of ignoring the Bible and now you've got a couple of generations that don't even remember the battle over biblical inerrancy and yet hordes of people who will say well I believe in biblical inerrancy I sign all the right doctrinal Sabin's I affirm all those doctrines the problem is to affirm a doctrine doesn't do you any good if you don't actually preach it and if you don't follow it and and that's where I think the conflict a lot of the conflict lies today you've got seminary professors who are aggressively and obviously eighty you've shown videos of these guys in their classrooms promoting critical race theory and you know cultural Marxism and all sorts of bad ideas and yet the defense is will they sign our doctrinal statement they're they're sound I don't care what doctrinal statement you sign frankly if you don't preach it and if you don't defend it against the errors that would undermine it and that's where I think we're at on this issue you got a lot of people who sign all the right doctrinal statements they take all the right boxes and yet they're actually and and fairly aggressively promoting I and a worldview that hits at the very heart of the gospel I mean social justice sounds benign right we all want justice and adds social tool but this makes it sound like we're saying our society should be just everybody agrees with that right but the social justice movement woke ISM how whatever you want to call it actually encourages people to hold grudges to hang on to resentments to to feel offended about things that never even actually happened to them and other people to feel guilt and bearing the weight of shame for stuff that they never did but supposedly maybe their ancestors did and if not other members of their ethnic group so it's like we've in the name of opposing ethnic strife and racism we've adopted a racist worldview where we're willing now to blame an entire ethnic group for the sins of people generations ago and you know it's a that hits at the heart of the gospel message of forgiveness and grace and and oneness in Christ and unity in the church I don't see what people don't see this and yet it's the critics people like 80 and so on who who actually speak truth on some of these issues they're the ones who get accused of destroying the unity of the church because they're not going along with you know the majority opinion and his tone his tone is just out of control well that's fair especially when he does the smooth jazz I lost my glasses I gotta get some new ones cuz any to do another one of those over yeah I say those for the nights when I can't sleep which is gonna be tonight after you do this show for sure so we have we have these churches that are using these states and statements and confessions is almost like get-out-of-jail-free cards is we're gonna do this we're gonna apply this we're gonna preach this but hey don't hold it against us we confess to these things we believe these things so you can't judge us and so we have these people that see the play being run and they're asking what to do and we say don't just be quick like to leave your church you should stay and fight so could we kind of kind of talk about that what does it mean to stay in fight and I think there's kind of two different routes depending on if it's your elders and pastors or is it people that are in the church with you bringing this in like what does it look like for people to stay in fight well for most people I think what it doesn't mean is you you get on the internet and publicly criticize the leaders of your church I think the right thing to do first always if the person you're critiquing is not a public figure who is promoted as heresy on the internet but your pastor in your church go to him directly amen and have a lengthy conversation with him about this and share your concerns and you might find that it's difficult to do you're not maybe as articulate or quick on your feet to think as he is it is an intimidating thing to do but it's your spiritual responsibility to those who have the oversight over you mm-hmm yeah and you shouldn't even I would say if I was doing this to my pastor I wouldn't even do it with the objective to win an argument I would just do it because that's what God wants me to do and how the pastor responds that's kind of between him and God and then I need to make a decision after that so you shouldn't go do it thinking that you need to win a debate that's gonna be on YouTube and there's an audience but it's for you to go there and give him a chance to explain himself maybe there's a misunderstanding or so repents or the change direction to change his mind but it's not about you having to win some intellectual debate so I just get that out of your mind if you're thinking that you have to do that yeah don't be discouraged - if he doesn't change is my first time you talk to him one of the difficulties about mass movements like this and one of the frightening things about the speed with which this particular controversy has so bold is that makes it harder and harder for people who I mean they're looking to the majority opinion they're looking to what's cool and stylish to begin with they're not gonna they're not gonna respond easily do concern one minute the church who you know who has no public voice it's a very very difficult battle to fight and I predict there will be lots of casualties lots of churches that are on what Spurgeon called the downgrade the road to apostasy and you're not gonna be able to stop them all but the Lord has a remnant and ultimately it may be that you have to leave your church and find those people from the faithful remnant who still want to uphold the gospel as it's given in Scripture and preached about you know man's sin God's forgiveness God's grace rather than all the time bemoaning how bad our society is you know III really appreciate what you said you know obviously I didn't know how you were gonna answer some of these questions but I've been telling people you know you know it's good to stay in fight you shouldn't just give up instantly you shouldn't just go out you know in a blaze of glory or anything like that it's just you know you know I think Christians that have a good church then they're thinking right now you know these guys are conservative like what's going on like you know stay set I would I would commit to the long game until I could just couldn't take it anymore you know have conversations and and be calm about and and I think Phil you're right you're not gonna necessarily change someone's opinion overnight but but I think bringing valid concerns and and and and being you know good you know sincere about it is is going to help to be honest and and and I promises a question here somewhere but honest this is why I wanted you know people that have big public platforms to do a little bit more debating and interacting and stuff like that so it wouldn't come to this situation where we're gonna have tons of casualties and the pews we could have avoided all this I think but it just didn't happen that way so let me ask you this so maybe even if we can get a little more granular you know any any specific strategies about you know making this kind of intimidating conversation with your pastor maybe you're you know a single woman in the church maybe you're you know just soul a layman and you have a family you know you're not a feel golde genius any like me do you ask questions I mean maybe if you could go into like some granular strategy of how to have this conversation in a way that that's not gonna not gonna come across as I know more than you pastor you know what I mean yeah I'm sure pastors get that all the time right - I think for for most church members you're probably on a stronger footing if you can you know quote quote from things you've read things that people who have some sort of stature and knowledge to speak on certain issues courts quote them to support the ideas you're trying to get across ask do more asking questions than you do accusatory comments generally those are sorts of rules of thumb which is not to say you know if if your pastor is veering off the gospel it's an urgent issue and you need to do it urgently it may sound like you're gonna be accusatory but do the best you can for me personally in a situation like that I'm a better writer than I am the speaker you know and so I like to take my time and write out something and I would hand it to the pastor and say I have these concerns I wanted to share it with you and I would stress this is just between you and me because the first concern the pastor is gonna have is are you trying to roust up a mutiny in the church you need to reassure him that no I want to keep this between me and you here are my concerns and hopefully he'll be motivated to answer you and answer you thoughtfully and maybe you'll influence him if he doesn't if he blows it off I give it a second maybe even a third try they're made in come a time when you have to go out in a blaze of glory I think I don't know what you I'm not saying cause that you're split on your way out try to drag as many as you can that's a bad way to respond yeah I wasn't saying that either but um but yeah I think one of the pieces of advice I really want to pull out there and just put an emphasis on is this whole idea of this is just between you and me that's huge man because I think you're right I think that that there sometimes can be a lot of defensiveness when you all of a sudden have to think oh my goodness is there an insurrection is there a mutiny is it what's going on here you know that's that's really good advice I also really like the idea of writing it out because I think there's a lot of people out there that you know may be worried about thinking on their feet and stuff like that and even if it's just like hey pastor you know here's some I want this is just between you and me like I'd like to talk to you about this a little bit but I think it'd be helpful if you kind of read what I was thinking before we talk you know me or something like that like I don't know I really like both of those things that can make it much less intimidating and much easier I think which is something that I think a lot of people are probably looking for and at the same time getting out what you need to get out you know yeah yeah and even to the look to the Obama I'm sorry go ahead no that's good it's it's just really a hard thing to manage this kind of disagreement with the leaders of a church but there are times many times when it's necessary for you as a believer in the church to do this and going back to those letters from Christ to the churches in the book of Revelation he actually commends people who stand for the truth even though the rest of the churches go in the wrong way so it's a noble thing to do and you may find that the church leaders don't particularly appreciate it and you have to understand from their perspective they can get carping critics all the time even the most faithful pastors do and I often cringe when I see like a church this being played out on the Internet even if I'm siding with the people who are publishing their grievances online like I think their grievances are valid that's not the way to handle a conflict in the church even an important doctrine of one like this yeah for the sake of loving your brothers and sisters in the church and for your testimony to the world I think those are the things we need to be considering as we handle all of this is how are we a defying the church and how are we and preaching the gospel through our actions and through how we handle these things it's putting it on Twitter and Facebook is not that not the way to be telling people about Jesus yep no crazy so how it what would you guys say to somebody that you see in the church that is espousing this kind of thing what do you do with somebody that you know that's talking about it spreading it around to people handing out the books things like that I depends on the person actually and and what what aspect of the conflict they're arguing I I I always like to come back to the fact that ultimately what ISM is its own religion it is a religion I first began to think about that maybe four or five years ago and it was it was a secular guy who got me thinking that way John McWhorter he's a professor at Columbia University professor of linguistics he's a black guy but he's an academic who came from a line of academics both his parents I think his mom taught at Temple University and his dad taught at another you know big league school so he grew up in this academic environment and he is one of the world's leading linguistic experts and himself a great writer but he's not a believer and does profess to me as far as I know and yet he looks at loke ism and he says look this is a religion this is a religion for the secular world this is this is what people who repudiated religion do to fill that spiritual gap in the human consciousness that says we have to have a religion it's got its own cRIO it's got strict doctrines that are here adhere to as matters of faith it's the new orthodoxy and it's a very narrow credo and it's still in flux and it's getting narrower every day it has its own sacraments and rituals you see that with the demands for people to bend their knee and they're washing each other's feet and and all that they have their own high priests and those are the living guys who are leading the movement and have their Saints the ones who are dead or have been you know even some of them former criminals killed by over-aggressive policemen they'd be instantly gained sainthood they have their own kind of hymnology they have rhetoric that if you notice favors homiletically other than a scholarly style when you hear these people talk it's a sermon and I'm not talking about just the image ellika ones even even the most secular woke people are their preachers they appeal to deep emotions and they utilize personal testimonies and it carefully crafted narrative it's the the woke mythology rather than statistics and facts and things like that's a religion in every way and ultimately woke ISM then has all of the characteristics of a religious campaign it is a crusade to win converts by any means possible and if you if you convert if you suddenly become woke you you gain a moral standing that non converts those of us who are unwashed and unwell we don't have so that to a devotee of woke Ness to be unquote is tantamount to being a rank Haven you know so they see wellness to them locust is not merely a matter of politics its religion it has quite literally become a point of religious doctrine that is so important to them that it has in any this is true even among the evangelicals it has upstaged and eclipsed abortion as the number one moral crisis in America and even in the minds of woe Kevin Jellico's I don't get that and I don't get how someone can think like that and say you know this isn't changing my doctrine this isn't doing anything serious to my my biblical convictions was deceived when you see and it's yeah it's suddenly crowded out abortion as the number one Ave angelical moral concern so wellness has all the characteristics of a cult it it defines sin for example mainly if not entirely as a horizontal offense you know it's it's not necessarily even a personal offense it could be that your your ancestors offended my ancestors and you have to answer for that is your sin you are guilty mainly for what your ancestors may have done and even if your ancestors never oppressed anyone my ancestors were poor Hawaii trash they weren't slave owners they were cotton pickers literally and horse thieves but even if your ancestors never actually oppressed anyone if there are other members of your ethnic group who did oppress people then you bare guilt for that guilt is therefore a corporate responsibility it's a portion differently to different ethnicities and if you don't have the right kind of victim status you you must confess your guilt by kneeling and reciting the prescribed confession and if you don't do this your refusal to genuflect on command is going to stand as proof of your culpability that fact that you descent from the received opinion only intensifies your criminality and you're going to be shunned by polite society in fact lie I read a somebody who was it somebody tweeted I think just today that's like the Free Speech Coalition or something out of 40 a 24 part tweet storm listing all the people who in the past two weeks have been fired because they weren't politically correct enough or they did something or said something that in many cases trivial things what about what about that what about that soccer player whose wife said something and he got fired or this church pastor he liked a tweet and the school that he was leasing in for his church canceled his lease just for liking a tweet yeah that's what happens and if you if you remain stubbornly unwell those who are woke will scold you and harass you and they'll even try to give you fire your job or worse there's a there's a woman on Twitter right now who all her tweets are all caps she's yelling at me and she has singled me out and promised me that she's going to get me fired from my job and I will regret the fact that I wasn't on when I wasn't woke no Phil might be the only one that's not one tweet away from getting fired on the planet you know I'm not as I don't think I'm not secure actually I don't know about that you know I from all that you said though it's one of the bright things or the the silver linings and the clouds for me with that is before it was it took some convincing and really some long discussions to try to convince people that this humanist religion what they teach in public schools about these kinds of things is religious and now it's just not arguable like you can't say that these people bowing down is not a religious ceremony just like everything that you said and so I'm kind of thankful for that yeah in fact the only thing they don't have that other religions do is a means of atonement or promise of forgiveness I mean there is no concept of forgiveness here there's no possibility of ultimate redemption it's a worldview that is impossible to blend with gospel truth and its inevitable drift is going to take the low Kevin Jellico's of today exactly where the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch took the mainline denominations last century in to rank theological liberalism and unbelief and it may take a while for that to happen it may not be this generation but I promise you the next generation is is going to be susceptible to everything that the mainline denominations fell into so the question I keep asking myself is like this stuff isn't hidden we see how the results of this happen and is it really just that people buy into this pastors the big ever buys into this because it's seeker-friendly they're trying to just build crowds is it something else like why is this so attractive to people I don't understand it whatsoever because of the results we see if this was the first time I ever encountered anything like that I might be mystified but I've been watching Evan Jellicle since well I became a Christian in 1971 and at the time this was right you know at the end of the Vietnam War where you'd had a lot of emphasis on social justice in the Methodist Church I got converted left the Methodist Church joined an evangelical church and and instantly then I noticed evangelicals are absolutely obsessed we're trying to win the world's favor what happened the first year I would say it was what was it called Expo 72 or something like that in Dallas was a big it was supposed to be the Christian counterpart to the Woodstock Festival they had all these big-name people I remember Kris Kristofferson the actor came and gave his testimony he's supposed to be a Christian and you know the idea was if we can do something that gains a lot of attention and a lot of goodwill we can win the world that way and evangelicals have been trying to do that ever since it's what seeker sensitivity was all about I'm convinced the emerging church movement was just another manifestation of this attraction 'el thing it's like I said earlier I don't think Angelica 'ls in this generation genuinely believe that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation they think the gospel alone is is deficient and in fact that's you hear that from these people who are touting social justice are you just gonna preach the gospel you think that's gonna solve people's problems yeah I do and and I probably saw those tweets from I won't name her but she's a Christian author and writes woman's books and she she posted a list of tweets saying if you're gonna join these demonstrations don't go and witness to people she said don't treat the protests as a mission field she said you you gotta go and and and don't dilute the message with the gospel mm-hmm yeah yeah Beth more even like that she did she did and that's the disturbing thing and how can you look at that and say no this movement won't detract from the gospel because we all sign the right doctrinal statement and yet here they are saying don't preach the gospel because you'll water down the message yeah it's a get out of free jail card that's all those statements are to them maybe what are we gonna say no I was just gonna say that you know there's there's there's literally pastors from the gospel coalition gospel centered movement that have said that exact thing like you would eat just gonna preach the gospel to them and it's just I don't really have anything to say about that let that just lie it really yeah well I know years ago I said years ago the gospel coalition needed to choose which was more important the gospel or the coalition and it seems to me they chose the Coalition mm-hmm yeah it's really hard once you become an institution to give up the institutional status it seems like you just circle the wagons and you have this groupthink and it just echoes and becomes more and more of whatever it was it's really sad so I don't know I don't even know where to go from here uh geez so what is your outlook on this whole situation well like what do you think where does this go from here well I'm getting old I'm I'm gonna die before it's resolved so you're leaving it huh yeah I just turned 67 man I I I figured 15 years or now I'm gonna be in heaven I do I am concerned about you know my grandchildren's generation and what they're going to face and yet you know I know enough about church history to know that the Lord does always preserve a remnant it's always a remnant and I think evangelicals make a huge mistake when they think we need to get the majority on our side I think what we need to do is cultivate and educate the remnant and let them be a testimony and the Lord will will use his truth the way he always has to keep the gospel alive it's kind of amazing in two thousand years that the that there there still is a gospel testimony all of the apostasy all the false doctrines all the stuff like this is not the first time that orthodoxy has been threatened by some popular idea it happens probably every four years or so and yet the truth does survive and the gates of hell are not gonna prevail against the Church of Christ so I'm an optimist I'm not a post millennial optimist but I am an optimist and and and I know the I know the last chapter of the story and the truth wins so my goal only is to stay on the on the right side of the truth and if the rest of the world denies it that's you know I'm gonna I'm still gonna stand with Christ even when he's not popular mm-hmm that's right yeah I think that's I think that's the key I mean whether whether you're you're holding out hope that the whole world converts or not our marching orders are fairly simple I mean we we disciple those that belong to Christ now so if that's a small number if that's one or two people or if that's the entire universe whatever that number is that's what that's what we're focused on I completely agree yeah right and the unity I want is unity with those people who share that commitment to the truth not not the unity of the vast majority you know in fact listen to the vast majority and their message get woke or get out how in the world does that promote Christian unity it doesn't and and so there's so many contradictions in this movement I honestly don't see how anyone who reads Scripture and pays attention to what it says can jump on this particular bandwagon but here we are I know it's astonishing and it's one of the things that amazes me about it is how the language between Christian woke people and the world woke people are the exact same it's interchangeable and I don't understand that doesn't seem to be a red flag to them like these are smart intelligent people right concept you hear all the time for math angelical people quite privilege and whiteness even the expression these are offensive terms and you don't get them from Scripture then get these ideas on the Bible you know they're straight out of Marxist sources and and why that doesn't bother the people who are spouting the jargon I don't know but I know they used to talk about 15 years ago everybody was talking about the missional church let's be missional I said they're not missional they're jargon 'el jargon all church yeah I don't want to be part of the jargon old church yeah eighty loves the jargon let me tell you you don't belong to a missional community is that you're trying to tell me like group or a small group or yeah well phil johnson thank you for joining us on your birthday happy birthday sir and thank you for being faithful it's a really encouragement to our generation to see men standing strong in the midst of so many just acting like the world so thank you so much for that seriously thanks for having me thank you

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Keywords: phil johnson, phil johnson grace to you, phil johnson al mohler, phil johnson womanly preachers, phil johnson john macarthur, phil johnson beth moore, phil johnson social justice, phil johnson woke, the woke church movement, social justice christian, critical theory social justice and christianity, phil johnson ad robles, ad robles woke church, ad robles youtube, ad robles podcast, reformgelical, grace to you, social justice for kids, virtue signaling meaning, virtue signaling

Id: J4dy96jPZQ0

Length: 50min 28sec (3028 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020