Latest / Worldview Matters With David Fiorazo / Christina Crenshaw: Biblically Defining And ‘Redeeming JUSTICE’

Transcript

Christina Crenshaw: Biblically Defining And ‘Redeeming JUSTICE’ · Worldview Matters With David Fiorazo

• 0:00
  The 2027 Worldview Matters Conference will take place April 30th and May 1st at the Tundra Lodge Resort, Water Park and Conference Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
• 0:10
  Speakers include Andy Woods, Brandon Holthouse, Nathan Jones, Matthew Mayer,
• 0:18
  Hadia Miramati Falco, Pete Garcia, Brian Thomas, Steve Smotherman, J.B. Hickson, Mark Henry, Brianna Claussen, Alex Newman, Mark and Amber Archer.
• 0:35
  To register, go to davidfiorazzo.com or worldviewmattersconference.com.
• 0:46
  Welcome to Worldview Matters.
• 0:48
  Discussing controversial issues.
• 0:51
  Discerning current events.
• 0:53
  Defending biblical Christianity.
• 0:56
  No topic.
• 0:57
  Off limits.
• 0:59
  And now, here's your host, David Fiorazzo.
• 1:03
  Friends, family, and Christ, welcome to another episode.
• 1:06
  We're going to talk about a subject we haven't touched on in recent weeks or maybe even months, social justice.
• 1:12
  First of all, what is justice biblically?
• 1:15
  We're going to talk about that with today's guest, Christina Crenshaw.
• 1:18
  But first, I just want to give you a little bit of her background.
• 1:20
  She's got a great book out called Redeeming Justice.
• 1:25
  So she's got a Ph.D. from Baylor University.
• 1:28
  She has 20 years experience as a professor, researcher, writer, speaker.
• 1:33
  She's an assistant professor at Arizona Christian University and a fellow with their Cultural Research Center.
• 1:40
  You're familiar with that, I'm sure.
• 1:42
  She's held faculty and leadership positions at California Baptist University, Baylor University, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Southwestern Seminary.
• 1:51
  She's served as a chair of the Waco Human Trafficking Prevention Coalition and participated in roundtable meetings with Texas Governor Greg Abbott's statewide human trafficking task force and so much more.
• 2:06
  Her website is really easy.
• 2:08
  It's just her name.
• 2:09
  It is Christina Corrigan.
• 2:11
  Crenshaw dot com.
• 2:14
  You can find her on X and communicate with her there.
• 2:18
  And her book is on Amazon.
• 2:20
  You're going to want to go check that out.
• 2:21
  Redeeming justice, reclaiming God's vision for doing good in the world.
• 2:28
  So let's have this conversation.
• 2:30
  Christina, welcome.
• 2:31
  Thanks for your time.
• 2:32
  Thank you for having me, David.
• 2:34
  All right, you're most welcome.
• 2:35
  Now, let's talk about defining the terms, as I kind of alluded to in the intro.
• 2:40
  We are not sure we're clear on social justice.
• 2:45
  I think most people know what justice is, but now, this day and age, especially young people today who want to maybe do good things, and maybe even in the church, can you please help us define the terms?
• 2:57
  Let's start there.
• 2:59
  Yeah, sure.
• 3:00
  Well, you know, David, I, as a college professor, started to get increasingly concerned when I would see my college students coming to class and they had a heart for doing good and really wanting to do justice.
• 3:12
  But I started to realize even at a Christian university, this is prior to where I currently teach, they were losing the biblical plot line, so to speak.
• 3:22
  I realized that their definition of justice and their activism was based really on humanism.
• 3:28
  So I start there when I'm having the conversation and I say, okay, are we rooting this desire to do justice based in a biblical definition?
• 3:37
  And God's desire of what he says to be created in the Imago Dei and to recognize that we have a sin nature, but that through Jesus that we can be redeemed.
• 3:46
  And God's ultimate plan is restoration, restoration for the earth, restoration for his people.
• 3:51
  Because anything apart from that biblical narrative is not something that Christians should partner with.
• 3:58
  And so I realized that students were really rooting their definitions of justice in humanism and the idea of kind of socialism or redistribution of wealth.
• 4:08
  And I kind of started asking the question which prompted the book, okay, there are some elements of this that I think that, you know, we could maybe fit into the biblical narrative, but largely these humanist ideas of justice do not actually align with scripture.
• 4:24
  And so that is where I start as a definition point is what is the end goal?
• 4:30
  What is the telos, if you will?
• 4:32
  What is the eternal perspective?
• 4:34
  Because social justice really is just concerned with the temporal, whereas we know with a biblical view of justice, it is concerned with salvation, that it is concerned with.
• 4:44
  with the eternal.
• 4:45
  So that would be sort of like a starting point that I would give parents or students when they're looking at what is the difference between social justice and biblical justice?
• 4:54
  Well, what is the end goal?
• 4:56
  Is the end goal really unity with the Lord and salvation, or is the end goal just to kind of make the world a better place?
• 5:03
  Because the latter is more of a social justice definition than it would be a biblical definition.
• 5:09
  Thank you.
• 5:10
  And I know the confusion is easy to understand when you talk about the declining biblical worldview in the church.
• 5:16
  So we have to go back to the basics.
• 5:19
  We have to define the terms.
• 5:20
  And could you please talk a little bit more about the difference between humanism and secular humanism?
• 5:27
  Or is there such a thing as secular?
• 5:29
  I know there's secular progressivism.
• 5:31
  Humanism is really just doing what pleases man.
• 5:35
  Is it that simple or can you help us understand that better?
• 5:39
  Yeah, so in the book, what I do in the worldview section and the middle part, the first part looks at, you know, kind of this cultural moment, how did we get here?
• 5:47
  I think sort of starting that conversation of we didn't just wake up one day and find ourselves in this crazy, you know, secular humanist perspective, that this really was a slow progression, or as, you know, I've heard people in the Colson Center sometimes talk about how we started to hit the pedal
• 6:07
  and go full speed once we got to about the 1960s with the sexual revolution.
• 6:12
  But we kind of look at how did we get to this place?
• 6:16
  And then in the middle section, I look at worldview and I walk through different questions that people have on like, what is nihilism?
• 6:24
  What is humanism?
• 6:26
  What is secularism?
• 6:27
  What is postmodernism?
• 6:29
  And really, David, the easiest way to explain this for listeners, and I'm sure your audience is familiar with this,
• 6:34
  is to look at critical theories critical theories are really what undermine um the the biblical worldview you know for most of you know our country's history we've had this biblical worldview this touchstone for what is true what is good what is right what is beautiful and as we have parted from or departed i should say from that biblical worldview as that's become less prevalent and relevant and culture
• 7:02
  what we've adopted is these critical theories that are based on post-truth and post-modernism and humanism.
• 7:10
  And really all of that is just really humanity's way of trying to grapple with what is our identity, what is our purpose, but really not integrating what God says our identity is, the Imago Dei, and what God says our purpose is, which is eternal unification with him and
• 7:32
  We've only got the here and now.
• 7:34
  We've only got humanity.
• 7:36
  So let's just do what looks right and feels right for, again, the temporal and not the eternal.
• 7:42
  Yeah, interesting.
• 7:43
  I'm also hearing a little bit of follow your heart, you know, do what makes you feel good.
• 7:47
  And boy, is that bad advice for the Christian anyway.
• 7:51
  I like your three sections.
• 7:53
  Part one, this cultural moment, which you just described.
• 7:56
  Part two, thank you for giving a shout out to our podcast.
• 7:59
  Your worldview matters.
• 8:02
  And part three, doing good for God's glory.
• 8:05
  And I think that's what you're talking about primarily for the believer in Christ to make sure we are doing his work, doing his will biblically, understanding and seeing through that framework, through that lens, and then living it out.
• 8:20
  And so it's not about doing just good works to feel good about ourselves, because that's what the world has been selling.
• 8:27
  And Christina, talk a little bit more about this younger generation, Gen Z, maybe even millennials that have been sold that, you know, we need to be compassionate.
• 8:36
  And I know there's a book called Toxic Empathy, I think, which helps us understand why are young people so drawn to maybe being compassionate over truth and over the Bible?
• 8:46
  Could you speak to that for a moment?
• 8:48
  Yeah, so you mentioned Toxic Empathy, and that's Ali Beth Stuckey's book.
• 8:52
  I am friends with her, it was on her podcast, and I always joke that she beat me to the punchline by about a year.
• 8:58
  I had already submitted the proposal.
• 9:00
  But what her book does, and I do recommend that that is a great place to start if you're really wanting to understand just how did we get here culturally.
• 9:08
  And she looks at five different points.
• 9:10
  What I try to do is go deeper and look at really how did we get here from a biblical worldview perspective.
• 9:18
  And then what do we need to do to rightly align our perspective and recapture our touchstone and get the ship back, you know, headed direct north?
• 9:29
  In the third part of my book, that was my favorite section to write because I look at...
• 9:35
  Not only how does the Bible describe justice, because there's different expressions of justice, but all of those expressions are aimed at redemption, at redeeming what has been lost and broken.
• 9:48
  And so every expression, even when we look at things that are like retributive justice, would be more of like an eye for an eye or...
• 9:55
  You know, we look at distributive justice, which would maybe fall under things like the year of Jubilee.
• 10:01
  These are all expressions of justice within the Bible aimed at redeeming what the enemy has stolen, at restoring what has been lost from the fall.
• 10:12
  And in that section I also talk about, which I think answers your question, the church history.
• 10:18
  I got a little weary.
• 10:19
  I think we all did in the church after 2020.
• 10:22
  of watching people deconstruct their faith and watching the bride of Christ be slandered.
• 10:28
  And I thought to myself as I had this idea for this book, what has church history shown us to be, again, what's good and true and beautiful about the body of Christ?
• 10:38
  Because when I look at church history,
• 10:40
  I see that they are, Christians are the reasons we've ended infanticide.
• 10:45
  Christians are the reasons that we have expanded education.
• 10:50
  Most of the seminaries that have been started in the universities, we have Western culture to thank for that and the Christian influence on Western culture.
• 11:00
  When we look at the abolitionist movement, you know, yes, I acknowledge in the book that Christians have been complicit worldwide in slavery.
• 11:08
  However, Christians are also the reason that we have ended slavery.
• 11:12
  When we look at the movement of William Wilberforce or we look at Frederick Douglass and we look at what the church did in order to end that atrocity.
• 11:21
  And then for a more contemporary perspective, I look at the human trafficking.
• 11:26
  What are the ways the church has stepped up to the place with things like human trafficking and homelessness and hunger?
• 11:33
  And largely when we see places of social justice, of social good within Western society, the church has been at the helm, everything from the Salvation Army to St. Jude's to Jesus
• 11:47
  to different charities.
• 11:49
  It has largely been driven by the church.
• 11:52
  And so part three was a reminder to the body of Christ that that is our legacy.
• 11:57
  That's what we have to stand on.
• 11:59
  Thank you.
• 12:00
  Thank you.
• 12:02
  I want to double down on that a little bit, because where did this narrative come from that the church is on the wrong side of history when it comes to, for example, slavery?
• 12:11
  And I'm thinking, wow, is it people don't know their history?
• 12:15
  They don't know what the Bible teaches.
• 12:17
  It's kind of a mind boggling thing for me.
• 12:20
  When you look at America and our involvement, weren't we one of the first countries in the world to be against slavery and oppose it and finally get rid of it?
• 12:30
  Can you speak to that?
• 12:31
  And where did the lies seep in to our culture where people were believing the opposite of the truth?
• 12:39
  Yeah, well, we talked about you.
• 12:41
  We're going to have a guest, George Varna, on, and he really is the expert, the preeminent scholar right now on biblical worldview and testing our biblical literacy.
• 12:50
  And he has data showing that we just keep slow creeping our way from the Bible as our touchstone.
• 12:58
  Even when I wrote my dissertation 10 years ago, our biblical literacy and our worldview knowledge.
• 13:04
  was ranked so much higher on every poll, not just George Barnett's research, which you could look at Pew, you could look at Gallup.
• 13:12
  Anybody who is testing sort of the religious temperature of America could tell you that even 10 years ago, and particularly 20, 30 years ago, we had more biblical literacy and we had more of a biblical perspective than we do now.
• 13:27
  And so we've got this fractured perspective that is no longer unifying our country.
• 13:33
  And when you have told kids for generations that you're living in a terrible country, that you can't trust the church, eventually that seeps into their psyche.
• 13:44
  And so we're seeing the unfortunate toxic fruit of that where kids no longer believe they're growing up,
• 13:52
  millennials and Gen Z to believe that the church is no longer relevant, that the church no longer produces good fruit.
• 13:58
  And so again, it brings us back to that place of humanism where they're falsely believing, well, then it's up to me.
• 14:04
  It's up to my social activism.
• 14:07
  One of the other things that I touch on in the book, David, that was just so deeply concerning to me
• 14:12
  is we know that we were created by God and the image of God to worship God.
• 14:17
  And so we know that there is that place in our heart to do so.
• 14:20
  And if we are not worshiping God, what we will do is we will fill that void with something else.
• 14:27
  And social justice has become a religion.
• 14:29
  It's become a dogma for a lot of people in millennial and Gen Z generations.
• 14:35
  And it's because they have...
• 14:37
  you know, falsely turned their heart towards this idea of humanism and social justice, rather than realizing actually God has had a redemptive plan for people all along.
• 14:48
  And we just need to recapture that, reclaim it, redeem it.
• 14:52
  But yes, the data shows that millennials and particularly Gen Z are more concerned with social justice and activism than any other generation.
• 15:02
  When I talk to college groups, I've talked, you know, at different
• 15:06
  worldview and generational conferences or discipleship conferences rather, they will tell me that they are involved in activism, even the Christians in them, which is a good thing, but they're calling their congressmen.
• 15:17
  They are calling their senators.
• 15:19
  They are writing letters.
• 15:20
  And I have to say, I can't speak for you, David, but I know that I was not doing that with my college years.
• 15:25
  These kids are concerned.
• 15:27
  And so I validate that and I want to remind them
• 15:30
  There is a plan of eternity in that.
• 15:34
  Don't lose sight of that biblical plot line.
• 15:37
  I'm glad you mentioned social justice has become a religion.
• 15:41
  And really, it's the religion of works.
• 15:45
  And works-based righteousness is not biblical.
• 15:48
  We are saved by grace through faith.
• 15:52
  But yet, an authentic salvation produces good fruit and good works.
• 15:58
  But that doesn't save us.
• 15:59
  So I'm glad you brought that up.
• 16:01
  But young people today want to feel good about something.
• 16:04
  So let's get back to the basics of just the word justice, because you say in the book, there's no justice without Jesus.
• 16:12
  Agreed.
• 16:13
  But that's going to sound very exclusionary to a lot of people.
• 16:17
  So talk to us about that.
• 16:18
  We know that God so loved the world, but yet Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.
• 16:23
  No one comes to the Father except through him.
• 16:26
  Talk to us about that along the framework of justice, please.
• 16:31
  Yeah, so I'm really clear in the book that I wrote this for a Christian audience and for the church.
• 16:37
  It will inevitably alienate people who are not saved, who have not put their faith in Jesus.
• 16:44
  This is written for the church to remind them of their touchstone for truth.
• 16:49
  But I also talk about in the book that there are ways to, you know, this can be a buzzword for some people, but to create a common good space and to create a place where there's a table of invitation.
• 17:01
  I just believe that the church should be leading those conversations.
• 17:05
  So an example that I give is with some of the anti-trafficking work that you mentioned in the introduction.
• 17:11
  It was out of our church that we started and founded one of the state's leading anti-trafficking prevention and rescue and redemption organizations.
• 17:23
  And we were able to invite different area groups.
• 17:26
  As you can imagine, it takes law enforcement to be a part of this.
• 17:30
  different abuse centers to be part of this, different restoration groups.
• 17:35
  And so we would lead this round table at our church.
• 17:37
  Over a hundred people would come quarterly and we would have these monthly meetings and we would meet with different government officials.
• 17:46
  I even had the honor of sitting in on a few
• 17:48
  of the task force that the White House had during the first administration.
• 17:53
  And so it was a beautiful example of how the church was saying, this is an injustice and we wanna be at the forefront of this.
• 17:59
  But we were also very clear, particularly amongst each other, that we are doing this because this is what
• 18:05
  The Lord has commanded of us that we're, you know, obviously this is not workspace salvation.
• 18:11
  James is clear about that, as you noted.
• 18:14
  But because we have been redeemed and we have been saved, there is a desire for us to go out into society and bring that redemption and restoration that can only be done through Jesus and through his body of Christ.
• 18:27
  to a lost and broken world.
• 18:29
  And so I think that that would be an example of, okay, we are doing this justice from a place of just trying to right a wrong.
• 18:37
  Well, that's fine for people who are not saved, but we wanna remind the church that you don't have to listen to the social justice narratives that have really just co-opted what Jesus had planned in his redemption story all along.
• 18:52
  You know, my son is
• 18:54
  14, and right now he's learning about the Abrahamic covenant in school.
• 18:59
  And I loved pointing out to him that this has been Old Testament to New Testament, God's redemptive plan for people all along.
• 19:07
  And so reminding the church of this through my book as well, that this was never God's plan B.
• 19:13
  His plan A has always been, you have fallen short, but good news, I have a plan of redemption and restoration.
• 19:20
  And so social justice from a Christian perspective is just taking that good news out into the world and actually righting the wrongs that have been caused by the fall.
• 19:31
  So we're going by really fast today, Christina.
• 19:34
  Let's go back to the beginning of your book.
• 19:36
  You talk about being in an airport.
• 19:38
  And I think how is that worded that you were watching a girl being trafficked in plain sight?
• 19:46
  Tell us about that.
• 19:47
  And how did that affect you and your approach to social justice?
• 19:52
  So my husband and I had the opportunity to go and raise awareness about anti-trafficking work and the dangers of human trafficking during the height of the Syrian refugee crisis.
• 20:03
  And so as your listeners may recall, a lot of refugees were leaving Syria by boat, risking their lives going across the ocean to Greece.
• 20:12
  And they would end up in Greece and these different encampments.
• 20:16
  Well, anytime you see the vulnerable people who are in poverty or who are destitute, that is where you also see a heightened activity for human traffickers to come in.
• 20:31
  So my husband and I went over to Greece and we were working with the Syrian refugees and kind of raising awareness and telling them what to look for, red flags so to speak.
• 20:40
  And while we were in the airport, we saw a girl
• 20:44
  being trafficked, two traffickers who were exploiting her.
• 20:47
  It was just textbook.
• 20:48
  I alerted authorities.
• 20:50
  I kind of let everybody know.
• 20:52
  But the reason I include that in the book, and it is how I start the book off, is I wanted people to know this is the depth of depravity that we are looking at for injustices.
• 21:05
  But God has an answer to this depravity, and it is the body of Christ.
• 21:11
  And, you know, one of the things that I wrestled with, with including that story, is that we weren't actually able to save her.
• 21:18
  And I had to sit and I had to wrestle with that.
• 21:20
  You know, we alerted every authority we could within the airport and even on our plane.
• 21:25
  And when we got to the ground, we let some diplomats know when we landed in Athens.
• 21:32
  But I realized in that, that if I had not been there, if the...
• 21:37
  God's people are not working to end injustice, then we don't have an eternal perspective on this, that I could have rescued her for that moment.
• 21:51
  But really, God's plan is to rescue us for eternity.
• 21:54
  So it's that juxtaposition of, okay, I am faced with this real reality of, of women being tracked to track fit and girls being trafficked.
• 22:03
  But I know that there is an eternal perspective and I can't lose sight of that.
• 22:08
  So that's kind of the moment I knew, okay, justice work is what I'm called to, but I too can't lose the plot line that it's really got to be for eternal purposes.
• 22:18
  Because from a temporal perspective, that is not going to carry us.
• 22:23
  Amen.
• 22:24
  And I love the work that so many people are stepping up to do.
• 22:28
  I think of Tim Tebow, Jim Caviezel, so many others that are raising awareness about this massive problem in America, especially Super Bowl Sunday.
• 22:39
  And anyway, that's for another podcast, Christina.
• 22:41
  But there might be, let's just say there's a woman watching or listening right now that left the faith because they didn't think the church was compassionate.
• 22:50
  They didn't think the church cared about suffering.
• 22:53
  Um, what would you say to that person right now?
• 22:56
  Yeah.
• 22:57
  So that's one of the things that I think we, the church has done better in the past couple of years, um, about reminding us that it's truth and love.
• 23:07
  One of the, the, you know, and fortunately, I think that what Gen Z and millennials have only heard is, well, it's, it's dogma.
• 23:16
  It's, it's this, you know, really, um, yeah.
• 23:20
  harsh word and there's not compassion in it.
• 23:23
  And I don't want to choose truth because truth looks like telling my neighbor, I don't love you.
• 23:29
  And I remind people in the book that you can't have love without truth.
• 23:34
  In fact, I start that section through a very simplistic story of when I'm putting my son to bed,
• 23:40
  at night, and this was several years ago, he's a little older now, but I would do this worldview exercise with them.
• 23:45
  And I would say, hey guys, what are the two most important things that you can do with your life?
• 23:51
  And I had sort of trained them to say, you know, love God and love other people.
• 23:56
  Well, one night my son, he's about eight and he's tired and he just gets it backwards.
• 24:00
  He says, you know, love people and love God.
• 24:03
  And I say, that's close, buddy.
• 24:05
  But the order actually matters.
• 24:07
  You cannot love people well unless you love God most.
• 24:13
  It's the loving God most.
• 24:15
  It's loving God's truth.
• 24:16
  that then compels us, that gives us the Holy Spirit's sanctification to pour out onto other people.
• 24:25
  And so in that section, I remind people that it's actually not very compassionate or loving to affirm people in their sin, to tell them what they want to hear, particularly when it's a false narrative.
• 24:38
  What we want to do is pair that compassion with God's truth and make sure we rightly align that order
• 24:45
  Because if we get that out of order, then we're actually just falsely affirming lies.
• 24:50
  We're just offering people something that's not true, that's not orthodox, that doesn't align with God's word.
• 24:59
  So that's what I would say.
• 25:00
  And it is, it's funny that you said, I think the scenario was a young woman.
• 25:05
  Because David, it's true, young women are falling more for social justice narratives.
• 25:10
  And they're walking away from the church at a rate that's higher than...
• 25:14
  than young men.
• 25:14
  So it is often young women.
• 25:16
  And so I want to look at them lovingly and say, hey, the most compassionate, loving thing you can do is to partner God's truth with your desire to hold them, to love them, to gather around them.
• 25:31
  That's right.
• 25:32
  And that's maternal.
• 25:33
  And that's God-given instinct.
• 25:35
  But without His truth, we see an unraveling of, um,
• 25:41
  what we know that's going to lead us to eternity, and it's going to lead us into false social justice narratives.
• 25:47
  I'm so glad you said that, especially about not affirming people just to appear like we care, loving or compassionate.
• 25:54
  Truth in love.
• 25:55
  Jesus, John 1.14, the Word became flesh, dwelt among us.
• 25:58
  He was the perfect balance of grace and truth.
• 26:02
  100% grace, 100% truth, and that's our example.
• 26:05
  So, Christine, in the last minute and a half here, you've—
• 26:09
  talked a lot, we've talked a lot about what you're teaching in the book about social justice and how Christians need to kind of get back to the definitions and understand and see it biblically, but how do you want us to act?
• 26:22
  What do you want us to do differently, maybe today, maybe this week?
• 26:27
  Help us apply this briefly.
• 26:30
  Yeah.
• 26:30
  So in the last section, I do talk about there are there are great big ways that you can do justice work.
• 26:36
  I think, you know, some of the anti-trafficking work that I've done kind of looks like a larger macro picture of it.
• 26:42
  But I also remind people that on a very micro level, that there are small things you can do, you know, bringing meals to someone who has just had surgery, stepping up with your church to partner in foster care or adoption or education.
• 26:58
  Even just a single mom's ministry, I was raised by a single mom, and so I have a real heart for that.
• 27:04
  So I think just encouraging the body of Christ, don't try to do justice alone.
• 27:09
  Partner with your local church body and do it together.
• 27:14
  It's a biblical model, it's a sustainable model, and it's a model that Christ lays out for us that has withstood the test of time.
• 27:22
  So I would just tell people, you don't have to go do something big and huge, just partner with your local church body and do what we've been doing for 2000 years.
• 27:32
  And that is just loving people with God's word.
• 27:36
  Perfect.
• 27:37
  Thank you so much.
• 27:38
  I want to mention Redeeming Justice is on Amazon, but Christina's website, ChristinaCrenshaw.com.
• 27:44
  Thank you so much for your time and for the book.
• 27:48
  Yes, thank you for having me, David.
• 27:50
  Friends, God bless you.
• 27:51
  And as always, keep speaking the truth about things that matter.
• 27:54
  See you next time.