Sacrificing rams, oil, firstborns are as ineffective as throwing a rock at a white supremacist or spitting on an Antifa protestor, or posting an anti-Trump meme.  All that autonomy, all that idolatry… all that…sin went to the cross of Christ.  And it is only in the Gospel that we find the penalty for our sin satisfied.  We cannot, and will not, ignore justice, on any side.  But we must continue to preach salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Introduction- scenes at Charlottesville

By now, many of us have seen the videos of the Charlottesville protests.  Confederate flags, swastika banners waving in the wind.  Across the way were “antifa” protestors, many with their faces covered hurling whatever they could lay their hands on.  We watched in horror as an automobile plowed into the crowd.  Later, protestors climbed up and starting tearing down statues.

FaceBook and Twitter, along with the rest of social media was ablaze, lit up with posts.  The president was criticized for his lack of calling out the “proper” side, both sides, or neither side.  Arrests were made and actions defended.  A U.S. Representative allegedly hoped the president would be assassinated but claimed to apologize for what was her “personal use” FaceBook page.  Arguments have been flying concerning the correctness of Confederate history, racism, to blaming everything and everyone on down to George Washington.  There have been some credible articles written by Christian conservatives.  But what I’m concerned with is there has been little identification with larger spiritual cultural currents, at least from a Reformed perspective.  Somewhere in the middle is a spiritual core, a biblical world view that has gotten muddled.

To unmuddy the waters and to make a clear sense out of comments made by several over the past week or so, one has to dig deeper into the cultural current of postmodernism.  Trying to do that sometimes is akin to getting a fish to describe water.  Postmodernism was originally a word to describe a movement in architecture in the 1930s.  In the 1960s it was applied to the social sciences by Jacques Derrida.

Essentially, he held that once an author’s pen left the page he relinquished any authority of meaning he intended for his work.  The reader now brings his or her experience to the page and can read into the work anything he intends.  Pushing further, the postmodernist holds that there is no overarching “meta-narrative” to any story by anyone.  Each person decides their own meta-narrative bringing their own experiences to the table.  If you insist on imposing your own meta-narrative upon someone else you are doing violence to them and therefore are to be rejected as oppressive.

For the believer in Christ this is disastrous and must be rejected in that the scarlet thread of redemption is that God has sent his Son to die for our sins, was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3ff).  (We’ll see below how the postmodernist social justice warriors violate their own beliefs and elevate their own meta-narratives).

It is no wonder, then, that the alleged vandal arrested for tearing down a statue of a Confederate justifies his or her action:  “I” feel that slavery was and is wrong.  That’s “your” meta-narrative.  For you (or anyone else) to foist that upon me is violence.  And you do violence to me because you are a bigot and a racist.  And you are an institutional racist in a country that is (and was) institutionally racist.  Therefore I am not bound (legally) by your racist meta-narrative (read: law).  Extend this to others who call for murder of political figures (which is against the law) whether on Facebook or by comedians in photoshoots.  But if you stand close enough you can see past the philosophy to the insidious spiritual deception.  And it is not new.

Held together by the flimsy mortar of postmodernism all sides; whether antifa, white-supremacy or Nazis, commit the sins of autonomy and idolatry.  Francis Schaeffer clearly articulated how in the Enlightenment God was systematically “removed” from the universe.  John Frame wrote, “Intellectual autonomy was accepted as a presupposition, as something fundamental, not to be argued about.”[1]  Frame continues:

Indeed, if human reason is autonomous, the God of the Bible does not exist, for his very nature as the Creator excludes the autonomy of his creatures.  An in fact nothing at all can be validated by autonomous reason, for as we have seen, such reasoning leads to a rationalist-irrationalist dialectic, which destroys all knowledge.[2]

The first part of Westminster Larger Catechism question 105 (What is forbidden in the first commandment?) answers this from a historical perspective:

The sins forbidden in the first commandment are, atheism, in denying or not having a God; idolatry, in having or worshipping more gods than one, or any with or instead of the true God; the not having and avouching him for God, and our God…

Our first parents, creation’s couple, Adam and Eve, believed they could live autonomously apart from God.  They believed the lie, the “meta-narrative,” if you will, of Satan (Gen.3:1-15), that human reason is autonomous, fulfilling, and meaningful apart from God: “You will be as gods.”  As the reader can see from the WLC above, it not only breaks the first commandment, “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me (Ex.20:3), it leads to breaking the second commandment as well. We read in Exodus 20:4- 5:

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me (Ex 20:4-5, ESV).

News pundits on every side were outraged at the white supremacists especially when the blood-red banners of the Nazis were flying.  Though they seemed to miss the Nazi inspired Antifa flags and banners, most Christians seemed to miss both the “supremacy” in white supremacy and the “carnal delights and joys, corrupt, blind, and indiscreet zeal” displayed on all sides, which is as idolatrous as apostasy, giving prayer to saints, angels, or having statues of idols.[3]  All were idolatrous in that it did not seem to me as I watched the rock throwing, fist punching, hate-spit-spewing protests that any were, “…yielding all obedience and submission to him [God] with the whole man; being careful in all things to please him, and sorrowful when in anything he is offended; and walking humbly with him.”[4]

Some may note that, “Well, this is the Law.  One cannot require an unbeliever to act like that, no less some ‘social justice warrior,’ or some ‘white supremacist.’  The Apostle Paul in a few short verses tells us the purpose of the Law,

But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.  So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith (Gal 3:22-24, ESV).

There is no such thing as “social justice.”  There is only justice.  And we, believer or not, are required by God to do justice as we reflect our imageness of God to the world around us.

We’ve seen the videos of Charlottesville broadcast around the world.  There was another broadcast some 700 years before Christ.  This time from the prophet Micah.  The people of God weren’t acting like the people of God.  They, too, were breaking the first and second commandments.  They, too, were saying one thing (their meta-narrative) and doing another.  God called his people into the courtroom of his justice, calling creation as his witnesses to the stand and said:

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”  He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:7-8, ESV).

Sacrificing rams, oil, firstborns are as ineffective as throwing a rock at a white supremacist or spitting on an Antifa protestor, or posting an anti-Trump meme.  All that autonomy, all that idolatry… all that…sin went to the cross of Christ.  And it is only in the Gospel that we find the penalty for our sin satisfied.  We cannot, and will not, ignore justice, on any side.  But we must continue to preach salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Christopher Faria, Ph.D., is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. He is a retired Army Chaplain and lives in Colorado Springs, Colo.

[1] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God, (PR Publishing: New Jersey), 2010, 19.

[2] Frame, 20.

[3] Westminster Larger Catechism, Question 105.

[4] WLC, Q.104.