Reformed theology is diametrically opposed to social justice ideology. But many Reformed people today are mostly just 5 point Calvinists who do not embrace our confessions or the implications of the solas.

Many young Christians didn’t learn how to understand justice from Scripture. So in college, they learned how to understand justice from culture.
And now, they think injustice is justice. And they interpret Scripture through culture, not culture through Scripture.
That’s why many professing Christians are more committed to Black Lives Matter than Biblical theology.
But our culture’s understanding of justice—or social justice ideology—hasn’t only infiltrated colleges, it’s also infiltrated churches. Professors are influencing Christians to adopt an unbiblical view of justice, and pastors are encouraging them to embrace it—especially Reformed pastors.
I’ve received hundreds of emails from people over the last couple months. And they’re almost entirely from people who feel pressured to adopt social justice ideology or critical theory from their Reformed pastors.
Social justice has become so widely accepted in mainstream Reformed circles it might be considered their sixth point of Calvinism. Some influential leaders and organizations look like they identify with social justice just as much as they identify with the five points of Calvinism and the five solas.
At this rate, social justice is probably going to be one of the major legacies and pitfalls of the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement—and it’s precisely what John MacArthur warned us about that almost a decade ago.
In 2011, John MacArthur said:
“The [Young, Restless, and Reformed] movement as it is shaping up also needs to face up to some fairly serious problems and potential pitfalls.
As the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement has taken shape, some of the best-selling books and leading figures in the movement have been completely uncritical (and in some cases openly supportive) of seeker-sensitive-style pragmatism.
And one cannot be genuinely “Reformed” and deliberately worldly at the same time. The two things are inconsistent and incompatible. To embrace the world’s fashions and values—even under the guise of being “missional”—is to make oneself God’s enemy (James 4:4). Many supposed reformations have faltered on that rock.”
John MacArthur was severely criticized for those words, but he was right.
The Young, Restless, and Reformed movement—or New Calvinism—was born as an alternative to the seeker-sensitive movement, but it’ll die as its own version of the seeker-sensitive movement.
Like the seeker-sensitive movement, the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement embraced a celebrity culture and naturally, an elitist model that sometimes prioritizes tribalism over truth, compromise over courage.
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Written by A.J. Melnick |
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
Harvard today is at a crossroads.  What it does next will impact the rest of American higher education, the nation, and the world in many ways. President Bacow has announced that he is stepping down in June.  A presidential search committee is looking for a successor.  Much is at stake.

Harvard University has consistently ranked #1 in many global assessments of the world’s top universities. For generations it has sought—with the aid of a massive endowment—to be ‘the best in the world’ in as many fields as possible. Former Harvard College Dean Harry R. Lewis once noted that Harvard ”holds, in the public imagination, a distinctive pre-eminence.” True, but Harvard today has lost its way.
When Lewis was dean he said he once had had some difficulty in finding a university mission statement. He needed one in order to certify Harvard’s participation in the N.C.A.A. intercollegiate athletic program. “It turned out,” he wrote at the time, “that for 360 years Harvard College had never had a mission statement.” Lewis finally settled on Harvard’s Charter of 1650, a fundamental document in which Harvard committed itself “to the education of the English and Indian youth of this country, in knowledge and godliness….”
Even though Harvard long ago jettisoned the “godliness” portion of that document, the Charter of 1650 is more or less still in legal force today. Nevertheless, modern secular Harvard has always tried to keep its Puritan legacy at arm’s length. This was exemplified in 2017, when the university even held a contest to erase the Puritans from the former 1836 alma mater, “Fair Harvard,” expunging the words, “Till the stock of the Puritans die.”
Earlier, in 2007, the university barely acknowledged the 400th anniversary of the 1607 birth of its namesake, John Harvard, who willed half his fortune and library of around 400 volumes to the young college. We don’t know much about John Harvard (the famous statue in Harvard Yard is merely a representation). But one thing we do know is that he was a strong Christian. Given the titles in his library, we also know that he had a strong intellectual bent. He was clearly a man of vision and generosity. The university might at least have celebrated those qualities. But about all that Harvard University could officially muster at the time to mark the 400th anniversary of John Harvard’s birth was a display of copies of his books (all of John Harvard’s original library was lost in a fire in 1764), except for a 1634 edition of a book by John Downame, appropriately titled, The Christian Warfare against the Devil, World and Flesh.
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Written by J.K. Wall |
Friday, March 4, 2022
Church and culture were both designed to be communities of selfless love. Even today, each one helps the other advance toward that goal. As in Genesis 3, church and culture are still able to help each other solely because God intervenes. This intervention, which Jesus as king now continues each day, is the essence of His kingdom rule. The people in the church have some ability to be a community of selfless love because of Jesus’ intervention in their hearts, regenerating them and giving them the desire to obey Him.

This post is about church and culture and how they interact.
Typically, that would mean I’m obligated to cite Richard Niebuhr’s 1951 book Christ and Culture. Or at least one of the more recent works that modify Niebuhr’s five categories of Christian cultural engagement, such as Tim Keller’s Center Church or D.A. Carson’s Christ and Culture Revisited.
Instead, I’m going to start with the Amazon box on your front porch.
We can best understand God’s original design for the realms of church and culture as a virtuous cycle. And one of the most famous examples of the virtuous cycle in action is online retailer Amazon.
A virtuous cycle is, as they teach it in business schools, a chain of events that causes the chain of events to occur again with more power and speed. Business author Jim Collins in his book Good to Great visualized this concept as “the flywheel,” a mechanical piece in certain engines that, as it rotates, picks up speed and disperses greater power.
Amazon’s flywheel declares that the company’s success starts with great customer experience. A great customer experience attracts more customers. More customers attract more third-party sellers. Third-party sellers drive more product selection. And more selection ultimately lowers the cost of products and innovation. More choices, lower prices and more innovation will create an even better customer experience, which will attract even more customers and more sellers.
The cycle has kept going round and round like that, generating annual revenue for Amazon of $386 billion. That’s bigger than the entire economy of even some wealthy countries, like Norway.
So what does this have to do with church and culture?
Something like the virtuous cycle was in effect when God created men and women. God created humans “in His image.” As I’ve written before, God is a community of selfless love, so He created men and women to reflect His image by also creating communities of selfless love.
These communities of selfless love are culture. These communities are designed to be created, expanded and replicated via the cultural work of marriage, procreation and family life. Yet these communities are also designed to have a spiritual impact—as they grow they add more and more people who know God and praise Him. Knowing and praising God are spiritual activities, and we now call the groups of people that do them “churches” or simply “the church.” As more people know God, who is the source of all selfless love, He inspires and enables them to engage in the cultural work of creating even more communities of selfless love. And the virtuous cycle turns round and round.
If we look closely at Genesis Chapter 2, we can see some distinction between the realms we now label culture and church (or, if you prefer, between the material realm and the spiritual realm). We can also see how they worked together as a virtuous cycle. Gen. 2:15 says, “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” That is, God created culture (a garden) and gave the man a job in the cultural realm (to work it and keep it). Just imagine Adam’s day-to-day life digging in the dirt—it seems about as material as you can get. Then Gen. 2:16-17 shifts to a spiritual command from God: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’”
It is implied that the man heard God and obeyed, for the next passage (vv. 18-20) isn’t about the man eating the forbidden fruit or arguing with God about his commands, but it shows God and the man working together on the man’s cultural job—bringing order to the material realm by naming all the animals.
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