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July 26 - August 2, 2021
CRT is basically neo-Marxism on postmodernist steroids—a deeply uncongenial point of view cynically weaponized for the deconstruction and dismantling of social structures. Wherever it is introduced, CRT deliberately provokes and feeds on disunity. It intensifies ethnic hostility, promotes crass identity politics, foments resentment, and imputes guilt or victimhood to people according to their skin color.
Many have insisted that these are indispensable tools that “can aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences” in a way that, presumably, Scripture cannot.
Meanwhile, Gospel doctrines like original sin, atonement, justification, and the glory of Christ are being eclipsed by lectures about social inequities and ethnic injustices that can never fully be atoned for—but for which reparations should nevertheless be paid.
And yet here we are with a whole book against it instead of FOR those things.
As an “analytical tool,” CRT has no more use than a wrecking ball. It can demolish core social structures and leave society itself in ruins, but it cannot clean up the mess, much less build anything worthwhile.
I agree, but some social structures need to be dismantled for the biblical structure to be built.
Yet every day, we hear the imperatives: “White” people should “be less white,” according to material presented in a training session for Coca-Cola employees, as just one head-spinning example.
This is a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts.
But enough table-setting. To the ramparts; to the law and testimonies.
According to standard woke ideology, in general terms “white” people are racist, the historic oppressors of others, and thus as a collective unit, “white” people are guilty.
The notion of "guilt" here is supplied by the author and is not integral to the understanding. Further, the author does not define guilt here.
Like liberal Protestantism, which denied the historic truthfulness of the faith, supernatural miracles, and a sin-cleansing atonement for individual sinners, wokeness is not merely a different form of Christianity, a remixed version that fits fluidly with conservative evangelical faith.
Claim needs backing.
Built on Critical Race Theory (CRT), wokeness uses theological language and even the very system of Christian theology, albeit without any need for grace and God.
What?
What Wokeness Is Not
Owen wants to define wokeness however he pleases.
It’s not hard, though, to see why folks would make this mistake. Here are some reasons why: Critical Race Theory is complicated and has its own language and discourse, and most people do not read many books on complex intellectual movements.
Owen so wants to link wokeness and CRT that he misses the differences.
Finally, most people support the police even as they want relations between law enforcement and citizens to improve in different hotspots around the nation.
This needs a citation.
But here we must ask: What is justice? What is unity? More broadly, what does it mean to be human? To answer these good questions, we cannot ask the people around us. We cannot learn such higher truth in an afternoon seminar. We have to go to God. We need the teaching of Scripture.
Will Owen and I have adifferent understanding?
Though many today operate as if academic theory and social activism should supplement Christian thought and practice, in truth the Bible is sufficient for these things. (The Bible is sufficient for all things that pertain to life and godliness—see 2 Peter 1:3.)
Biblioidolatry?
CRT teaches that all of societal life is structured along racial power dynamics.
Woke theorists and activists argue that America was and is shot through with racism.
Will Owen refute this point?
They do so intentionally, both individually and systemically, through campaigns of violence by police, disproportionate incarceration of minorities, unfair housing decisions, unequal distribution of public resources for schooling and other causes, limited access to health and nutrition, and much more.
This is not true. It can be done unintentionally as well, see 1994 Crime Bill
The high-minded civil rights ideals of Martin Luther King Jr., to cite just one figure, are strongly—even severely—critiqued by CRT theorists and activists.
Apparently Owen has not read the letter from a Birmingham jail.
In actuality, it saves its strongest firepower not for extraordinary offenders, but for ordinary men and women who live quiet, normal American lives.
Reading this, it becomes more clear that Owen has not read Birmingham Jail.
Countries, after all, often have one ethnicity represent a major part of their population.
Owen misses that these countries do have racism, and that America is fundamentally different.
As we shall explore in Chapter 7, America’s past does indeed contain real and systemic sin. Countries can and do enshrine unrighteous thinking in law; Christians know this and stay vigilant against it.
Tisby shows this is NOT the case.
But woke scholars and activists argue that the America of today is much like the America that formalized slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.
There is no common grace in wokeness; there’s just the righteous (the woke) and the guilty (ordinary white people).
Is this language used in the wokeness conversations?
In the summer of 2020, marches under the BLM banner—which included many Antifa members—endangered many American cities.
"Many" and no source.
For its unbiblical teaching and its ungodly violence, Black Lives Matter and woke activism must be rejected—by Christians, certainly, and by any citizen besides.
Owen started off saying this was simply a description. This is not description language.
One recognizes the “intersectional” nature of injustice, meaning that one discovers that the causes of many underprivileged minority groups overlap.
I'm not sure Owen knows what this means.
Your skin color and access to privilege determine which category you’re in, not your character.
This is not.completely true, because it's not a simple binary.
Men must be removed from positions of authority, and boys must be trained to see strong manhood as akin to “toxic masculinity.”
No. This is false.
Reason must be opposed by “personal narratives” driven by a belief in “standpoint epistemology,” the view that one’s minority status gives one a unique ability to see truth that privileged peoples necessarily cannot comprehend.
Owen misunderdtands Postmodernism here, or something.
(As I have noted, a thorough critique of these views comes in Chapters 3 and 4; we’re seeking, in all fairness, to describe the system in a compact way here.)
Given the earlier statement, I disagree with your assessment of what is happening.
(holding evildoers to account) to a distributive and reparative emphasis (creating a more equal society through “humane” laws and verdicts).
Yes, this is biblical justice.
In truth, humanity is divided into two groups: saved and unsaved. But Marx reframed our fundamental categories along economic lines—“class struggles,” to be precise. He saw history playing out as a great conflict between oppressors (those who control the means of production) and the oppressed (those who are not economically privileged).
Both of these can be trues. A flase dichotomy is presented, and once again, this is not a fair treatment.
When whites move away from black neighborhoods, it’s white flight. But when whites move into black neighborhoods, it’s gentrification, even when they pay black residents generously for their houses.
Um, what makes you think black people own those houses?
In fact, no less a figure than John MacArthur—a leading evangelical statesman of our time—has called it the greatest danger to the Church that he has seen in six decades of Gospel ministry.
Instead of the unifying message of the Gospel and the need for it to go to the ends of the earth out of love for sinful humanity, Urbana featured a fiery denunciation of a Church committing “adultery” with “white supremacy.”
Owen might be shocked by Matthew 23.
But we grew up in a society that had made real societal progress along “racial” and ethnic lines.
It would convince many people who did not harbor “racial” prejudice that they did; it would teach many people who had made real cross-cultural connections that they could not transcend differences of skin color. Most devastatingly, it would introduce in many churches the idea that Christianity incubates “white privilege” and, still more strongly, “white supremacy.”
This is an incredible effort in missing the point.
Christians are being called to “repent” for their “whiteness” and reject their inherent “white fragility”
Christians are urged to support “reparations” and distributive justice (over retributive justice)
Yes, because one of those is biblical.
As much as evangelicals might voice a desire for racial reconciliation, their institutions, organizations, and unspoken values actually perpetuate racial division.
Are we going to refute this claim?
It communicates a generational understanding of sin that is foreign to the New Testament.
This is an interesting unsupported thesis.
Rah argues that systemic racism is pervasive in the United States, a reality which has become more and more evident through the high-profile shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers.13 In such cases, non-black Christian outsiders should lament with their black brothers and sisters, joining in their cries to God voiced out of pain and outrage.14 The author argues that, when faced with the reality of injustice against blacks: Our claims must first shift from the defensive posture of “I am not a racist” to “I am responsible and culpable in the corporate sin of racism.” We must move
...more
Without law and without order, society breaks down, and justice atrophies.
This is a WS talking point.
It looks like segregation, and lynchings, and women being abused by slave masters, and a societal order denying the humanity of people based on their skin color. That is actual “white supremacy.”
This is not the only way it appears.
My “partnering” with him—as just one small example—was in no way motivated by trying to “subjugate” him, make him “dependent” on me, or “kill” his freedom.
Here Owen fails to understand what Dr. Mason is doing.
But as wokeness has infiltrated the Church and taken people captive to varying degrees, this unity has been lost. Distrust reigns. Resentment festers.
Owen thinks that wokeness, not racism, is what is dividing.
First, he largely fails to tell the story of how a diverse coalition of voices, including many “white” people, campaigned against slavery and Jim Crow.
So the critique is that Tisby didn't adequately praise white people? That certainly seems like some white fragility. Tisby's point was that the church complicit in these acts.
Secondly, Tisby makes the move already observed a few times in this text, assuming that the same evil that corrupted America societally in days past is working with similar effectiveness in the present hour.
Im going to love hearing why this isn't true.
Denying substitutionary atonement—and even decrying it as a form of weakness alien to a truly liberated people—he made the move that the liberal Protestants had already executed, albeit from within his own social location.
Does Cone deny substitutionary atonement? Or, more rightly, is that a requirement for Black Liberation Theology?
This means that the first task of Christian witness regarding other systems is not to show how God and a sinful world are the same; the first task is to make clear how God and everything else are distinct.
Hmm
