A follow-up of an earlier posting.
My friends you can’t put words in the mouths of your opponents. Worse than that, you can’t put straw men in the mouths of your opponents. I mean it’s false witness to begin with. It’s… it’s even more egregious. It’s the most egregious form of false witness I’ve seen…
I can promise you: I can say that in all of my years of reading hundreds of thousands of pages, millions and millions of words, I have never once ever seen a case of academic dishonesty, of a lack of academic integrity, an infraction so egregious in my entire career… i have never seen one even close to this…. And yet the the people who are just eating this book up are not in a position to go check, and the ones who are just don’t because they’re uncritically accepting this stuff.
But Voddie Baucham is not just, uh, you know; your random pastor who happened to get a, a platform. He is the dean of a seminary or of a divinity school at a Christian university. This… he ought to have impeccable scholarship. He ought to have at the very least very good scholarship. And this is nowhere near that… this is at the very lowest levels of infraction, if not um (and I just hate to say it because I know it will turn people off more to me than to him) but if not dishonesty. The the effect of it is intellectual dishonesty, because you can’t put your own demonized version of what someone says as what they believe let alone their own words, and that’s what Vody does in this book.
“He is the dean of a seminary or of a divinity school at a Christian university… he ought to have impeccable scholarship. He ought to have at the very least very good scholarship.”
We really need to demand the best from Christian scholars, and not just lap up whatever affirms our prejudices and emotions.
How else can we expand the Kingdom?
God does not bless shoddy work. Instead, He curses it.
Observe the current state of the Christian church for evidence. You know, the church that so strongly supports Fault Lines, boosting it to the position of a national bestseller.
Shame.
I should say it’s [the book Fault Lines is] important for this reason: it basically catalogs and responds to all the broader milieu of racial anti-racist… you know, kind of whiteness studies… all those things. It gives the a structured response from the perspective of a conservative Christian, and kind of the FOX News talking points conservative world.
And I think it’s, in that respect, that it speaks for a lot of people. But i won’t spend a lot of time dealing with that. But for those two things, it provides a useful summary from a certain perspective. That it becomes a good catalog of how that world is reacting to these issues; but also, because so many people in the conservative Christian world pick up this book and essentially say it speaks for me. I think those are two reasons it’s very important so we can thank Voddie for putting that together for us.
Well, the book is selling well, and the author will win a circle of supporters. And a decade or three from now, it will be useful as an artifact of Conservative Christian thought in the 2020s, in regard to Critical Race Theory.
And scholars will take a serious read of it, and say, “So many lies, and so much slander.”
Shame.
I wish we would stop doing stupid ego-stroking nonsense like this.
Also, if we deal with people as they actually are, we will avoid wasting time and energy attacking straw-men and shadows.
Finally: on occasion, our enemies may have a real point, targeting a real sin or failure on our behalf. How can we repent of our sin if we ignore anyone who points it out?
If we do that, we might as well be Collectivists, censoring anyone and everyone who says something that makes us uncomfortable, or makes us look bad.
Our Lord stands for freedom and for truth… and for repentance, too. We must not go down the road of the Collectivists, be they Red or Black.
Once more, let me recommend Bradley Mason’s piece on Critical Race Theory, or Lamb’s Reign article Is Critical Race Theory Marxist?
Voddey has the footnotes. Voddey does provide the quotations in some cases. We can identify parts of it as “yeah that’s what they said”. But in hardly any case is there a quotation put up that is representative and… and presented in such a way that the other side will look at it and say “Yes, that’s what I believe.”
To win, we need to stand for the truth.
And the first step in standing for the truth is to stop lying.
Also, bearing false witness is a sin, and unrepentant sins lead to hell.
When we repent of sin, not only do we denounce our evil behaviour: we stop doing it too.
<GASP>
This may be difficult, granted. But if we fail 100 times, and repent 101 times, we’re on the right track. “Pray, repent, pray, obey God.”
Also: be open to feedback and challenges, even criticism from unbelievers, so long as it is rooted in reality. Don’t be like the Marxists, so eager to silence all criticism… and so fast to jam their own thumbs into their eyes, nails into their ears, and fists into the mouth of all critics, justified or not.
Christians must stayed tied to reality. And work to change it.
…and let me let me go one step further: if that’s what these guys were doing, and what Critical Theory was all about, I would rather listen and study what those guys were doing any day. More so than most of the preachers I have ever met — including Voddy — because they’re doing what the church had failed to do in this country for hundreds of years. And that is identify where the problems in society are, and then do something actually to change it.
“Identify where the problems in society are, and then do something actually to change it.”
I think I know exactly what is going to be placed on the headstone of most American Churches by 2100.
And I would suggest something more below that line, in small print:
“Here lies a worthless servant.”
I would recommend you go to read there is a book entitled Future Christianity. It was edited by Alister McGrath — good solid evangelical hardcore conservative free-market-minded guy — he edited this book. It was composed of several select authors. And I believe he wrote the essay — but if I’m wrong that’s fine you can correct me — but I believe he wrote the essay on, on the methodology for looking toward the future for the church. And his model was — guess who his model was — Antonio Gramsci.
Now, he’s not trying to follow Gramsci into socialism or in many other areas that he would have wanted to bring about. But in the general methodology of of teaching and changing people’s ideologies as as a means influencing people’s ideologies beliefs — through art, entertainment, literature, a variety of things, education — as a way of bringing about this positive social change… that was the means. And of course he, he demonstrates where Gramsci got the idea. It was from Martin Luther!
Assuming you aren’t interested in the whitewashed tombs more than a few churches are getting really, really fond of,1 you can purchase The Future of Christianity2 to grab some tools to expand Christ’s Kingdom.
Or check out his website, alistermcgrath.net
If you want to understand Critical Theory, you got to read Critical Theory.
Amen.
1Well, for political reasons certain liberal groups would like to have the mainstream churches propped up for a few more electoral cycles and keep the enemy divided. (Guess whose the enemy.) Changing definitions helps Liberals feel more comfortable and powerful… but does not change reality. *cough*
2 From one of the comments:
The American church has a more market mentality, to Erich the church readily and easily adapts to change in culture. New churches spring up all the time, old churches who have lost their cultural relevance die. In Europe, churches are more entrenched with government or other structures, impeding their ability to change with culture. The system was doomed to kill Christianity in Europe, while the American system provided for continuous renewal. For this reason the author is optimistic about the future of Christianity in America. As new independent churches spring up in Europe, new life is arriving there too.
Lesson Learned:
- Don’t Trust the State.
- Don’t touch the Smiling Men of the Ruling Class – left, right, whatever – and their poisoned Free Money.
Trust in God. Face reality with your people, without the Masters propping you up. Get funded by the voluntary tithe & offerings, not taxes. And if you fail? Fair enough, you learn and try again… as a free man, and not some Establishment Puppet.
<Waves to the Established Churches of Europe.>
Acrosss the Stars 