.gif)
Elite believers often sound more like disciples of Jacques Derrida than Jesus Christ. That needs to change.
A few years ago, I was asked to speak about the gospel’s justice imperative at a local Christian high school. Upon arrival, I was escorted through campus by a young administrator, who thanked me for coming to engage a topic the school’s elders had ignored for too long. With Dietrich Bonhoeffer–like resolve, he and another young teacher confided that they were subversively trying to change the culture at the school. I immediately, and perhaps hastily, commended their efforts.
The truth is, too many Christian institutions have been nonresponsive to the injustice in their midst. Some of these schools were established to maintain segregation and still refuse to reckon with their history and extinguish the mentalities responsible for it.
Many evangelicals will fight to exclude critical race theory but won’t even acknowledge racial disparities in education. We do not have to agree with everything every critical-race theorist says in order to recognize unjust disparities. The Black church has been addressing injustice in a theologically sound way for literally hundreds of years, well before CRT was a thing.
Without a doubt, the young educators’ concerns were legitimate. Deep, disruptive change was necessary, but the more we talked, the more I grew concerned that their approach was misguided. They were espousing a plainly secular progressive framework, unrefined by the truth and moral order of the gospel. They had an infatuation with trending secular theories, without guardrails to keep them from taking concepts like intersectionality and inclusion into unbiblical territory.
Those ideas can be helpful. But they should never be followed uncritically, because they can lead to identity idolatry, which would ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
via
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
