Thread by @DannySlavich

This article (along with misunderstanding SBC polity) makes a mistake I keep seeing: the assumption that words, concepts, or tools of a philosophical worldview can never be separated from that worldview for use within a different worldview.

thefederalist.com/2019/06/18/las…

The Christian tradition has often used words, concepts, and tools from non-Christian or even un-Christian philosophical systems (Platonism and Aristotelianism to name two).

Use of these words, concepts, or tools was sometimes unhelpful and unfaithful (syncretism), while at other times helpful and faithful (appropriation).

I don't know enough about CRT to say to say much about how its words, concepts, and tools might be deployed for biblically faithful Christian theology.

I *am* saying that many declaring the SBC to be in a state of "downgrade" over it are using arguments that don't hold water.

I do trust many of my faithful, patient, long-suffering minority brothers and sisters (who find certain aspects of CRT helpful) more than I trust most of the discernment "ministries" crowd.

Intellectual fairness and Christian charity demand that we don't assume and import all the history or connotations of word/concept/tool into a specific person's use of that word/concept/tool.

Instead, we should ask, "How is *this* person using *this* word in *this* context?"

The irony of this un-nuanced rejection of anything containing a whiff of CRT/intersectionality is that those who purport to defend the Bible are actually using the same argument as the revisionist theologians of the 20th century!

The 20th century was littered with arguments that classical Christian theism was actually beholden to Greek/pagan philosophy and that a return to "biblical" theology was to believe, for example, in a God ontologically related to the world (panentheism).

In an effort to "save" the Bible and God from captivity to the words, concepts, or tools of Greek philosophy, 20th century theology ended just creating a God in its own image.

The upshot is that those voices who label any and every use of anything smelling of CRT as a wholesale capitulation to Marxism would do well to take caution, because in seeking to "save" the Bible from Marxism they might end up making the Bible and God in their own image as well.