1. Although we are not the major characters in this plot, I want to offer some brief thoughts in response to @JonathanLeeman's recent article, which cites my/Greg's work as a noteworthy example ("to a T") of the so-called deconstruction project's discursive script.
2. Notably, we are set in close proximity to deconstructionist "wolves," or wolves-in-denial who "never think they are wolves," or prospective wolves who "soon discover their sitting on the very [confessional] branch the project is trying to saw through." Well, alright then.
3. Foremost, it strikes me as odd that Leeman identifies us as proponents of a project that "doesn't begin with exegesis but with exegeting the exegete" when the beginning of our public engagement was a book we wrote that broadly surveys 300+ years of exegesis/ethical reflection.
4. Yes, let's dig into Ex 3:21-22; 11:2-3; 12:35; 21:33-22:15; Lev 6:1-7; Num 5:5-8; Luk 10:25-37; 19:1-10. And Gen 20:14; Ex 12:35-36; Judg 17:1-4; 2Sam 12:6; 2Kgs 8:1-6; Neh 5:11; Job 20:10, 18-19; Prov 6:31; Ezek 33:15. All of these (among others) are referenced in our book.
5. And let's not only examine our private interpretations. Let's also consider the long exegetical history of these passages of scripture—the observations of Philo, Augustine, Calvin, Baxter, Hepburn, Watson, Hopkins, Dwight, Stewart, Garnet, Grimke, among many others.
6. JL suggests that deconstructionists (like us?) are in danger of "taking a hike with the devil," i.e., "mimicking his [NB: devil's] hermeneutic even while maintain their beliefs in basic Christian principles." What we actually did was take a hike with our theological forbears.
7. And the destination of that exegetical journey was the conviction that "the earliest public cases for reparations in America were made on the basis of the Bible" & that "reparations has a distinct, if forgotten, place in the history of American Christian thought and practice."
8. Leeman suggests that we have succumbed to some recent ideological fad. In truth, it is those who promote an unyielding rejection of any moral possibility of corporate restitution for Afr Americans that—viewed in light of the history of exegesis—begins to appear quite modern.
9. Indeed, our aim is not to dismiss theology but to recover it and to call the church to faithfully embody it—living up to our shared creed and confession. Our goal is/was not to dismantle Christian doctrine but to reestablish it. And it is in fact because of high regard for
10. their acumen as theologians—prudent scholars who, in other instances, can exquisitely and surgically parse ad infinitum the mind-numbing complexities of moral truth—that we struggle to accept their inability to leave even one square inch of moral room for reparations. None.
11. It seems to escape some observers that DeYoung could have offered a different bottom line even while maintaining some of his basic convictions. A partial solution. A call for restitution where applicable. A call for repentance. An invitation to collaboratively repair wounds.
12. He did not. Which is why we offered some brief responses to some of the arguments and questions he raised. thefrontporch.org/2021/07/distin…
13. But we focused on what concerned us most about DeYoung's essay, which was in our view far less purely "theological" than it claimed to be. Leeman is "merely" interested in "honest biblical interpretation." We felt DeYoung failed to offer just that. thefrontporch.org/2021/07/sancti…
14. Leeman refers to the doctrine of total depravity as the grounds for "our own hermeneutics of suspicion." Yet when it comes to the historical failures of the church in regard to racism, we lose all capacity for moral suspicion or chastened curiosity.
15. Time and again, across 400 yrs of church history in the New World, the church gathered and scattered has served as perpetrators and accomplices of racist theft, and silent bystanders before it. The track record—yes, our "Story"—is alarmingly consistent. Yet we rarely ask WHY.
16. Instead, time and again the church (its Evangelical/Reformed expressions in particular), when confronted with these failures, takes a peek at its theology, reaffirms its orthodoxy, and carries on. Alas, we are blind to our errors—oftentimes, willfully so. Unconscionably so.
17. Some of it is doctrinal, but much of it is methodological. And by "methodology," as we argued, what we have in mind is not the discrete doctrines of our faith but the priorities and norms by which they are synthesized and applied.
18. It's not the ingredients but the recipe by which those ingredients are prepared. And the point we made in our response to DeYoung was that the meal he cooked up—one that included little by way of actual exegesis/theological analysis—is one that's been served for centuries.
19. We called attention to this poisonous cultural recipe—this inherited mode of reasoning, these hermeneutical habits—that lead to the dismissal of reparations outright/altogether. As a result, we are evidently in danger of becoming, or already being, deconstructionist wolves.
20. Yet faithful Christians *in every era of American church history*—black Christians, in particular, from Douglass to Stewart to Wells to Grimke to Hamer to King to saints in our present day—argued that the church has taken Christian belief and cooked up a deadly meal.
21. They condemned the habitual contradiction between Christian profession and "Christian" practice. This is not new; in truth, it is a very old Christian moral response to racism in America, one borne of love for the church itself.
22. And if this moral outlook and disposition makes them, too, purveyors of a kind of "deconstruction project," then I will wear the label, along with them, gladly.
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