Thread by @drantbradley

This is a 2022 book on Black Liberation Theology. It's become increasingly clear that single greatest cause of deconstructed/ing US evnglclsm is the abysmal failure to fully believe the gospel during slavery through the 1975ish. Sad but true. amazon.com/dp/1626984700/… @amazon

The theological method that allowed Jonathan Edwards to own slaves and sadly prevented Billy Graham from marching on the front lines, arm-in-arm with MLK, is the exact same framework that set the stage for the current #deconstruction/#exvangelical trends. There be no Du Mez book.

The "blind spot" was a cancer. They will not be able to church plant their way out of what they created. There is no "discipleship" program that can rescue them. Not .org for pastors. No study center on a college campus. No campus ministry. No new parachurch org. Etc.

Instead of focussing on apologetics and obsessing over salvation doctrines, as if Catholic theology or arminianism was a real threat, they should have focussed, instead, on self-critique, walking in repentance and purity. The Gospel Coalition should have been about repentance.

What they didn't realize is that the biggest threat to evnglclsm wasn't from the outside, it was from the inside. They were their own worse enemy because they refused acknowledge failure and focussed on outlier exceptions as proof that the truth wasn't true.

Repentance of Christian failure should have been the center of Billy Graham's church movement & Okenga, Harold O.J. Brown, The Moral Majority, The Alliance of Confession Evnglcls, Desiring God (should've "Desiring Repentance"), T4G should've been T4R, "Together for Repentance"

The massive failure to practice repentance, prayer, fasting, etc. because of all the things Christians did terribly wrong in America from 1619 to 1965 set up white conservative expression of Christianity as indefensible. Their lack of awareness killed their own "movement."

The entirety of this updated version of BLT is predicated on the failure of white Christians to acknowledge and correct the failures of their own forefathers (Neh 9:2). It's sad to see this play out. Racial reconciliation programs won't fix this.

If evnglcls want any credibility in the 21st-century everything they discuss must be centered on the corporate repentance of the failures of evnglcls to intervene on the oppression of blacks & Native Americans. Until that happens, they shouldn't expect anyone to listen to them.

Christianity in America would be radically different if the fundamentalist movement and white evnglclsm had put repentance at the center instead of self-righteous versions of the gospel--I mean corporate repentance, not personal repentance, like in the Old Testament. Really sad.

What's failed is the false triumphalism of "We Are Right" and only telling the *handful* of outliers that lived properly in relation to Native Americans & black Americans, as if that was normative. Why would they expect God to honor their lack of repentance with "growth?"

What if there was a movement focussed on the fact that "we are all failures, a mix of truth and error, but God is an incomprehensible mystery, yet prefect and true, whom we are seeking to understand as we live in union with Christ via the Bible, prayer, & the sacraments?"

*There'd be...