What are your thoughts re Hegelian Dialectic & CRT in the Church?

[Bootstrap]

boot:
.. But we do need to listen and wrestle with what they are saying.

i’m not exactly sure how words like these aren’t recognized as some of the most efficiently elitist and even racist words out there.

Really?

Saying we need to listen to what black people are saying and have empathy for them too is "elitist" and "racist"? I would have thought the opposite.

[Bootstrap]

Jesus Christ does not talk this way. Neither does Voddie Baucham, who clearly listens closely to Jesus Christ.

Actually, we seem to be very far from looking at how Jesus related to Samaritans and lepers and sinners and outcasts and asking how we can do the same. And very far from looking at the history of the New Testament Church or the teaching of Deuteronomy or the prophets.

And the right-wing American counterpart of CRT is just as foreign to the Gospel as CRT is. Perhaps we can learn from their criticism of each other?

[Bootstrap]

Voddie Baucham takes a closer look at their fundamental principles and lists these four features of the CRT worldview:

He seems to be paying attention particularly to Ibram Kendi and other fairly extreme and non-Christian people. I did not see any serious attempt to look at the range of CRT teaching - which is admittedly hard to do.

But what percent of people who say they embrace CRT would embrace all of those principles? I suspect not the majority. But I'm not an expert on CRT at all - I suspect the same may be true of Voddie Beacham, but I could be wrong. I can say this much: the articles I have read by scholars that seem reliable to me all emphasize the range of different views among CRT scholars.

Regardless, I keep asking this: neither you nor I find CRT particularly helpful. But what do we do instead to create community and solidarity across ethnic and class divides in the American Church? How do we work against the lack of empathy many whites seem to have to any black who says they are hurting under our system?

Here's part of that Bacote quote again:

In all honestly, if the people who express these concerns about cultural Marxism had lots of examples of congregations that have an allergy to critical race theory but are leading the way in cultivating and practicing a faith that addresses the past and present challenges of race, I would be more inclined to take their warnings seriously. As far as I can tell, these people are not leading the way toward cultivating a gospel unity. Instead, I see the act of using the label “cultural Marxism” as a smokescreen or diversionary tactic that forestalls both the reckoning required to contend with theological-ethical failures on race and the subsequent work to pursue new paths of Christian discipleship.

[Szdfan]

But what do we do instead to create community and solidarity across ethnic and class divides in the American Church? How do we work against the lack of empathy many whites seem to have to any black who says they are hurting under our system?

It’s a lot easier to fight culture wars than it is to build relationships across ethnic and class divides. Therefore, we fight culture wars.

[temporal1]

boot:
.. But we do need to listen and wrestle with what they are saying.

i’m not exactly sure how words like these aren’t recognized as some of the most efficiently elitist and even racist words out there.

Really?
Saying we need to listen to what black people are saying and have empathy for them too is "elitist" and "racist"?
I would have thought the opposite.

It’s clear you are convinced you’re uniquely right, and you’ve made it clear on this forum (for 10 years i’ve been present).
Possibly, what you believe might be labeled, “truthiness.” It’s something, not everything.

i’ve lived in a mixed culture, mixed religion world since i was born.
even physically handicapped real people don’t appreciate being patronized. real people resent pity. i’ve never thought of POC as being less Christian than “white looking” people; au contraire, many are models for faith on earth.

liberal academia has done a lot of damage in recent decades.
in the past, academia was more a minority phenom, places for learning, philosophising, concocting social engineering experiments.
it served an important purpose - in some proportion with the practical world, not defining the practical world.
there was tremendous freedom for ideas in their limited world. what harm in it??

somehow, balance has been lost, academia acquired too much power/influence, relativism (a product of academia) has become a false god for many. government is used as a tool to put relativism into action.

not from Jesus Christ. suffering results.

is the present obsession with skin color an effort to thwart admission that lib policies in gov have resulted in a devastating price?
anything but admit error? admission of error can be a bear.

“ Fatherlessness Can Be Fatal”
https://illinoisfamilyaction.org/2021/0 ... -be-fatal/

Written by Dr. Jerry Newcombe

There were more mass shootings in Chicago last weekend. The irony of these shootings, in which 54 were shot and 8 died, is the weekend itself….Father’s Day weekend.

Some sociologists note that what we’re seeing in large part are quite often the results of fatherlessness in America.

Mark J. Perry, a scholar with American Enterprise Institute, put out a chart on March 30, 2021 on fatherlessness in America. He compiled the statistics from the National Center for Health Statistics, and the chart compares the “percentage of U.S. births to unmarried women by race” for the year 2019.

The chart notes that:

11.7% of Asian births in America were to unwed mothers,
28.2% to white mothers,
40% for all races,
52% for Hispanics,
69% for Americans Indians,
70% for Blacks.
That explains a lot. The breakdown of the family in America is one of the leading causes of societal breakdown.
The cliché is correct: “As the family goes, so goes society.”

Fathers can make a huge difference in the life of their children, and their absence can lead to all manner of problems.

African-American leaders are expressing concern.
John Diggs, M.D. of Massachusetts once talked with me about the devastation wrought by the breakdown of the family.

About 15 years ago, Dr. Diggs told me in an interview for Christian television that the seeds of fatherlessness were sown in the sexual revolution: “Social science has borne out that all the bad effects associated with sex outside of marriage have increased under this paradigm. For example, you can look in the Black community. If you look at 1960, it was on the order of 5 out of 100 children were born out-of-wedlock. Now that number is something on the order of 60 out of 100. And once you get that kind of number, the whole society tends to break down.”

Tragically, that 60% has now increased to 70% as noted in the chart cited above.

Diggs continued, “Marriage has a very important function. It gets people to commit to each other even when they don’t want to, even when they don’t like each other for some short period of time. It’s financially better to have a mother and father in the house where you have two different personalities, two different orientations in terms of maleness and femaleness affecting both the child, both the girl and the boy. And I think, clearly, the crisis of fatherlessness can be laid at the feet of the sexual revolution.”

He said one of the biggest problems with all this is viewing the father as “expendable.”

And who fills in the gap? Uncle Sam? The gang leaders?
Of course, many young men become gang-bangers because the gang leader becomes surrogate fathers for them.
The Bible warns: Bad company corrupts good morals.
And the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle.

And then on top of all this:
welfare transfer payments reward those who bear children out of wedlock and punish those households where the father remains. We get what the government subsidizes. What a tragic nightmare. Fatherlessness can be fatal.

To compound all this are those on the left who are saying we need to defund the police.

Civil Rights leader Robert Woodson thinks that is a terrible idea.
Woodson created the Woodson Center in Washington, D.C., which has had many years of providing effective help for inner-city communities.

A Gallup Poll backs up Woodson. The pollsters found that 81% of Blacks do not favor defunding the police.

Noted Woodson: “The people who are advocating hostile actions against police do not have to suffer the consequences of their advocacy. They live in gated communities; they live where they are protected.”

Woodson added, “This battle is critical to our future. I don’t think we have been this close to just anarchy that you see this assault on police. It is resulting in withdrawal from some of the most high crime areas. As a result, murder is soaring in some of these cities, and it’s directly related to the nullification of policing.”

Woodson remembered when Black families used to be a model for the rest of the nation.
He said, “From1930-1940, during America’s 10 years of depression, when racism was enshrined in law, elderly people could walk safely in their community without fear of assault because of our faith in Christ and also our marriage—

we had the highest marriage rate of any group…that has been our history.”

Ultimately, a spiritual renewal is what is needed to turn things, including fatherlessness, around.

Woodson told me, “As a country, we must seek redemption and understand that we need to be all that we can be as a nation.
If we were to mimic Christ and understand the importance of our future, it depends upon redemption and restoration.”

A person might wonder if contemporary well-intended western lib policies may actually be more devastating to society than slavery?
Of course it sounds far-fetched. But. i’d like to listen to VB and/or Thomas Sowell speak to it. Possibly they have.

(For me) i prefer to continue to listen to men like Voddie Baucham who (strike me) as holding Jesus Christ in highest esteem.
i’m sorry they receive so little recognition in this noisy world. the imbalance of information is bizarre.

still. against all odds, Truth endures. Jesus promises.

[MaxPC]

>>Your goal is clearly to criticize CRT. Can you start with a commonly accepted definition of what it is?

Absolutely not. (I'm not too good at definitions.)

Please provide one for us. What is the commonly accepted definition of CRT?

Falco, just a heads up: I did not write that quote above.

[Bootstrap]

i’m not exactly sure how words like these aren’t recognized as some of the most efficiently elitist and even racist words out there.

Really?
Saying we need to listen to what black people are saying and have empathy for them too is "elitist" and "racist"?
I would have thought the opposite.

It’s clear you are convinced you’re uniquely right, and you’ve made it clear on this forum (for 10 years i’ve been present).

My neighbors of various races, Bible-believing Christian brothers and sisters who are black, and other people I know don't seem elitist or racist to me.

I bet if we each sat down with believers from the nearest Bible-believing black churches and had these same conversations, they would come out very differently. We would do a whole lot better to ignore the noise from Fox News and ask them what we can do to serve together and to build the kind of biblical Christian fellowship that is a witness to the world.

[Falco Underhill]

Of course it sounds far-fetched. But. i’d like to listen to VB and/or Thomas Sowell speak to it. Possibly they have.

I have just ordered Vouddie Baucham's new book, Fault Lines. It's on this topic of CRT. I will probably be sharing insights from it sometime next week or the following week.

[Falco Underhill]

>>Your goal is clearly to criticize CRT. Can you start with a commonly accepted definition of what it is?

Absolutely not. (I'm not too good at definitions.)

Please provide one for us. What is the commonly accepted definition of CRT?

Falco, just a heads up: I did not write that quote above.

No problem, I probably mixed that up myself. Never noticed till you mentioned it.Sorry about the confusion!

[temporal1]

boot:
.. ignore the noise from Fox News ..

i’ve repeated multiple times, i do not follow Fox, never have. i’m less aware of Fox than CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, BBC - which were part+parcel of my growing up - until months into 2016, when they all became so blatantly partisan, in both “news” and “entertainment,” i couldn’t stand it anymore. i UNPLUGGED satellite TV in 2016 for this reason.

in summer 2020, i stopped the vast majority of “news” on the internet - pretty much everything i saw regarding “news” then became what was brought and “discussed” on this forum. i chose not to OPT OUT of politics here because there are opinions of value here.

it’s interesting, and mistaken, to believe people are not capable of thinking, living, observing, experiencing life outside of partisan scripts. refusing to recognize that LIMITS a person’s ability to reason. (boot, you found a way to dismiss Voddie B just above.)

i’m sorry for you. clearly, you WANT to “do right.” no doubt in my mind.
unfortunately, it turns out, you are just human, and as fallible as any. this seems to torture you.

i believe in miracles.
one day, it might dawn on you that others might not so much disagree with your goals, but have arrived at conclusions that do not fall in lockstep with yours. all sorts of people!

Max continues to add threads based on scriptures, inviting discussion. Not interested?

Of course it sounds far-fetched. But. i’d like to listen to VB and/or Thomas Sowell speak to it. Possibly they have.

I have just ordered [Voddie] Baucham's new book, Fault Lines. It's on this topic of CRT.
I will probably be sharing insights from it sometime next week or the following week.

Both men have written and recorded a lot. i’m ashamed i’m so far behind the curve.

Thomas Sowell is 90. he’s still speaking! amazing.
(i’m sad for myself and the world) he has been so ignored in his life, and not a “household name.” he could have been!
he’s a full-on intellectual. he just has the nerve to arrive at his own conclusions. interestingly, he uses much the same approach as boot extolls on this forum: facts and research, data. he arrives at conclusions not part of the prevailing lib script, so, crickets.

he is well-aware of it.
possibly the most discriminated against folks in the U.S. are black, and POC, conservatives.
they deserve daily prayer for the injustices thrown at them. seriously. the accusations thrown at them are brutal.
often coming from those they care most about. it may be impossible to grasp.

one day, if this wrong is mitigated, the world will be brighter for it.