re: Voddie Baucham explains the looming catastrophe of CRT in the church

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Oh, I know what he is and claims to be, my friend. And I also know what you believe. And I, a non Calvinist, also believe that God uses us as vessels to do His work. Not because He needs us, but because He wants us to be obedient. And to that end, I applaud Mr. Baucham for speaking out against things like CRT. I'm merely pointing out the logical inconsistency of his own belief system, in doing so.

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For the sake of not trying to derail this further, I won't provide an in-depth defense of Calvinism as a biblical paradigm, but I assure you, I believe it is perfectly consistent with the scriptures as it comes directly from the scriptures, themselves. It is perfectly coherent, and any perceived incoherence stems from a misunderstanding of what the doctrines teach, and saying that there is no difference between a hyper-Calvinist and a three point Calvinist seems to indicate a misunderstanding on your part.

However in response, I will say that I believe the only consistent Arminian is an open theist, who doesn't believe God actually knows what will happen for certain, but learns as time progresses.

Maybe when this thread falls behind a few pages, I'll go into further detail and provide a more thorough defense of why I believe Calvinism to be a biblical theological framework.

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It’s a garbage theory built on an explicitly Marxist foundation. And that Marxist foundation is explicitly anti-church and anti-Christ. And that Marxist foundation is responsible for death and destruction everywhere it has taken root.

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Oh, so anything built on a garbage theory that has been responsible for death and destruction is bad?

You realize that you are kind of agreeing with an extreme version of CRT right?

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3NOut is wrong.

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kiss my grits.





David French article on the use and abuse of CRT


i know French isn't loved here, and i have a lot of criticisms of his TDS, but this was an article where i did learn that there are some practical things to glean from CRT viewpoints and how it plays out in the real world.

Neither he nor I wholesale endorse it. I view it the same way i do politics. every single thing a democrat doesn't say is wrong. They actually correctly point out problems very well at times. It's just that their solutions are hot garbage and should be rejected.

Some of the problems pointed out by CRT can be valid. Their solution is trash.

i'll put a small excerpt where it clicked in my head. again, it's not that i agree with it, but i just get where the concepts are coming from.

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A critical legal theorist will often deconstruct any given story or narrative to look for hidden ways that power, privilege, and assumptions about language color our decisions and our discourse. I’ll get to the problems of this framing later, but let me first show how it can help illuminate important truths.

I used to advise a number of Christian schools, and several years ago the county offered one of those schools a county sheriff to serve as a school resource officer, free of charge. The purpose was to deter/respond to potential school shootings, and a number of board members were initially enthusiastic about the idea. What’s not to love about free security?

But the headmaster spoke up and quickly changed their minds. The chances of a school shooting were vanishingly low, he said, but the presence of law enforcement in the halls would be reasonably certain to criminalize school discipline. When a police officer is present a fight often isn’t just a fight—dealt with jointly by parents and the principal as a matter of school discipline. Instead, it might be deemed an assault. A student found with weed isn’t just a kid who might need parental and spiritual intervention, he might be judged a drug offender.

The headmaster argued that the school needed to retain maximum liberty to raise and discipline its kids. And he prevailed. The board rejected the county’s offer and devised its own school security plan.

What the heck does any of that have to do with critical race theory? After all, race never came up during the discussion, and none of the participants had a known racist bone in their bodies. Race couldn’t have been relevant, right? But viewed through the CRT lens, the entire incident was absolutely laden with power and privilege, and that exercise of power and privilege reinforced existing racial disparities.

How? Let’s contrast the disproportionately white private school with the disproportionately black public school that was located a mere five miles away. First, look at the difference in power—the private school parents had the wealth to create and maintain a separate institution that was governed separately from the local board of education. Unlike public school parents, they had the absolute autonomy to say yes or no to a law enforcement presence in their halls.

This power thus created an important privilege. Their students had the privilege of committing low-level crimes without fear of criminal enforcement. They could grow and learn from their mistakes without being fed into the maw of the criminal justice system.

Power and privilege thus distorted our language and understanding. How could one even begin to understand, for example, the true difference in crime rate between the public and private school? If a fight is an assault in one place and just a “scrap” in another, how do we know which school is more dangerous? If a marijuana purchase is a drug deal in one place and a “mistake” in another, how do we know which environment is more perilous for vulnerable youth?

When you overlay these considerations with local histories, including residential segregation, a history of redlining, “white flight,” and other factors that might concentrate black families in worse schools, then you start to have a eureka moment. “Ahh, so that’s what we mean when we say that racism has ‘systemic’ legacies and creates systemic problems.”

As a Christian, this kind of CRT-infused analysis helps me not only understand the reason for persistent disparities, it should also build empathy and motivate action. What can we do to ameliorate the effects of this disparate power and privilege?

So does this mean that critical race theory is entirely good, useful, and worthy of Christian embrace? Not so fast. Go back to the definition above—as practiced, it quite often creates a virtual irrebuttable starting presumption that “existing power structures” can be accurately analyzed primarily (or sometimes exclusively) through the prism of race.

The end result, ironically enough, is both reductive and complex. Quite simply, race (or gender or gender identity) are not always material factors in any given historical development or cultural phenomenon, and the desire to attempt to racialize any given power structure can lead to radically-strained analyses. CRT is biased in favor of viewing much of life through a racial lens, and that lens does not always see reality clearly.

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In that construct, critical race theory can be an analytical tool (one of many) that can help us understand persistent inequality and injustice in the United States. To the extent, however, that it presents itself as a totalizing ideology—one that explains American history in full and prescribes an illiberal antidote to American injustice—it falters and ultimately fails. Moreover, as a totalizing ideology, it contradicts core scriptural truths.

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Oh, so anything built on a garbage theory that has been responsible for death and destruction is bad?


Yes.

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So let's walk down this line of logic then. What is white supremecy? Saying that someone white is more human/better than someone who isn't, right. So when the constitution says slaves are only 3/5 of a person, doesn't that ring as white supremacy to you?

Following down your line of logic (which I disagree with), then America is foundationally irredeemable.

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So when the constitution says slaves are only 3/5 of a person

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The Constitution doesn't say that.

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Saying that someone white is more human/better than someone who isn't, right. So when the constitution says slaves are only 3/5 of a person, doesn't that ring as white supremacy to you?

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Yes. If I view it anachronistically. Another favorite tactic of all Crits.

Do you think the Constitution has resulted in death and destruction?

It’s all he’s posted about.

White supremacy is a belief and not a theory.

CRT is the tool you people will use to declare the founders to be the bad guys and rewrite the constitution into some Marxist manifesto.

I am not sure who they think they are fooling.

Now it's critical race theory getting every deference and benefit of the doubt in our institutions, including the Church.


Who does this in what ever institution other than pandering, successfully conditioned liberals.


As for the Church, previous to this it was the pandemic across Christianity of deviants tactically positioning themselves within the churches for access to the young, trusting, and vulnerable.


(Marxism in all its phases has never given up the preferred tactic of exploiting and attempting to convert the young.)


But in all the decades this has been going on, it was never presented to unknowing, unwary parents as Marxist-influenced principles and programs.


It was always cloaked as some liberal/progressive latest advance in education that parents "could be proud that their children were receiving.


Revealing again that the hallmark of marxism is deception. Never call it what it is.


Now it's CRT


Nothing new for the Church.


It once lowered its guard and allowed into its midst another neo-Marxist method/technique that threatened to rock its foundations.


Called "values clarification."


A concept by Maslow that sought to influence the young to reject existing traditional family principles and rules.


Encouraging the young when presented with a problem to decide its solution according to "how they personally feel is right for them at the moment."


Effectively making every aspect of life relative and subject to whim, feelings, emotion, even irrational snap-judgment.


It found its way into the seminaries "to disastrous results." Many of the students/seminarians simply lost their faith.


Forcing the Church to pull back and adjust itself again to smooth over the damage done.


Again, "values clarification" another neo-Marxist method/concept dressed up in a high-sounding but vague euphemism cloaking its true nature and the intent behind it.


Its "father" Maslow was a personal friend of Marcuse, so was solidly entrenched among the cadre of anti-West cultural/political sappers we invited into the country who sought to take it down from within - and admitted it publicly.


Notice that in what ever propaganda mill attended, what was attributed to Maslow and discussed invariably was his ever popular "hierarchy of needs."


It's always been a "safe" move and didn't reveal exactly what he was, nor the true purpose of what has been his most destructive concept.


Revealing once again that the essence of marxism is deception.


Its destructive concepts have been cloaked under the guise of "progressivsm" for at least 50 years.


To be fair, most of the deviance and other equally retrogressive theories and behaviors found their way into the Church via Vatican II.


Locally, we have the most liberal Archbishop since Rummel.


Could a legitimate connection be made between that unsettling fact and the Archdiocese being for all intents and purposes now bankrupt.