One consequence of convergence theory is that the oppressors cannot be trusted to care for the interests of the oppressed, and any supposed attempt to do so is one more instance of oppression. Conversely, those who see the gospel as a fulfilment of critical theoretical aspirations seldom emphasise the radical antithesis between the two.

And I don’t mean that to sound a historical, or meant to say that, that we need some sort of new strategy other than the ordinary means of grace and good faithful ministry, like always, from God’s word, and by God’s Spirit for God’s glory. We may find ourselves longing for a simpler account than this, but any reduction of this complexity is sub-biblical. But there’s something really really different as well, which is that our society as it stands today, Western society, as it stands today has so been built on assumptions that take root in biblical soil, that it can’t jettison Christian influence without renouncing it’s very self and it has no categories. He is a scholar with an international reputation in modern and contemporary European thought, atheism, and the relationship between the Bible and philosophy. Finally, we cannot overstate the importance of being directly acquainted with primary source material.If you think about it, he says, We’re lost in distraction, were distracting ourselves through our lives, can’t focus on anything you could be writing today couldn’t be and, and that he’s showing how the God that set forth in the Bible. Both CRT and liberalism capture something of the complex biblical picture of justice, but both fall short – in different ways – of its rich complexity. The division usually runs between those who principally seek to repudiate CRT as an existential threat to the church, and those who principally seek to learn from it. A glowing and glorious and delicious exception to this is the way that God relates to his people in the Bible.

In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Kimberly Jones’s viral video [1] gave voice to the anger and anguish felt by many black men and women in the US and beyond in the face of a society pervaded by systemic racism. Christians who embrace the paradigm of critical theory as a solution to racism or sexism often question a biblical understanding of gender roles, gender identity, sexual orientation, marriage, parental authority, and even the uniqueness of the Christian faith. I will explore two salient examples: Paul’s treatment of Jewish ‘power’ and Greek ‘wisdom’ in 1 Corinthians 1, and Augustine’s engagement with Roman ‘glory’ in The City of God. But when the teachings of the Bible are largely unknown, misunderstood or condemned, this makes for a strange and at times amusing situation in which society increasingly sets itself against Christianity, but does so by using distinctively Christian arguments and assumptions and quote, later, you’re right as if Paul, the Areopagus, people of modernity, I see that in every way you think yourself is very religious, but your religion is very Christian. Critical theories exist to critique what we think we know about reality and the social, political, and cultural structures in which we live.See, for example, Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why it’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2019). In this paper I will be using ‘critical race theory’ as a general term to capture this set of concerns. Forgiveness is hard to come by, with job losses, ‘cancelling’ and public shaming ensuing from individual infractions of CRT orthodoxies, no doubt compounded by social media.

When a church demonstrates true neighbor-love and fellowship across lines of race, class, and gender, it undermines the idea that critical theory is the only path to human flourishing and gives credibility to the charge that critical theory fails to deliver on its promises. Those who insist on the antithesis between Christianity and CRT refuse to countenance the idea that Christianity may be a fulfilment of critical theoretical justice in the same way that it is a fulfilment of Greek wisdom and Jewish power. There is both the hope of a radical overturning of the status quo, and an imperative for achieving incremental change on the ground here and now. One of the closest examples in the Scriptures to the situations in which Christians find themselves today is that of Daniel and his friends Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah at the Babylonian court of King Nebuchadnezzar. We must constantly be seeking to repent and put our faith anew in God, for ‘if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall’.

Others, whose education or life experience have primed them to see liberalism’s dangers, give a free pass to CRT as the go-to tool for addressing them. In the words of Derrick Bell, ‘racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society’. As Michael Walzer notes‘[a]gainst the prophetic demand that the king listen only to the word of God, the wise live comfortably in a world shaped by their own words,’ and ‘[t]heir own good advice is worldly and strategic, aimed at accommodating differences, reaching a compromise, negotiating alliances, and, only as a last resort, making war. In other words, racism is not simply the result of the way people think, but it is a perennial feature of modern Western societies in a way that cannot be addressed by better education. Well, I think you just covered in that answer as well, I was going to ask you about what you describe as the post Christian dichotomy, what you described as both too great and too humble, a vision of humanity at the same time, you just covered that right with, made in the image of God, but not God.