100 Years of Resolution 9

Conversations That Matter

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Conversations That Matter podcast, my name is John Harris. This is a quick episode. I was doing some research earlier today and I came across some information.

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I just thought, I need to share this. Sometimes that happens and I don't share because there's just so many things going on.

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But I made the time because I thought this is not only interesting, but I think it's going to be very helpful for Southern Baptists who are going to the convention in Nashville this year in June, I believe, to hopefully kind of scale back the progressive drift.

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It's not even really a drift. It's a full on run at this point. I don't know if some of you might have seen, there was a video from 2018 that the

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ERLC put out of Danny Akin talking about, basically it's almost like textbook standpoint epistemology talking about how because there's this experience that black people have that he just doesn't know about, he's trying to learn, and as a result of the little he has learned, it's important to just give up power.

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Make sure there's places for black people to lead. Of course, Danny Akin's still the president of Southeastern, so that's one of the things that I've tried to point out a few times with some of these social justice types.

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How much are they actually just after power and how much are they committed to the cause? This is what gets progressives angry, when they're committed to critical race theory, they're committed to whatever neo -Marxist idea you want to throw out there, and then there's people in the halls of power who say they are, but then do their actions actually match their words?

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I would challenge someone like a Danny Akin, well, why don't you just resign from being the president of Southeastern?

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Sounds like you need to give up your power. That's what you said needs to happen, so why aren't you doing it?

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That's where the proof is. The proof is in the pudding. Look at the actions to see if they're actually going to follow the policies that they put out there or the theories that they tout and they want everyone else to live by.

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Just actually a good rule of thumb for progressives in general. Do they live by the philosophies, the theories, what they say reality is like and or should be like?

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Do they live by that or do they just want everyone else to live by that? All that to say, that was a little tangent on Danny Akin, but all that to say, there's a lot of examples of the

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SBC moving in this leftward direction, promoting ideas consistent with critical theories.

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I wanted to just point out that a lot of people will say Resolution 9 was what ushered this in or that's the thing to point to.

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This existed way before Resolution 9. Resolution 9 has perhaps justified some of it in some way, but I want to show you this is nothing new really.

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I'm going to give you a few examples throughout history and then stay tuned because at the end I have something.

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If you're a Southern Baptist and especially if you're a messenger going to Nashville, you're not going to want to miss what I have for you at the end. I have a product that you might be interested in.

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Let's go through some of this history though first. Where has this happened before? Where have we heard similar language to Resolution 9?

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I'm going to start here. There's probably a lot of places that I could draw from. I only spent a few hours this afternoon looking at some of this stuff, but here's one of the places.

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The social gospel, right? Walter Rauschenbusch, who is really the father of the social gospel movement or at least he's the identifiable figurehead.

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It really goes before him in some ways, but he's the one that made it more popular, made the term social justice actually popular if you really want to know where that term gained a lot of popularity in the

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United States. It's from Rauschenbusch. He wrote a book called Christianizing the

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Social Order. This is a quote, I believe it's from 1913. I'm just going to check that real quick.

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Yes, 1913 when this book came out. There's a picture of him if you're watching. He said,

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I speak for men who have drawn their economic insight from socialism, their economic insight from socialism, and their democracy and moral ardor from Jesus himself.

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That's who he feels like he's representing. If you read the book, if you even just do like a search in the book, just type in socialism, see where it comes up.

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You could probably do this with almost any of Rauschenbusch's books. You're going to see he just intertwines it with Christianity.

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He mixes socialism with Christianity. This was just, I think, a representative quote here that just shows who he is.

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He drew his economic insight from socialism, from Fabian socialism specifically. Then he thinks that the morality comes from Jesus.

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You can mix your economic insight, the word insight is going to be key here, or tool.

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Some of the words that are used to try to justify taking these ideas that are out of step with Christianity, but then shoving them into Christianity, mixing them with Christianity, syncretizing them with Christianity, socialism in this case, and then the ethics of Jesus.

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He's drawing from two streams, and he admits it right there. These are the two streams I'm drawing from, and this is somehow justified.

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The socialism is justified within a Christian moral framework. Here's another example.

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People are going to be mad about this one, but I chose to include it. This is from a book.

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Actually I have the book here. I might grab it here. I have the book sitting here.

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I got to give you a caution with this book if I'm going to recommend it. This is called The Aryan Jesus by Susanna Heschel.

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I had to read this for a Holocaust class that I was in. It's an interesting book. She's pretty much given over to a lot of bad stuff, critical theories included.

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She tries to blame Christianity. I did a whole in that class, I remember I had to write some papers.

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One of them was a review of this book, and I debunked some of that because some of it's so ridiculous.

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That's my caution. If you get this book, follow where she has primary sources, take it with a little bit of a grain of salt.

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It is useful as long as you realize she is influenced by critical theory. It's going to influence some of the way she views

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Christianity. She tries to trace this line going back to the early church that influenced the Holocaust. It's just not doable.

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But that's for another episode. In this case though, there's some good information in here, and specifically the information

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I'm going to give you actually isn't really hers. It's actually a translation that she gives us of a primary source, and that's what

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I want to give to you. It's on, let's see if I wrote down what page number,

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I don't think I did. I think it's around page 230 though, or 260 if I'm not mistaken. Here's the situation.

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This man, Wolfmeier Erlach, and you can see him, if you look at the picture, he's the guy that's bald, second from the right, who's walking there.

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He served in a number of different positions, theologically speaking, but I think at the time he wrote this letter to the

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Ministry of Education in Nazi Germany. He was the professor of practical theology at the University of Jena, and he had been

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I think the dean or the president, I forget which, of the entire theological school. But this letter is written in 1941, and at the time a lot of Christian seminaries were being shut down by the

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Nazis, but the University of Jena, their theology program did not get shut down. Let me read for you.

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The institute's call for de -Judaizing Christianity became the model for the Jena theology curriculum and may have spared the

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Jena faculty from a series of closures and consolidations of theology faculties announced by the Third Reich Ministry of Education in 1939.

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Jena was spared because of the regime's confidence in its National Socialist sympathies and serves as a model of what all theological education would have become had the

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Reich survived. As Martin Borman, head of the party chancellery reported at the time, for the time being

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I would like to leave the small Jena faculty, which is oriented in an extremely

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German Christian direction, alone as it holds its ground in intellectual exchanges of the future.

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The theology faculty in Jena should be retrained as such for the time being.

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The policy was approved by Meyer Erlach as a tactic to impose political discipline on the field.

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As he subsequently wrote to the Reich Ministry of Education, and this is the quote I want you to hear, he said,

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I beg you, so here's what he's doing, he's begging, right, from this man who teaches at a theology, theological institution, a theology school, he's writing to the secular government, the

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Nazis, right, and he's saying, I beg you to occasionally take our work into consideration, having become awakened, woke, awakened, by the fundamental insights of National Socialism.

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So he's saying he got woke to National Socialism, he became awakened to the fundamental insights of National Socialism, as a theology guy, as a professor of theology, he was teaching theology and then he became awakened by National Socialism, that's what he's saying.

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We work steadfastly to dissolve the morbid crust that the confessional churches have placed around the religious life of our

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Volk, meaning the German people, that's the Volk. The state cannot retain theological faculties that reflect the overbearing self -cannibalism of the

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German people, but it will always need men who, out of passion and devotion to the Reich, speak of the great

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God who sent the Führer to liberate us from their dull narrowness. So now he's talking about the confessional church, he's saying that they had a dull narrowness, he says their hypocrisy, their satanic delusion, which makes them murderers of each other, and the goal of this particular

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German Christian movement is to liberate Germans to become a great community in which one serves the other.

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Now if you can't see some parallels there, I'm not saying everyone's a Nazi, right, everyone in the social justice movement, they're really just Nazi, there's parallels though guys, and one of them is how the

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German Christian movement tried to ingratiate itself to the state, I mean he's begging there, he literally says that,

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I beg you, they had this awakening, this moment of, wow, we've been wrong for so long, and it was national socialism that they say they became awakened to, and it showed them what was wrong with that confessional church.

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Now confessional church in their context would have, it means, it would have had connotations that confessional church in our context doesn't have, it's a very positive word in our context, in that context, it meant more than just, it would be like fundamentalist, that's probably the best way

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I could explain it to you, he's basically saying, I've been awakened to what those fundamentalists have been doing wrong, and the state is doing right, and we're with the state.

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That's what he's saying, he's mixing, he doesn't see a contradiction, he thinks that national socialism,

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Nazism, is actually, it complements, it actually serves alongside of true

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Christianity, because the fundamentalists, his word, the confessing church, they were the ones that were, unfortunately, they erred, in his mind, they were, and look at the things he says, narrow -mindedness, narrow -mindedness is part of their problem.

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If you can't see the parallels, I can't help you guys. There are some big parallels here, and you have to wonder,

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I mean, this stuff is not, it's not that hard to find, for those who really, just a basic understanding of history, you know what you're looking for, you can find this stuff, there just isn't an incentive in higher education to find this stuff.

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So anyway, here's another one, I'm jumping now to 1977, Sojourner's Magazine, this is

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Jim Wallace's magazine, for those who don't know, this is a very, very progressive, left -leaning,

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I mean, Jim Wallace, an advisor to Obama, he was part of Students for a

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Democratic Society in his younger years, even, I think, had the CIA investigate him when he was at, oh, it was a college in, outside of Chicago, I believe,

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I can't remember the name of it now, but anyway, or maybe it was Michigan, he went to a few different schools, but anyway,

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Jim Wallace, very left, very liberal, progressive Marxist, I mean, he even admits in some of his writings that he says, yeah,

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I was a Marxist when I was younger, this is a magazine that he started, Sojourner's, and this is only, this is less than 10 years after they started it, and a gentleman named

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Dr. Thomas Finger wrote, and in the article, he's a professor at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, this is what he said,

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Christians could apply Marxist insights from Latin America's popular liberation theologies. He said, quote,

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Marxism has much to offer, a set of scientific tools for social analysis and projection of strategy.

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Here, many liberation theologians distinguish between Marxism as scientific analysis with its own autonomy and objectivity, and as a metaphysical system.

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Christians may accept the first aspect as a functional tool while objecting to the second. Thus, Finger adopted the

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Marxist critique while objecting to it as an alternative to Christianity. Finger stated, insofar as capitalism is founded on selfish individualism and monetary motives,

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Marxist critiques can help flesh out, in economic and social terms, biblical indignation against these things.

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This was a Marxist analysis understood in light of scripture and Christian praxis. That is almost exactly the logic,

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I mean, it is, it is exactly the logic of Resolution 9. Christians can take it as a scientific analysis, he even uses the word tools, it's a set of scientific tools, that's what

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Marxism is, and we can use that without using it as a worldview. Here's another one,

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James Cone, father of black liberation theology. Here's a small little book that you may not have heard of, but it did come out, 1980,

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I believe is when it was, came out, or at least when it was written, The Black Church and Marxism, What Do They Have to Say to Each Other by James Cone, is what he says.

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The fact is that many people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America call themselves Marxists and Christians at the same time.

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They do so by distinguishing between Marxism as a worldview and Marxism as an instrument of social analysis, rejecting the former and enthusiastically taking up the latter.

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Black church people in this country may find themselves able to do the same thing. Marxism may be understood as a scientific tool for analyzing the economic, political, and social structures of this society, so that we will know how to actualize in the world the freedom that we affirm in faith.

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So James Cone saying the same thing that Thomas Finger was saying, the same thing that Resolution 9 says about critical race theory and intersectionality.

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Christians can, without adopting it as a worldview, Christians can take Marxism and use it as an instrument of social analysis, and he advises the black church in the

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United States to do that. And then we have Resolution 9. Here's the

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Resolution 9 committee, you can see Walter Strickland sitting there, Curtis Woods, you can see

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Whitfield, who's now, I believe, the provost at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, a number of people,

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Southern Baptist people, Trevin Wax, I believe, I don't know if he's in the picture, maybe he's taking the picture, is in this committee as well.

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And here's what they said, critical race theory and intersectionality alone are insufficient to diagnose and redress the root cause of the social ills that they identify, which result from sin, yet these analytical tools can aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences.

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Guys, it's the same thing. It's the mixture of critical race theory, intersectionality,

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Marxist derivatives, postmodern derivatives, it's taking those things and saying, well, it's not sufficient in and of itself, we need scripture, but, you know, we can use this as an analytical tool.

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And have we not seen where this leads? Have we not seen where this leads? It leads to terrible things.

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It leads to all the civil unrest that we've seen, in the world at least,

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I'm talking about, quotas, real discrimination, this stress on trying to, with our own efforts, create this multi -ethnic church in this world, and anyone who stands in the way of any of those policies, like diversifying libraries, or keeping certain pastors from coming who might be left -leaning, think the

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First Baptist Naples from coming, you know, you get tarred and feathered as a racist. It's created the schism, the unrest.

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A lot of the stories that we talk about here on this program are caused by this attempt to take these

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Marxist derivatives and cram them into Christianity, which you just can't do. The two cannot be compatible together.

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And just like Marxism, hopefully most people understand that Marxism and Nazism, the two, and Fabian Socialism, right, the three kind of ideologies that are not, you know, the modern critical theories, but were also used in the same way by Christians.

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Look at the fruit that, look at what took place when people tried to do that. Look at the German Christian movement.

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Look at the social gospel movement. Look at where Sojourners is at today. Look at James Cone. Can you say that any of these people are orthodox in the least?

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They're not. They're not orthodox. And that's the danger. There's a theological danger here that it poses, specifically with critical theories.

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It undermines objectivity, which undermines revelation itself, which is pretty basic stuff. It undermines the biblical justice, which gets to the heart of the gospel because you have to understand justice to understand the gospel.

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So we're playing with fire here when we try to take these supposed analytical tools, which rest, which don't make any sense outside of this foreign worldview to Christianity, this

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Marxist -derived worldview, and then jam it into Christianity. It's a misunderstanding of what these tools actually are.

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They don't come as tools in themselves. They come, or as such, they come as, they come with a package.

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They only make sense with the assumptions that critical theory brings to you. Let me give you an example for those who don't know what

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I'm talking about. You think about systemic racism. This is one of the most basic ones that all the people that even say they're conservatives in the

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Southern Baptist Convention want to, who are pushing this stuff, want to say they still believe that. They'll deny critical race theory as a term, as a doctrine, as a worldview, but they'll say, oh,

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I believe in systemic racism. I believe in these lenses that we need to have to really get insight into the scripture. So systemic racism is one of the most basic ones, but systemic racism, according to who, what is systemic racism?

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What do you mean by systemic racism? If you mean by it what the critical theorists mean by it, which, and I've pointed out before that the term itself, systemic racism, or it used to be more institutional racism.

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Now they separate those two and say they're different, but that was the term that was used in the 70s. It comes from the new left.

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That's its origin. That's its source. It is a way to take the concept of racism and then apply it more broadly to systems, institutions, groups of people, et cetera, without them being personally responsible by their individual choice for forwarding racism.

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It's systemic. They're just part of it. It's part of the milieu that they live in. And this was, you know,

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Ron Sider used systemic oppression to talk about even just trade patterns. You know, if you benefited from certain trade deals, so you live in the

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United States, right? And you benefited when another nation was getting the short end of the stick on a trade deal, then you were in some kind of a systemic sin or systemic, you were participating in systemic oppression.

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That's how this term has pretty much always been used. Yes, I know there's little things here, there are exceptions where people used it and they were trying to talk about something that didn't match that.

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But I'm saying the people who actually created the term, who used the term, the origin of the term, that's what it is.

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And I believe in authorial intent, so that's how I take it. And the people in the SBC who use it, use it that way.

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They use it the way that new left thinkers, critical race theorists, et cetera, use the term. That's why

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Al Mohler said last year that systemic racism is in every American institution, every single one.

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That's what he said. No exceptions. Really? Every single one? I mean,

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I guess that you don't, if you just say that, then you don't have to go through and find the racism because you just know it's there.

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It's just, it's the assumption that it's there without having to prove it. It's in the police department. You don't have to prove it.

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You don't have to actually try to do a study. You don't have to do a survey. You don't have to ask questions. You just know it's there.

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That is a basic fundamental assumption about reality. When you start talking that way and it's unargued for, it's, it's a presupposition.

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It's a premise. And then from that premise, you create the problem and the problem demands a solution.

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There must be some kind of a solution. Well, what's the solution? Well, we got to have some kind of a quota system. We, you know, have to do some kind of a redistribution of power or resources.

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There, we have to take down symbols that represent the quote unquote, hegemony or power structure. I mean, so once you just buy into the fact that this problem exists, it's systemic without having to prove it without having to do really any work, then the solutions come really easy.

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And it's just a really simple way of looking at the world. And this comes from a social justice religion. It comes from a pre -commitment.

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And this pre -commitment is just fundamentally out of step with biblical truth. You can't say that there's just this pre -commitment.

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We'll take white supremacy. White supremacy is a problem and it's in every American institution and it's on the

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McDonald's menu. I mean, you just don't, you can't see it because you don't have the minority lenses, but once you put those on, then you can see it and you'll see it everywhere, et cetera.

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The Bible itself then becomes subject to this and it destroys the biblical text because who's to say that, you know, the

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Bible doesn't have some systemic oppression of some kind. I mean, we just saw, I think in the last episode or two episodes ago,

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I showed that, hey, here's a guy who was trained by a graduate of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He's a supposed gay pastor and he thinks

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Jesus was a racist. He's now applying this to scripture because it's all encompassing.

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It's totalitarian reality. It's a way of thinking that colors your entire reality, which includes the

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Bible. It also denies the idea that the Bible itself talks about all people, which by the way, that means every race or ethnicity, whatever term you want to use, they're all capable of sin.

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They're all in Adam. So they're actually equally capable of sin because of who they are in Adam.

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That's what makes them sinful. Racism is possible for those who aren't white. Racism is possible for anyone, you know, and I don't even like using that term all the time, but ethnic partiality, let's use that term.

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It's possible for everyone. So, you know, you're not, you have to think about every institution now.

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The people that work within those institutions could harbor some kind of partiality or hatred in their heart and that is very possible.

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But you don't hear about, you know, well, you know, every American institution just has Asian supremacy because there's

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Asians, if there's Asians working there, it must be there or something. I mean, you would say that's ridiculous and rightly so. But it's the same thing if you say that white supremacy is somehow part of every

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American institution, it's just as ridiculous. It's a fantasy world. It's like walking around saying middle earth is real.

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I mean, it's that level fantasy, but unfortunately some very smart people who should know better are buying into it.

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And I say all that to say this, this is nothing new. And I wanted to show you that this is nothing new.

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This has happened. This has been happening for over a hundred years, at least probably before that. I just haven't really gone back that far to look at language that would parallel resolution nine.

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But this has been sold to Christians and every time it's sold, it always creates a problem and orthodoxy never lasts.

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And that's really the point I wanted to make. And history bears it out. Every example that I gave you, sojourners, the

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James Cone liberation theology. You want to look at the German Christian movement.

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You want to look at the social gospel movement. Every single case, the groups that went that direction, the people that went that direction did not remain orthodox because they couldn't.

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And all they were doing every single time was just using it as an analytical tool, using the insights from it, using parts of it, but rejecting parts of it.

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It doesn't work guys. It doesn't work. Now here's the part for Southern Baptist that I wanted to show. If I can here, actually,

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I'm going to have to, let's see here. So there's a product that you might be interested in.

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If you're heading to Nashville in June for the convention, there we go.

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You may want this. I'm just saying, I don't know for sure, but you may want this.

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So this is a Resend Resolution 9 t -shirt.

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And the link is in the info section if you're interested in this. And you can see,

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I'll zoom in a little bit here. You can see what it looks like. Resend Resolution 9. You have some symbols there that encapsulate intersectionality.

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Some of the different identity factors that would go into intersectionality, as well as some of the root ideologies of the political party that benefits from this thinking.

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I mean, this is all part of Resolution 9. And so you would get noticed,

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I think, if you walked around Nashville during the Southern Baptist Convention with this shirt. But this is the Resend Resolution 9 shirt.

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And if you feel like that's just too much, I don't know if I can do that. Which I mean, look, not everyone maybe can.

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Oh, by the way, I should say, you can get different colors here. White and gray. Let's see. And there's a green.

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There's a light olive that you can get, depending on what you want. But if you don't like that, you can always get this one, the

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Resend Resolution 9 mask. And I'm not a big mask guy.

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Not at all. Quite the opposite. But I'm sure that in Nashville, the Southern Baptist Convention, knowing who they are, they'll probably require it.

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They'll probably want you to wear your mask if you go in there. So I would say just get both, actually.

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You don't know. You might be there for a few days. Get the Resend Resolution 9 mask, and then get the

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Resend Resolution 9 t -shirt. And while you're at it, if you want, you can still get the

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Social Gospel Coalition shirt, all on Bonfire. And the links are in the info section for those who would be maybe interested in those.

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So there you go. How's that for, he's so mean. How can he put those things out there? Well, let me just be clear about one thing.

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I thought about these products. I think there's two reasons.

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I don't support anyone being a jerk with this, going around and saying anything that's unintentionally provocative.

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I do think though, and here's why I think this is good for those who might be going there.

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I do think it's important to have the conversation while you're there with the people in the room. And it's a good way to bring it up.

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And there may be, you may draw a crowd, you know, someone may take issue with your shirt and you may be able to go back and forth with them and it may draw a crowd and you may be able to get your point across.

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I mean, or you just may, someone may notice and you can talk to them, hey, are you for Resending Resolution 9?

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I am, here's why. So it gives you an opportunity that you might not have if you don't have the t -shirt. And for those especially who aren't as outgoing, sometimes we need that.

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We need something on us that's gonna put the message out there. It also encourages others. It shows others that, hey, there's another guy with that t -shirt.

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Hey, I can go talk to him. And you can kind of form your alliances, encourage each other that if you're not alone in this, there's other people who feel the same way.

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So get your Resend Resolution 9 face mask. Get your Resend Resolution 9 shirt.

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Hey, it may even, I mean, I don't know where you go during the week, but maybe even the church you're at or something.

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Maybe, I don't wear t -shirts to a normal service, but I don't know. Maybe it's a workday and you can wear your

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Resend Resolution 9 shirt and your pastor can say, what's that about? And you say, hey, you should go to Nashville, send some messengers.

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We need to Resend Resolution 9. I don't know. But there you go. So I hope that was helpful for you. God bless.