Sunday Night, September 20, 2020 PM

We'll be, go ahead and start with a word of prayer. Father, I thank you so much for gathering us together this evening.

Pray that you would give us understanding of your truth, that we would be able to understand the need of the times, to rest upon Christ, trust in your word, and be able to speak from your sufficient word, help us to be courageous and hope -filled as we follow

Christ. We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen. So tonight we're starting on another section of our

Sons of Issachar study. This will prove to be something of a large section with a little bit of academic work that we're gonna have to do a little bit to understand where we are today.

Again, the whole point of what we're doing, the name of what we're doing comes from 1

Chronicles 12, 32, wherein we read of the sons of Issachar, that they were men who understood the times with knowledge of what

Israel should do. Their chiefs were 200, and all their kinsmen were at their command. Remember that these were men who supported

David in the enthronement of David over a united Israel. And they understood the times, what they should do.

And that's what we need. We need to have understanding of the times and knowledge of what we ought to do as followers of Jesus Christ.

This is what we need to have. And so this involves understanding what we're fighting against.

We do not wrestle against flesh and blood. We're not fighting against flesh and blood. What is it that we are in opposition to?

Second Corinthians 10 and five says, we are destroying speculations, speculations, and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God.

Lofty things that are launched against the truth of God, the knowledge of God. And we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

We're not letting thoughts go rebelliously scampering about. We're going to throw a rope around the neck and pull it aside and say, hang on, what does this have to do with Jesus Christ?

First Peter 3 .15 tells us that the personal nature of this, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you yet with gentleness and reverence.

So these are the passages that we often return to. We're talking about the various issues of our time.

And we're gonna talk about critical theory tonight. How many people here have heard about critical theory as a term?

Okay. You're better equipped than in a luncheon I was at the other day where the same term came up.

Why are we going to talk about critical theory? I'll tell you why in a moment. But what is critical theory?

Critical theory is hate turned into a philosophical acid.

Critical theory is hate that has been turned into a philosophical acid. Meaning that it is designed to take on ideas, beliefs, ways of living, and completely take that apart.

Here's the definition for critical theory. It is a hostile interrogation. You ever seen a hostile interrogation?

You know, like on a TV show or a movie, or maybe in the Senate. It's a hostile interrogation of assumed societal oppression.

In other words, critical theory assumes that society is filled with oppression.

And so it interrogates society and this oppression in a very hostile way.

Okay, so that's critical theory. It is a hostile interrogation of assumed societal oppression.

It's not exactly a worldview in and of itself, but it is a parasite. It's a parasite.

Critical theory must eat. And it must infect, it must kill, and eventually it will eat itself.

Critical theory depends on something else being coherent or being intact at least for it to survive.

So whatever that is. Take nutrition, for example. This is a fun one. All the science about nutrition.

You know, you need to have a balanced diet and depending on your health needs, this is a good diet for you, and nutritionists will help you out.

Well, there's a critical theory of nutrition about how nutrition is, that the nutritionist department, people who are trained to be nutritionists are participating in a system of oppression against people who are minorities.

That's what critical theory does. Critical theory is a parasite which attaches itself to anything, including math, by the way.

That's why two plus two does not equal four anymore. Critical theory is a parasite that attaches itself to something, changes the subatomic structure to a racial issue or to an oppression issue, and then begins to take apart whatever that thing is along those lines.

That's what critical theory is. The rage and the violence of Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots, the material and judicial support of these riots offered to them by various politicians and philanthropists and celebrities.

The relentless attacks on all things Christian and biblical like faithful marriage between one man and one woman, raising children to fear

God and love Jesus, working diligently to make things more glorifying to God and the next generation studying the world and learning history as that which is created and governed by God.

All these matters and more are not just tossed aside but targeted as hateful and vile and these things must be destroyed.

More distressing are those loud voices and powerful movers within the evangelical church who consistently acknowledge that the enemies of Christ, they have valid points and we need to make some changes.

We need less about marriage, less about life, less about children, less about diligence, less about hard work, less about leaving a legacy, less about creation, less about God's providence in history, less about substitutionary atonement, less about the authority and clarity of scripture, less about the exclusivity of Jesus Christ.

We need to hear less about that kind of stuff. We need to hear more about queer Christianity, about how social justice warriors are good for abortion, more about how pulling kids out of state programming centers is child abuse and racist, more about how we owe the poor all of our money and property except what we need to subsist, more about evolution, more about racist and harmful and how racist and harmful and evil and vile the church in America has been.

Why is that going on? Critical theory. That's why it's important.

That's just critical theory doing its job, doing what it was intended to do. Let me ask you something.

If, for instance, some kind of alternate universe where the Mormons took over everything, okay?

And a majority of professors in universities and people who were controlling higher education and a lot of people who were in the government bureaucracy and positions of power all throughout the nation, the people who were in charge of all of the arts, basically pushing everything out of Hollywood, let's say they were all

Mormons, right? And they were like the faithful Mormons.

I mean, they actually wore the underwear and everything. And a lot of them were pro -polygamy and all that kind of stuff.

I mean, real Joseph Smith kind of Mormons, okay? Do you think it would be important for you to know something about Mormonism, to be able to understand what's being said when they use this term?

I use the same term in my vocabulary, but we mean different things. I mean, it would be worth studying it, wouldn't it?

If you lived in Ogden, Utah, you would probably need to learn a lot about Mormonism to be able to function well in that society and be able to evangelize and everything else, right?

Well, that's what we need to learn about critical theory. That's what we need to learn about critical theory. So I think it's probably easy to get tired of hearing about it in its various forms, but it's also tiring to fight cancer.

You should still try. Where did it come from? Well, the devil is the father of lies.

So we know where critical theory came from. It came from Satan. And as things have gone along, as more and more people think that the gospel of Jesus Christ is for the church only, and should not be, the claims of Jesus Christ and his lordship and his truth should not be pressed on anybody outside of church membership,

I think that's where darkness abounds. In the history, the labors of the

Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the center of authority was not passed successfully from the

Roman Catholic Church to the scripture, rightly interpreted. It was passed from established religion to the horizons of reason.

And society as, Western society as a whole, began to believe that authority is based on human reason. Whatever we can reason out is true and authoritative, and that's where we're going to put our faith.

The horizon of reason, reason will solve it all. Now, that's a faith maneuver. That's a faith maneuver.

The assumption is that revelation, scripture, what God has to say, is being left behind as the fountain of knowledge, the main fountain of knowledge, and thus the touchstone of authority was not seen as the scripture or the church, for that matter.

But in reality, once man puts his faith in the God of reason, you're just leaving the shores of one faith position for an untamed wilderness of another faith position.

And in the abandonment of God's revelation from holy scripture, the philosophers struck out for the gold of autonomy.

We get to decide for ourselves what is right and wrong. Man's like, well, Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, didn't work out for them, but it'll work out for us.

No? So we have philosophers, and you may recognize some of their names if you ever want to go through what they believe.

There's a great series by R .C. Sproul on the consequences of ideas. He walks through all the major philosophers.

Very helpful read. There's a great little book. No, it's not too long, really. It's by James Sire, The Universe Next Door.

Really helpful synopsis of what the philosophers were saying and how it all came about. But in the history of CT, Critical Theory, there was some major gunslingers that came out.

Hume, Kant, Darwin, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. These are all gunslingers in the epistemic

Wild West. The Wild West of how do you know what you know? The Wild West of how do you know what is true?

The Wild West of how do you know what is right from wrong? Well, if you give up on the Bible and you go searching for the horizons of reason, then who knows where you're going to end up?

Once you leave the established landmarks of truth, morality, and knowledge itself, you are required to blaze your own trails.

I mean, you're all on your own, really. And naturally, of course, you're going to use some of the trails that others have already started, but if you follow their route particularly, you're gonna suffer the same fate.

There's the blind canyon of Hume's empiricism. The only way you can know anything is by what you can prove empirically, except for that statement you just made.

And then there's the wandering circle of Kant's rationalism. I can prove that reason is reasonable by using my reason.

Then you have the double crossing of Hegel's dialectic. It's neither this nor that, but this until that comes around and then it's neither this nor that again.

You also have the drunken stagger of Darwin's materialism, where I think we came from this, but I think we came from that.

And how can I trust my thoughts if I came from a monkey? He actually wrote that. There's also the bone -dry mirage of Marx's revolution.

The revolution that Marx wanted to see was only a mirage, and anybody who arrives there finds no hope.

And there's also the hallucinogenic peyote of Kierkegaard's existentialism, where you just provide your own meaning for life.

You just be you and whatever you want to believe about yourself, that's your reality. That's who you are.

And then we have the self -applied, tall tree and short rope of Nietzsche's nihilism. And nothing, if everything is matter, if there's nothing but matter, then nothing matters, so end it all.

And that was Nietzsche's end. So out in the epistemic wild west, one gunslinger comes along after another, and the only authority on knowledge or truth and morality is the one left standing.

So what do you do then? The way to survive the quick draw or the superior firepower or the better tactic is to run in a gang.

You need a gang out in the epistemic wild west. You need the sharpshooter on the roof, you need the flanker in the alley, and you need the guy in the middle of the street.

You need more than one guy, you need a gang. And the real story of philosophy, I think, is found in all the adaptations and the syntheses which have been expressed in various schools of thought, various schools of thought.

And what happens if you take the trails of Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard and infuse them into a network where you have a gang of non -COVID -related max men?

You get the Frankfurt gang. There's a Frankfurt gang, and they said that the way to understand everything is to develop truth and morality by getting the societal classes against each other.

And in the fallout of interrogating societies and their contradictions, knowledge will emerge.

This is the Frankfurt gang. The Frankfurt school, as it's known, the

Frankfurt school was a communist gang of intellectual thugs. They didn't actually do any thuggery, but intellectually they did.

They got their inspiration from a man named Antonio Gramsci. Antonio Gramsci lived from 1860 to 1937, and Gramsci was a neo -Marxist.

So you have Marx, and then you have Marxists. You ever seen a picture of Marx? His beard goes out to here, okay?

And then you have all the lesser Marxists, like Fidel Castro. His beard doesn't go out as wide, but it's kind of long.

And then you have that one guy down in Venezuela. What's his name? Yeah, he's got a beard too, and it's kind of like a hopeless case.

But there he is. So you have all these Marxists, and they all have beards. But Antonio Gramsci was a neo -Marxist, which is

Latin for, I'm a Marxist, but I don't have a beard. And actually, none of the neo -Marxists of the

Frankfurt school had beards. So I think it was a thing, I really do. Now Gramsci had a little bit different point of view from Marx.

Now Marx, he believed, had succeeded in identifying class struggle as the way forward in Hegelian dialectic.

What is the Hegelian dialectic? The Hegelian dialectic is said, what we used to believe isn't true.

And what people are proposing way over here, that's not true. But I think that if we mix them together, we'll come out with the truth.

Okay? So that's a, yeah, syncretism, a synthesis. The truth is in the emerging synthesis.

And Marx said, well, in the class struggle of the, in the class struggle between proletariat and the bourgeois, we're going to make progress.

A dynamic class, or a class conflict. Marx focused on this as a political and economic reality of 19th century

Europe. But his predictions, a lot of his predictions failed. He said there's gonna be a revolution, the proletariat, the people who are always working are gonna rise up against those who own the means of production, and there's going to be class warfare, and then the proles are going to be liberated in that way, and the state, being

God, will sort it all out. Well, his predictions, most of his predictions failed. So Gramsci thought about that.

And he liberated the whole idea of bourgeois, or the oppressor, and the proletariat, the oppressed, he liberated that from only economic or political kinds of categories.

He noted that the reason why the revolution failed in so many cases was that there were structures in society, there were generators of cultural meaning that kept the categories as they were.

And so he noted that there was the universities, the schools, there were the arts, there was the church, there was even the family, the home, all these different structures in the culture of a society maintained the capitalist consciousness.

And he said that the real reason was that there wasn't a revolution everywhere, like Marx said there should be, it was because that culturally, all these things kept there from being a revolution that needed to happen.

And so that the oppressors and the oppressed were not so much separated by economic factors or political factors as by cultural factors, and hence we have the phrase cultural

Marxism. Cultural Marxism. So Marx and Gramsci, they were both materialists.

Okay, they both believed it was zero at some game, no God. But Gramsci took an approach more about you have to change the way you think about things before things can actually change.

Marx said you have to change the way things are before things can change the way you think. So they disagreed about the chicken and the egg problem.

But Gramsci's approach has been more successful, more penetrating, more widely felt than Marx.

So his way of approaching these things, again, his whole idea is that there's a problem with capitalism, just standard.

The problem is you have people who are the oppressors and people who are the oppressed. Why do they stay that way? Not simply because of economic and political factors, but because of cultural factors, like the church, the schools, the arts, the family, so on.

Unless these things change, oppression will never end. So that was his idea.

And so his way of thinking inspired a whole gang of thinkers to begin criticizing, critical theory, criticizing the structural oppression, the systemic oppression of what he called cultural hegemony, meaning the way things are and the majority of people doing it that way.

We just call it privilege now. Cultural hegemony was the term back then.

It's just called privilege now. So between World War I and World War II, a new gang of beardless cultural

Marxists formed a new think tank called the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany.

It's called Frankfurt School for short. Of these, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse are the three that appear on the

Wanted posters. Max, Theodor, and Herbert. Those are the three names that are on the

Wanted posters of the cultural Marxists. Now, Max and Theodor took things as far as they could, and Herbert Marcuse took it even further.

It was vital to them, it was vital to them that it be understood that no objective structure like the academy or the church or the state, the economy even, or the home should determine your existence.

You should determine your existence for yourself. If someone's defining who you are, that's oppression.

Because then they control, they can control, therefore, your, in a sense, what your range of things that you can do.

So they were very much for existentialism, where the dogma is your existence precedes your essence, which means it doesn't matter what the bits you are made up of, how you understand yourself is more important, and you create your own meaning.

They had to come to that point rather than, you either go to existentialism or you go to suicide with Nietzsche.

So I mean, if you're just made up of nothing but matter, randomly thrown together by some cosmic accident, and the only thing happening in your head is brain fizz of a certain different flavor than somebody else's brain fizz, then it doesn't matter.

That's nihilism, right? That's the logical conclusion of the claims of the materialists, that there's nothing but matter.

So to break off from that suicide route, you have to go to existentialism and just provide your own meaning, right?

Every Disney film, right? You know, go your own way, don't let anybody, don't let any of the institutions or structures tell you what you are, you are who you say you are, provide your own meaning.

Okay, it's existentialism, popularized. Now Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse immigrated to the

States in the 60s and was especially influential. Herbert Marcuse is called the father of the new left.

He's the father of the new left, more like the godfather of the institutional mafia. Remember that Gramsci re -envisioned

Marx's revolution. He's like, there's not gonna be any kind of revolution until there's a long march through the institutions.

That's what he said. There's gonna be a long march through the institutions of this critical theory of these ideologies so that the institutions will be broken down so that the barrier to revolution can be removed, right?

The academy has to be broken down, the arts have to be broken down, the economy, the state, the church, the family, all these things have to be broken down and removed away as those influences which are keeping revolution from happening.

Cultural Marxism. So they have to have a long march through the institutions. That's what

Gramsci wanted and that's what the Frankfurt School was all about. And so we have an institutional mafia because the gangs eventually matured into mafia, right?

You stopped with the horse riding and everything and then you got cars and cool suits. The Frankfurt School, with Marcuse as the godfather, became the institutional mafia in the academy, in the state, and in the church.

There was a couple of other hired guns called Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault who collaborated with deconstructionism and postmodernism which basically means that nothing written down means what you think it means and nothing that anybody ever said means what you think it means.

It only means what, or it means what you think it means but it doesn't mean that to somebody else and so on.

Now, critical theory is an acid that breaks everything down, everything. So any field of study, the practice of medicine, the practice of law, religion, the pursuit of wealth, family, no matter what it is, it is an acid that is to break everything down.

If it is an identifiable part of the cultural hegemony, if it's part of the privilege, then critical theory must attach, make it about oppressors versus oppressed, and then completely begin to criticize it and break it down based upon those terms.

The mafia are those who support one another's promotion of critical theory.

So whatever it is, it must be interrogated as a hostile witness. Whatever the structure is, whatever the cultural structure is, it has to be interrogated as a hostile witness.

In other words, this, it is guilty of oppression so now we begin to identify all the ways that it is oppressive.

That's the way critical theory works. We're gonna attach this to Subway in a moment so hang on,

I'm gonna show you how this works with Subway. I still eat at Subway. I don't know if that's bad for me.

But it attaches to anything and then makes it about oppressors versus oppressed and then breaks it down. I'll show you how that works.

But it doesn't matter. From the academy through various facets of Western culture, critical theorists assume, they must assume oppression, they interrogate by their own questions where that oppression is, and they self -fulfillingly discover oppression wherever it is.

Told ya. You know. Neo -Marxist and cultural

Marxist class conflict. What are the, what is the class conflict? So whatever is considered the cultural hegemony are the oppressors.

So white, straight, male, cis -gendered, heteronormative, wealthy,

Christian, educated, just keep on going. Whatever is considered the norm in the culture, that is what is oppression, that's oppressive.

And so critical theory must break that down. So these back and forth, the oppressed and the oppressor provides the partners for the

Hegelian dialectic to achieve an emerging worldview along existentialist lines.

Let me give you an example of what that is. This is exactly why, you watch the videos of the riots and parades and protests and stuff.

This is why there's a lesbian woman marching in a BLM parade with a sign that says, I can't breathe.

You're not black, why are you in the protest? Nobody choked you out? Why are you holding a sign that says,

I can't breathe? This is so weird. And it is, but that's critical theory.

That's critical theory at work. Why is she saying, I can't breathe?

Why is she identifying with Black Lives Matter? Because, what is the norm? What is the basic standard norm?

It's cis -gendered, heterosexual, monogamy, expressed in a nuclear family, which lives in a patriarchal economy laid across a

Christian framework of morality. In other words, the norm is man meets woman.

They get married in a church. They have kids and work hard to make it bountiful for their generation and the next, all to the glory of God.

Yeah, that's considered oppression. So, since the lesbian out there at the

BLM parade is not that, and she's like everything opposite to that, at least she understands herself as that, then she lives in the air of oppression then.

She has summed up all of, this is all summed up these days by the euphemism whiteness. Now, if you think whiteness is about color, it's not.

It's not. Whiteness is not about color. And blackness is not about color.

These are euphemisms. To put it a different way, these are theological terms of a different religion.

Like you would have to learn some theological terms about Mormonism. You have to understand that whiteness and blackness are theological terms of another religion.

It's a good way to express this. Whiteness is a euphemism, not because it has anything to do with color, but because this is the term that has been most effective in targeting privilege, targeting cultural hegemony.

In critical theory, because it's based upon post -modernism, they're not interested in some objective truth.

They're interested in the words that seem to work the best. Words are nothing but a power play to a critical theorist.

So whichever words are most effective, that's the ones they're sticking with. And lo and behold, whiteness really worked well, right?

This is why they're using that term. It's not about color. This is about cultural

Marxism, identifying the oppressors and the oppressed. One author put it this way, mere proximity to white people in a white society, again, you think this is about color.

Mere proximity to white people in white society is like climbing the mountains of shadow into Mordor every day.

It is toxic and oppressive. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume.

Why are people marching in these protests and they have these signs of, stop killing us?

Why are they doing that? Who's killing them, right? People reach into their pocket, pull out their statistics, you know?

There were 337 million interactions between police officers and black men in 2019 and only 13 were shot.

Pretty good record. And they're like, stop killing us. That's oppression, you just said something racist.

What's going on? This is critical theory. It's not about numbers, it's not about empirical data, it's not about science, okay?

This is critical theory. Now, there is the notion that if you oppose critical theory, you're claiming that everything

America and the church is and has done is perfectly right and good. There's the idea that if you oppose some of the leaning towards critical theory, if you oppose that, then you're just justifying everything

America's ever done or everything the church has ever done. No, I'm not.

Shouldn't there be a critique of these things? Oh, yes, absolutely. We never needed critical theory to take a look at ourselves and say, hey, that's not right.

Or this is commendable, keep it up. Never needed a critical theory to do that. We've always had the word of God, which is sufficient for all these things.

Now, how is critical theory manifested in our time? Well, critical theory is manifested, as we've already been talking about, by identifying oppressions through something called intersectionality.

Who here has heard of intersectionality? Intersectionality is the logic that was in the beginning with CT, and it is the exact imprint of CT's nature.

Revealed in our time by Kimberly Crenshaw, it is critical theory's selfie.

It's critical theory's selfie. Oppression is assumed. So let's take a selfie and see how many layers of oppression

I'm under. How oppressed am I? Or am I the oppressor? So that's your identity, according to cultural

Marxism, cultural Marxism names you what you are. The assumption is oppression.

How many areas of oppression are intersecting into your life? For instance, a black lesbian trans -disabled fat

Muslim wins the intersectional trophy. Oh, also poor.

A poor black lesbian trans -disabled fat Muslim wins the intersectionality trophy. Why? Because all the different intersections of oppression are there on every single level.

They win the trophy. They're the most oppressed ever, which means they have more to say than anybody else, and nobody else can know what they're going through.

So everybody's intersection gives them an ability to speak to their oppression that nobody else can say anything else about who doesn't have that same kind of oppression.

Okay? So this is why it's confusing when white silence is violence, and then it says, it's not your turn to speak.

What? You just told me to speak, no. Speak up and say the slogans we tell you to say, but when it comes about talking about the oppression, you don't have any, oh, white, so you don't get to say anything.

You have to listen to the people who are oppressed, and they'll tell you what it's like, and you have no authority on the matter to, but again, we have the word of God, so.

All right, so how is this manifested? In various ways. Feminism is one of them. It's one of the more established ones.

Feminism is not the message that God made man and woman in his image equal in his image, equal worth.

That is not the message of feminism. Okay? Feminism is hatred of females.

Comes from a critical theory, so it's hate. Feminism is hatred of females. By saying that males and females are fungible, interchangeable, one for the other.

Anything a man can do, a woman can do, end of story. Okay, that's feminism, and so what does feminism achieve?

Feminism achieves femininity, making it evil, and achieves the replacement of all women with men.

Or makes a woman the sum of her parts, which can be replicated. That's the end of feminism.

I'll give you a quote from Summer Jaeger. A quick perusal of the writing of women such as Susan B.

Anthony and Emma Goldman tells us that they believe that being a wife means little more than being a housekeeper. It is a life of drudgery, mistreatment, and servitude.

Wives are essentially parasites that are socially and individually useless. One must be stupid to believe that marriage is anything other than a commitment to failure and misery.

In order for a woman to be truly free, she must not enter into a marital union. Women must be freed, not from sin, but from men.

Which is a pretty good assessment of feminism. And of course, you see the success of feminism in the destruction of anything feminine.

That's what critical theory does. Remember, it's a parasite that attaches itself to anything, makes it about oppressed oppressor, and then proceeds to destroy it.

Remember that cultural Marxism only makes progress if it destroys the structures of a culture, including the family. Critical race theory.

You hear this a lot. There's critical theory, which is like a broad circle, and within there's several different aspects of critical theory.

One of those is critical race theory. This is the most popular one today, where it turns the categories of oppressor and oppressed into matters of racial oppression.

So now we go to Subway. You ready to go to Subway? All right, so here's critical race theory interpreting your visit to Subway.

When you go to Subway and dine in to eat a sandwich, you as a white person participate in the racist societal structures in the following ways.

Your transportation to and from Subway is included. Your car runs better, because as a white man, you've had more money to buy and repair it, better treatment of the car by the mechanics because you're white, less traffic stops by cops, more access to education on how they keep up a car and how to drive safer, and more deference from other racists, which are the majority of power structure on the road.

The white people drive nicer around you once you go to Subway. The black man who comes to Subway and sat down to eat a sandwich had it much harder than you did getting there.

Your choice of food at Subway is part of your racism. As a white man, you unwittingly participate in racist structures that accord you more money and thus you have a wider selection of food to choose from than the oppressed minority in line behind you.

Remember, he had a difficult time getting to Subway and thus you're ahead of him in the line because you're a racist.

If you were to offer him to go ahead of you, you would simply be flaunting your superiority and exercising control over him like those plantation owners you look like.

When you make your choice of food as a white person, you have been given far more access to education and dietary understanding, thus you make better choices than the minority does.

You eat better than he does because of the racist structures you participate in. Number three, your table manners and interactions.

There's no end to the multitude of microaggressions you manifest as you eat, blithely unaware of all of your oppressive whiteness.

You can look at everybody in the eye and greet everyone without fear of reprisal. Your ability to eat with poise and comfort speaks to your privileged life.

The minority cannot enjoy the freedoms you do because of the racist structures that have kept him from learning to be at ease around others and to eat with poise.

Number four, the way you throw away your trash and clean up your table. Will your whiteness never end?

The minority cleans up too, but not with the same feeling, although he might clean up as much as you do and knows how.

For him to do this kind of work is no favor to the establishment, such menial labor offends him with his overtones of slavery and living as a low -class laborer.

He cannot clean like you do due to the oppression of whiteness against him. Number five, the way you walk out the door and drive away.

You don't look behind you or keep your head on a swivel when you walk to your car. You can start your car with ease and pull out your car from the lot with less fear of hitting another car.

If a white man gets into a fender bender, he is not afraid of the cop. The minority does fear.

Now, that is just going to subway through the lens of critical race theory.

All right, now, yeah, see, I can do it too. It doesn't take much to be a critical race theorist.

You just have to be really cynical and make everything about race. Notice as well,

I don't believe any of this junk, but in order to make critical race theory work, you have to be a racist.

You have to make assumptions and say things about people of another race that are demeaning and derogatory.

Critical race theory is in itself racist and feminism hates femininity. Are you catching what happens?

Critical theory is a parasite that destroys whatever it attaches to and then finally eats itself.

This is what always happens. Same thing with queer theory, which we talked about when we went over Black Lives Matter.

We talked about queer theory. And then et cetera, as we talked about with nutritionists or maybe even veterinarians or training dogs or vacuuming the floor.

There's always some way to take anything and put it into the shredder of critical theory and totally take it apart.

Now, that to me is fairly obvious. I think that there's a lot of that going on and I think that it's self -destructive and I'm glad that God has created our world and governs our world in such a way that people who dig pits fall into them, people who roll stones have them rolled back over them and that folly like a fire finally burns out even though it makes a lot of mess on the way down.

My concern moving forward is going to be talking about how critical theory, not in its pure cynical form, but in a syncretized, synthesized form is being brought into the church.

And we're gonna talk about a lot of that coming up. And when we do, this is when we're gonna go back to our method of talking about clarifying our terms and running the reductio and responding and hope and all of that.

I just, about like tonight, we really needed to go over some basics.

And finally, I give you a passage from 1st Critical Theory, Chapter 13, verses one through 13. You need to understand that critical theory is the opposite of what

God means when he says love. Hence, we'll take the famous love passage out of 1st

Corinthians and let's examine it as a foil against what critical theory is.

I think this is a very accurate rendering. If I speak with the language of political correctness but do not apply critical theory,

I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I am verified on social media and know all sociology and all science, and if I have all political power so as to remove structures of oppression but do not apply critical theory,

I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor and if I surrender my body to be burned but did not do so in the name of critical theory, it profits me nothing.

Critical theory must be applied now. Critical theory is rigorous and suffers no rivals.

Critical theory, virtue signals incessantly and is the only right way of thinking. Critical theory acts however it needs to.

Critical theory exists from critical theory. Critical theory never ceases to be provoked, forever records even the smallest wrong suffered.

Critical theory rejoices in utilizing any acts or words which achieves its aims. Critical theory abandons all things, denies all things, damns all things, deconstructs all things.

Critical theory never fails. But if there is Christian gospel preaching, it will be done away. If there are cross -cultural

Christian missions, they will cease. If there is conservative biblical scholarship, it will be done away.

For critical theory is in a long march through the institutions. But when the full application of critical theory comes, the revolution will be complete.

Because I am privileged, I speak as an oppressor, think like an oppressor, reason like an oppressor. But when

I became woke, I now abhor all privilege. As an ally, I see in a mirror dimly but only those with intersectional oppression understand and can speak the truth and determine what is just.

But now politics, racism, critical theory abide these three. But the greatest of these is critical theory.

Which is why I don't think that it can be used as an analytical tool for anything, let alone the church and the scripture.

But more on that next time we get together. Let's close by singing the doxology.