How Be the Bridge Twists the Image of God

Standpoint Theory, Intersectionality, and Ethnic Gnosticism

Via the Bridge incorporates standpoint theory through intersectionality to help bring us into a knowledge of racism and oppression. Standpoint theory, also known as standpoint epistemology, is a feminist theory that examines how a person's social and political experiences shape their understanding of the world.

The theory is based on the idea that knowledge is not objective, but is instead shaped by social position. Via the Bridge reinforces and reminds its disciples that the BIPOC community knows and understands racism because they have lived it.

Standpoint epistemology grants special knowledge only to people of color. Via the Bridge not only connects certain knowledge to certain types of ethnicities, what Lottie Baucom coined ethnic Gnosticism, but Via the Bridge goes so far as to say that each ethnicity reflects a certain attribute of God.

The Image of God as a Collective Rather Than Individual Reality

Instead of the image of God being rooted in the humanity of an individual given to one male and one female and passed on to all descendants and reflected in each individual, to Via the Bridge the image of God is only fully reflected in humanity as a whole.

And to express the image of God, Christians must become color brave, not color blind. Quote, the truth is that each ethnicity reflects a unique aspect of God's image. No one tribe or group of people can adequately display the fullness of God.

The truth is that it takes every tribe, tongue, and nation to reflect the image of God in His fullness. End quote. That's Morrison's Via the Bridge, page 22. This is a collectivist view of the image of God.

In fact, listen to this clip from the Via the Bridge podcast with Morrison interviewing Andrea Smith from Insight. I believe that this slight twisting about the image of God being uniquely reflected in individual ethnicities comes from a more panentheistic view of God than the traditional transcendent view of God.

Regeneration and Sanctification as Collective Practice

And this clip, I believe, reveals where this type of belief ends up. You end up with a collectivist and humanistic view on regeneration and sanctification, rejecting the work of the Holy Spirit in these and placing the work on the collective.

In terms of kind of addressing relationships between people of color, we need different structures that make us become different people. We need structures that kind of require us to think about others, to think collectively, not to think about our own individual interests.

And we can't just think these things through in our head. And I think that's what we see in Christianity. Jesus had the call to be born again because Jesus is telling us, under 500 years of white supremacy shenanigans, you are so messed up.

If we were to end white supremacy right now, we wouldn't recognize ourselves because we are so shaped by these forces of oppression. So we are going to be born again into a new world we can't even imagine right now, into new people we can't imagine.

But how do we do that? Well, we learn in the early church, you don't just think your way there. You need a practice that helps you get there. And so when we create these different kinds of collective practices, we start to become different people in the process.

The Biblical Image of God in Male and Female Humanity

First off, there are no ethnicities when God made man and woman who are made in his image. From the male and female came all men made in that same image. Are there reflections of different aspects of that image in different ethnicities?

No, all are made in God's image, regardless of culture or color of skin. The image of God transcends culture, ethnicity, and color of skin. God is not like us. He is spirit who has no body or ethnicity.

So what is given this image is not what we see, but our attributes that separate us from all other creation, such things as morality, authority, creativity, logic, and reason. And our purpose is to be fruitful in multiplying these things because we all reflect them in some capacity.

These are spiritual in nature. How we reflect them may look different from one culture or ethnicity to the next, but we all have this image individually. Now if we believe that there are unique aspects of God's image found within ethnicities, it makes sense then to display the image of God rightly, one must take on ethnic collective structures to allow all ethnicities to display this image.

This is why Andrea says what she says. If being born again allows one to rightly display God's image, and you take on a collective ethnic view on this, you will have to conclude that 1. we work first off to be born again, and 2. that work can only be fully realized through collectively working with other ethnic structures so that each race may adequately display these different aspects of God's image within them.

This then begs the question of how is this done? How do we give each ethnicity the ability to display them? In the intro, I played a clip of an interview with Dominic Gilliard stating that people are equitably made in the image of God.

All people are equitably made in the image of God.

Equity is the issue. We must understand that this is at the very core of critical race theory, it's at the core of social justice, it is the expressed goal of an anti-racist. It's not about equal opportunity, but about equitable outcomes.

Think of equity as just plain fairness. Everybody has the same outcome, they all exercise the same power and authority, and they all have the same privileges, they all own the same, etc. To get everyone to the same outcome, really, all must, in essence, believe the same.

According to the social gospel, God's kingdom is an equitable kingdom. All will have the same authority and power, which will be no power or authority at all, and all will leverage privilege, which means no one will have any, and all will share, which means no one will own anything.

Sound familiar? That's egalitarianism at its finest. This is what God intended until men fell in the sin of power and privilege brought oppression and inequalities. A part of bringing the kingdom is to fix racial inequities.

Those racial groups who have more power and privilege must leverage these and center or raise power and privilege to the marginalized. Equitable outcome. This is part of being anti-racist. We'll see this played out as I go over Be the Bridge's Whiteness 101 training.

In the broader sphere, anti-racism is accomplished through laws and political means. In the more localized sphere, church, religious groups, and educational systems, it's through raising and empowering people who identify as part of the minority.

Again, intersectionality at play here. It's done by placing as priority the reading of theological and hermeneutical viewpoints of people of color. This is how you honor each ethnicity and allow them to display their aspect of God's image.

This is racial justice. Being anti-racist is the sanctification process by which one achieves racial righteousness. If you thought this was a slippery slope as people talk about racial righteousness, you'd be right to say that something just doesn't sit right.

Because when we start talking about righteousness, we are diving into God's standard here and what pleases Him. And like all forms of works righteousness, apart from God's law, we end up falling into legalism.

Reparations, Salvation, and Zacchaeus

Listen to this clip from the Be the Bridge podcast interview with Dominic Gileard, who by the way, denies the penal substitutionary atonement of the cross in his book, how he connects reparations to salvation.

Zakiya said, I realized that I have to not only pay back what I stole, but four times as much because I realized that my sin had a multiplicable impact on communities and it harmed people and impacted people that I never directly encountered.

And we have to have that kind of maturity within our faith to be able to soberly assess sin and the impact of our sins. And then we can really start to meet and discern with God and community about what does it look like to make reconciliation a material reality.

And for Zakiya, somebody who got filthy rich off of sin and stealing, it meant reparations. And I know that's a scary word for a lot of folk, but it's right there in the biblical text. And it's really interesting that Jesus didn't say salvation has come into this house until he actually has articulated this understanding that his reconciliation entailed reparations.

Notice that Gilead went so far as to say that Jesus doesn't mention salvation in regards to Zakiya until Zakiya not only repents, but bears the fruit of that repentance by reparations. There is a glaring, glaring implication he's making here, hoping to draw our attention to imply that Jesus mentioned salvation to Zakiya because he showed that he really repented through reparations.

And it's not reparations that we might understand from scripture. The reparations that scripture shows us from Zakiya are ones that are paid directly to those he stole from. Gilead twists it to make it look as if Zakiya was paying four times more to make up for societal effects of his sin.

Zakiya said, I realized that I have to not only pay back what I stole, but four times as much because I realized that my sin had a multiplicable impact on communities and it harmed people and impacted people that I never directly encountered.

This is to read this worldview into the text, not draw out of it. And then Gilead implies that that type of repentance was acceptable enough by Christ to declare that salvation was granted to Zakiya. Hugely, hugely problematic.

The Gospel of Individual Salvation and Jew-Gentile Unity in Christ

I bring this up because I want you to recognize the complete change of the gospel and Christian life here. The gospels change from a salvation that reconciles individuals to God and sets us free from our own sin by God's grace and sanctification through his word to a social materialistic salvation won through reparations with a goal to reconcile man to man through sanctification by collective structures that are supposed to bring equity.

Now think about this. How does Morrison's claim in her book, Smith's view on the collective structures, and Gilead's reference to salvation affect our idea of Christ, who bore the fullness of deity in one ethnicity?

Jesus was a Hebrew. He was a Jew. And what effect might it have on biblical distinctions? The distinction that racial reconciliationists and anti-racists completely ignore is the Jew and Gentile distinction.

The distinction made not by the color of our skin, but whether one is in Christ or out of Christ. The fullness of deity dwelt in him. He bore the image of God undefiled by sin and in his humanity, which included his ethnicity, fulfilled all the law that was given to it.

The law was given to those of ethnic Jewish descent. And it was the adherence to the law that separated one or united one to God, an adherence that no Jew or Gentile could fulfill until Christ, who was the promise given to all the nations, the sacrifice of God that would dissolve the separation between Jew and Gentile and unite us into one man in him.

Therefore, remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands, remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two.

So making peace and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. That's Ephesians 2, 11 to 16. As Christians, our identity is no longer rooted in ethnicity.

It's part of it, but it's not rooted in it. It's rooted in Christ. In whatever ethnicity we are, we are united in the new identity. We are transformed by the Holy Spirit to want to be like Christ and love God and neighbor as he instructs us to in his word.

Be the Bridge’s Anti-Racist Discipleship and Its Consequences

But Morrison Smith, Gilead and other Be the Bridge builders who take on these collective beliefs, take in these intersectional standpoints as truth and actually teach that by them we become born again, as we heard, bringing in the kingdom of God and are sanctified as the collective leverages the privileges of white people to people of color.

Be the Bridge trains people to become anti-racist, to identify racism in the system and challenge and take on practices, or as Andrea Smith called them, collective structures that go against whiteness and white supremacy within it.

This is where it will lead for Christians who join the ministry and participate in these communities.