CRT and Triperspectivalism

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, my name is John Harris. I realize this has a million dollar word in the title, is tri -perspectivalism a third way for critical race theory?

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Actually it's got more than one million dollar word if you don't know what critical race theory is. So this is going to be a little heady in some ways.

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We're going to talk about tri -perspectivalism a little bit, but this really all comes down to a small tweet thread that a theologian by the name of John Frame made last week and several people sent it to me.

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I guess it's been applied to critical race theory and some people think that John Frame is proposing some kind of third way, some kind of option.

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Now of course the third way that we're used to is you can implement critical race theory tools, but you just can't, you have to stand against the worldview, so you separate the worldview from the tools, which we talked about ad nauseum is impossible, you can't do it, but some people think that it can be done.

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And John Frame though gives us more of an intellectual, if that's what he's doing, intellectual way to try to maybe put, to reconcile critical race theory and Christianity.

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Now here's the thing, I don't know that this is what he's doing, I'm not sure, but there are people who are taking it that way, and because there are people who are taking it that way, whether I'm responding to John Frame or maybe

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I'm responding to the people that are using some of John Frame's thinking to promote critical race theory, my response is going to be the same.

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So I want to take you through some of that and show you kind of what's going on here.

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So it's going to be hard to get our brains wrapped around this a little bit, it's like you got to take a few

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Advil and then you'll understand it and then you'll forget it, right? That's a lot of complicated ideas are like that, where you kind of got it, you grasp it and then you lose it.

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This is one of them, in a way I'm going to try my best here, but there's a good,

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I think it's a pretty good article in explaining and interpreting John Frame's epistemology is Tri -Perspectivalism, it's by James Anderson, it's called

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Presuppositionalism and Frame's Epistemology, and I'm going to read for you an excerpt from it, it says this,

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Framian Perspectivalism, meaning John Frame's Perspectivalism, is characterized by two core claims.

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One, at any one time, each of us has only a partial and limited perspective on any subject matter and two, in order to best understand any subject matter, we need to consider it from multiple perspectives.

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The first claim follows from the simple observation that we are not God, we are finite and not omniscient and therefore our apprehension of any object of knowledge is inevitably limited to one perspective or another.

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Now I'm going to stop there for a minute, Perspectivalism, I mean, Standpoint Theory and Perspectivalism go together, generally when we're thinking of Perspectivalism, we're thinking of someone who thinks, we're talking about postmodernists generally.

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Now Frame is not a postmodernist, Frame is a presuppositional apologist, presuppositional apologists tend to have a lot of different sort of variations and kind of like reform theologians, there's kind of like different versions of it,

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Frame is in a certain category, I don't really know how to categorize it, but his book Apologetics to the

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Glory of God, I think it's pretty good for the most part and he kind of sets out his ideas there, but I digress.

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So Frame's Perspectivalism is not going to be postmodern Perspectivalism, he thinks that there is objectivity, there is truth, there is a way to apprehend some of it because we have revelation from God, right?

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But he still thinks, he's still making this claim, which is true, that we're limited in our perspective and so we need to consider something from multiple perspectives.

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All right, now I think there's a possible danger here, but we're going to keep going. The second claim is a natural extension of the first, given our perspectival limitations, it follows that our understanding of any subject matter can be developed and enhanced by considering it from alternative perspectives.

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Now here's the thing, if you have revelation from God on issue and you know and your idea matches

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God's idea of that particular topic, then you can't really add to that, you can't be like, oh, we're going to get a better perspective, an enhanced perspective, a developed perspective by talking to someone else.

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In fact, all you can get yourself into is a mess of error, because if you're adopting their perspective and they're wrong, and you already have the right perspective, then you're going in the wrong direction.

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I'll keep going here. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, for example, by shifting our point of view, either physically or conceptually, by reordering or reorganizing our data, by considering different emphasis or entry points, and by consulting with others and allowing their insights to complement our own.

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Now, there's some truth to this, like, you know, if you're looking at a statue, and you're looking at it from behind, you think it's a woman or a man, and it's really a woman or something, someone on the front of the statue can say, hey, look, you know, no, actually,

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I see this. But the reason isn't because you're not looking at the same thing. That's the problem. You're looking at two different angles of the same thing, and you're not, one person has access to an observation that you don't have access to, and because of that, they can inform you on what you don't have access to.

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So there's some truth to this. Now, in standpoint theory, today's version of it by critical race theorists, that means that, well, certain, you know, minorities or sexual minorities or women have certain insights that a white, straight male can't have because of their knowledge of oppression that white, straight male people don't have.

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And we have gone after that idea in every single way, how it just, it eats everything, it's postmodern.

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It ends up, you have to, you can't even interpret the Bible without, correctly, without these perspectives informing you.

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It denies objective reality because everyone's locked into their social location. Now, the

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Achilles heel is that you can, somehow the sociologists are able to transcend this, these views and adjudicate them and compare them and realize, oh, it's the, it's the lesbians who had it right, not the straight people who are male or something, you know, that's how this goes.

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Now, if you have a perspectivalism though, where God is the creator and different people have limited perspectives, but God is the one with the one true perspective.

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And he gives us revelation by which we can know things through general and special revelation. I don't know that I have a problem with it, but it,

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I don't know that in this paragraph, at least we're not seeing those things really come out as much. Now, if you read the whole can in a frame,

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I'm sure you'll see some of that. Let's keep going though here. And hopefully it'll, the fog will lift.

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It'll be more clear as we keep going. First, the normative perspective considers the norms for human intellectual activity, the standards, laws, principles, and criteria that apply to our truth gathering and truth utilizing.

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Second, the situational perspective considers the situation or circumstances in which the human knower is placed. In particular, it concerns the external objects or matters of fact toward which human thoughts are directed.

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Finally, as a necessary compliment to these two outward oriented perspectives, the existential perspective considers the subjective internal personal aspects of human knowledge.

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Note that the ordering of the perspectives here as is, as in frame zone writings is incidental. No one perspective is more important than any other or reducible to any other.

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Each perspective must be considered in conjunction with the other two. Together they furnish us with a balanced and unified understanding.

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Recall the earlier house viewing analogy. So you view a house from different angles. You get different perspectives of it.

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And if you're going to check out a house, you don't want to just look at the front. You want to look inside. That's kind of, that's the analogy. And so they're saying that, frame is saying that there's, there's three different perspectives.

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You have a first one, the normative. So this is the laws and the principles. Then you have the situational.

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So you apply these norms and principles to certain situations. And then you have the last one, which is the existential, which is subjective, internal and personal aspects of human knowledge.

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So that's who you are. So think of it this way. You have yourself. You have the environment, the situation you're in, and then you have laws.

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You have, well, you could even say God's law, God's moral law, right? So you're going to apply that to a situation, but you're the one applying it to a situation external from, you know, the revelation from God in this case.

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And so he calls these three things perspectives. Now here's the thing that I quibble with in my mind, and maybe someone can write in the comments that they understand this really well, is that, you know,

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I don't know if I'd call those perspectives. Those seem to be like, just, those are the elements that would make up a perspective.

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So God has full knowledge of all the environments and situations. He created it. God has full knowledge of who we are and our capacities and his own understanding.

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And God created the rules and the rules that govern things. And so God would, you know, a perspective would encapsulate all three of these elements,

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I would think. I wouldn't call them each three perspectives. I would say a perspective requires all three of these things.

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And that's a little, I don't know if it's confusing. It is. It seems confusing. I should, I can say that.

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It's confusing. I think I know what frame's getting at here though, but I just think the language just seems,

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I'm sure he chose it on purpose, but it seems like it becomes confusing. Now why is this relevant for our audience, for Conversations That Matter people?

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Well, if we're going to use that and sort of this perspectival, this presuppositional perspectival perspective, say that, that's a mouthful.

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If we're going to apply this to critical race theory, what would that look like? Well, here's what it might look like. Here's John frames tweet thread.

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He says, when there is a controversy, don't get on one side right away. Now I'm already having red flags.

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Like really? Like there's don't get on one side. So abortion, like we don't, okay. Do some analytical work first on both positions.

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Consider these possibilities. A, that the two parties may be looking at the same issue from different perspectives so that they don't really contradict.

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B, that both parties are overlooking something that could have brought them together. C, that they are making, they're talking past one another because they use terms in different ways.

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And D, that there is a third alternative that is better than either of the opposing views and that might bring them together.

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E, that their differences though genuine ought to be tolerated in the church, like the differences between vegetarians and meat eaters in Romans 14.

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Now I'm not probably going to get into the Romans 14 one as much. I think that the Romans 14 issue is certainly wouldn't apply to certain, you know, obviously it's not going to apply to issues like critical race theory because we've demonstrated over and over how critical race theory undermines the very idea of revelation, that it's objective, that we can access it, that it's clear.

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It introduces an ethic that contradicts equality before the law, which the Old Testament certainly teaches.

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And, I mean, those are the two primary things, I guess, the Marxism and the postmodernism, but it's causing real division.

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It breaks apart the unity at the communion table. So it doesn't, it wouldn't fit the Roman 14 thing.

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But the other stuff here, you know, I think it's worth looking into these things for a moment just to kind of test this, if critical race theory could be applied to this.

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So I came up with some examples for each of them. So B, let's, B was that both parties are overlooking something that could have brought them together.

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So what might that be? Well, matters of personal preference, right? One person likes blue carpet. One person likes green carpet.

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However, they both like red carpet. So what's the solution? You compromise. Okay. But that really only works with matters of personal preference.

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I mean, you can compromise other things, but you're, you know, if it's a dead set, you're held on it, moral absolute, then there, you can't.

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Misunderstandings for C. C says that they are talking past one another because they use terms in different ways. So one person from the

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North wants a barbecue, which is to them grilled meat. One person from the South wants barbecue, which is smoked meat.

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I can, I bridge this gap because I've lived in both regions. And I know, unfortunately, Southerners are correct when it comes to this, guys.

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Barbecue is smoked meat. I don't know why, you know, in the North, Yankees talk about going to cook a cookout and getting a burger, you know, done as a barbecue.

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It's not, but I digress. What's the solution? Well, understand the terms. Understand one person's using the term differently than the other person.

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So it's not really a disagreement. It's just you mean different things. It's, you know, one person has a different view of the term than the other person.

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So semantics. And then D is that there is a third alternative that is better than either of the opposing views.

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All right. Here's an example. Unconsidered possibilities. One person thinks a bus is faster.

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One person thinks the train is faster. However, they could both take an airplane. So what's the solution? You just consider the possibilities.

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Hey, we can actually take an airplane and get there faster. We don't have to take a bus or a train. So in each of these cases, there's ways of navigating these disagreements, and these are legitimate disagreements, but they're in the matters of personal preference, misunderstandings and unconsidered possibilities.

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That's the realm in which this works. Here's the problem realm in my mind, in a way.

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Unreconcilable disagreements, because those exist, too. You have reconcilable disagreements, but then you have unreconcilable ones.

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They're diametrically opposed. One person believes lying is wrong under any circumstance. One person believes lying is permissible under some circumstances.

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Well, how do you? There's no way with that's not a matter of personal preference. It's not a misunderstanding. It's not an unconsidered possibility.

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How about one engineer believes the bridge will last 10 years? One engineer believes the bridge will not last 10 years. Again, not a matter of personal preference, not a misunderstanding, not unconsidered possibilities.

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Now, you know, maybe one engineer didn't do his homework or something, but like one's right and one's wrong.

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If they had this belief and they're dead set in it and they think that, you know, the science bears them out. One person believes mask wearing should be coerced in order to prevent the spread of COVID.

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One person believes mask wearing should not be coerced in order to prevent the spread of COVID. One person believes critical race theory provides useful analytical tools.

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One person does not believe critical race theory provides useful analytical tools. There's no solution. There's no way to compromise here or understand or consider possibilities.

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One's right. One's wrong. One has to win. One has to lose. You can have a discussion. You can inform someone.

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Maybe they haven't thought through all the possibilities. It's possible they're ignorant on the subject.

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But if both are hard set and they have an unreconcilable disagreement, then there's no there is no third option here.

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Now, my question is, can this all be a matter of perspective? Because he brings here's the category that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

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And I think it goes right into his idea of tri -perspectivalism. He says the two parties may be looking at the same issue from different perspectives, so they don't really contradict.

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Let me give you some examples of what that might look like. One person mistakenly thinks the Statue of Liberty is a male because they only see it from the back.

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The mistake here is this does does contradict reality and therefore cannot be a valid perspective. It's not that they're both well, one's looking from one perspective, one's looking from another perspective, and one actually doesn't have the full perspective.

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That's the problem. Yeah, he's got a perspective, but it's not he doesn't have enough information. He doesn't have the full perspective to be able to make a judgment call on the

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Statue of Liberty. The other person does. They've looked around the statue. They can see. So he's making claims, knowledge claims about which he does not have information.

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So that's the mistake in that. Here's another one. One person thinks critical race theory is a false worldview. One person thinks critical race theory is a false worldview and by extension contains false analytical tools.

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That's the disagreement going right now going on in the Southern Baptist Convention. The mistake is the two parties are not looking at the same issue.

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So you can have a mistake where one person can does not have a valid perspective. Right. So there's no way to adjudicate, you know, oh, you both have perspectives that are they're not they're not equally valid.

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Right. You can't there's no third way here. It's one perspective has to win. The guy looking in the front of the statue wins.

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The other thing is, hey, the two parties can't get along because one's saying one thing and one saying another.

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You can't have someone like a Danny Akin saying, well, we critical race theory is a false worldview or Neil Shenvey or Al Mohler or I don't know, you know, they say critical race theory is a false worldview.

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But there are some, you know, some analytical tools are fine to use. And then another person saying, no, you can't use the analytical tools.

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One is right. One is wrong. You can't say, well, we agree. No, you don't agree. You're not looking at the same issue.

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There is not a scenario where two people who disagree both possess valid perspectives apart from reconcilable disagreements such as B, C and D.

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Either they are contradicting each other or they are not looking at the same issue. And that's where critical race theory lands in this.

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There is no there is no matter of personal preference, misunderstanding, unconsidered possibilities.

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You can't compromise, understand or consider possibilities. There's no way to do those things.

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And in this scenario, you know, there's there's one person has to win out. One person has to lose.

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Either one person has a wrong perspective, doesn't have all the information, has a flawed understanding or they're not talking about the same issue.

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So the danger in this here, here's what I think attributing unreconcilable theological differences to differing but valid perspectives will either devalue

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Orthodox views as reconcilable, i .e. Peter and Galatians or devalue truth itself like Simon's Sorcerer.

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So here's what I'm saying. If you take you say there's there's these different valid perspectives and you can look at these valid perspectives and somehow, you know, it may you may not really on critical race theory, you may not really disagree.

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You're just looking at it from different angles. One person's looking at it more from, I don't know, the existential perspective and another person's looking at it more from the norm, normative perspective or something like that.

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The problem is that you're looking at an unreconcilable theological difference here. You're not going to be able to navigate this.

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And that's what Peter tried to navigate, something like that. And he was rebuked for it. So and that's what it does is

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Orthodox views become devalued in that case. Gospel becomes devalued. I remember when

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I was at Southeastern, I couldn't figure out why evolution, why eschatology, why, you know, soteriology, where you could disagree about a lot of those things.

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And when soteriology, Calvinist, Arminian, but you could disagree about this. But for some reason, social justice, you really couldn't buck that.

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And that means that Orthodox things are being devalued and you're bringing up this one issue.

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And this issue becomes a preeminent one. And that's what I saw, at least there. Or what happens is truth itself is devalued.

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You know, truth just becomes a means to an end. Hey, I want to do I want to do the miracles the apostles do. That's why

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I'm becoming a Christian. That's why I'm pursuing these things, because I want a certain end to happen.

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It's not the truth that matters. It's getting its alchemy. It's achieving a certain end, which is what we're living in now.

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So this is you can't attribute unreconcilable differences to just differing but valid perspectives.

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That's a dangerous thing to do. Scripture seems to focus more on God's perspective than our own perspective.

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God's perspective encompasses the proper relationship of the normative situational and existential. The goal should be to understand and apply his perspective, which some people can help us better understand.

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But they can also mislead us. There must exist an external standard rooted in the revelation by which to test perspectives.

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Perspectives can be useful, but they are not autonomous. In other words, someone's perspective must there there needs to be a way to test that perspective to to adjudicate it, to figure out, is it right?

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There's only one way to do that. You have to have access to revelation that's beyond you because you can't just be trapped in your perspective.

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So there is objectivity. There is a way to test perspectives. And sometimes those perspectives, you can't get at it.

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It's internal. It's something someone had an experience. No one else was there. And you maybe can't have quite a valid opinion or maybe that person's a trustworthy person.

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You believe them. There are situations like that. God knows, though, God has the right perspective on that no matter what.

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Here's where the red flag went off for me. I actually I've kept this till the end because I wanted to read this to you.

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This from 2009 is Tim Keller on tribe perspectivalism. And I didn't realize that maybe you could say this is a misrepresentation of it.

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I don't know. But this is how this theory has been used. Tim Keller says this summer I spoke at the

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Willow Creek Leadership Summit. It was an honor. No one pulls off a conference like Willow Creek. There are all sorts of people.

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And he says basically how he praises Willow Creek. And look, he's reformed.

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His own camp is the non mainline reformed world. And they've been critical of pragmatism that Willow Creek has and its lack of emphasis on sound doctrine.

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But on the other hand, the emerging and postmodern ministries and leaders have disdained Willow Creek's individualism, its program centered and corporate ethos.

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These critiques, I think, are partly right, but they are actually there. You realize many of the most negative evaluations are characters.

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Why? He says John Frames tribe perspectivalism helps me understand Willow. The Willow Creek style churches have a kingly emphasis on leadership, strategic thinking, wise administration.

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The danger there is that mechanical mechanical obscures how organic and spontaneous church life can be.

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The reformed churches have a prophetic emphasis on preaching, teaching and doctrine. The danger there is that we have a naive and unbiblical view that if we just expound the word faithfully, everything else in the church, leadership, development, community building, stewardship, unified vision will just happen by themselves.

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The emerging churches have a priestly emphasis on community, liturgy and sacraments, service and justice.

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The danger there is to view community as the magic bullet in the same way reformed people view preaching. By thinking in this way, it makes it possible for me to love and appreciate the best representative representatives of each of these contemporary evangelical traditions.

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Nobody provides more practical help for organizing and leading than the Willow Creek. I'm also humbled that Redeemer is well regarded in each of these streams of evangelicalism, though we have our feet firmly in the reformed tradition.

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Here's the thing, guys. Here's the thing, the emergent church, I mean, they were heretics, they're false teachers.

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Tim Keller here is saying, well, I used to try perspectivalism and they have this beautiful emphasis on community.

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So I guess Redeemer would be the normative and then Willow Creek. Well, actually,

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I'm not sure what that would be. I should probably go back to that slide. Where would they fit? They I don't think they'd be the existential.

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Maybe that would be the the emergent church would be the existential. And was the third one here that he posits the situational.

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So the situational and maybe the situation will be the emergent church and the existential would be the.

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Well, I'm not sure I'm not sure where he's placing these three, but he's he's calling these three different they're just different perspectives, you try perspectivalism and, you know, you can you can sort of justify these three.

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It's fine. You know, you'd be fine with the Willow Creek, fine with the emergent stuff, fine with the reformed stuff. But in the case there's major dangers in the seeker sensitive, pragmatic approach to Christianity, very man centered.

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Those those issues just don't just go away. It's not just a matter of emphasis. It's a matter of bad doctrine on what the nature of the church is, what the nature of actual leadership is and how it's it's not you can't just train a leader.

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Leadership is is also a gift of the Holy Spirit. If you're talking about preaching, at least or teaching or some of these things with emergent church,

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I mean, they destroy truth. They're, you know, sanctifying things that God hates. You cannot there's no reconciliation there.

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It's not just, well, they have a different emphasis. But Tim Keller does that. And he uses this tripe perspectivalism to do it.

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Now, maybe he's misreading frame. But either way, this is this is how I conceive of something like using tripe perspectivalism to to say for Christians to then come and say, well, you know, the social justice

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Christians, they got a point, too. They are just emphasizing more God's justice in this area.

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And then these other Christians, they're emphasizing, you know, the gospel, more indoctrinal purity. And we can just learn from both.

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No, you can't do that. You never find the apostles doing this. You don't find Jesus doing this, guys, not on issues that are irreconcilable.

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And that's the issue that I have with all of this. So I'm going to actually leave it there. I was going to read for you an

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R. Scott Clark quote because he kind of he's against it. Tripe perspectivalism.

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But I don't have time for it, unfortunately, today. I hope that helps you, though. If you ever hear this kind of logic being used, you know, kind of,

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OK, here's how to respond to it, or at least you understand what it is you're dealing with, because I think that was complicated for some people.