Response to Jarvis Williams

Introduction and the EFCA Resources on Wokeness and Social Justice

Hello, my name is Jeff Clewer. I am the pastor of Cornerstone Church in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and I was installed here in March of 2016. But let's just say that I hadn't been an EFCA pastor for a long time.

I was a newcomer to the EFCA, and I just wanted to know, where does the EFCA stand on issues of wokeness and social justice and race? Where would I go to find out? Well, I would go to EFCA .org, and I would begin to look at the resources that the EFCA has put out regarding these questions.

So let's do that. Let's go to the national website and look at what the church teaches on social justice. The first thing that we'll find, as I share my screen here, is a theology conference in 2018 with Jarvis Williams.

Now before I play a clip from that here, the theology conference on the EFCA website, I want to introduce you to Jarvis Williams here. There's no video on the EFCA site, so here is an example of Jarvis Williams.

Let's profile him a bit and look at what he's teaching about wokeness, social justice, race, all of these issues, so we can get a perspective of where the EFCA stands right now.

White Supremacy, Racism by Consequence, and the Gospel

White supremacy is not only the overt, violent expressions that you see on the television in Charlottesville, for example, but white supremacy is an ideological construct that believes that whiteness is superior to non-whiteness.

So then how this shows up in part is, it shows up in curriculum, right? I'm a seminary professor, and in theological education, you're hard-pressed to find many evangelical institutions that have a regular requirement of black and brown authors.

And often what happens is whiteness becomes the standard by which all good theology is judged. You understand what I'm saying?

Amen.

So that if it's right theology, it's written by a white scholar who is contextualizing that theology for white audiences. And so one of the things we see is, and hear this very, very carefully, there's racism by intent, and there's racism by consequence.

You can have racism operating in a context whereas there are no individual racists, and that in part is the way in which white supremacy works in a socially sophisticated way. When you have whiteness as the priority, and when folks work and operate in such a way with curriculum, with economics, or with policies to maintain and to posture and to privilege that whiteness, and then to require those who are non-white to culturally colonize to whiteness.

So then we think about reconciliation and ethnic hostility. The solution is not more black and brown faces in white spaces who colonize to whiteness. The solution is fundamentally, yes, the gospel, the cross, the resurrection, right?

The blood of Jesus, but also dethroning. White supremacy in all of the forms in which it shows up in Christian spaces, folks, because when Jesus died to disarm those principalities and powers, one of those principalities and powers, I would argue, is white supremacy in all that it entails.

So feel that tonight. White supremacy is not just violence or KKK or lynchings. It is also the belief, directly or indirectly, that whiteness is rightness, and everything has to be judged by that.

Okay, surely the EFCA did not know that that's how Jarvis Williams teaches. Well, actually, sadly, he did the same thing in his speech at the EFCA National Conference. So here is a clip from Jarvis Williams 2018 Theology Conference, and then I have a slideshow where I've just written down what he had to say, and I'll interact with a number of the points that he makes.

Colorblindness, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Racial Neutrality

But first, let's hear about two minutes of this sermon. I would encourage you to go listen to the whole thing in context, from beginning to.

End.

Context, context, context.

Unfortunately, many Christians espouse vague pieties about colorblindness, which in my view hinders gospel unity in many different contexts. As you know, colorblindness basically refers to racial neutrality.

According to this view, the color of one's skin or one's race or ethnic identity does not matter, because this view says we live in a post-racial society. It is a society that has moved beyond race. We got a black president, after all.

Colorblindness urges, then, that humans need to look beyond skin color, because treating people equally and ignoring their race or ethnicity, they argue, will lead to a more equal society and less racist churches.

In my view, the idea of colorblindness, however, is an utter impossibility. In a racialized society that has, in fact, in part built itself upon racialization, right? Every system, every structure in our churches, Southern Baptist Convention, for example, was built upon the backs, in part, of enslaved black people, because their black skin was not white.

All right. So, let's look at this teaching from 2018 at the Theological Conference of the EFC. I'm trying to keep this brief, but let's just go into it as much as we can in this context. Now, we understand that one man seems right until another comes and examines him, Proverbs.

18, 17.

So, claims that are just made, they're not that important. You know, you need to study the scriptures to see if what's being taught is congruent with what the Word of God says, if there's that similitude.

Otherwise, it's just somebody's opinion. And this is clearly a social justice, woke opinion. But is it in keeping with the Word of God? Fall on us, move on us to respond to your work in Christ, to do relentless anti-racist.

Work.

This is his prayer. This is his call to God. Now, he says that he knows that what he's going to say will sting and might arouse anger.

Right.

The reason that he knows that is because he's been dealing and peddling in the grievance industry long enough to know that CRT is divisive. It just by nature divides people. Because when you begin to chop people up into little groups and pit them against each other, well, that creates hostility.

That's by nature divisive. So, CRT is divisive. Therefore, it will do what he's praying that it will. Unfortunately, many Christians espouse vague pieties about colorblindness. Now, he spends this two minutes that we listen to some of it regarding colorblindness.

But there is a history to the use of colorblindness with reference to people groups, ethnicities, and as he terms it here, races. Now, it's not referring to whether someone can see red and green. It's not referring to physical colorblindness.

It's being used in context. So, where was this first discussed? Well, it has a long history in our country. For example, when Arthur Plessy tried to board a train and he was told he couldn't, he pled colorblindness.

He said, you shouldn't look at the color of somebody's skin to separate, even if you say separate but equal, you should let people just live and not judge them by the color of their.

Skin.

But in Plessy versus Ferguson in the 1890s, the Supreme Court cited against Plessy in favor of the side of Ferguson. And this whole concept of not being colorblind is the Ferguson side of the debate, which makes it ironic that the events of Ferguson took place in our country because, again, it was not colorblind.

So, Plessy versus Ferguson. Plessy is told he can't get on board this train.

Why?

Well, of his seven, of his eight great-grandparents, one of them was of African descent and the other seven were of European descent. And by the doctrine of just one drop, that makes him colored. So, you need to mark off and keep separate those who are colored people or people of color over against white people.

That was the basis of Plessy versus Ferguson, which fortunately, by God's grace, was overthrown in 1964, only to be reintroduced in 1965 by Lyndon Johnson in the Great Society speech, where contra Frederick Douglass, Lyndon Johnson says, well, we need to do more than just give equal rights.

We now need to grant affirmative action, which is then affirmed in 1978, reaffirmed in 2003. Clarence Thomas argued in the 2003 Grutter versus Bollinger case for colorblindness. And he quoted Plessy versus Ferguson, the dissenting opinion, Judge Harlan, who said our constitution is colorblind.

Now, on the left, on the liberal progressive side, Sandra Day O 'Connor argued against that and said, let's just do 25 more years of not colorblindness. And Clarence Thomas said, you know what, 25 years from now, the problem is only going to be worse, not better.

It's not going to get better when you separate people by the color of their skin. Rather, we should allow things to proceed in a colorblind manner. As Frederick Douglass said, do nothing with us. Your doing with us has created the mischief in the first place.

So colorblindness has a long history. But shockingly, Jarvis Williams is deriding colorblindness. The speech of Martin Luther King, I have a dream where my children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, a meritocracy.

Jarvis Williams does not believe in colorblindness. He says it basically refers to racial neutrality. Yeah, we should be racially neutral. And it does not matter. It's literally only skin deep. It's a micro evolutionary adjustment to proximity to the equator.

That's what pigmentation in the skin is. Someone from Norway will have less melanin in their skin and somebody from Egypt will have more.

It's meaningless.

It does not determine character. It doesn't determine somebody's merit or their value or their ability to do a job. Colorblindness is, in fact, what we ought to be shooting for, but not so, says Dr.

Williams.

Systemic Racism, Colossians 3:11, and Critical Race Theory

Every system, every structure and our churches were built on the backs of enslaved black people because their black skin was not right. Now, of course, where Dr. Williams is going with this and what he says is systemic structural racism.

That the churches that we have are built upon black skin because their skin is not white. What is this? Where does this come from? Is this from Colossians 311? Here there is no Jew or Greek or slave or free or circumcised or uncircumcised barbarian Scythian.

But Christ is all and in all. Is Williams getting this from Colossians 311 or from critical race theory, systemic injustice? Now, many people will say, well, we're not into critical race theory. We just believe in systemic injustice and structural injustice and white privilege and we don't need to prove it.

It's just our experience and you need to accept our narrative regarding these things. Well, CRT is a lens through which people view the world and it's a false lens. A false narrative. It doesn't come from the Bible, which creates unity in the body.

And Williams says it's impossible, but actually it's what happens when the church looks at people based on who they are in Christ and not based on the color of their skin and treats people not at all with reference to the melanin level in their skin.

What you actually find is unity. You find joy in the Holy Spirit and the unified church, which is our experience here at Cornerstone. Praise be to God. The gospel is not colorblind, according to Williams.

And to say this, to advocate for colorblindness actually perpetuates white supremacy. Here you have this talk again about the experiences of black and brown people, which give them a narrative. Now, not all have this narrative, by the way, but those who aren't woke don't count because their narrative is aligning with the majority white culture narrative.

This whole concept of experiences, feelings, what somebody says dictating the narrative that's written. These are, all of these things are CRT. If you just read Delgado and who's her, her, Kimberly Crenshaw, his disciple Crenshaw, and then the more popular ones of today, Ibram X.

And all of these anti-racist social justicians, this is their language. This is their language. And it's just, it's sickening. By the way, you have racism by intent and racism by consequence, even if you don't have any hostility in your hearts toward black people.

So this is the idea of being in a racist system and perpetuating the white privilege, even if you don't mean to, you're still, there's still racism by consequence. So again, CRT. One aspect of this obedience, so obedience to the Holy Spirit, as he works in us, we will do anti-racist and social justice work.

Ibram X. Kendi, I believe it's page nine of how to be an anti-racist, says that you, you have to fix past discrimination with present discrimination. And you have to fix the present discrimination that's going on against black people with future discrimination.

So you are to continue the cycle of discrimination because you've got to keep redressing grievances from the past. That's this concept of anti-racist, how to be an anti-racist. We need social justice work.

God sees ethnicity. Why do you think the Bible says tongues and tribes and peoples and nations, right?

Well, yeah, right.

The Bible says that, Revelation 5, Revelation 7, but what you go on to say Jarvis Williams is not what the Bible says. He often uses in this speech, if you listen to the whole thing, the little nursery rhyme, red and yellow, black and white, each is precious in his sight.

And this is where Williams conflates a biblical teaching, Habakkuk, that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. That beautiful teaching of the gospel going all throughout the earth to every people group, every different language group, and all coming to worship before the throne with skin color, which is a different category, completely different category.

So when we teach the nursery song in our Sunday school classes, for a long time, we've actually teach shades of brown from dark to light, each is precious in his sight, so that we don't begin to create this black, white binary, this myth of red and yellow people based on the old racist constructs of the past.

But Jarvis Williams uses this rhetoric again and again, that nursery rhyme, in order to conflate categories that Revelation 5 and 7 would uphold the Ferguson side of Plessy versus Ferguson. No, that's not what the Bible is teaching.

It's not a matter of pigmentation in the skin. He died for black and brown and white. There's no such thing as a white person. There's melanin in skin, right? So I have American Indian in me. If I was Elizabeth Warren, I would claim special privilege based on the fact that there's Cherokee Indian in the Wagner side of Jeff Cleaver.

That's what Elizabeth Warren tried to do. Just one drop, right? Just one drop. But this concept of there being black, brown, and white people, and ultimately the binary is supposed to be white on one side and people of color or colored people as Plessy versus Ferguson described it.

To maintain that binary, he's relying on Revelation 5 and 7 and conflating those two things. American, Middle Eastern Jewish, he died for Egyptian, right? He died for people of particular ethnic groups.

And the diversity of that atonement brings him more glory than if he died for everybody of the same race. Hmm. Well, if that's true, then Dr. Jarvis Williams ought to be a kinist. Kinism is that doctrine that you should only marry within your race.

So if Jarvis Williams sees himself as a different race than me as an American, he's an American, both raised in America. Our cultures are so much the same. Maybe he played basketball like I did.

I don't know.

But we're different races. So, you know, a race of African, just one drop, descent, because I'm not even sure if Jarvis Williams has two black parents or maybe it's mixed, I don't know. But according to kinism, if he has a daughter, I have a son, they ought not marry.

Because it brings more glory to God if we don't dilute the races and compound them into some amalgamation of them. We need to keep as many racial distinct groups as possible. That's a logical implication of what he's teaching, kinism.

But of course, the longer we exist together in a place, there is a mixing of the races. So does this bring God less glory? So Jarvis Williams, I guess, should be a kinist. Will he be logically consistent and do that?

I doubt it. He's pushing against these Jewish teachers who are trying to colonize. So he's talking about Galatians at this point in the sermon. And Jarvis Williams uses the language of colonizing. And again, this is an attempt to present the European colonizers as those who are to blame for everything.

Everything.

So I just don't know why Dr. Jarvis Williams would use the language of colonize to describe what's happening in the book of Galatians. Why do that? There's other language for the Judaizing of the gospel in the book of Galatians.

But that's interesting. Anti-racism, social justice. We should be embarrassed as Christians that the world thinks about these things more than we do. No, we shouldn't. The world is obsessed with the color of people's skin.

Entire industries of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, grievance are built upon this idea of the color of people's skin being so determinative and so important. Martin Luther King would roll over in his grave to hear this from you, Dr. Williams.

We should be embarrassed. No, the Christian is not obsessed with race.

That's the gospel.

So he's going on here to talk about how Luke's gospel, evidently different than the gospel. Luke's gospel is all about poverty and oppression. Poverty is complex, but one reason people are poor, I would argue, is because of injustice.

And all injustices are part of the present evil age. And so the gospel is like undoing this. The only place we see the gospel taught in this sermon is here. That's the gospel. It sounds a lot more like Rauschenbusch's of the social gospel than it does the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sin and eternal life to all who believe, who repent of sin and believe in him.

That's the gospel, not this. Leverage our privilege and our power. Gag me with a spoon. Too much talk about privilege and who's marginalized. Without ever proving who's marginalizing someone. This term, an active verb, to be pushed into the margin.

You have to prove that offense. That's gospel stuff. Everybody assumes marginalization, oppression. And that is the construct of critical race theory. Victim oppressor. The marginalized, the proletariat, are being marginalized and victimized by the bourgeoisie.

And of course, in cultural Marxism, that fans out to race and gender and sexuality, not just economics. But we need to leverage our privilege. White privilege.

Leverage it.

How do you do that? We the people, borrowing some language here from, is that the Constitution? For whom Jesus died consists of some from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation. And then again, he goes back to red and yellow, black and white, all precious in his sight.

And this again is the concern of Dr. Williams. When God transforms us, he does not erase our ethnic identities. I'm still an African American brown skin man inside Christ as I was outside of Christ. But I'm a new kind of black man.

So identity is found in the color of his skin, a black man. And Christianity is like what modifies the noun. It's the adjective that modifies the noun. The identity is as a black man. By the way, that's not how I would see myself.

I don't see myself as a white man modified by Christ and transformed by Christ and still.

A white.

I'm not a German. I'm not. I have no identity as a German American or whatever other ethnicities are mixed in the stew of who I am. So and then he gets to the prescriptions of where we should go from here.

We're to live multi-ethnic lives. You want to care about compassion and justice, live multi-ethnic lives. Because if you only live around people who never experienced marginalization. So marginalization happens to those of different ethnicities.

There's no white people that are marginalized. Then you're never going to learn, lean into social justice. No, I'm never going to lean into social justice because as as Hayek said, he would wish to make anyone thoroughly ashamed for ever using that term again.

Vodibachan makes that point in a great way in defining social justice. Go watch that. That we are not to lean into social justice. He says, I am shocked to the degree that many of my white brothers and sisters don't even have any real relationships with black or brown people.

Shocking.

If they live where there's not a lot of black or brown people, is it still shocking? But the thing is, I don't think I know any white people that don't have deep relationships with black and brown people.

I don't even categorize people that way. But if I were looking at their skin, I have a lot of deep relationships. Like I lived in the inner city in Philadelphia where almost everybody had black or brown skin and some of my closest friends are.

And then if you say that, you're a racist for saying I have friends who are, but you're criticized if you don't have enough. I'm also shocked. Then he kind of trails off and says that there are many white evangelical institutions, seminaries, training people for ministry who never put before those seminary students black and brown authors.

In the video I showed you, he was talking about that subject as well. He goes on to give examples of like this Booth guy and we need to read Frederick Douglass and not just Grudem.

Okay.

What we need is a meritocracy. If Wayne Grudem's systematic theology or his politics according to the Bible or his Christian ethics are great resources and the best in those fields, which I would say Christian ethics is probably the best ethical book.

Maybe Norm Geisler is pretty close, but even that has some error. I would take Grudem over Geisler in a number of places that we could talk about. But he did a great systematic on Christian ethics, right?

I don't care. I never thought about what color Grudem or Geisler skin is. And if Frederick Douglass wrote a better one, then show me, but he didn't from what I know. There are black folk who aren't woke.

Now this is where he goes on an aside and this is horrible, horrible. EFCA, be ashamed that you platformed this man, Dr. Jarvis Williams to say this. There are black folk who aren't woke. So not all black people should be listened to.

And he's referring to the Vody Bokums of the world, Virgil and Daryl Harrison in their podcast, Samuel Say and others, or maybe a Clarence Thomas or Ben Carson or so many wonderful godly men who write on issues of race, but they're not woke.

So they're not really black, according to Williams. And he said, by the way, you can tweet that. This is what he wants to represent. There are black folk who aren't woke, right? That's true. But his point, if you listen to the context, context, context of Jarvis Williams sermon is that you ought to be woke.

So here's the problem. The EFCA has been going woke. And I just pray in Jesus name that the EFCA will now turn back from that. Stop platforming men like Dr. Jarvis Williams and this nonsense. Let's go with 1 Timothy chapter 5, verse 21 instead.

It says, in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of the elect angels, I charge you. That's a heavy charge. Presence of God and Christ and the angels for good measure. I charge you to keep these rules without pre-judging, doing nothing from partiality.

So to look at the color of skin, my face is looking kind of red right now. In fact, one time I was in inner city Philly and these Hebrew Israelites pulled up on me. I was surrounded and I was talking to this young guy who had come to Christ.

His name was Chris. And these guys pulled up next and started harassing me and stuff. And he said, put your arm out. So I put my arm out next to him and the Hebrew Israelites put his arm next. And it was a shade darker than mine.

I was looking kind of red that day. And he said, God hates you and so do I. He called me Esau because I have red skin. Maybe that's an American Indian coming out in me. I don't know. But it was a racist partiality, a pre-judging.

The Hebrew Israelites pre-judge based on the color of your skin. You know, what we need is color blindness, no partiality. And that's what we were charged to do in 1 Timothy 5, verse 21, in the presence of God and of Christ and the elect angels, keep these rules without pre-judging, without partiality, color blindness.

That's what the Bible teaches. So this is Dr. Jarvis Williams. And the horrible sermon that he preached at the 2018 National Conference needs to be rejected. It needs to be marginalized.