SRR 105 Hiram Diaz on Critical Race Theory

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I do a podcast. I'm not interested in your podcast. The anathema of God was for those who denied justification by faith alone.

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So he wishes he could be here with our guests today to talk about some very important topics that are really affecting the body of Christ.

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Very pertinent topics. So I do have some administrative items to cover, as you all know.

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So you can reach us out there. You can send us an email and give us your feedback. So without further ado,

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I have a very special guest with us today. We have Hiram Diaz of the third with us today. If you have been following the blog, you would have noticed that we recently published an article from him.

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The name of which is is critical race theory, anti -Christian and to which

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Hiram answers in no uncertain terms an unequivocal yes. And so we want to kind of do a deep dive of what's been going on.

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So, Hiram, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience? Let us know.

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Just tell us a little bit about yourself and your reason for writing the article.

03:24

Thanks. Like you said, my name is Hiram Diaz. When I write, I put Hiram R.

03:30

Diaz, the third just recognition of my predecessors, my grandfather, my dad.

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So that's why it's there. But you can just call me Hiram Diaz. I am a lay apologist, which means

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I don't get paid to be an apologist. It's not like a professional title. It's something that I do because I love the body of Christ and more importantly, love the

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Lord. I've been doing apologetics for quite some time now, maybe 10 years or so since my conversion.

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And before my conversion, I was an atheist. I was someone who had a false conversion. I was like 16 years old, 16 and a half years old.

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And I read a lot of theology at that time, but a lot of apologetics. But I wasn't converted.

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You know, a little while afterward, when I started getting more involved in philosophy, I abandoned the faith that I thought

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I had. And I just spiraled out of control philosophically, epistemologically, and even in my in my everyday life.

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You know, drug abuse, partying, things like that. And it wasn't until years later that the Lord saved me and delivered me from that.

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And when he did, I asked the Lord to just use my life, use my intellect, use all the knowledge that I obtained from philosophy for his glory.

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So I wrote on my own blog, which is invospec .org. It's my personal blog. And when

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I was writing there, I got involved with a guy named Mike Burgos. He's a pastor out in Connecticut. We worked together for CARM for a little while,

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Christian Apologetics Research Ministry, Matt Slick's name, when they had a blog. And he and I worked together. And later on, we came together again.

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We started Biblical Trinitarian. And that's where you guys found the article, biblicaltrinitarian .com. And that's where we're trying to provide scholarly resources for everybody, basically.

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But for pastors also, for people who are going behind the pulpit preaching, who don't have the time to collate all these scholarly sources for different subjects.

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We're going to do the work as best as we can and then present it for people, you know, giving full citations so they can look these things up for themselves.

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Whether we're dealing with annihilationism, Unitarianism, or social justice, empirical theory, you know, pastors don't have a lot of time to look these things up for themselves.

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And so we're trying to provide scholarly resources, well -researched stuff. So that's what

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I do. Everyday life, I'm just a normal guy. You know, I have four kids,

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I'm married, and I work 40 hours a week, you know, for the school district where I live. I preach also at my church,

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Port Cities Reformed Baptist Church here in Lewiston, Idaho. It's been more frequent lately. And Lord willing, maybe

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I'll move into a full -time preaching ministry. But for now, it's just intermittent as my pastor asked me to do this.

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So that's basically me in a nutshell. Very cool. And you asked me, did you ask me to talk about, like, why

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I wrote the article? Yeah, so before we get into the article that you wrote, I think you've also published a couple of books, right?

06:17

You want to talk about those? Yeah, yeah. So I self -published three books. The first one is

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Non -Neutrality, a personal testimony that's about, basically, it's like an overhead view of how the

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Lord saved me. It's my testimony. And I go into some philosophy stuff, not in too much depth, but enough to show the problems that it causes intellectually and spiritually.

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Another one that I put out is called Soul Sleep and Unbiblical Doctrine. And that is where I'm dealing with the question of whether or not the proponents of soul sleep, the heresy of soul sleep, whether or not they interpret the metaphors of sleeping in a literal sense.

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And I show that they're not. And I show that if you interpret it literally, then you can't support the doctrine of soul sleep.

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And most recent, actually, there's another, there's four, actually, altogether. The third one is

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Athanasius, Ontology and the Work of Christ. And it's the title. And in there, I'm addressing another claim from annihilationists regarding the church father,

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Athanasius. It's become popular for them to say that he was an annihilationist. But I demonstrate from contemporary scholarship and from writers in the past, and even from a well -known annihilationist from the past, that Athanasius was not an annihilationist and people didn't consider him to be one until fairly recently.

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So they're manipulating history. And I show that in the book. And the most recent thing that I put out is called Jesus was a

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Trinitarian. And that's essentially a response to a book by the Unitarian, Anthony Buzard, who wrote a book called

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Jesus was not a Trinitarian. Hence the title, Jesus was a Trinitarian. And what I'm doing is showing from Jesus's interaction with the scribe in Mark chapter 12, where the scribe says, teacher, what is the greatest commandment?

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And the Lord answers him. I'm showing from that text itself that although Jesus affirms the Shema Deuteronomy 6, 4, he's actually not supporting

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Unitarianism at all. But he's actually showing Trinitarianism from the text of the Old Testament.

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So that's the most recent thing that I published. There's another book that Mike and I and some other people like Anthony Rogers, vocab

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Malone, and Edward Alcor. We've put out a book recently called Our God is Triune. And that's just multiple essays from me, from Mike, from Eddie Alcor and Anthony Rogers and vocab

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Malone regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. Also Rudolf Bischoff, he's a South African pastor and apologist.

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And he wrote some articles in there as well. So that book is it's a little more pricey, but that book is really good.

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Not because I wrote for it, but because of the other stuff that other people wrote for it. There's a lot of meat there. So if you're looking for like systematic

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Old Testament interpretation regarding the Trinity, there's a lot in there. And you can you can get all these from Amazon or from other websites as well where you sell books.

08:57

Excellent. I didn't know you knew Dr. Edward Alcor. Ryan Denton actually knows him pretty well,

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I think, too. That's pretty cool. Small world. Good stuff. You know, in light of what's the you know, in light of recent events, namely the 2019

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Shepherds Conference, you know, we kind of talked about this a little bit before. And so I wanted to get kind of get your thoughts on it in light of the fact that you also wrote this article.

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It's really good article criticizing critical race theory. And, you know, so I didn't get to see the whole thing.

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I mainly just listen to some like three or four podcasts and listen to Todd Freel, James White and J .D.

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Hall talk about it. I did hear the I listened to the clips and it was it was pretty bad.

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It just it looked pretty bad from my from my perspective. But what were your thoughts about that fiasco there?

09:56

Yeah, it was painful. Like I told you before we started recording, we talked about a little bit. It was it was painful to listen to, you know, because it was so obvious that they were avoiding answering questions, the questions that Phil Johnson was giving them.

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And these weren't even really that hard to answer. Right. You know, and especially see how

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Mueller gets so worked up. You know, he was palpably mad. You could tell he was upset. And, you know, the question

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I mean, we should come to mind is if there's nothing going on, this is if there's no funny business going on here.

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And why are you so upset? Yeah. You know, why not just address the issue? If someone asked me about social justice,

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I would tell them I don't support and hear the reasons why. It's not a it's not a complex issue. You know, it's black and white.

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You either do or you don't. That's it. And if and something that is really frustrating listening to these guys is the idea that, oh, the issue is too complex for us to get into in, you know, in a short

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Q &A session. Well, that's nonsense. You know, something that we know as Clarkians is you define your terms. Right.

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Right. There's ambiguity regarding the definition of social justice, define it and then work within the confines of that definition.

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That's all you have to do. But even that is something that they didn't want to do. You know, so it was like I said, it was painful to listen to because it was so blatantly obvious that there were nerves being touched upon.

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Definitely. Yeah. You know, it was interesting because it struck me as odd because Phil had talked to all of the men and the panel prior to that in the green room or whatever it's called.

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And they had agreed to discuss that issue. So it just seemed very strange that when it came up with the cameras shining on everybody's face, like it still kind of just went the wrong way.

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And, yeah, I was pretty surprised at how badly Al Mohler handled himself.

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He was just you could tell he was kind of very defensive, prideful, arrogant even. It was pretty disappointing.

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And it was interesting. I was going to mention this before as well, that I went to Lifeway and I saw they had a little social justice shelf section where I saw

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Eric Mason's book, Woke Church, and it was endorsed. Yeah, right on the cover page.

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It was Ligon Duncan's endorsement of that book. And so there was an obvious there's an obvious contrast there.

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And yeah, it was pretty bad. It was pretty ugly. And I think everybody has said some helpful things.

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I don't know if you got to listen to like Todd Freel or James White or any of the other critiques of that of that incident.

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But one thing I do appreciate is that this this at least is going to force the conversation.

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Hopefully, hopefully it will force a conversation between these men at least and to the church at large as well to kind of tackle this issue head on.

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Like you have to deal with it. And so, yeah, this is definitely something that is a lot of people are just misinformed about.

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They're not they don't have a biblical as your article very well illustrates. They don't have the proper understanding of just how badly this social justice, critical race theory contradicts scripture.

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And so and, you know, on that note, I wanted to see if we could just dive right into your article.

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I got the chance to read this. A couple of times, and I was really I really enjoyed reading it.

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It was a it was a very good kind of an expose of of this critical race theory stuff.

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And I like how you you basically detail. It was kind of neat to see how you when you.

13:44

So. So in our previous discussion, you mentioned that you studied literature, right?

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Yeah. And so I thought that was pretty neat because I studied literature,

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English and American literature in college as well. And, you know, the big buzzword at the time was post -colonialism.

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And this this whole this whole issue of post -colonialism kept coming up and the literature departments were being practically redefined by it.

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And it's it's exactly this stuff that you talk about in the article like this. These academics were formulating theories about critical race and stuff.

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And it was like happening right under my nose. And it was interesting because I just sort of dismissed it as postmodern babble, but postmodern nonsense.

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I never really dug into it. But that's what I appreciate about your article, that you actually dug in and you show just how anti -Christian it really is.

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So why don't we talk about just first your motivation for for writing the article?

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Well, like I said, when I was introducing myself, I love God's people, you know, and I love the

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Lord more, you know, even more so. And it's really sad to see specifically white believers.

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Right. Because this is an assault in a lot of ways on white Christians, quote unquote, white people, you know.

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And it's really sad to see, because as a Christian, you are motivated to do good works for God's word.

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As a Christian, you desire to serve your neighbor, to love him as yourself, to give your life for your neighbor if necessary.

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You know what I mean? Right. And to see a group of people taking that good desire that God has instilled in us by regeneration, by the indwelling of the spirit and trying to manipulate that, to guilt people into doing something that they're not required to do by God's law.

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It's not only heartbreaking, it's also angering, you know, because that's essentially what you see happening with people who are promulgating the social justice nonsense, instead of taking advantage of, you know, the

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Christians who are going to be more sensitive in terms of recognizing past abuses of one group by another group.

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They're taking advantage of it. And that's one of the big reasons why it why I was why

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I thought I should write about it. You know, another issue is the fact that I am Hispanic and I grew up in, quote unquote, the hood, you know, and I see that I see the hypocrisy behind all the social justice stuff.

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You know, I grew up seeing my own people, the tensions between Puerto Ricans.

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And tensions between various black groups and various ethnic groups and the racism that exists there that nobody ever talks about.

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Right. And the way that it's being promoted now with social justice and critical race theory, even in the secular world, is as it's as if the only people who are racist are white people.

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And that's not the case at all. You know, so that's just on a personal level why it was bothersome to me as well, because it's pure hypocrisy.

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It's not a realistic depiction of what's going on at all. Not at all. Like I said, it's like I talk about in the article.

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This is an academic thing and it was birthed for academic and social purposes.

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And it's not realistic. It doesn't match up to reality. But another issue is the fact that critical race theory, social justice, these things depend upon a worldview that is not

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Christian at all. And if you embrace it, then you are going to come into head on conflict with the

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Christian faith. And for, you know, for a pastor to go up on stage like Matt Chandler did and talk about white privilege as if it's a thing.

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And for Al Mohler to talk about white supremacy as if it's a thing. You know, one of the things that Al Mohler says in a response that someone had that he had to someone who asked him the question, they said, you know, tell us what your take on social justice is.

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And so he's going he's saying, well, you can find this on YouTube. He says, well, I don't agree with the

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Marxists. I don't agree with the Marxists, et cetera. Not a liberal, obviously not leftist. And he goes, but there are issues of white supremacy that need to be dealt with.

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And I'm thinking, OK, well, you're saying you don't agree with them. But in order to come to the conclusion that there's such a thing as white supremacy as the academics define it, which is what he's saying, right.

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He's saying he agrees with that. Then you already have to succumb to a postmodern way of looking at the world.

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You already have to do it. You know, so he on the one hand, he says, you know, my position, you know, that I don't you know,

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I don't support Marxism. I don't support the whole leftist totalitarianism that's going on. And it's true.

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Politically, he doesn't. Right. But if you're going to stand there and say you want to approach white supremacy as the academics define it from a

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Christian worldview. Well, congratulations to contradict yourself. If you're accepting the academics definition of white supremacy, of white privilege, then you've already shown that you've given into a worldview that's not

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Christian and you are a double minded person. And one of these things needs to go either your

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Christian faith or the social justice postmodern ideology that's lurking in the background.

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You know, but this sends mixed messages to God's people. And not only that, but it it destroys the gospel.

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You know, something James White talked about is the unity of the church in light of the whole social justice movement.

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Now, the social justicians are basically tearing the church apart by sending black people against white people, white people and black people against Hispanic people, etc.

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Right. By dividing us all by our skin color, by our ethnic heritage. And he ties that directly into the gospel.

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Because critical race theory cannot coexist with the gospel. Social justice, as defined by the academics, cannot exist alongside of the gospel.

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It contradicts Christianity at almost every point. And purposefully so because, like you mentioned, it's tied into postmodernism.

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And postmodernism was an assault on the Christian faith, like explicitly so. You can read the postmodern philosophers and they talk about their antagonism toward the

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Lagos Christ. They talk about their antagonism toward reason, rationality and against, quote unquote, the patriarchy.

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A lot of people don't understand that the patriarchy isn't just some sort of feminist thing that has to do with men.

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It goes all the way up to God himself. Right. Because we know from Scripture that God is referred to as a he is him.

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And so the feminist anti -patriarchy thing also ties into an assault on Christianity.

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So, like I said, these are some of the motivations for writing. And I want to clarify these things and get really down to the brass tacks.

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Right. It's not an issue of whether or not those who are opposed to social justice want to love their neighbor. Because that's the way it's presented by those who are criticizing the critics.

20:18

Yeah. They say, oh, well, you guys must not want to love your neighbor. It's like that's not the issue. That's very superficial.

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The issue is that when you get down to brass tacks, you get down to foundations. You guys are pushing implicitly, pushing a worldview that is completely contradictory to Christianity.

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And it's going to destroy the faith of those who are in the church. And God's elect won't fall away into perdition.

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We know that. But that doesn't mean that you won't give them a heck of a time trying to deal with understanding what's going on.

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You know what I mean? Yeah. And you will bear the they'll bear the responsibility for doing that. You know, if I can help my brothers and sisters not have to go through that struggle, then

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I want to do that. And if I can do that by writing an article where I clarify some of these things, I want to do that.

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I really I really appreciated what you were doing in the article. And another funny thing.

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So we have I'm starting to find a lot of common ground between us. Myself, I'm also

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Hispanic and probably have some some similar experiences to what you were describing about your where you grew up and stuff.

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So that's that's really interesting. So in terms of your the article here, this this really struck me because when

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I first read it, I kind of was just kind of breezing by it and I didn't realize. So in the very first paragraph,

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I'm going to go ahead and read the first paragraph and then comment on it. You write Matthew Mullins, professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has a series of articles titled is critical race theory on Christian, in which he seeks to demonstrate that CRT is not incompatible with the

21:56

Christian faith. The articles form an apologetic defense of the recent utilization of CRT by professing evangelical leaders such as Al Mohler, Thabiti Anabuile, Russell Moore and others who are presently attempting to make social justice issues a primary concern for all

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Christians. This has been the cause of conflict between themselves and other evangelical leaders, as well as their congregants and other like minded believers who see such an emphasis on social justice, quote unquote, issues as contradictory to the central role of the church in preaching and teaching the scriptures, summarily expressed by the law and the gospel and not engaging in social activism.

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So I kind of it's funny because we just talked about the Shepherds Conference and that it just that is exactly what's been going on.

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And so I was really pretty surprised. The thing that struck me is that I thought you were critiquing a secular professor, like an unbelieving professor.

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And it turns out this guy is a professor, allegedly Christian professor. I would

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I would assume at a at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. And I'm assuming this is part of.

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Is this an SBC seminary? You know, I believe so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, surprise, surprise.

23:11

That just hit me right in the face. So why don't we start to unpack that a little bit and see where you're going with it?

23:17

OK. And so far as the the first paragraph. Yeah. Yeah. Just just the article Mullins, like who

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Mullins is. OK, well, I don't know much about Mullins, but I do know the more I looked into Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, the more

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I started seeing bad stuff like this. I learned about the series of articles through the

23:37

Pulpit Bunker on Facebook. J .D. Hall, Pulpit and Pen. They have a group on Facebook, right?

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The Pulpit Bunker, where people post different articles about stuff that's happening, basically like news.

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You know, people post news and sometimes they write about it at the website. So I found out about the articles and I was like, are you serious?

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Is there really somebody trying to justify the admixture of Christianity and critical race theory? So I went in and I read the articles and I was just blown away.

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You know what I mean? Because if you know if you know anything about postmodern philosophy and you do, you know, post colonialism and all that stuff that comes along with it, you know that these things are incompatible.

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So I don't know much about Matthew Mullins, but I did see the article and I started reading it. And then I started looking, just looking around at the college website and seeing different links to things like kingdom diversity is something that they're pushing.

24:26

It's basically like a form of, I'm going to say this affirmative action for people in ministry roles.

24:33

You know, that's what they're pushing for. And this is something that Matt Chandler talked about where he's famously or infamously talks about, you know, if he has a white pastor that's more qualified and then a black pastor who's just a little less qualified, he's going to hire the black pastor who's a little less qualified.

24:51

You know, this is basically affirmative action, like I said, in ministry. So Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, they're promoting this idea as well.

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And they have other things. I think they recently just started, if I'm not mistaken, a course on postmodern philosophy.

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And not in the sense of critiquing it, which a Christian university should do. But in terms of like trying to converse, they say something along the lines of trying to put

25:19

Derrida and Foucault postmodern philosophers in conversation with the Bible. And if you know about postmodernism, you know that that's that's very specific jargon.

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And most people don't catch on to this. But to say that you're putting one text in conversation with another text is to assume that neither text has superiority over the other in terms of which one has truth.

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And you're putting these two things together to try to come up with your own conclusion, basically. Right. But people don't know this because it just sounds like regular talk, you know, just like when people say we need to have a conversation about social justice in the church.

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That doesn't mean people just talking back and forth. That's a very specific way of talking in postmodern jargon, which is to say conversation is a denial that there is a transcendent communication from God to man.

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And the only thing that you have left when you deny that is imminence. You have discussions between people groups and you are negotiating in terms of power between the people groups.

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And that's what the terminology of conversation really refers to when you get down to the foundation of postmodernism.

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You know, so this is something I saw in the public bunker and I followed it through and I was just taken back by.

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Really, it seems like a purposeful misrepresentation of critical race theory for the sake of, like I say in the article, presenting an apologetic in defense of it.

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You know, because. The thing that really is frustrating is when

26:47

I read these guys is that I believe that they're aware of the fact that a lot of people aren't going to sit down and read Jacques Derrida, a

26:53

French philosopher. But they are going to listen to their pastor and apologists saying that these people, these philosophers have ideas that are contrary to Christian faith.

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So knowing this, the person who's supporting the postmodern philosopher, postmodern philosophy, critical race theory, what it seems that they do.

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And I'm going to go ahead and say I believe that this is what they do. They take advantage of the ignorance of the Christian, the naivete of the

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Christian who's trusting in the word from the apologist or the pastor. And they say, is it really the case that, you know, just like the serpent in the garden has

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God really said, you know, is it really the case that these postmodern philosophers are that bad? You know, don't they say things that are similar to Christianity?

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And that's the end. You know, that's that's the end right there. They sneak in and then they start promoting the ideas of these people, you know, not not giving a level headed evaluation of what these people are saying, but saying, hey, they say good things and we say good things.

27:52

And what's what's the big deal? Yeah. Yeah, that's that's really dangerous.

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And the way you describe that, it's funny because that's exactly what men like Tim Keller do and how they repackage

28:05

Marxism and socialism to the church. And that's it. And that's no surprise that he as well is on the wrong side of this of this issue.

28:15

I did want to mention when I read this article, I was really I really appreciated your perspective on this and how you take a very noticeably scripturalist approach or Clarkian approach to to to how you critique the critical race theory.

28:33

So I was I thought that was excellent and how you presented the issue and how you responded to the issue, biblically speaking and from a from a scripturalist perspective.

28:41

So I know we talked about that before a little bit that you you you appreciate the writings of Gordon Clark and all that.

28:49

So let's let's keep jumping into this. I want to really unpack kind of you have like six major points.

28:55

Right. As to kind of the problems behind critical race theory. And so why don't we start with the definition, you know, in Clark?

29:06

How about we start by defining our terms? Critical race theory is it's a theoretical framework in social science.

29:12

And he uses critical theory to examine society and culture and the relationship of society and culture to the law, to race, to power.

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And this started within legal schools. And this was in the 1980s or somewhere around there.

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But there was it can be traced back a little bit farther than that. But it ties into something called critical legal studies.

29:35

So critical legal studies in American jurisprudence. This was at the same time when the analytic philosophers and the continental philosophers and broadly speaking, you can say the

29:48

English and British and American philosophers versus the Western European philosophers, would say at the same time where all these philosophers were questioning universal truth, absolute truth, whether or not man can come to the conclusion of truth, whether or not morality is absolute.

30:05

These things basically the beginnings of postmodernism. At the same time as this. Legal studies in America were questioning whether or not you can use, let's say, a syllogism deducted syllogism to come to the conclusion that a person is guilty for a particular crime because they were questioning, again, universals, transcendent truth, et cetera.

30:26

And so critical legal studies builds off of that. It's basically the degeneration of real thinking in terms of syllogistic reasoning and coming to a conclusion about guilt and innocence in the court of law and moving into things like trying to interpret the motivations of groups that are forming laws.

30:44

So instead of taking the law as a given, what you say is as a critical legal theorist, you look at who benefits from the formulation of a law and you make it about that.

30:55

Right. And so you can see how this ties into critical race theory because critical race theory is kind of doing the same thing.

31:01

Right. It's saying no absolutes. And what we're left with is relationships between individuals vying for power.

31:07

And so you have to look at the terms as we're coming forward to see who benefits from definition of terms, who benefits from society being structured in a certain way.

31:17

So that's what critical race is criticizing. But it comes from critical legal studies.

31:23

And those two things also come from critical theory and philosophy. And critical theory was assessment and an assessment and critique of society and culture.

31:33

And they did this by applying knowledge from the social sciences and from humanities, literature, philosophy, things like that.

31:42

And Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were two philosophers from the Vienna School.

31:47

This is in western Germany or in Germany, excuse me, not the Vienna School. Apologize, this is a different philosophical school, the

31:54

Frankfurt School. And this is in Germany in the 1930s. And they focus on, again, power, social relations.

32:01

And they were Marxists. So they utilized Marxist thought, but they also utilized Freudian thought.

32:06

This is another part of the background of critical race theory. The critical theory part comes from these guys,

32:12

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. And they're using sociology and political philosophy to deconstruct society in favor of Marxism, essentially.

32:24

And another thing with critical race theory is intersectionality. And intersectionality is another kind of framework, another way of looking at relationships in society.

32:35

And basically what they're doing is identifying how interlocking systems of power, as they would say, impact those who are marginalized in society.

32:45

So me as a Puerto Rican male, they would say I have, even though I'm Puerto Rican, so I'm quote unquote oppressed.

32:53

I don't believe that, but that's how they put it. I have an advantage over a

32:59

Puerto Rican gay male, right, because I'm straight. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

33:04

Yeah. And so they would look at that and they'd say, well, on the power spectrum, you have more power than this individual because you have.

33:10

You have straight privilege, right. And then they say, and that gay

33:16

Puerto Rican male is dark skinned and you're light skinned. So you have another advantage over him.

33:22

And so they look at so people are analyzed according to the groups that they fit into. And so that's that's another aspect of this.

33:29

And that all ties into, again, a rejection of transcendent truth, a rejection of God. Essentially, this is an atheistic framework in the most.

33:39

I guess in one of the most clearest ways, this is atheistic or attempting to be atheistic, at least.

33:46

And. It's at odds with Christianity, but individuals aren't seen as individuals, they're not seen as persons made in the image of God.

33:55

Obviously, individuals are seen as the products of the cultures to which they are.

34:02

To which they belong and you're seen as the product of historical circumstance, you're seen as the product of intersectionality, the various categories that you fit into.

34:14

And so these are some of the things that are involved with understanding critical race theory. It's a framework. It's a way of looking at the world that divvies things up in this manner.

34:23

Yeah, that's that's crazy. So, like, I think in other words, if if if if you're a woman who's black and and a lesbian, for example, then you have like three overlapping layers of intersectionality that somehow makes you the victim of these, you know, the opposite or the people who have power over you in three different ways.

34:46

And that would require some kind of reparations or something like that. Is that is that kind of where that's going?

34:52

Yeah, basically. Yeah, that's crazy. You know, and I'm one of and you're definite when you're defining you're kind of listing out the definitions of this, the critical race theory.

35:05

One of the things that stood out to me was I think the the one where the one where you say race, you're quoting

35:14

Mullins, I guess, and saying that racist social construct. And so I'm going to read where you say that.

35:21

Or I guess you're quoting him where he says this means that race is a social reality rather than a biological reality.

35:29

It does not mean that they think that everyone's skin is the same color. It means the characteristics we associate with those colors are imposed rather than inherent.

35:38

Race is something we have inherited to organize our world rather than a product of our

35:43

DNA. And for critical race theory, folks with lighter skin have organized the world based on values assigned to colors that privilege themselves and oppress people with darker skin.

35:56

So this kind of struck me. And as I was reading this, I wasn't I wanted to kind of see if you can maybe clarify a little bit, because it sounds like what they're saying.

36:09

Are they because I don't think they deny that race actually exists. Right. But they're saying white people, for example, have used race to sort of leverage themselves against other colored, different colored people.

36:26

So but because I'm trying to see if like are they saying are they denying that race. Is a biological reality or where are they going with that?

36:36

So when they say race is a social construct in postmodern philosophy, everything's a social construct, everything.

36:43

OK. And particularly categories are a social construct. So race would be a category and it's something that humans have constructed in order to excuse me, like like Matthew Mullen says, it's been invented to organize the world.

36:58

So it's not a it's not a product of something natural. It's something that's superimposed upon people groups. And it's not a denial that there are genetic differences between people groups.

37:09

It's a denial that these genetic differences are determinative of these people groups and individuals who belong to those people groups.

37:18

So part of this is due to the fact that race as a social construct is a reality.

37:26

Right. The idea that there were four main race groups, white, black, red and yellow was a construct.

37:32

You know, it's not something that you derive from a study of genes, of genetics. They didn't have the study of genetics when the division of all humanity into four groups of people.

37:42

When they came up with that, the study of genetics was was not even started, if I'm not mistaken. You know, I think they were beginning to mess around with plants to find out things about genetics.

37:52

You know, so it was it was superimposed upon people groups. And so there's a little bit of truth to this.

37:57

Right. Dividing society into into groups like that and giving them distinct characteristics that are incompatible with each other.

38:06

Right. So the white European was viewed as superior in terms of, let's say, art.

38:13

And these stereotypes that even today you have, right, like white people are smarter, white people are better at building societies.

38:20

And then, you know, the stereotype would be something like Asian people are better at familial relations, let's say.

38:28

Right. These are things that are superimposed upon groups. And it's a it's a false form of essentialism philosophy where whereas as Christians, we say there is a form of essentialism where we are essentially the image of God.

38:40

And so what we do is determined by the fact that we're meeting God's image. That's a real form of essentialism.

38:46

Right. We'll never stop being the image of God. But the false essentialism is what you find in the idea of race as a social construct.

38:54

And that's what the postmodern philosophers, critical race theorists are arguing against. They recognize that there are genetic differences.

39:00

They recognize that there are cultural differences. But they say that these are not determinative of those people groups.

39:07

And those people groups are basically allowed to should be allowed to define themselves.

39:12

Right. That's what you're getting down to. You know, you're saying take me out of the category because you are pigeonholing me and let me define myself on my own terms.

39:24

Right. So that's what it's fighting. That sort of superimposition of a false category on people groups.

39:34

OK. Yeah, that's helpful. So and then another one. This is the third point also stood out for me.

39:42

The article I quote, so colorblindness is a problem, not a solution for critical race theory proponents.

39:50

The idea of treating people the same regardless of their histories is why racism persists.

39:56

Critical race theory proponents argue that if racism has evolved over time into an integral part of the structure of our society, and if that structure holds some people back and gives others a leg up, then to treat all those people the same is to maintain a status quo that disenfranchised disenfranchises some and privileges others.

40:16

So one thing that this didn't really make sense to me because it's like, well, if these people are.

40:23

Are in favor of some form of reparations, then what what the scenario you just described that Matt Chandler explained in his in his message on the

40:38

MLK 50 conference, which I thought that was one of the worst conferences

40:43

I've ever had to sit through. I mean, so like you said, Chandler was describing if he

40:50

I think what he said was if he was interviewing pastors and he had a seven out of 10 black guy and an eight out of 10 white guy, he would hire the black guy.

41:04

And but if there was like a seven out of 10 black guy and a nine out of 10 white guy, he would hire the white guy because then it would be too obvious.

41:12

It's like as if that wasn't a blatant form of showing partiality like that.

41:18

You just committed the center partiality by categorizing them in that way. And it's like, well, isn't that exactly what these people are doing?

41:26

It's almost like a it seems to me like a blatant contradiction because it's like a form of affirmative action, like you said. So what's up with that?

41:33

Yeah, well, the color blindness is a problem and not a solution. This is another thing that, you know, you remember the

41:39

Black Lives Matter movement. Oh, yeah. I remember every Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter everywhere.

41:45

And then you had people who were saying, you know what? All lives matter. Right. Right. And what are the Black Lives Matter? People say, well, that's that's wrong for you to say that it's wrong for you to say all lives matter, because what that does is it, you know, it it pushes us to the side.

42:00

And, you know, it treats us as secondary as not important. And anyone who's thinking normally is going to say that's insane.

42:10

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Right. Because, you know, we know if if I say all people are important, the word all is universal and includes everybody.

42:18

All lives matter. Black matter. But the reason why colorblindness is a problem,

42:24

Black Lives Matter versus all lives matter, why this all makes sense to them. The proponents of critical race theory, postmodernists, is because, again, there's no transcendent truth, ultimately.

42:35

And this this is why the epistemological aspect, the philosophical aspect is something that needs to be dealt with.

42:41

When you deny that there's transcendent truth and you say that all truth is the result of individual cultures working out their ideas and negotiating the terms of their existence with one another and negotiating the terms of their existence with other people groups.

42:56

Then what you are left with is the idea that knowledge is relegated to a particular group.

43:02

So black people have knowledge that is specific to them and they have experiences that are specific to them only and knowledge is specific to them only.

43:10

This is hyper relativism in epistemology. Right. And what this means is that there is no universal subject.

43:18

And in philosophy, when we talk about the universal subject, we're talking about the idealized human being.

43:26

Right. So as Christians, we say the universal concept of the subject is the image of God. And we have a concrete version of that in Christ.

43:33

Christ is the perfect image of God. He's the perfect man and he perfectly represents the father.

43:40

So as man, we see what the image of God should be like in incarnate.

43:48

But we know that universally, all people are in the image of God, whether they are fallen in Adam or whether they've been redeemed by Christ.

43:55

Right. So there is a universal subject. But in postmodernism, there isn't a universal subject. And the way that you can look at it is like this.

44:04

For philosophy before postmodernism, the subject, the agent, the moral agent was the one who created the world around him.

44:11

In postmodern philosophy, the subject or moral agent is the one who is created by everything around him.

44:18

So they completely turned it on its head. And because of that. They deny that there's anything like colorblindness, because if there is no universal subject and there is a universal truth and there is no transcendent truth, then to say that you have transcendent truth is to basically take your opinion, your truth, and to superimpose it on everyone else and to exercise power over them.

44:42

Now, this is this is not what people would hear when they hear someone say colorblindness is a problem, because the way

44:48

I quote in the article, the way that they word it is, well, if racism has evolved over time into an integral part of the structure of society and if that structure holds some people back, et cetera, they make it very concrete.

45:00

But in reality, there's a really abstract philosophical background here that says. Your experiences as a black person are completely distinct from the experiences of a white person, so much so that, you know, when you think about when people say something like.

45:18

When you talk about homosexuality and someone says, well, unless you're gay, you wouldn't understand. Right. Yeah, right.

45:24

When you say abortions murder and they say, well, do you have a uterus? So how are you in a position where you can judge these things if you've never been in a position of being pregnant?

45:34

Right. This is where it comes from. The idea that your individual experiences, because you as you're a product of time, circumstance, society, imminent relations between people negotiating the terms of their existence because you are the product of those things.

45:50

No one can come to you and tell you from a transcendent point of view, point of reference that what you're doing is wrong, that what you're doing is immoral, that what you're doing is right.

46:00

Even all they're doing is giving you an opinion from an outsider point of view. And you are the one that's in control of whether or not you accept that.

46:08

So for somebody to say that we should be colorblind in terms of race relations and things like that, for the postmodernists, for the critical race theory is for them to say we should take one particular viewpoint, namely the

46:20

Western European viewpoint that comes from the ancient Greeks and Romans. Which is for them, white supremacy.

46:28

And superimpose on every other group and thereby ignore their individual problems. Wow, that is profoundly disturbing.

46:40

It sounds like what you're describing is that this whole my truth is my truth, your truth is your truth.

46:46

You can't really tell me if I'm right or wrong. The academic legwork behind that is basically this stuff, this critical race theory that just relativizes pretty much everything.

47:02

More or less, yeah. That's insane. Even more broadly conceived, it's postmodernism.

47:11

Right. Yeah. And speaking of that, so you talked about essentialism.

47:19

And could you kind of define what that means a little bit? Because I wanted to ask you something about that.

47:25

Well, essentialism versus accidentalism in philosophy, it's an age old debate.

47:33

We talk about the identity of the chair, let's say, and we can talk about what it is that makes a chair a chair.

47:40

And what it is that makes a chair a red chair versus a blue chair. Right. Well, what it is that makes a chair a chair.

47:47

Those are essential properties. The essence of a chair is to be X, Y and Z, whatever it is.

47:53

And let's say it's to have four legs and to have a back and a seating area. If we define that as a chair, then that's the essence of a chair.

48:01

Something that doesn't have that is not a chair. Accidents. This goes back to, like I said, it goes all the way back in philosophy.

48:09

But Aristotle is the one who really uses this language and he codifies it when you talk about metaphysics.

48:15

He talks about accidents and accidents are basically modifications to. Different subjects, broadly conceived.

48:24

Different beings, right? Modifications that don't change the identity of that thing. They don't change the essence of it.

48:30

Right. So a blue chair is still a chair. And a red chair is still a chair because they both have the essence of what it means to be a chair.

48:38

So the color of the chair, that's what you would consider an accidental property. And what it is that makes a chair a chair?

48:45

Those are the essential properties. That's the essence of the thing. So postmodernism says that distinction is dubious.

48:53

They say there is no essentialism. There's no there's no essential definer of all things.

49:01

And like I said, this is atheistic and you get down to it. There's no one who's defining all of reality. It's us who define reality.

49:09

So there is no essentialism. All there are are the accidents of history, of space, of time, of gender, of the relationships that you've had in the past, your own personal history.

49:21

It's postmodern. Postmodernism behind all of this is anti -essentialist. It's right.

49:26

Going against that idea. And with that, if you can tell, I mean, it's only. You take a couple of steps and what you see is that this is a repudiation of logic.

49:35

Because with logic, we're dealing with identities, we're dealing with fixed identities. The law of identity says

49:41

A is A. Postmodernism says there are no fixed identities. Well, then you can't even have a conversation with them.

49:48

Yeah, that's that's really interesting. So and incidentally, I think this reminded me of the

49:53

I believe this is how Roman Catholics justify their view of transubstantiation. Right.

49:59

They say that they believe the bread was is still essentially the body of Christ, but it was accidentally changed into into to look like bread or taste like bread or something like that.

50:12

Right. So, yeah, it's that's that's a very that was a very helpful clarification there.

50:18

So now what I wanted to ask you about this was does denying essentialism, in essence, presuppose that you hold to a form of nominalism?

50:31

Yes, it does. OK. Yeah. But for postmodernism, it's like a radical nominalism.

50:38

Right. Yeah, it's it's it's about as bad as it can get. And so I know

50:43

I figured yourself being a Clarkian, a scripturalist, you know, the difference there's realism and there's nominalism.

50:53

And obviously, from a Clarkian perspective, we would say that the that the idea, the truth, the truth, the proposition of the truth of the truth itself is itself the reality that there is no we would deny like a correspondence theory of truth where something has to correspond to reality in order to be truer or things like that.

51:17

And also we would because I know Clark has he basically refuted

51:22

Aristotle's nominalism, did a brilliant job of refuting it by just showing like if everything is a proper noun, then you can't talk about anything, anything, having something in common with anything else.

51:34

Right. So, yeah. So that's that's kind of what what struck me there, that it would seem to presuppose a form of nominalism, which is utterly at odds with with Christianity.

51:47

I mean, that's like you wouldn't be able to hold many of the doctrines of the Bible that way.

51:54

And so this is like this is worse than I initially thought it was.

51:59

I mean, it's really bad for you to have this serious of a holding to these perspectives requires you to presuppose so many things that are like your article does a very good job of describing things that are utterly contrary to the

52:15

Bible. I mean, it's astounding how just how bad it really gets. And so when when

52:23

I wanted to read this part, too, so you talk about this, you quote this guy again, I think it's

52:28

Mullins again. So in your article, you also say critical race theory proponents see themselves as actively being committed to expanding history, which is to which is to say, quote, telling a more complete story of the

52:44

United States history than many of us learned in school. End of quote. They they they also, quote, critique colorblindness by, quote, focusing on revealing how stories, laws, customs and decisions that seem to be neutral or colorblind are actually built on assumptions about race.

53:02

End quote. Additionally, critical race theory proponents seek to, quote, make the legal system fairer, advocating for voting rights and changing speech norms.

53:13

So this is where I kind of wanted to talk about our our background in literature.

53:20

So this this immediately reminded me of the when

53:26

I studied literature back in college, how postcolonialism was just completely redefining literature studies.

53:34

And it kind of it really surprised me because exactly the stuff that you're talking about here in this critical race.

53:44

And I never studied it formally, but it was the byproduct of this critical race theory stuff being completely taken out, taking over the literature departments, because now they were saying, oh, you know, we have a white we have a white canon.

54:02

You know, we have a canon of white male authors, right? You have Shakespeare, you have Milton, you have all of these classical figures who we consider like, you know, giants of literary studies, classical literature.

54:15

It's all of a sudden now a problem because we are oppressing and suppressing these other minorities.

54:22

And the whole concept of like postcolonialism, right, where they say, well, why do we get to define what literature is like we took over these people and these people have valid forms of expression as well.

54:35

Right. And so now now it's almost like everything and anything, any scribbling on a piece of paper by a person who was colonized by a

54:45

European or a white people group. Now, all of a sudden their literature is just as valid or just as worthy of being studied as as anything else.

54:56

And it's like, well, you know, it was it was so strange to see, like not like the qualities that you would basically judge a good literary work that what would make a good work of literature worthy of being studied and examine and so on and so forth.

55:16

Now, they just basically it almost seems like it became a history class riddled with propaganda to just like make make us make everybody feel bad for studying all these white people for so long and not giving these other repressed minority groups a chance to study their literature, you know?

55:35

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly that's exactly it. When I was in school a few years ago, like six years ago or so,

55:44

I went back to college for a little bit and I was studying literature, studying various kinds.

55:51

One of the things that always came up was this issue. Exactly. You know, post -colonialism and, you know, the standards for judging the work.

56:00

I remember I was reading, I believe it was Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Right.

56:06

And I commented on some of the language that my professors saying, look, this is overwrought. This is like heavy handed.

56:12

You know, just basically giving a basic literary criticism of the work saying these are the good points, these are the bad points.

56:18

And the bad points that I was saying, he basically was like, well, that's coming from a particular perspective.

56:23

And that's not necessarily the case when it comes to African -American culture, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, really?

56:30

Really? Because if it was Shakespeare who was doing this, you would you would lay into it. Right. If it was, you know, look at John Milton, if you're familiar at all with the studies on Milton, people go to town on Milton because of the heavy handedness of some of this writing and how overwrought his stuff is and it gets over the top.

56:50

But just because a person is from a repressed people, of course, you know, people could have had it harder.

56:56

Like they get a pass on it. It doesn't make any sense, you know. And when you consider the fact that, you know, and this is the greatest irony of the whole.

57:05

And I love pointing this out to people, the greatest irony of the postmodern critical race theory, social justice thing, where it's pro minorities, right?

57:12

It's pro for everything that's ever been oppressed, is that all of these ideas come from white

57:19

European males. Right. And that's something that I find hilarious about it, because you're like, yeah, you know, white supremacy, white supremacy.

57:26

OK, well, if there really is white supremacy, then you're playing right into it because of the guys that you are building your philosophy on.

57:33

They were white guys from Europe who had no conception of what it was like to be a black person in the middle of the day in Africa, you know, doing things in a small village.

57:42

They were white Europeans who were typically wealthy or well off in one way or another way. They were privileged.

57:48

And so your whole philosophical edifice is self -contradictory. Yeah, I agree with you.

57:55

The same thing that's that's there in the literature classes. That's one of the things that really saddened me when

58:00

I went back to school is the fact that it went from being literary criticism, which is a good thing.

58:07

I think studying how people write, what are effective ways of writing metaphors, all that stuff.

58:12

It went from that to essentially being, well, let's look at this text through the lens of reader response theory.

58:18

Well, let's look at it through post -colonialism or let's look at people in the text who have power versus those who don't have power and see if this text is actually supporting people who are oppressed or supporting people who are privileged.

58:29

And it's like, is that why Shakespeare wrote Hamlet? You know, maybe there's some of that in there, but he's dealing with way bigger issues, right?

58:40

Yeah. Is that is that the reason why, you know, Melville wrote Moby Dick? There's some of that in there, sure, but he's dealing with way bigger issues.

58:49

Again, he's dealing with philosophical issues that go beyond, you know, the accidents of history, as it were.

58:58

Yeah. Yeah, that's that's really that that's really that's taking me back, man. I really appreciated you bringing this stuff up because, you know, it's one thing.

59:07

And we're not saying of course, we're not saying that there's no value in studying these oppressed peoples and their literature and stuff.

59:12

But it's one thing to judge the best expressions of of the written language, namely

59:20

English, by the authors who have been, quote unquote, canonized in literature departments like Shakespeare, like Milton and these these folks who have been almost universally considered to be some of the best expressions of the

59:36

English language. As opposed to just putting that on equal merit with an oppressed writing of somebody who simply because of the fact that they were oppressed, all of a sudden that gives it some kind of weighted weighted status to judge it on the same level as like Shakespeare.

59:57

You know, it's just it's so ridiculous and how it just seems to deny the obvious that the differences are obviously there.

01:00:07

And so, yeah, that really it was pretty it's pretty eye opening stuff as I'm kind of going through this and just my experience in college.

01:00:16

This stuff is all over universities, and that was really one thing that I wanted you to touch on as well, because Mullins, apparently he's trying to sell people the lie that this stuff did not originate in academic circles, that it originated in the streets of protest.

01:00:35

Right, because there was even after racism was outlawed, that there were still there were still other more subtle, covert forms of racism and stuff.

01:00:45

So you mind touching into that a little bit? Yeah. You know, like something

01:00:52

I noticed with with heresy and false teaching is, again, they will heretics false teachers play on a real concern that the

01:01:02

Christians have, you know, and in this case, it's going to be the social well -being of other people. Right.

01:01:08

In our country, the civil rights movement is rightfully noted to be. A really big event, it was, you know, it's a really important part of our history, you know, so the thing that's dark about, you know, what's wrong about what this guy is doing is that he's latching on to the moral proclivities that we have as Christians and saying, well.

01:01:32

And he's basically insinuating that anyone who says that critical race theory started in philosophy, well, that's wrong.

01:01:41

And what's right is that it started at the grassroots level. It was just people like you and me, man, just fighting, fighting the man, fighting the structures of power.

01:01:49

And it's like, that's not the case at all. It's not the case at all. And, you know, the funny thing is, like, he.

01:01:56

I cite in the article to the people who are responsible for bringing critical race theory to the prominence that it has now,

01:02:05

Richard Delgado and John Steffen, Stephen Kick, I believe it is. Right. And they openly say as a scholarly movement, critical race theory began in the early 1970s with the writings of Derrick Bell, an

01:02:16

African -American civil rights lawyer. And the first black teacher at Harvard Law School, he wasn't just a lawyer, he was a professor.

01:02:24

Right. And he was writing about interest conversion, means of understanding racial history and things like that. But he was also part of a group of scholars.

01:02:32

So they explicitly say in their introductory work on the subject, they explicitly say that this is tied into academia.

01:02:40

Because it is. Yeah. And anyone who knows the stuff, anyone who has studied, like I said, like you were talking about postcolonialism, postmodernist literary studies, you can see the terminology.

01:02:51

It clicks, you know, I mean, it's like Pavlov's dogs when they hear the bell salivating. Right. But when you you know, when you hear when you hear things like power and privilege, you're like, oh, wait a second.

01:03:01

I heard that. You know, are you here? You know, let's have a conversation. Ding. Bell goes off.

01:03:07

You hear that, you know, because it takes you back. But that's one of the things that was so. Upsetting to me about this article by Matthew Mullins is that he's like, well, it started in the streets where people like you and me were fighting the powers that be.

01:03:21

It's like it. It didn't. It started as a scholarly movement and it trickled down masses like everything a scholarship does.

01:03:29

You know, in our own time, we have the effects of postmodern philosophy. Postmodern postmodernism is dead as a philosophy.

01:03:36

Right. Postmodern philosophers are gone. You know, they flourished basically in the 1980s.

01:03:42

In the 1990s, you had some developments on that. And now it's it's you know, people are debating what what the new movement in philosophy is.

01:03:52

But in our society, the effects of postmodern philosophy have finally come down to us. Right.

01:03:57

As a society is crumbling. And it's in part because the academics, they push this idea, they push it, they push it.

01:04:04

They die. They don't care what happens. And it trickles down to us. You know, so this is the safety of a critical race.

01:04:11

It didn't start with people in the streets. It trickled down to the people in the streets because it provided a useful tool for reorganizing things in society and became a useful tool for pushing for things like Marxism and socialism.

01:04:26

But yeah, Matthew Mullins is just wrong. And either his degree is not worth the paper that it's printed on or he's lying.

01:04:34

And that's the only conclusion I can come to, because I'm not even a scholar of the subject. And I know for a fact that he's wrong.

01:04:41

I knew whenever I read the article. So. Yeah, that's very enlightening. And, you know, obviously, being a scripturalist yourself, we would hold very strongly to the to the tenet that theory always precedes practice.

01:04:58

Right. And I really appreciate how Clark would demonstrate the history of philosophy from a high level, from a big picture, is that every these movements always start in the academic and philosophical high towers.

01:05:13

They always start with the theoreticians, with the philosophers formulating these ideas.

01:05:20

And then they it takes as the years go on and their ideas start spreading through the through the educational institutions and through to the masses.

01:05:31

You start to see the effects and the fruit of those of those perspectives and philosophies.

01:05:37

And so another really interesting thing here, your article really kind of highlights just how much critical race theory and and postmodernism are basically bedfellows.

01:05:52

And and in order for you to call that Christian when it's postmodern, it's it's it's like a rank contradiction.

01:06:04

Like you said, it's mutually exclusive. There's no way these two can coexist. Like there's just no way.

01:06:10

And what really struck me about that was that, you know, I took a postmodern literature class as well when

01:06:19

I was studying literature. And. The class was. It felt like a gigantic waste of time and money, because when

01:06:29

I read the trash that I was reading, it was like people were barfing out nonsense, putting out paper and calling it literature.

01:06:40

And it was to the point it wasn't even coherent. And these were like considered valid expressions of creativity.

01:06:49

And it was like one of them, I remember, was I think it was a Native American author. And he was saying like the fancy dancer, fancy dancer, dancer, like he just kept getting one word after another.

01:07:01

And that was supposed to be some sort of like creative expression of the English language.

01:07:07

I mean, it was utter nonsense. I mean, the stuff wasn't even coherent. And it reminded me a lot of I don't know if you've read

01:07:15

Schaeffer's work. How shall we then live? Some of it. Yeah. Yeah.

01:07:20

It's a great book, because in that book, he details he sort of highlights how movements when they become.

01:07:27

And one of the main themes of that book is what you're describing in your article and how there's always a tension between the the particulars and the universals.

01:07:37

And so basically what you're describing in the article is that critical race theory denies universals and only when you're only left with particulars.

01:07:46

It's like Schaeffer describes. Basically, you're left with man as the ultimate standard, his own ultimate standard, and that erases any standard whatsoever.

01:07:54

And so and truth for that matter. And so I thought that was pretty fascinating how it's there.

01:08:02

They're so clearly bedfellows because essentially all you're really doing with critical race theory is you're applying postmodern philosophy to subjects, to the subjects of race and social issues and so on and so forth.

01:08:17

I mean, that's really all it is. It's the application of postmodernism to those areas. And so,

01:08:23

I mean, it's just it's baffling just how a university professor, how professors not just I mean, we're talking about an entire denomination, the largest

01:08:34

Protestant denomination in the country is trying to justify these perspectives as Christian.

01:08:41

I mean, it just it really is baffling to me. I mean, I don't know. I don't it's it's that's about as bad as it can get at that point.

01:08:51

I mean, so that really did. I really appreciate it. How do you how you kind of helped expose that in the article?

01:08:58

And so I think I wanted to also touch on something here.

01:09:04

You have a really interesting section about the incarnation.

01:09:13

So that that was really that really kind of stimulated me a lot, a lot intellectually.

01:09:21

I was really kind of got my gears grinding. So you mind you want to get into that a little bit when you talk about the incarnation?

01:09:31

Yeah, this is another thing that really, you know, before I started writing this article, this is something that I thought about for quite a few years now, especially with the

01:09:42

Black Lives Matter thing years ago, because I had brothers and sisters in Christ who would say things like, you know, like we mentioned earlier, unless you are such and such a person, you can't you can't tell me that, you know, about subject

01:09:57

X, Y or Z. Right. And something I noticed from listening to that, it's like that's that's relativism.

01:10:05

Right. Well, that's a denial that the truth comes from the mind of God and is given to us. And that's what scripture teaches.

01:10:11

The truth is given to us by God reveals the truth to us. Romans chapter one tells us that there's general revelation given by God and scripture itself is a form of special revelation that's given to us by God.

01:10:22

Whatever we know, we know because God has given it to us. Truth is eternal. God is eternal. So to say that truth is relative to a particular person, particular experience, et cetera, is to deny.

01:10:37

That truth is God's property. Firstly, that is his possession. And it's also to implicitly deny the incarnation.

01:10:44

And the reason why is because Christ is God and man.

01:10:50

Right. When we talk about the incarnation, we are affirming that Christ is fully man, fully

01:10:55

God. And because he's fully man and fully God, there's an overlap there between his knowledge as God and what he knows in his human nature.

01:11:07

Right. In the incarnation. Right. You know, if the son of God incarnate knows. The same things that he knows prior to the incarnation, which he does.

01:11:18

Then you cannot tell me that anyone's quote unquote truth. It's relative to their perspective because he was a

01:11:25

Jew. You know, living in second century. Exactly. Right.

01:11:32

And he's a male. He's a particular height. He's not very wealthy. We can tell he didn't have like these great social ties that, you know, like somebody in the

01:11:41

Sanhedrin would have. So, you know, the irony of people saying, well,

01:11:47

Jesus was a brown person. You know, when you talk about Jesus was an immigrant. Right. We try to justify immigration stuff like, well, he was a displaced brown person.

01:11:56

It's like, so what? That says nothing about the relativistic nonsense you're pushing because he's he's

01:12:02

God himself. Right. The one person maintains the same omniscience, which means that there is a direct overlap between what he knows as man and what he knows is

01:12:12

God. He's human nature and his divine nature. And the way that this works out for us when we're talking about critical race theory is that, look again, if you are affirming that Christ is who he is, he's truly

01:12:24

God and truly man. You cannot affirm that any knowledge is relative to a specific people, groups, specific persons, specific skin color, et cetera, because he knows all things.

01:12:34

And he's not a woman. He's not he's not a homosexual or not to be blasphemous.

01:12:39

But, you know, to put this out there, because this is what they're trying to say. Right. Unless you're gay, you have this knowledge. Well, he wasn't gay.

01:12:46

He wasn't a thief. He wasn't, you know, unless you're Irenaeus, he wasn't an old man.

01:12:52

Irenaeus believed Jesus died at like 50 or something like that. But, you know, there are a whole bunch of different groups that he doesn't fit into.

01:13:01

And yet he knows all things and he knows them in the same exact way that he knew them when he was with the father prior to the incarnation.

01:13:08

And he's always with the father. But, you know what I mean? Prior to the incarnation, his knowledge, his knowledge doesn't change.

01:13:13

He learns and he grows in grace. He grows in favor with men and with God.

01:13:19

Yeah. And that's something I think it's above my pay grade for understanding fully. But we affirm that Christ is omniscient.

01:13:27

And because of that, we cannot affirm critical race theory because critical race theory says, you know, you can't be omniscient as a human being.

01:13:34

Yeah. Well, we can't be omniscient as a human being, but the God man can. And if the

01:13:40

God man can, then what that means is that there is a direct overlap between his knowledge as man, his knowledge as God, such that there is no such thing as relativism at all.

01:13:50

Jesus can tell us about universal human nature, which he does. Right. And he says out of the heart proceeds blasphemies, evil thoughts, etc.

01:13:57

He can tell us about the universal nature of all things, which he does. He can give us these categories by which to understand the world, which he does.

01:14:06

Yeah. And this doesn't reflect his specific mindset as a

01:14:11

Jew living at a certain time as a male who was born to a displaced family, etc. None of that nonsense matters.

01:14:19

What we see in Christ is that truth comes directly from God. And it's not dependent upon us.

01:14:25

It's not dependent upon our circumstances. We don't make truth. We receive truth from God.

01:14:31

And Christ himself is the incarnation of truth. He is truth itself. So critical race theory is mutually exclusive with the incarnation.

01:14:38

You cannot consistently hold to the incarnation and critical race theory. You can't. And what this means, what this implies necessarily, is that white privilege needs to go out the window.

01:14:50

The idea of white supremacy as a systematic understanding of society needs to go out the window as well. Because those things are dependent upon the relativistic epistemology that we're talking about from post -Mohammedanism.

01:15:01

And that's incompatible with our belief that God became man in Christ. Wow. That is fascinating in an extremely disturbing and bad way.

01:15:13

So that really fascinated me. And, you know, this also kind of brought to my attention a few other things that kind of got me thinking.

01:15:24

So what you're saying is that no one person, essentially, no one person can know the same thing as any other person.

01:15:33

Because their reality has been constructed by who they are, by their race, by their gender, by their upbringing, their cultural background.

01:15:45

All of this stuff colors your perspective of what the truth is. Right? And so that it's almost like they're saying, therefore, you can't know the same thing that any other person knows.

01:15:58

And so it's all relative. Right. I mean, and which leads me to to make the conclusion.

01:16:05

So that basically means that they affirm polylogism then. Right. That there are, of course, many logics.

01:16:12

Right. Exactly. It's a necessary sort of presupposition to in order to hold to this view, it would require you to presuppose that there are many different kinds of logics and that your logic is not necessarily better than the white, the black, you know, oppressed lesbian woman's logic or, you know, or people who have different religious views for that matter.

01:16:40

And so that's that's so disturbing. Like for for people, for these people, these professing

01:16:49

Christians, not just Christians, but Christian teachers and scholars to hold to a perspective that would actually lead you to deny the incarnation.

01:16:58

And now, as I'm thinking about it, it's not just a denial of the incarnation. It also would appear to deny omniscience, because if if you can't know something, unless you experience that person exactly the way he experienced it, then that would mean

01:17:13

God can't know everything. Right. God can't know what it's like to be a woman or or or a black person or a

01:17:23

Hindu person or whatever the case may be. Therefore, there would be things that that actually, you know, that God doesn't know.

01:17:31

I mean, and and this is why I didn't mean to cut you off. Yeah. No, go for it. Yeah. This is why one of the reasons why if you remember the emergent church movement 10 years ago or something like that.

01:17:42

Yeah. One of the things that they were pushing a lot was open theism, not only open theism, but also what is it called?

01:17:51

Process theology. And if you're familiar with those, open theism is what God doesn't know everything.

01:17:57

He doesn't know the free choices of his creatures. Right. He can't know those things. Well, what if your free choice is to experience something that gives you knowledge that you could only obtain by experiencing?

01:18:07

Well, that means that there's even more that God doesn't know. Right. And the only way that God is going to know those things is through process, through development, through changing with his creation, changing.

01:18:18

You know, so this is the reason why the emergent church was heavy on that sort of theologies, because they were postmodernists.

01:18:27

They were trying to be at least taking the postmodern way of looking at things and applying it to Christian theology.

01:18:32

And what conclusion did they come to? Well, OK, we have to deny essentialism.

01:18:38

We have to not deny universalism of any kind. We have to deny the idea that there are divine archetypes of ideas in God's mind.

01:18:47

Right. We have to affirm radical nominalism. We have to affirm open theism. We have to affirm that God is changing with us, because if they're if they're postmodern assumptions about knowledge and man, et cetera, are true.

01:19:01

Then the things that scripture that we believe as Orthodox Christians are not true. And God has to change with the, you know, with the worldview that they're that they are proposing and that they're assuming.

01:19:14

So there's a direct tie there. You know, this you hit the nail on the head. Wow. That's I mean, that's a huge list of things that are so blatantly anti -Christian.

01:19:24

Just just to require just for you to hold that perspective requires you to subscribe to a massive list of of even like blasphemous teachings for you to say that, you know, something that God doesn't.

01:19:39

And therefore, which would even which is even worse, because now, therefore, God can't judge you because he doesn't know the truth in the thing.

01:19:48

Whatever it is that your experience was, he can't judge you. I mean, it's like you could go.

01:19:54

It gets so bad at that point. I mean, there's no stopping point to that. I mean, wow, it is that is insanity.

01:20:03

I just this is universal. So I guess. Yeah, go ahead. Universalism is mixed in there, too.

01:20:11

And that's something you find with the postmodern emergent church people, too, is universalism. Right. Surprise. Yeah.

01:20:17

And that's that's part of the reason why. Right. Because, yeah, sure. The Jews had their laws, their ten commandments back in the day.

01:20:23

But I mean, you're not a Jew. Right. Wow. They don't apply to you. You know, those are just that's a historical record telling you about the past and you can learn from it and stuff.

01:20:32

But you know what? God is love, man. And God knows that you are trying to figure things out in the world.

01:20:39

And so it's completely, completely anti -Christian. But I mean, where else are you where else are you going to go when you deny the foundational assumptions of the

01:20:47

Christian worldview presented in Scripture? And then you try to say you're a Christian. It's all going to fall apart.

01:20:53

And that's what you see with critical race theory, postmodernism, you know, the Christianity that these people are holding to who are sound.

01:21:01

Like I mentioned earlier on. The Christians who are wrestling with this stuff as if it's legit, they're going to come to a point on the road, either, you know, early on, which

01:21:12

I hope for. And I hope I pray for that. Or after struggling for a long time and coming to some ruinous situations in their life.

01:21:21

And you can completely avoid the ruinous situations by just really sitting down and thinking,

01:21:26

OK, what is it that critical race theory says? What is it that white privilege assumes? What is it that social justice assumes when we're talking about what it really foundationally assumes?

01:21:37

What does it really say about the world? What does it imply about the world? And is that compatible with what Scripture tells me on the face of Scripture?

01:21:45

You see, it doesn't it doesn't match. Right. So look at what Scripture says on the face of it.

01:21:51

Is the world created? Yes. Is the world organized by categories? Genesis chapter one tells you explicitly that God organized everything by categories.

01:21:59

Right. I mean, so you got to get rid of any kind of hyper nominalism, any kind of anti categorical reasoning.

01:22:07

You know. Yeah, that's wow. So, yeah,

01:22:13

I mean, it is the almost the exact if there was an opposite of Christian, it almost seems like it's the exact opposite of what everything everything that Christianity is by definition.

01:22:27

Just it's it really you know, this and this reminds me of an interesting experience

01:22:32

I had when I was in college. I took a religious studies class that was about like women.

01:22:39

I forgot what something about women and religion, like women and religion or gender.

01:22:45

It was called gender and religion. And she invited a friend of hers to come and speak to the class.

01:22:52

And she was a black Methodist preacher, a pastor. And so it was it was interesting because she actually was kind of conservative because my my professor, she was more liberal.

01:23:07

But the her friend, the black, the woman preacher, she was kind of she was actually somewhat conservative.

01:23:15

And so she she somebody asked her a really interesting question. They say, how when you read the

01:23:21

Bible, how do you understand it or how do you process it? And she said, well, when

01:23:26

I read the Bible, I read it first as a woman and then as a black person and then as a

01:23:33

Christian. She said something like that. You know, I forgot the order that she listed it in, but it was like, oh, man.

01:23:40

And then it sounded so wrong. But after reading your article, it took me back again to that point, started salivating.

01:23:47

And and it realized she's that's an expression of critical race theory.

01:23:53

Right. Just right before. Right then and there. I mean, it's so it's just crazy how you in the university, this stuff is like inescapable.

01:24:04

Oh, yeah. It's incredibly it's just incredibly prevalent.

01:24:10

And it's just wow. It's so disturbing. And really, I really hope this kind of salt salt people's oats and encourage people to read your article, because it really you bring out this stuff so well.

01:24:25

And really just expose how utterly contrary critical race theory and the presuppositions that it holds.

01:24:35

They're just so utterly contrary to the Bible, to the most basic teachings of the Bible, even the incarnation, even

01:24:41

God's omniscience, even like just the most basic doctrines of the Bible. So, you know,

01:24:49

I really appreciate you coming on on the on the show. Hiram, I really hope we can do this again sometime with some of your other work.

01:24:56

And I know we've run a little long, but did you want to did you want to comment on anything else or close out with any any closing thoughts?

01:25:03

Oh, yeah. Some closing thoughts. Firstly, thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it. I've been blessed by the work that you guys are doing.

01:25:11

It's encouraging to see an upsurge of Harkins here and there. Yeah. It's it feels like there's bantilians like everywhere.

01:25:23

We're oppressed. Yeah. Yeah. We're we can we can claim some sort of intersectionality.

01:25:31

For Puerto Rico, you know, we're Hispanic, Clarkians, you know, so it's got reparations.

01:25:39

But, yeah, like I said throughout, you know, my main concern is is getting down to the root of the issue.

01:25:50

Right. Yeah. Something that that's really problematic. Now, let's put it this way.

01:25:58

For a while back in the day, a few years ago, I was going back and forth with the annihilationist over rethinking how.

01:26:04

Right. Yeah. And debating back and forth through through essays and something that always would come up is, well, you're being mean, you're being harsh.

01:26:13

Or we should be more patient about this particular position or things like that. And. Other issues related to morality.

01:26:22

Right. Well, if you're a Christian, then we should really go for is some sort of compromise between this and that so that we can have charity between the two of us.

01:26:31

And I'm like. That's a Trojan horse. That's what heretics always use.

01:26:37

And I'm not saying everybody there is a full blown unregenerate heretic. You know what I mean? But when people have false teaching, they always have a

01:26:46

Trojan horse and a Trojan horse. Nine cents out of 10 is some sort of pietistic sounding, some pious sounding nonsense, as Clark would put it.

01:26:54

We have to be united in the essentials. And it's like, that's the whole issue here.

01:27:01

We're not united to be essentials, but that's how I'm sorry. Right now.

01:27:07

Yeah, that's obvious. Right. Yeah. So that's one of the reasons why I want to write this show.

01:27:12

Like, look, you're going to get this from everybody around. You're going to have people who will tell you about sob stories about how they were oppressed.

01:27:21

They'll tell you about their family, where their family came from. You know, I can go off on a long screed talking about how the

01:27:28

American government went into Puerto Rico and forcefully made women infertile, which which our government did.

01:27:36

Right. I can talk about Operation Bootstrap, which is a really horrible thing that happened in the history of Puerto Rico. I can talk about how my ancestors were.

01:27:44

They weren't picking cotton, but they were in the sugar plantations that were being beaten for not gathering enough sugar cane.

01:27:49

You know, I can go to all that. But if I'm doing that and then I'm slipping something in heresy in there, then

01:27:59

I'm not. My concern is not to get you on my on the same page morally. My page is excuse me.

01:28:06

My my goal is to throw sand in your eyes while I sneak in the heresy. Yeah. And this is what they're doing.

01:28:12

You know, the social justice movement is really harping on playing on Christians, emotions and Christians, good intentions when it comes to loving their neighbor as themselves.

01:28:23

And the closing thought here is. If you want to know what to do for your neighbor, if you want to know what a real concern for your neighbor is.

01:28:32

Go to scripture. Scripture will tell you what suffering is. Scripture will tell you what oppression is.

01:28:39

Scripture will tell you how to alleviate oppression if you need to or if you need to. Scripture will tell you how to help those who are suffering.

01:28:45

And it'll do so, obviously, in the way that glorifies God and doesn't contradict the Christian worldview.

01:28:51

You know. Go to scripture, you know, because if you really are concerned about the state of minorities in America, quote unquote minorities, if you're really concerned about those things, if you really think that there are issues, they're social.

01:29:08

Go to scripture and see whether or not your concerns are valid. Go to scripture and see what it is you are supposed to do, what you can do, see what you're see what the

01:29:16

Lord has ordained for you to do, because it's all there. If we really hold to scripture, if we're really evangelicals, then that's where we need to go.

01:29:26

Not to the postmodern philosophers and not to the anecdotal stories of people who have literally been oppressed or who claim to have been oppressed or whatever.

01:29:34

All those things are to be judged by the word of God. Amen. All of them. Yeah, great stuff,

01:29:41

Hiram. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this. I mean, we barely touched, we didn't even get to touch on a lot of the points that you that you talked about in the article.

01:29:50

So I really encourage our readers, our listeners to check out the article. Is Critical Race Theory Anti -Christian?

01:29:56

Yes, you can read it at biblicaltrinitarian .com or also at thorncrownministries .com.

01:30:03

And, you know, you touched on a lot of topics that I'd love to have you back on, man.

01:30:08

You talked about annihilationism. I kind of toyed around with annihilationism a little bit when Chris Date converted.

01:30:15

And he really kind of got me thinking about some things. And I was like, no, you know what? I was struggling to see where he was off until until I kind of dug into it a little bit deeper.

01:30:26

But, yeah, it'd be great to talk to you about that stuff. And I appreciate the fact that you have a that you've studied philosophy, you know, and that you've obviously that you have a scriptural perspective to process it and to analyze it.

01:30:40

So there's a lot of stuff there that we can definitely I'd love to to chat with you more about.

01:30:47

So, again, we think thank you again, Hiram, for that. This is a great article. Our readers definitely hope our readers take a look at this.

01:30:56

It will it will really help you see where this movement, the social justice movement is headed.

01:31:02

And it's not it is utter destruction. I mean, it is it is the end of the church as as the

01:31:10

Bible defines it for that. So I want to thank thanks everyone again for staying, staying with us.