Liberation Theology

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Father in heaven, we thank you for the opportunity to come together and to continue our study of various theological systems and perspectives.
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As we look at liberation theology today, Lord, help us to always remember that true liberation, true liberty comes in Christ for the one who Christ has made free is free indeed.
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And Lord, though we may struggle with oppression in this world, we know that in the life to come, all of that oppression will cease.
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We thank you for Jesus, our Savior, and our spiritual liberator.
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Help us to, Lord, understand how this idea of liberation has been maligned and misunderstood and be able to properly understand it in light of scripture.
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In Christ's name we pray and for his sake, amen.
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Well today we're going to be looking at two pages from our book.
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As you all know, we've been looking at charts of theology and doctrine by Dr.
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House.
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And we're going to be looking at liberation theology and black theology.
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Black theology can be called black liberation theology.
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In fact, I want to begin with simply a reminder of something somewhat contemporary happened about ten years ago, well eight years ago now, when we first really became acquainted with a politician by the name of Barack Obama.
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It was about ten years ago, I think, that he was at the Democratic National Convention giving a speech and he was seen as very well-spoken, very, people said, this guy's going to be popular.
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You know, he's just, he's so charismatic and people are going to really like him.
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And it was true, within two years of that speech, that was the first time I remember seeing him, was at the Democratic National Convention ten years ago.
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And then it was two years later, he was up for nomination for the President of the United States and he has been the President for the last eight years.
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During his presidential campaign, it was made known that he was a church member and that he had been a part of a church for, you know, most of his adult life and that this church leader, Jeremiah Wright, was a big influence in his life.
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And we see the influence in the way that he understands faith and things like that.
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And Jeremiah Wright made a huge, made a huge ruckus, I'm trying to find the right word, he made a huge splash on the scene when it was put out that he had actually preached in a sermon, G.D.
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America, and he had, you know, used the phrase, you know, God damn America was the phrase that he had used.
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And, of course, in context, you know, normally we wouldn't say the G.D.
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word, but in context he was saying God judge America.
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And people took great offense to that, and I think rightly so.
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The way that he was saying it was, it was meant to elicit emotional response.
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I mean, for any of you who have ever heard me preach, I have said several times, and I do believe it's so that America is under the judgment of God.
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We see it in morality, we see it in culture, we see it in politics, we see it in business, we see America under the judgment of God.
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But to use the G.D.
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phrase in such a way as to elicit emotional response certainly caused a lot of emotions to rise, and even men like Sean Hannity and others who have radio and television programs continue to play that.
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Even ten years later, nine years later, whenever, however many years it's been, they continue to play that specific line, they have it as a soundbite on their radio shows and their television shows, just as a reminder so that no one need forget that this man actually said those words.
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And again, within the context, Wright was saying God judge America, or God is judging America, but the way it was taken, of course, was G.D.
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in the sense of the way we would use it as an ugly word.
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So, it is a difficult situation because in one sense, have we not all said that God is judging America because of what we see, but he was saying it for the purpose of eliciting an emotional response, and he did.
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He certainly did a pretty powerful job of doing so.
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Well, Jeremiah Wright, I bring him up this morning and I use him as the example this morning because Jeremiah Wright is one of the figureheads in what is known as the Black Liberation Movement or Black Liberation Theology.
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And so, I felt like he was a good example as any to begin our lesson today because today we're going to be talking about Liberation Theology and Black Liberation Theology.
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Liberation Theology is the parent of Black Liberation Theology.
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And I'll just put BLT there, and that's not a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.
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Sorry, I didn't even realize it until I wrote it.
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But you have Liberation Theology gave birth to Black Liberation Theology, so one is the outgrowth of the other.
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Liberation Theology began as a movement in South America.
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Let me kind of write, or read, rather, sort of the history.
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Liberation Theology is a movement that attempts to interpret Scripture through the plight of the poor.
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True followers of Jesus, according to Liberation Theology, must work towards a just society, bring about social and political change, and align themselves with the working class.
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And it has its roots in Latin American Roman Catholicism.
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Its rise is seen as a response to the widespread poverty and mistreatment of large segments of Latin American society.
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And an influential book promoting Liberation Theology by Friar Gustavo Gutierrez is entitled A Theology of Liberation was written in 1971.
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So to give you an idea of how old this particular movement is, you figure it's a generation old.
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It's a little over a generation old.
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It had its rise in the 70s, and it's had great influence in the 80s, the 90s, and into the 2000s.
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It began, as I said, with Liberation Theology, and then it became part of the understanding of the African American plight in the United States.
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Of course, we all know the history of the African American people in the United States is not a positive one.
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They were brought over here as slaves.
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Many of them lived in very poor conditions even after slavery, and some even continue even to this day to live in difficult situations.
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And we have a society that is very racially divided, even now in 2016.
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And there is still racism in the world.
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It is interesting, though, that racism has seen somewhat of a shift, because when I was a child in the 80s, there were no more separate bathrooms.
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There were no more separate water fountains.
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There were no more sitting on the back of the bus.
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That was in the 60s, and some of you, your parents may remember that.
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Some of you may have been children during that era.
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You may remember some of that, but by the time I was a child in school, my first best friend was a little boy named Samuel, who was a black boy, and I was a white child.
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There was nothing weird about that.
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There was nothing strange about that.
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So I didn't grow up in a time where you saw whites-only water fountains.
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For me, that's a black-and-white picture in a sociology textbook.
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That's not real, because it's not an experience that I had.
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I know it's real, but you understand what I'm saying.
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For me and my experience.
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So throughout the 90s, yes, I understood what racism was, but institutionalized racism was not something that I understood as a problem, except maybe I knew that there were people who considered themselves white supremacists, and they would argue about things like affirmative action.
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But as far as institutionalized racism, I didn't understand what it was, because it wasn't something that I was having to deal with and see visually all around me.
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But since the rise of, specifically after 9-11, a huge issue regarding Islam and Muslims and racism according to Arabs was a big issue, and then of course since the rise of the presidency of Barack Obama, the issue of racism, black-and-white racism, has really come back to a huge head.
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It's a big issue.
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It's in the news all the time.
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The hashtag Black Lives Matter.
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Why is that even a thing? Because the argument from those who promote Black Lives Matter is that the police don't seem to care about the black people, and they're willing to kill black people more frequently than they kill white people.
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And so it's created a new sense of hatred, it seems like, at least for me, it just seems like it's grown, and now we're back at a point where we have a black family in the White House, a black president, and yet in that, seeing a black man risen to the highest office of the land, and yet it's created the highest amount of division in the land.
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Not him specifically, I think he's part of it because he promotes such things, but what I mean is you see it as, okay, here's an example of how far we've come, black persons in the White House, he's the president, but yet it seems like we've gone the other way culturally, and there's more division than ever among people and things like that.
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So liberation theology acts as a way for people to use Christian themes to promote social causes.
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That's, if I could boil it down to a very simple sentence, liberation theology allows people to use Christian themes to promote social causes.
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You've heard me, I think, and I know that I've used this on Wednesday nights, but I don't know if I've ever used it here.
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How many of you have ever heard the term social gospel? How would you define the social gospel? Anybody want to take a shot at it? Oh sure, yeah, yeah, you can't, it's sort of jello to the wall type thing.
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To say that's the social gospel is hard to say with absolutism, but in general, we talk about the social gospel.
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The social gospel is that Jesus Christ's purpose was not so much to save men from sin as it was to save people from oppression.
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Yeah, yeah, exactly.
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Righting of wrongs, and whether that's social wrongs, political wrongs, financial wrongs, any type of wrong that's going on in the world, that was what Jesus came to deal with.
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Jesus' concern was more for poverty physically than it was for poverty spiritually.
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So that is the social gospel model.
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So a person who is a social gospel oriented person would be very concerned about opening a food bank.
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Their concern probably would not be telling people about their sins or explaining to them their need for faith in Jesus Christ.
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As much, I'm not saying they wouldn't care about that, but the concern would be more that we need to solve the problem of the hunger.
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The hunger problem comes first.
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The spiritual problem comes second.
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And the social gospel means that we're reaching out into society, seeking to solve society's problems through whatever means is necessary.
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Liberation theology, of course, is a part of that type of social gospel because the idea is when a person comes to Jesus or when a person understands the role of the church, the role of the church and the role of Christ, is to liberate them.
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It's to take away their oppression.
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And so the whole goal of Christianity sort of shifts from a spiritual one to a more political one.
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And in regard to black liberation theology, I just want to read you a quick quote here.
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Because of its extreme overemphasis of racial issues, a negative result of black liberation theology is that it tends to separate the black and white Christian communities and thus is completely unbiblical.
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I've said this before, I've said this from the pulpit.
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There are two places in our society where racism or racial division is the most easily seen.
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One is in the church.
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And what do you think the second one is? This is one people are often surprised about.
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Where you see the highest amount of racial division, one is the church.
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Second one is the funeral home.
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Funeral home.
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I happen to work in the funeral business, have since I was 16 years old, and I can tell you this, there are still to this day black funeral homes and white funeral homes.
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Now you'll see white people in black funeral homes and black people in white funeral homes, but it's very rare.
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It's like the same as in the church.
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Ratios are very low.
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Funeral homes tend to be very racially segregated.
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And I'm not giving a reason why.
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I don't know why.
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But like churches, funeral homes tend to be black funeral homes and white funeral homes.
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It's just that way.
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I've seen it.
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This is experiential for me.
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I've experienced this as working in the business.
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But my point simply being, the greatest place where there's division is on Sunday morning.
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There are churches that identify themselves as what? Black churches.
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It's a black church.
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Come with me to my church, but know that it's a black church.
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And typically that comes with a certain cultural expectation.
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And I've even heard, I've heard theologians, I love to preach in black churches because they're so much more life filled.
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I've heard, you know, I've heard some very prominent theologians say that.
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It was surprising to hear.
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Because while it's probably true that there's more jubilance and a little bit more willingness to stand up, to amen, to clap, and things like that, the point that's undergirding that is that there's division there.
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There's a black church.
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Why is there a black church? Well, there is cultural differences.
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There is reasons why people tend to associate themselves one to the other, you know, in different ways.
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But in regard to our discussion for today, there is an entire theology that lends itself to understanding the cross differently than what the Bible teaches.
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And sees it not as an atonement for sin, per se, but rather as an example of a man standing up under oppression.
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I want you to turn, if you would, in your little notes here, and I just want you to turn to the part that says liberation theology, and I want you to go down to the third box which says Christ.
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This is the biggest, and I'm going to preach on this this morning.
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Heresy begins with misunderstanding who Christ is and what he did.
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That's always, whether you're talking about Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, anyone.
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You talk about the heretics, the cults.
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The biggest heresies begin with misunderstanding who Christ is and what he came to do.
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In liberation theology, Jesus is seen as a Messiah of political involvement.
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He is God entering the struggle for justice on the side of the poor and the oppressed.
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However, he was not a savior in the traditional meaning of the word.
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Instead, liberation theologians support a moral influence view of the atonement.
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There is no thought of a satisfaction of God's wrath against men.
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When Jesus Christ was on the cross, it wasn't about satisfying the wrath of God.
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It was about one man being an example of sacrifice in the face of oppression and not hating his oppressors but standing up to them.
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How many of you saw The Passion of the Christ? It was pretty popular when it first came out.
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I always disappoint people when I say I wasn't a fan of The Passion of the Christ.
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I wasn't a fan of the movie.
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It was a lot of Catholic overtones.
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Jesus looked like a white man, very, very white man.
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Jim Caviezel played Jesus.
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It was very much a Catholic movie.
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The seven stages of the cross, all that was all part of it.
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There was so much of the movie that was Catholic overtones.
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That being aside, when the movie was made, it was produced and directed by Mel Gibson.
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As you know, Mel Gibson has a friend in the movie world.
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They did three movies together, four movies actually, called Lethal Weapon.
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The man's name was Danny Glover.
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Danny Glover went and saw The Passion of the Christ.
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He had a quote after the movie came out.
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I don't know the quote for absolute, direct, specific how he said it.
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I remember to this day how many years ago, I remember him coming out and saying it.
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I remember it struck me.
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He doesn't understand Jesus.
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He says, this movie was great because it showed us an example of a man standing up against his oppressors.
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Basically, he gave the liberation movement position on Jesus.
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I remember saying to my wife, I said, that guy doesn't understand the cross.
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He doesn't understand the purpose of the cross.
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Honestly, to get back to The Passion of the Christ, just for a second.
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One of the things about The Passion of the Christ that I think is overdone is, even though Christ did undergo all of the suffering and the torture, it was the wrath of God that was the focus, not the wrath of men.
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We tend to over-excite about the wrath of men and under-appreciate the fact that he drank the cup of God's wrath while on the cross.
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There was something going on spiritually that was much more heinous than what was going on physically.
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The physical was representational of the actual that was going on from God to him.
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I remember Danny Glover saying, this is a great example of a man who underwent oppression.
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I remember thinking, was Christ oppressed? Yes.
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Was he hated? Yes, the scripture says that.
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But that wasn't the purpose of this.
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The purpose of this is the wrath of God being poured out and the atonement for sins being made, the promise of Isaiah 53 being fulfilled, that he would take the sins of his people, that we, like Sheba, have gone astray and God has laid on him the inequity of us all.
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That's the part that's missed.
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That's the part that concerns me most regarding liberation theology, is the missing of who Christ is and what he came to do.
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Right here, Keith, in the very first part, the beginnings of this theology idea.
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It's kind of ironic, isn't it, that in Latin America, where the first slaves in the New World came to, it wasn't America.
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They were in the West Indies and Mexico and other places before, because they were on ships serving the Spanish and others that came over, long before America was even becoming a country.
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And now, and then in there, too, later, the Marxists and all these guys came out, ex-Nazis all down in Central America, began to influence this stuff.
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And we see this rise of an anti-Godism, you know, coupled with the Catholicism problems that had already influenced it.
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And so you can really see how it's just spread right out of that whole idea.
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I mean, not only black liberation, but just all these weird...
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Oh yeah, and that's what I'm saying.
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I'm only combining black, because the black liberation theology was born out of this.
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But certainly, yeah, there's a combination in this.
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It's a seeking of combining Christianity and Marxism.
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It's combining this social problem with the religious solution and melding the two together.
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That's the results of it today, now.
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Yeah.
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The Word talks about Christian suffering.
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They don't realize that we choose it or anything like that.
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But we will suffer as Christians.
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And they don't seem to realize some of that oppression is part of it, if you're serving for the right reason.
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Well, again, let me show you two Bible verses very quickly, if you don't mind.
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I just want to show you just in regard to the way they look at Scripture.
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The first one is Luke 1, 52 and 53.
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This is Mary speaking.
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In fact, if you don't mind, Mike, I'll get you to read it for me.
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Luke 1, 52 and 53.
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No, I was talking to that, Mike, but it's okay.
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Yeah, 1, 52 and 53.
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Okay.
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I can't get there.
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Yep, that's it.
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According to liberation theology, Mary is expressing joy that God has liberated the materially poor and fed the physically hungry while bringing down the materially rich.
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He is a God, in other words, who favors the destitute over those with wealth.
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So that would be one of their particular passages.
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They would say, here, Mary is exalting God for what reason? He has brought down the rich and he's lifted up the poor.
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So it becomes an issue of social class, social evils, and this is the main concern for God.
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God is concerned with this.
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Another passage, if somebody else wants to read, nobody else has their Bible, so I'll go ahead and open.
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So, Mike, if you don't mind.
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Matthew 10.
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Yeah.
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And verse 34.
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I think Ms.
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Rosanna is going to beat you to it.
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Yep.
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Well, that particular verse, liberation theologians would say, is a promotion of activism for the church.
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And so the church's role is to have that activist mindset, that we're to be out there with the sword of liberation, seeking to liberate and push for, even with social unrest, push for liberation and liberation causes.
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Well, oh, absolutely, absolutely.
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Well, that's the saddest but most obvious thing in all of this, is that liberation theology is not derived from the Scripture.
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Liberationism is pushed into the Scripture, and thus a theology is born.
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But it's not a biblical theology.
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Oh, yeah, absolutely.
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You know, Moses and the story of the Pharaoh and all that, and of course the Pharisee and the very rich.
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Well, they would say he's glorified as a liberator.
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But not liberation from sins.
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Sin is not the problem.
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Sin is a result of the problem.
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The problem is the oppression.
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Salvation.
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I want to just...
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I'm not going to read everything on these sheets.
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You have them.
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I gave them so you can look at them on your own.
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I just want to make a few references to parts of this.
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Salvation, underneath liberation theology.
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Salvation is viewed as a social change in society, where justice for the poor and oppressed is established.
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By C.
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Torres says, the Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin.
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So basically, if you're not out there seeking social change, if you're not a revolutionary, then you're a sinner.
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And mortal sin in Catholic theology is what? It's the sin that removes the grace of justification.
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Meaning that if you're a Catholic and you've been justified or being justified by the sacraments, if you are not a revolutionary, you've committed a mortal sin.
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Now, this is not dogma of the church.
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This is just a writing of one man.
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But it's establishing his principle.
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Our principle is if you're a Catholic and you're not doing this social justice mentality, if you don't have this revolutionary mentality, then you're living in mortal sin.
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You're living in sin that has robbed you of Christ's justification.
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So it's a very serious view.
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Any method to that end is acceptable, even violence and revolution.
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The view tends towards universalism, and evangelism becomes merely an effort to create awareness to prepare people for political action.
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See, again, it's not about salvation for the individual.
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It's about liberation for the oppressed.
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And it really changes the purpose of what the Bible teaches Christ came for.
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It's just an opposition to the Bible taught by...
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Well, Jesus says, my kingdom is not of this world.
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If my kingdom were of this world, I would dispatch angels and they would come and everything would change.
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Christ looked at the face of Pontius Pilate, one of the greatest oppressors in the world, and he said, you would have no power over me if it were not given to you by God.
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He strikes you on your left, you strike him on your right.
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And so we see people have ideas and thoughts and mentalities, specifically political sociological ideas, and they force them into the Bible.
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They insert them.
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And then, because of that, you read through the lens of that ideology, you can get anything you want to.
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The Bible, as Martin Luther said, can become a wax nose, which can be twisted and turned and shaped any way you want.
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And your nose is a big part of what makes you who you are, and if your nose changed, your whole face would sort of look different.
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And that's what Luther said.
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If there was a wax nose, you could just change it any way you want, and that's the way people treat Scripture.
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It's very dangerous.
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But that's what liberation theology does.
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It says that we have this social, political, economic agenda.
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Let us use the Bible to undergird it, or to not undergird it so much as to promote it.
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Well, what we're doing is what Jesus did.
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What we're doing is what God has told us to do, because we have here in the Bible, when Jeremiah Wright said what he said, what did he say? It's in the Bible! That's exactly how he said it, too.
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Very, very confident.
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It's in the Bible! Yeah.
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Now, under black theology, on the next page, salvation is given a little bit more exposition.
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Liberation theology says salvation is about justice for the poor and oppressed.
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Well, black theology says salvation is freedom from oppression and pertains to blacks in this life.
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So it becomes very much a focus on a specific race, which they would argue has endured so much slavery and oppression and so are deserving of this liberation.
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And many teach that Jesus is a black man.
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Well, it goes on to say...
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I'll go up to the part that says Christ.
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He is one who delivers almost exclusively in social ways.
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He is a liberator or a black messiah whose work of emancipation for the poor and rejection of society is the parallel to the blacks' quest for liberation.
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Quiet Christ's message is black power, according to a writer named Henry.
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His intrinsic nature and spiritual activity receive little or no attention.
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Some even deny his role of the atoning sacrifice for the world's sin and provider of eternal life.
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That's from the writer named Shrine.
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So we see, not necessarily calling him black Jesus, but he's a black messiah.
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His purpose is focused mainly on the black people.
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Again, it creates racism by creating division among the races.
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You know, the Apostle Paul tells us, in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek.
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There is neither slave nor free.
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There is neither male nor female.
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For we are all one in Christ Jesus.
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And yet this entire theology is meant to create a division.
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It's meant to create separation.
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And Christ's focus is on us, the black people, because we are the oppressed.
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That's the argument being made.
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Going back down to salvation, proponents of black theology are concerned specifically with political and theological aspects of salvation more than the spiritual.
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In other words, salvation is physical liberation from white oppression rather than freedom from the sinful nature and acts of each individual person.
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Presenting heaven as a reward for following Christ is seen as an attempt to dissuade blacks from the goal of real liberation of their whole person.
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So again, I'm not worried about heaven.
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I want liberation here.
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I'm not worried about where I'm going.
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I'm worried about where I am right now.
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That sort of becomes very focused on here and now and what's going on, and very myopic in that sense.
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Not looking towards eternity, but looking towards the situation right now.
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Now, I want to look also, because we can look at all this, but just for time, I want to look also at the way the liberation theology and black theology looks at the church.
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So go back to liberation theology.
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Turn back over.
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Because again, remember, who is doing God's work in this view? It's the revolutionary.
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It's the political activist.
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It's the person who's going out seeking to make change.
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So what then becomes the role of the church? The role of the church is not a spiritual place where you go to meet God.
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It's where the church becomes an avenue for political activism.
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So reading in, it says under the church, it says the church is perceived as a means of change to society.
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The pastoral activity of the church does not flow as a conclusion from the theological premise.
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It tries to be part of the process through which the world is transformed.
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Political neutrality is not an option for the church.
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The church takes the stand politically.
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Now that last sentence, you know, we could argue and say, well, political neutrality really isn't an option in the church in reality because the church takes a stand on morality.
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It takes a stand on truth.
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And as a result, we're not politically neutral.
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But we're also not trying to, as a church, advertise for certain candidates or go out and make political change in the world, even though I would say, in a sense, I guess there are those who stand for Christian causes and things like that in politics.
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But this point is that the church's role is a political one in the world.
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More than spiritual, it's political, yes.
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They went there instead of being a church in some places.
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Well, again, political neutrality is not an option because that's the purpose.
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It's a church.
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It's a political organization.
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Now, under black theology, it says this.
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The church is the focus of social expression in the black community where the blacks can express freedom and equality.
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That's from Manning Cone.
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Thus, the church and politics have formed a cohesion where the theological expression of the desire for social freedom is carried out.
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So the church becomes the avenue where our political views can be expressed, our political views can be explained, and can be disseminated out into the world.
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And thus, the church becomes sort of an avenue for the dissemination of almost propaganda at that point because it's political.
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Yeah, deny the truth.
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George Orwell, I mean, that's one of his quotes.
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He said, the further society drifts from the truth, the more it detests those who speak it.
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That's really where we're at now.
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And historically, we have seen, such as in Nazism, the use of the church as a political tool in the hands of the dictator who dictates the speaking, the writing, and the expressions of the church.
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I mean, Hitler had his priests.
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Hitler had his men who were willing to stand up and promote the Third Reich through the pulpit.
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And I know that those men are reaping the hellish rewards of such a heinous thing.
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I mean, if they did not repent, that is a sin beyond, I mean, just beyond my mind, to stand up and promote Nazism, the death of the Jews, the internment camps, and to promote that through the church.
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But it's not what I'm saying, I guess, is it's not unheard of in history that the leaders would use the church as their avenue to promote their false views and their political agendas.
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So, we've gone through a lot today.
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Like I said, I didn't want to spend two, three, four weeks on this.
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It is a difficult thing, for sure.
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Racism, in and of itself, is a bad thing because it hinders people's understanding of the equality that we have in Christ.
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There is not a black man or a white man or a Chinese man or any of these other things, an Asian person, none of these things matter in the eyes of God.
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The idea that race is even a thing is really a social construct, because there's one race, it's the human race.
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We have different ways in which different humans have adapted to certain areas of the world.
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Thus, we have black skin and we have skin that's more reddish and we have skin that's a little more pale, and then we have people who are very pale, northern European-looking people.
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But the idea that because I'm a northern European-looking man, that I in some way am better or more willing, not more willing, more able to receive God's favor than a man who is pitch black because he's from Africa or somewhere else, that I somehow deserve God's favor more, or I'm more intelligent, or I'm better spiritually than that person, is false, is unbiblical, and it's something that we should repent of if we're racist in that regard.
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But if we use anything to change the meaning of the cross, to change the purpose of Jesus Christ, no matter how noble fighting against oppression may be, no matter how noble that may be, if we're using that to change the meaning of the cross, that's unbiblical as well and needs to be repented of.
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So this whole system misunderstands Christ, misunderstands the purpose of the gospel.
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It's not to say that the Bible doesn't talk about oppression, it does.
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And of course we could look at the story of Moses, we could look at several stories in the Bible of those who sought to oppress and God standing with the poor.
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Obviously, that's true.
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But to take and make that the sole purpose of the gospel and to rob the gospel of the atonement, to rob the gospel of the true purpose in which Christ came, and that was to save sinners from their sin, and that truly demonstrates that this is an unbiblical theology.
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Well, next time we're going to look at feminist theology, so that ought to be a lot of fun.
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Well, let's pray.
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Father, thank you for coming to study together.
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I pray that you would use this just to simply further us along in our understanding of what you would have us know in regard to different theologies and different systems, and ultimately, Lord, to be able to grow us in what your system says, the true biblical theology that we seek to know and love.
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In Christ's name, amen.