Keep sharing good news without ads.
#NoDespair2020
Here's something I never thought I'd say. When it comes to John Piper on critical race theory, I'm more with Neal Shenvey than I am with Doug Wilson. Now let us never speak of this again. Nah, I'm just kidding.
No, listen, I get grief for this all the time. I like Neal. I think Neal's good on a lot of things. I understand the criticisms, and I make my own criticisms of Neal, but I think his head's in the right place.
He's just a very, very, very winsome guy. Too winsome, almost. Like, you don't want to be in the foxhole with him, because, like, you know, before he would swing the sword, he would, you know, want to nuance things to death just to make sure that he should be swinging the sword.
Sometimes you need someone that just swings a sword, you know what I'm saying? But anyway, but Neal wrote an article about John Piper's critical race theory podcast, and it's a decent article. I think that he goes out of his way to find agreements where there might not be quite as much, but that's not a problem so much for me, because he does definitely talk about where he diverges from John Piper and where he thinks that John Piper's presentation wasn't all that helpful.
And in the areas where he said that, I completely agree. Now, I would probably use stronger words, and that's totally fine. I don't need everyone to approach the battle the exact same way I do, so long as they're on the right team.
And that kind of brings me to Doug Wilson's comments, because a lot of people were saying that I was giving Doug Wilson a pass for protecting and defending John Piper, and, you know, how it's time for me to come out against Doug Wilson and stuff like that.
And to be honest, like, I'm just not going to do that, at least at this juncture, because something that I think Doug Wilson has influenced me on in a very good way is this idea that, look, if somebody's fighting against the untruths that are out there, somebody's fighting against it, and they're just giving a little bit of pushback in our culture today, that little bit of pushback is very valuable.
So you don't want to squash it. You want to encourage it. And it doesn't mean that you don't, you know, you don't level your own criticisms or whatever. It doesn't mean that you don't do your thing. You don't wield the sledgehammer when the other guy's just wielding a chisel.
But you appreciate the pushback, right? Does everybody have to, you know, sing psalms on the mayor's doorstep at night? No, not everybody has to do that. But everybody does have to fight against the tyranny that we're seeing all over the place.
They have to fight, and they might have other ways to fight, but that's okay. And so here's the thing. So if you remember, Doug Wilson recommended John Piper's thing on critical race theory, and after I finished it yesterday, I didn't really understand why.
I mean, I thought it was okay. Like I said in my video yesterday, his presentation was fine, but it was inadequate. It was just inadequate. And so I just did what a normal human being does, and I asked him, why did you think this was so great, Doug Wilson?
And I didn't necessarily think he'd respond, but he did. And so he said, this is what Doug Wilson said about John Piper. He said, I thought his rejection of CRT proper was robust. He attacked the self-deification and the self-definition and the self-determination.
I don't see what's left. By the way, I love that word robust. That's the word that somebody uses when they're really trying to convince you that something is true. But anyway, yeah. So he said that he defeated or at least critiqued critical race theory proper completely.
And I liked that part of the podcast as well. I thought that that part of the podcast was very good. I commended John Piper for just flat out saying that critical race theory should be rejected. And he definitely did do that.
I don't think he equivocated there at all. But Doug Wilson asks, or he says, I don't see what's left. And that's where I disagree. I think there's a lot left. Because here's the thing. And that's what I said to him.
Let me just read what I said and then I'll explain myself. I said to Doug, thanks for the response. I think what's left are the more practical rejections. Sure, he decimates the most objectionable parts of the theory in theory, but the issues with critical race theory in evangelical circles come from those who deny self-deification, et cetera, but still use critical race theory categories.
And when you couple that with his first podcast, he almost removes the ability to properly critique those who use critical race theory categories in that way by, as you said, asking people to treat them with kid gloves.
That's something that Doug Wilson said. The first episode, he liked it, but he felt like he was being asked to treat critical race theorists with kid gloves. I agree. So the idea, what I'm trying to get at here, and I mentioned this in my video yesterday, is in Christian circles, what's happening is not the self-deification stuff and the self-definition stuff and the self-determination stuff.
What's happening in Christian circles is they're trying to use many categories from critical race theory while holding on to a high view of the gospel or a high view of God and a high view of God determining your gender, your sexuality, and stuff like that.
Now, that's eroding. Like, let's make no mistake about it. Many people that we thought were conservatives are kind of blending some of these gender categories and kind of making room for sexual deviance and stuff like that.
So that's eroding as well. Make no mistake about it. But still, many of the conservatives that are using critical theory categories when it comes to race are not using it when it comes to gender identity and stuff like that.
That was my whole point. And so they're trying to combine horrible, you know, kind of practical uses of critical race theory as an analytical tool with the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's the primary areas that are at play right now.
I'm not so worried about the liberationists, you know, the group of homosexuals that were trying to talk about being genderqueer and stuff like that. Like, that stuff is obvious, very obviously wrong to most Christians.
But what's not very obviously wrong is this stuff regarding race. And that's where I felt like John Piper completely punted and failed. Yes, he rejected it, but it was in a way that didn't really have much practical use.
And I'm assuming that John Piper was hoping for his podcast to be helpful to the common person, and I just don't see how it was. I walk away from those podcasts thinking, well, critical race theory is bad because of gender theory and fat studies?
Like, it didn't really give me much of practical use. And as I said in the video yesterday, the stuff on race is twisted enough. And the reality is that Doug Wilson knows this. Because Doug Wilson wrote an article about Tim Keller, and it was called Tim Keller Has His Thumb on the Scales.
It's a very good article. And I want to read this excerpt from Doug Wilson regarding Tim Keller. He says, Even though Keller does use quite a few of the categories of critical theory, does that make him a cultural Marxist?
I saw one exchange online which basically said, Of course he's not. He denies it. He has written against critical theory. And so, Doug Wilson critiques that idea. Like, of course you can be at least influenced by critical race theory or Marxism and not believe everything that Karl Marx wrote.
Like, it reminds me of that article that the guy from Mortification of Spin wrote, where he's like, Oh, Keller can't be a Marxist because he believes in God. Like, that's pretty preposterous. And I think that Doug Wilson here, when it talks about Keller, can see that.
That's preposterous. That's a preposterous way to think. Just because somebody denies being a critical theorist doesn't mean that they're not using very objectionable parts of critical theory. In fact, he quotes Tim Keller here, where Tim Keller's talking about being white.
He says, If you have white skin, it's worth a million dollars over a lifetime. You have to say, I don't deserve this. I'm the product of and standing on the shoulders of other people who got that through injustice.
The Bible says you are involved in injustice even if you didn't actually do it. And so he's using critical theory here to make whites the oppressor. And you're an oppressor whether or not you did any oppression if you're white.
And so that's objectionable. That's something that, in and of itself, we should come against as a Christian. And I think Doug Wilson here is saying that's clearly a category from critical theory. And he's right.
And yet, Tim Keller would deny being a critical race theorist. And so my question about the Piper thing is not that I think Piper is as far gone as Tim Keller. I don't. I don't think that at all. I think Piper is way better on critical race theory than Tim Keller.
However, using John Piper's podcast, how could I possibly critique Tim Keller? He's not saying you get to self-deify. He's not saying you get to self-determine your identity. He's not saying those things.
And he seems to have a high view of the gospel. He wrote a great book called The Prodigal God. It's a very clear gospel presentation and all of that. So how could I critique Tim Keller using Piper's two podcasts as a base?
I don't think you can. You know what I mean? That's the thing. That's why I find it so unhelpful. And I think that Neal Shenvey did a great job explaining exactly why. You know, he's a very friendly guy.
So he wrote a very friendly response. And I wrote a bit more of an attacking response. And that's fine. I think that there's room for both of these things. Again, I love John Piper. But the Bible says that the wounds of a friend are...
What does it say about the wounds of a friend? I lost my train of thought there. But that's fine. So here's the thing. So, you know, Shenvey points out in the beginning, you know, Piper said he couldn't see a single disagreement between Shenvey and Razul.
I found that preposterous. And Shenvey finds that perplexing. It's a little bit nicer of a way to say it. But here's the thing. I want you to read this. Because here's the point that I brought yesterday.
And I think Shenvey is 100 right about this. He says, Second, while Pastor Piper is quite right to point out that rejecting biblical sexual ethics and even biblical authority is the logical consequence of the core tenets of critical race theory, many evangelicals will insist that they do not intend to adopt these views.
They will argue that they are using critical race theory only to understand racial dynamics while rejecting its views on sexuality and power. As a result, it is crucial to show that critical race theory's views on race are also wrong and tremendously destructive.
Even if we could extract critical race theory's racial perspectives from the larger framework in which they're embedded, what we are left with would still be poisonous. Moreover, critical race theories, especially those working from within an intersectional framework, would be the first to insist that their racial concerns are inseparable from their views on gender, sexuality, class, and power.
And that leads to my next point. Should critical race theory be defined generically? Shenvey nailed it right there. He absolutely nailed it. And this is what I said yesterday in my video. I hadn't read Shenvey's critique at that point, but he's right.
He's like, the stuff on race is objectionable enough. That's the critique here. That's the critical aspect here. Many Christians are being fooled by this race stuff that are not being fooled by the gender identity stuff and by the queerness studies and that kind of thing.
And so to do a podcast, two podcasts, mind you, on critical race theory, I'm assuming he wanted to be helpful and to really just kind of punt on the race stuff and almost kind of embrace some of it as well with that weird generic definition, which Shenvey is about to decimate in a second.
We're not going to go into that. I think that's a little bit too much. But I find that to be the opposite of helpful, which is why I was so confused that Doug Wilson was so enthusiastic in his recommendation of this.
It made no sense. Listen, I know why he's doing this. I know Doug is committed to this. Look, people pushing back, I want to celebrate that. Even if it's not the way I would do it, even if it's not perfect, even if it's a little pushback, he wants to celebrate that.
I respect that, and actually I do that myself. That's why I get in trouble for promoting Neil Shenvey, you know what I mean? I do that myself. So I'm not saying that that's wrong necessarily, but to be honest, I'm going to have to diverge from Doug Wilson here.
I just don't think that his rejection of CRT proper was that robust. He definitely rejected it. That's good. I want to commend that. I want to celebrate that. But if you were to ask someone, okay, I want you to read John Piper, or listen to John Piper's two podcasts here, and I want you to tell me what's wrong with critical race theory, I don't think that they're going to have a robust definition for what's wrong with the racial aspects of critical race theory.
In fact, I think that they're going to come away saying, well, I know that it's wrong, and it could lead to wrong things, but as long as I keep it in the right place, then it could be beneficial and helpful.
And I just disagree with that. I disagree with that completely. And I think that if you want a very nice person to explain it to you, as opposed to a very mean person like me, you should read Neil Shenvey's response here, because I think that, as far as the generic definition, he does a great job talking about this.
Like, it's a very interesting article. I think you should read it. And so anyway, that's going to be my last word on John Piper's critical race theory stuff. I just don't think that it's that helpful at all.
I think, yes, I'm glad that he rejects critical race theory, but I defy you to find out how to apply that to practical situations, for example, Tim Keller. You know, because the thing is, Tim Keller, as Doug Wilson points out, does use many categories from critical race theory, and yet is not self-deifying or self-defining or self-determining.
He doesn't do that kind of stuff. So how do we use Piper's robust rejection of critical race theory in practical situations, like with Tim Keller? It's just not useful at all for that. And so I don't really get what the appeal is.
I mean, I'm glad that... Put it this way. I'm glad that Big Eva people are coming out against critical race theory, but the problem is you have to get specific. You have to tell me the specific way that it applies to specific situations and not others.
And that's the thing that every Big Eva person that's coming out against critical race theory is failing to do. All the seminary professors and all the talking heads, conference-speaking type people, they're all coming out against critical race theory, but they're refusing to get specific.
And that's what we need. We don't need another John Piper to come out and come out against critical race theory in theory. We need it to be applied to our situations that we find ourselves in every day.
The next time Tim Keller says, repent because you're white, you wicked pagan, we need to be able to figure out how to refute that and why it's such a problem and all of that kind of thing. Anyway, I hope you found this podcast helpful.
It's not a podcast, it's a video. What am I talking about? God bless. By the way, it is faithful are the wounds of a friend. See, I know scripture. Sometimes my mind's just going a mile a minute and that kind of thing.
Anyway.
