The bias with which certain people “hear” what is said by others is sometimes, well, glaring. So yesterday I talked about how a person would be “crushed” in a debate if they denied a particular theological statement. Some people just heard “crushed” and, in concert with so much of the thinking of the world today, assumed things that just were not actually stated. So I asked someone in our chat channel to transcribe a few minutes from the program so we would have specificity (something often sacrificed in Twitter conversations). So, here is the transcript:
Language is one of the biggest problems here, and I will say without question there’s one side that thinks that language should be defined consistently and historically, and the other side is the one that thinks language is play-dough to be changed with all the time. If you are a critical race theorist—if you’re into the social justice stuff—you’re the ones playing with definitions, not us. You’re the ones that are the new kids on the block here, so don’t don’t go telling me I’m changing stuff.
I was clear, I was straightforward when I, what, twenty…I forget when it was, 2010, whenever it was when I first started talking about some of this stuff, when then I had Voddie Baucham on, when I’ve talked about my own personal experience, which has been mocked by people, a number of people that are still leaders in this group — I get to define how I’m using the term colorblind. And it has nothing to with thinking that once you become a Christian everyone just simply becomes the same color. It has nothing to do with abandoning that which is true, honest, just, lovely of a good report, that comes from God’s grace, in one’s ethnicity. It is not pretending that you cease to be who you are, but it is saying that because there is only one righteousness that is imputed to believers, and that is the active and passive obedience of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, then that means that there is a radical and new unity between believers in the church that destroys any concept of ethnic division within the body of Christ based upon the history of your people versus my people. Because now we are one people, and those other connections that would bring division in must be severed and destroyed in our thinking.
That is what I am talking about, and I will defend that against anybody, and if you’ve got a brain in your head, and you know anything about the New Testament, you will not accept a challenge to debate that, because you will get crushed, because that is plain biblical teaching. That’s plain biblical teaching. That’s what I’m talking about.
There’s one body because there’s one Savior, one righteousness, and your ethnicity on the one hand can be a beautiful gift of God, so everything that is from grace is certainly still there, but as soon as you start getting together with the rest of your ethnic group in opposition to the rest of the body and begin to divide the body saying, “Well your people did this and your people did that,” that is where you have a clear misunderstanding of the nature of the unity of the body in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. There’s the problem, there’s the issue.
So, when I spoke of what I would “defend against anybody,” I was referring to the theological content I had just proclaimed: that there is one body founded upon the singular, seamless robe of the righteousness of Christ, which is imputed to each and every believer, equally, without the slightest reference to one’s skin color. That the unity of that righteousness results in the factual, real, heaven-grounded unity of the body, resulting in a “radical” unity that cannot be found outside of Christ. I then stated that any connections based upon one’s pre-conversion life (ethnic, political, anything) “that would bring division in(to the body) must be severed and destroyed in our thinking.” I identified this as “plain biblical teaching,” and it is.
Therefore, if you say you will debate that issue, you must be denying that there is a unifying, seamless, perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ that is imputed to all believers without reference to skin color, nationality, ethnicity, or anything else. You must be denying that our unity is found in the equal relationship we have through the Spirit to our Lord, and to one another through that one in-dwelling Spirit. And you must be willing to positively argue that ethnic heritage that divides the body is a good thing, must be celebrated and brought into the church as a more basic identifying element than one’s status as a new creature in Christ. So, if that is what you want to defend, well, good luck with that!
