So apparently we aren’t Christians after all.
Despite centuries of spreading the Gospel worldwide, defending the Faith in public, practicing it in private, and ordering our nations according to the Word of God, apparently the fact that white people don’t cater their world to the whims of black people means that we’re all going to hell.
That’s the conclusion that Anthony Bradley is arriving at. He may not have declared us eternally damned, but he has declared us anathema, and there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two.
https://twitter.com/drantbradley/status/944317041497997312
Bradley is a professional pontificator who got his position at a Reformed seminary mainly due to his melanin content. (It certainly wasn’t because of his spelling or grammar, because they are terrible.) He’s been on an “I’m-no-longer-evangelical” binge for the past year and he’s busy taking as many people with him on his pilgrimage to…wherever he’s going. I think it’s Chicago, the city of Rev. Jeremiah “God DAMN America!” Wright.
See, when Bradley says “evangelical,” he isn’t referring to someone who believes in the need for a personal relationship with Jesus, an inerrant Bible, and the divine mandate to share the Good News. When Bradley says “evangelical,” he means white people who believe these things. To Bradley, “evangelical” is code word for “white.” Now read his tweet again and ask yourself, “How can a professional Christian worker whose salary is paid by white people throw their entire race into the lake of fire?”
It’s simple, really. Bradley is embracing nothing other than an Africanized, Marxist, humanist theology. Bradley is going the way of God of the Oppressed liberation theologian James Cone, whom Wright famously referenced in a televised spat with Sean Hannity during the 2008 election cycle (video clip linked here).
Like Wright and Cone, Bradley is concluding that the black church and the white church are actually two completely separate religious groups. Not two parts of the same Body of Church, but two completely separate, different, and mutually exclusive faith groups. To the black liberation theologian like Cone, Wright, and Bradley, the central experience of their faith is not the experience we read about in the Bible. Rather, those are to be referenced back through the lens of the black historical experience. The Cross, the Resurrection, the Exodus, the Law and Prophets, the Psalms — all of these are to be interpreted through the experiences of slavery, Jim Crow, #BlackLivesMatter, and the still-unfolding demand for reparations and interracial sex.
As Wright mentioned in his spat with Hannity there are Chicano, Asian, feminist, queer, and of course black theologies of liberation. Central to all of them is this idea that the Bible and the Christian faith are basically about a suffering God and suffering people on one side, versus their oppressors on the other side. Their oppressors always tend to be straight, white, Christian males of the capitalistic, law-and-order bent.
Elie Wiesel, who put God on trial for His alleged failure during the Holocaust, and Richard Rubenstein, author of After Auschwitz, argued that the Holocaust is an essential, defining feature of Jewish existence, and that the Jewish faith and life must be interpreted in light of the Holocaust. In Is God a White Racist?, Cones’ disciple William Jones argued that slavery, segregation, and ongoing racial struggles in majority white countries have been central, defining features of black existence, and that any black faith must deal with these experiences just as Jewish faith must deal with the death camps.
In a similar way to Wright, Bradley is staking his claim that in order to be a Christian, one must be Afrocentric, since in his view no real Christian could support slavery, segregation, lynchings, mass incarceration of black convicts, police shooting black suspects, and so on.
To the liberation theologian, attempts to ignore the basis of oppression — whether economic, sexual, gendered, racial, or other — are ignorant at best and satanic at worst. That’s logical, since to the liberation theologian God and the faith are mainly concerned with the suffering of the oppressed, and overthrowing the power of their oppressors.
When Hannity tried to bring his conversation with Wright back to a race-blind “we’re all Americans” tack by invoking Martin Luther King, Jr., Wright replied, “Martin Luther King was from the black church. He was not from the white church. He was not from Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, the Christian conservative…”
This is logically consistent, since as Wright told Hannity,
The African-centered point of view…assumes Africans speaking for themselves as subjects in history, not objects in history…
When you say an African-centered way of thinking, African-centered philosophy, African-centered theology, you’re talking about one center. We’re talking about something that’s different…
In other words, MLK was not a member of the same faith group, religion, or Church to which white Christians belong.
Bradley is making the same stand and is arguing that any “real” Christian must embrace the liberation theology espoused by Cone and Wright. Failure to do so equals failure to grasp the Gospel, says Bradley.
American 20th-century, Christ-centered, gospel-centered evangelicalism in the North and the South existed primarily for the promotion of whiteness rather than the Gospel or the mission of Jesus Christ and his Kingdom…
It is especially difficult to argue against the black church critique that white Christ-centered, gospel-centered, and especially Reformed, Christianity in those regions during the 20th-century never really existed at all [emphasis mine]. After all, how could white Christians, who believed the gospel, do nothing to dismantle Jim Crow, or stop lynchings, not join Martin Luther King, Jr, or adopt a secularist, inhumane racist GOP disposition toward inner-city blacks in the 1980s and 1990s, or etc.? The conclusion from much scholarship, and from black church leaders in the black Methodist and black Baptist churches, is that during the 20th-century there were very few, if any white Christians in North or South who actually believed the gospel and acted on it [emphasis mine]. The black Church was convinced of this.
[20th century white evangelicalism was] beyond deplorable and was decidedly in the spirit of anti-Christ. That is, supporting, participating in, and benefitting from Jim Crow was in the spirit of anti-Christ [emphasis mine], many black religious scholars would say with confidence.”It’s not that fact that they had “orthodox” doctrine and they simply misapplied it. There’s something wrong with the doctrine itself [emphasis mine].
Bradley is fully aware of the fact that he is claiming that tens of millions of white believers are, in fact, heathen or heretics. He knows this and approves of this conclusion. He is not letting his mask slip, or using hyperbole. Like his white counterparts Al Mohler, Russell Moore, John Piper, and others who are treading the liberation theology path a few paces behind Bradley, Bradley is openly asserting that to be a Christian is to be a liberation theologian, and that liberation theology is the one true Faith. Why do they openly say these things? It’s because they are true believers that the only “Christian” thing to do is to eradicate the white race and all of its constituent parts.
The Black Inquisition is upon us.
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