The Blackwashing of Christian History and Beyond, Part 1

“And when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he disdained him: for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance.”
~1 Sam. 17:42

An emerging facet of the Alienist heresy yet unaddressed is the blackwashing of Church history. Within the Reformed fold specifically, it is Peter Leithart who sometime around 2010 began peddling the notion that the Church fathers such as Origen, Cyril, Lactantius, Cyprian, Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, et al. were Black Africans. And per this revolutionary hagiography, he insists Christianity is to be understood as originating in and built natively upon African spirituality:

“Western theology is, in fact, an African export, as is much of Eastern Christianity.”¹

But Leithart seems to have picked this thesis up contemporaneous with the release of Thomas Oden’s 2010 book How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind.

Read that title again. Understand what is in the offing here: the Christian Church is being demanded to confess Afrocentrism, a thing heretofore undreamt in the Reformed, Evangelical, Roman, and Eastern churches alike.

Adopted seemingly overnight without a scintilla of circumspection, we witness now its implications and their implementation. This inversion of historical narrative necessarily portends revision of all areas of theology. For instance, corollary to this new Afrocentric ecclesiology, Ken Ham has introduced the theory that Adam and Eve were dark Brown to Black in color. Yes, he describes it as “middle-brown,” but look at the pictures he uses to denote it on page 99 of his book One Race, One Blood — they aren’t Italians, Greeks, or Iranians. They are clearly Africans. And look at this graphic published by Ham’s AIG. His outfit (the preeminent creationist ministry today) is promulgating the notion not only that the African type is prototypical Man, but also that Whiteness is presumed to denote the mark of Cain! So the fair European phenotype is cast as the symbol of murder. This in spite of the fact that the scriptural language suggests precisely the opposite by the first man’s name — Adam, and the family of words of which it is part (adom, edom, etc.), is alternately translated as ‘clay’, ‘ruddy’, ‘rosey’, ‘red’, ‘blushing’, ‘fair’, ‘white’.

Accordingly, we see this paradigm shift is even now beginning to work its way into Bible translation; specifically, the passage quoted at the top of this piece — 1 Samuel 17:42 is, as of the 2011 publication of the International Standard Version, suddenly being rendered, “When the Philistine looked and saw David, he had contempt for him, because he was only a young man. David had a dark, healthy complexion and was handsome.” This isn’t just a slight divergence. It posits a diametrically opposite vision of David from the one known heretofore.

Back of Leithart, Oden, Ham, and the translators of the ISV bible, this Afrocentric view of salvation history ultimately stems from the work of Black Liberation theologian James Cone. In his 1969 book Black Theology & Black Power we read:

For white people, God’s reconciliation in Jesus Christ means that God has made black people a beautiful people; and if they are going to be in relationship with God, they must enter by means of their black brothers, who are a manifestation of God’s presence on earth. The assumption that one can know God without knowing blackness is the basic heresy of the white churches. They want God without blackness, Christ without obedience, love without death. What they fail to realize is that in America, God’s revelation on earth has always been black, red, or some other shocking shade, but never white. Whiteness, as revealed in the history of America, is the expression of what is wrong with man. It is a symbol of man’s depravity. God cannot be white even though white churches have portrayed him as white. When we look at what whiteness has done to the minds of men in this country, we can see clearly what the New Testament meant when it spoke of the principalities and powers. To speak of Satan and his powers becomes not just a way of speaking but a fact of reality. When we can see a people who are controlled by an ideology of whiteness, then we know what reconciliation must mean. The coming of Christ means a denial of what we thought we were. It means destroying the white devil in us. Reconciliation to God means that white people are prepared to deny themselves (whiteness), take up the cross (blackness) and follow Christ (black ghetto).

When first published, Cone’s view was laughed to scorn by all mainstream communions. But no longer. Though entirely foreign to historic Christianity, this Afrocentric paradigm is being adopted now by the same denominations absent cursory examination or circumspection. While contrary in every detail to orthodoxy, it fulfills the confirmation bias impressed upon them by the modern neurolinguistic programming of Christ’s enemies. Which is really the only explanation for their collective amnesia: their very memories (of Christianity prior to Cultural Marxism) have been retroactively overwritten by the warlocks of propaganda to the extent that they can no longer even conceive of the faith known to our fathers; or even of the faith they themselves knew in their youth. (Which I shall prove in the case of John Piper in an upcoming article.)

But behold now the unfolding implications of this new Afrocentric Christianity:

African biblicism has arisen because of the revolutionary impact of vernacular Bible translations. Mbiti says,

When the translation is first published, especially that of the New Testament and more so of the whole Bible, the church in that particular language area experiences its own Pentecost. The church is born afresh, it receives the Pentecostal tongues of fire. As in Acts 2, the local Christians now for the first time “hear each of us in his own language.”

~Peter Leithart, What Africa Can Teach the North

So because Africans prove innate charismatics, the definition of authentic Christianity and ‘biblicism’ becomes charismata, which means continued word gifts, which, for all intents and purposes, means an open canon, and in practice, no quantifiable standard, person to person — which is all thoroughly heretical. Some ‘biblicism’, there, Pete.

Africans have no use for the pansy Jesus of modern liberalism. They want a savior with the testosterone to fight for them. No pale Galileans need apply.

My jaw drops every time I read that portion. Leithart is clearly channeling James Cone who ignominiously wrote, “If God is not for black people and against white people, then God is a murderer and we’d better kill him.” (Cone, Black Theology & Black Power) But I’m still taken aback at Leithart’s blithe baptism of obvious racial animus toward ‘pale’ (i.e., White) people. Even more so for his surreal description of the alternative to this anti-White sentiment as ‘liberalism’ and a ‘pansy Jesus’. So the African Christianity he holds forth here is one which sees itself as having a racial and religious mandate against White Christians and orthodox Christendom, generally. And this anti-White sentiment, he assures us, is the real Christianity — the empowerment of Africans to overcome White Christians! Which is all a little too coincidentally confluent with the ethos and eschatology of our zeitgeist. Sheer coincidence, I’m sure.

And if any White Christian said something equivalent — that ‘they would only bow to a savior with the testosterone to fight for them against the dark-skinned peoples’ – they would rightly be accused of forging a god in their own revanchist image. In fact, this is the very thing of which Kinists stand so wrongly accused (and by the very same Alienists preaching race war on Whites!). Kinists make no such claim of any onus on God’s part to favor Whites, nor any mandate to war on other races. Just the opposite, Kinists hold that God demands as a matter of Christian love, that we are to honor the bounds and belongings of other peoples. Meantime, Leithart, the African religion which he lauds, and the Alienist convivium are preaching just such a tribal deity.

Reminiscent of Xerxes’s emissary at the Hellespont, in his essay “Evolving Toward Africa“ Leithart calls for traditional Christians to lay down all defense of the faith against this takeover. As he explains it, the duty his god demands of Whites is to “assume a posture of reception” with respect to this new African theology, ethics, and cultural dominance.

Whence comes such an onus? Aside from the bald assertion that unless we acquiesce to Afrocentric charismata with its overtly anti-White ethos, yield the rewrite of the Christian history and faith, the dispossession of our children, and genocide, we are damned.

We could laugh to tears at all of this nonsense if not for the fact that it is actually being taken seriously within the majority of the churches at present. Which of course raises the question of whether or not these people can be considered Christian in any sense of the word.

In part 2 we shall quench this strange fire.

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