Presiding Bishop Ray Sutton Denounces CRT and Hyphenated Christianity

Fault Lines, by Voddie Baucham, might be a good book for anyone who wants to know more about CRT, its roots, and its theological implications.

 

We had a presentation on CRT at our most recent clergy retreat. It was prepared by Fr. Roseman, who is a public school teacher. He spoke to how it is filtering down into lower grade levels each year.

I saw this myself with my older daughter, who was in Kindergarten in the most recent school year. At one point she had begun coloring pictures of herself as a black girl. This is my daughter:


It became clear to me that something strange was happening in the school.

 

I've read it -- it's a good resource on this issue, and written in a very readable fashion. It's not full of academic jargon. But then Voddie has always been a light of clarity and plain-speaking. His Calvinist theology may rub some here the wrong way, but on this issue he is rock-solid. Recommended.

 

If my mother says, "I love you" and I say, "How do I know that?" am I questioning or denying? It certainly indicates skepticism if not outright rejection; otherwise, why say it?

It's a standard trope among the left that criticism of a given topic does not equate to disagreement with that topic. But in practice, criticism is a synonym for disagreement in nearly every leftist essay, book , or monograph you will ever read. It's a sleight of hand: take a well-understood word, change its meaning to conform to your own ideological requirements, and then use the word exclusively in your newly-defined way. Then accuse people either of confusion or bad faith when they reject your argument. It's a basic element of Marxist theory. Post-modernism simply takes the notion further (via Lacan and Foucault) and declares that words have no intrinsic meaning or referent; it's all just cultural presupposition and interpersonal power games. When I assert that, e.g., "love" means one thing, a leftist will immediately object and say that it actually means something else (or nothing at all when removed from its context).

Consider the term "social justice". This is a well-known and long-understood term when applied to Biblical teachings, but the left hijacked it and turned into something completely different and utterly corrupt. "Social justice" of the kind advocated by Antifa is the absolute anithesis of everything Christians believe. It is positively demonic, and it shocks me that so many Christians have been sucked into this lie.

Marxists and post-modernist leftists use language as a bludgeon and a shield, not as a mode of communication. Never forget that. Leftists do not simply reject propositional speech as being conditional statements of fact; they reject the entire idea that propositional speech can be "true". To a leftist, everything is relative.

Just look at the word-salad from DiAngelo that Stalwart posted above. This sort of thing isn't an outlier; this is the same meaningless glossolalia you find all over the liberal-arts curriculum (and the softer sciences like sociology and anthropology). DiAngelo's dreck is not even the worst of it (just read the stuff from Ibram Kendi, or any random "authoethography" paper from a gender-studies major).

Christians consider the Bible to be axiomatically true -- that is, as a revelation from God himself, it must be true because God is the source of all truth and wisdom.

The Bible is God's very Word. If the Bible is not true, then either it is not God's word or God is himself fallible (and therefore not really worthy of worship). If you accept Christ as your savior and become a disciple, you accept the axiom that God cannot be wrong, cannot tell lies, cannot make mistakes. The Bible is also inerrant in its teachings -- its didactic purpose never wavers or contradicts itself.

The Bible is the utter antithesis of everything the Marxist and post-modernist advocate -- it stands as a refutation of everything they think and say and believe.

 

Discussions like these are exactly what will make people aware. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

 

We have someone in our parish who has studied the issue for several years, and he recently taught a Sunday School series to the youths on the subject of CRT. The rector was impressed and has asked him to teach it to the adults, too, so that series is scheduled to begin in mid-July. I'm looking forward to it.

 

The Anglican Unscripted podcast recently did a show about CRT, and it reminded me of something that J. I. Packer once said: the argument isn't really about CRT (or LGBT inclusion in the church, or women's ordination); it's about the authority of Scripture over us as Christians. All the hot-button cultural issues are just the part of the iceberg you can see -- it's the big part beneath the water that is the bulk of the problem. The long fight between the "liberal" and "orthodox" faithful really boil down to this fairly basic point: does Scripture carry plenary authority over our theology and our worldly conduct, or doesn't it? Are we free to simply disagree with Scripture without falling into error?

Of course the answer to this question will depend on who you're talking to. The liberals have pretty much explicitly rejected the Bible as an authoritative source of Christian teaching. They take God's word as a buffet table where they can take what they like and leave the rest. Those of us who remain orthodox insist on the fundamental idea of Sola Scriptura -- the Bible is God's very Word, to be read in the manner described in 2 Tim 3:16-17.

I have come to think that the fundamental rot eating away at the Christian faith is the rejection of absolute authority by many Christians in the West. They proclaim to be followers of Christ, but reject His commands to them. Not only that, they invert their sin and call it holiness! All this "tolerance, diversity, and inclusion" talk is just a cover for a deadly antinomianism to centers faith not in God through our Lord Jesus Christ but in each individual person. The liberal (apparently) believes that religion is entirely idiosyncratic -- that "truth" is whatever a given person thinks it is. "My" truth rather than "the" truth, in other words.

This is why I think that churches are going to have to start enforcing canon law more strictly. There have to be consequences for error and outright apostasy, up to and including excommunication. Boundaries need to be drawn and defended rigorously. Bishops need to bring the hammer down more often on maverick priests, and the College of Bishops needs to do likewise for wayward Bishops. Most of the current rot did not start in the pews, after all; the fish rots from the head, and our current predicament was started by scholars and clerics bringing this garbage into their churches from outside. (Seminaries, with a few notable exceptions, are the breeding grounds of a lot of this nonsense. There needs to be a thorough housecleaning here as well.)

 

Absolutely, I wholly and entirely agree.

Scripture used to have this awe-inducing, awe-striking presence in people's minds. It was the greatest authority in the minds of Christians. It was a vast tome, thick, expensively printed and designed with the most beautiful aesthetics. Today, it's a cheap paperback printed on recycled paper. When held in a palm it flabs and bends, without strength of its own, just like genders bend all around us.

I honestly think, that we need to start having a much more 'fall down on your knees when Scripture is presented'.

The backbiters of Scripture are always saying, "What are you, a Muslim", or "I'm a follower of Jesus, not a follower of books". That is the quickest way to sideline Scripture's authority and put it into a corner, with its myths, legends, while we do the serious grown-up work over here.

Granted, I also believe that we must have a revival of natural law as well. The Scriptures teach supernatural truths, unattainable by reason, while natural law teaches natural truths. That combination is what made the prior Christian mindset so much more confident about their world.

The Scriptures, the holy Sacred Letters, the Holy Writ, is the very God's Word itself to us, revealed and directly inspired by the Holy Ghost himself, about the supernatural truths of the supernatural invisible realities. It's an authority for everything supernatural. Add to it Natural Law about truths which are natural, and then you have the complete toolkit which Christians have always had.

 

This might be trivial and nothing really but I can't stand to see people stack stuff on their Bibles or put it just some where in a random stack of books. I mean it is the Bible, God's Holy Word, show it some respect.

 

I'd be happy if Bible publishers would stop printing Bibles in China. It's a disgrace and an outrage. An atheist totalitarian regime with a history of human rights abuses and suppression of the Christian faith is now the primary source for the world supply of Bibles. I've made it my mission to never buy another Chinese-made Bible, and to press Christian publishers to stop doing business with the PRC.

 

Here's the "iceberg" video I was trying to find for my post above.

 

Part of me wishes that denominations would get out of the seminary business altogether. I like the idea of an apprentice/mentor system, which may even be more scriptural and produce more orthodox clergy. The problem would be teaching some of the more advanced material, such as different languages. I would like to hear your opinions.

 

Every one of us could benefit from listening to the first portion of that video, the comments of the Canon Theologian, the Rev. Dr. Kendall Harmon.

 

There's a lot wrong with the seminary system in the United States (I can't speak for any other countries). They suffer from all the ills of secular universities -- there is something in the academic environment that grows heresy like fertilized dirt grows corn. To succeed in the academy, you have to publish. It is hard to overstate this: to succeed in the academy means you have to publish, and given the great vast ocean of published matter, its extraordinarily hard to stand out. If you're a humble adjunct yearning for tenure, you strive for "original" scholarship to draw the attention of the tenure committee. But what more can be said in terms of traditional Christian orthodoxy after 2000 years? There's a sense of just crossing t's and dotting i's for many theologians. So seminarians cast about for something "new and different" to make their mark, and given the state of the culture now, that "new and different" stuff tends to be leftist agitprop. (Third-wave feminism, intersectionality, LGBT, CRT, pick your poison.) It's less about ideology than it is academic politics and ladder-climbing in many ways: it's a bunch of academics jostling for a small (and shrinking) number of tenured chairs.

The resulting ocean of academic publishing is, alas, mostly worthless junk that no one ever reads. "Peer review" has become a sick joke in most cases; I've read supposedly-peer-reviewed doctoral theses that are essentially illiterate and nonsensical. (Hint: when you see "autoethnography" in the abstract of an academic paper, you can just throw it in the trash right then and there.) It's obvious that much of this published matter is simply getting rubber-stamped: you have to fill all those pages of academic journals and websites somehow. But it's still a publishing credit, and it duly goes on the CV of a striving academic.

The plight of the seminarian is even more desperate than the usual academic because the jobs on offer are much more rare, and the chances of post-graduate employment in their chosen field much slimmer. Seminaries thus become a version of the ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail -- seminarians only go to school to get jobs at seminaries.* There's a whole international pipeline of seminarians who wander from school to school, desperately trying to get tenured positions.

Then there is the money issue. Seminaries require funding, and costs have exploded in recent years and federal loans have warped the educational economy. This is one place where seminaries are in dire straits, and the pandemic has basically bankrupted a lot of middle and lower-tier seminaries -- many rely on a steady flow of inflated student tuition (i.e., federal loan money) to operate, and as enrollment dwindles, all that debt crushes them. Even the college-bookstore racket is teetering due to the ready availability of academic books via the internet.

The upshot is that I think there's a place for first-tier seminaries, but there's a huge wave of consolidations or outright closings going on. I consider this a good thing; too many people are being pushed into colleges who shouldn't be there, and they take on too much debt in order to do so.

Honestly, I'd like to see an Anglican-specific "virtual" seminary set up with maybe a physical campus or two for higher-level training. Given the state of current technology, I think that much of what modern seminaries offer could be achieved just as well via internet courses with occasional live events via video. And it could be done at a *much* lower cost than is currently the case. I mean, on the order of 20% of what it costs per credit hour in a modern seminary. The average as far as I can tell right now is $750 per credit hour, which goes beyond ridiculous and into ludicrous territory. A good remote-learning setup should be able to profitably offer online courses, complete with instructor interaction, for $750 per course, if not less.

*I aver that "academic inbreeding" of this kind is why so much modern scholarship is not just worthless, but actually stupid. You're dealing with people who are, in many cases, mentally unfit to do the job they're attempting to do.

 

I actually think the Continuum has moved to virtual seminaries. @Shane R

 

I thought most people went to seminary in answer to a call on their lives to become ordained pastors and such. They can't all be hoping to become tenured academics, can they?

I don't see how, practically speaking, denominations can be divorced from seminaries. For example, what Baptist church is going to want as pastor a man whose head has been filled with RC doctrine? One should (ideally at least) meet standards that agree with the beliefs of one's denomination, which means going to a seminary that teaches agreeable beliefs.

 

It is the case that several reputable jurisdictions are running mostly online seminaries. The problem is always going to be accreditation. Getting the accreditation of a big school like Asbury or Nashotah House or Gordon Conwell is simply prohibitively expensive. It is also nearly impossible to check all the boxes for accreditation without having both a classroom facility and some sort of dormitory.

Some argue that a man cannot be immersed in spiritual formation in the online learning environment. This is where checking up on the students is important. You need to make sure they are actually members of a local church (you would be appalled at how many people register for seminary without having a church).

St. Andrew's Theological College & Seminary: https://www.divinityschool.org/

 

I would think training under a local priest or Bishop along with school would be the way to go. Why do we need accreditation for our own churches?

 

Sign me up.

 

You'd be unhappy with me then. Right now next to me I have my bible stacked on top of two different prayer books, with an alternative lectionary book on top of my bible. I'd hope that if someone saw that their first thought wouldn't presume I don't respect God's Word, but rather I am doing my best to love God how He tells us to:

For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome,
~ 1 John 5.3
​

Not all of us are blessed with ample desk space so I hope God forgives me for trying to be time efficient with managing my space so I have more time to read what He wrote .