This article may be pertinent to the discussion here:
Missed Opportunity: Francis Grimké on Racism and Revival (thegospelcoalition.org)
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Timothy, thank you for this outstanding article. How did you find this one? What are your thoughts?
We - the church - always miss the opportunity for social justice. We actually lag, we’re part of the problem. No denomination practices it except narrow extremist outliers like the Amish and the Jesus Army.
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On the whole, yes, we do; we are. I don’t see that there is any honest theological reason for the lack. Even if there is disagreement on who, what, how, why, that still includes a recognition for the need for justice. For us biblicists, there is no biblical justification for the lack. We are without excuse.
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I follow TGC, so I see a decent number of the new articles.
It seemed accurate and timely. I tend not to have such issues come up very frequently with those I know, so I have not thought about them quite as extensively as some others.
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It’s easy not to see, particularly in churches, because we have self-segregated so effectively and for so many different reasons, many of which we use all the time to determine if ANY church would be a good fit for us. So, it’s easy to miss.
I think this is probably the most pithy of many pithy quotes in the article and gets to the heart of the matter:
To Grimké, the prevailing cultural attitudes about race flew in the face of the Bible’s teaching. Grimké wanted to awaken believers to the “hypocrisy” of their “pious cant” about Christian love and their complicity with racism. It was a message, however, that Kennedy [the editor of The Presbyterian] didn’t think readers of The Presbyterian needed, or perhaps wanted, to hear. “There are many good things in your article,” Kennedy wrote Grimké, but The Presbyterian found that Grimké’s article “defeats its own purpose” because it was “calculated” to produce “a variance” from “a spirit of harmony” that supposedly existed between the races inside the church.
The church behaves hypocritically by talking about Christian love, while practicing racism.
AND
We continue to stifle the legitimate, prophetic voices of Black and Brown brothers and sisters, because their message makes whites uncomfortable.
This is a consistent complaint of Black people for well over a century; that they are forced to temper the urgency of their message to accommodate the fragility of white sensibilities, and in doing that, the urgency is ignored as well as the need for change.
Timothy, brilliant, promising young person, I urge you to add this to your study of mollusks. Keep reading and listening to views from Black and Brown brothers and sisters that make you squirm. Read books you hate, because they make you see things you didn’t want to know. Seek out good voices who teach you things you wouldn’t guess.
I think this is an excellent place to start: Tyler Burns’ and Jemar Tisby’s outstanding podcast Pass the Mic, and this particular episode, which was the first I listened to:
Tisby and Burns focus on a Black audience, but clearly welcome the rest of us as well. They are youthful, engaging and intelligent. They speak their minds, and their minds are worth hearing. Additionally, they are brothers in the Lord and not ashamed about it.
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