This website is dedicated to the exposition of Biblical truth and to encouraging and edifying those seeking to understand the teaching of the Word of God. Consequently, I have studiously avoided getting into political issues confronting society today. However, there are current events that impact the Body of Christ, like Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality (CRT and CRTI), that need to be addressed. In this article, I will attempt to define CRT and CRTI according to what its proponents have written and said. Then I will comment on how this highly charged political issue contradicts biblical teaching and why Christians must reject it in part and in whole.
Many have addressed this issue better than I am able to in this short article. However, I believe I need to set down in writing what the Bible teaches and, perhaps shed some light on how CRT and CRTI are impacting our understanding of God’s Word.
To the question, “What is Critical Race Theory,” the Encyclopedia Britannica states:
“Critical race theory is an intellectual movement and a framework of legal analysis according to which (1) race is a culturally invented category used to oppress people of colour and (2) the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, political, and economic inequalities between white and nonwhite people.”[1]
Merriam-Webster appears to be the first to define Intersectionality:
Definition of intersectionality
:the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups
//[Kimberlé] Crenshaw introduced the theory of intersectionality, the idea that when it comes to thinking about how inequalities persist, categories like gender, race, and class are best understood as overlapping and mutually constitutive rather than isolated and distinct.— Adia Harvey Wingfield[2]
To underscore how rife these philosophies are and the turmoil surrounding them; at the recently concluded annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, this issue was debated extensively. The subject is now set to divide the convention delegates long after the convention ended.[3]
Rather than take the bait and become embroiled in this controversy as to the validity of CRT and CRTI, those of us who know the Lord Jesus Christ as our savior should simply acknowledge that past history of the behavior of individuals and groups, including the church, demonstrates that the heart of man is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”[4] Hence, individuals and groups claiming to represent the church have practiced racism in its many forms. However, whenever and wherever racism existed, it did not represent the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ nor the writers of the Bible as it was given, i.e., Godbreathed Scripture.
Proponents of CRT and CRTI seek to ignore history and substitute their Postmodern theories of social constructs in place of any change in behavior that has taken place. They thereby substitute their own social construct as reality and reject any possibility that human nature can change.
Change in attitude and behavior is what the Judeo-Christian faith is all about. But this transformation is not from humanism, atheism, or any other -ism. CRTI is partially correct. Human nature is a product of cultural conditioning and cannot be changed. But we would add, it can not be changed without God’s intervention.
King David wrote:
I waited patiently for the Lord; And He inclined to me, and heard my cry. He brought me up out of the pit of destruction, out of the miry clay; And He set my feet upon a rock making my footsteps firm. And He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God; Many will see and fear, And will trust in the Lord.
How blessed is the man who has made the Lord his trust, And has not turned to the proud, nor to those who lapse into falsehood.
Many, O Lord my God, are the wonders which Thou hast done, And Thy thoughts toward us; There is none to compare with Thee; If I would declare and speak of them, They would be too numerous to count...[5]
Then I said, "Behold, I come; In the scroll of the book it is written of me; I delight to do Thy will, O my God; Thy Law is within my heart." I have proclaimed glad tidings of righteousness in the great congregation; Behold, I will not restrain my lips, O Lord, Thou knowest. I have not hidden Thy righteousness within my heart; I have spoken of Thy faithfulness and Thy salvation; I have not concealed Thy lovingkindness and Thy truth from the great congregation.[6] (italics mine)
Anyone who has truly been born from above[7] should have, at one point in their life, experienced this “AHA!” moment to which David was referring. That moment when he or she experienced real power over sin. Paul wrote:
Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin, once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace.
What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.[8] (italics mine)
Further on in his letter to the church in Rome, Paul wrote:
I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.[9] (italics mine)
The context is of individuals committing themselves to live and work within the Body of Christ, the church. Paul continues to lay out how this is to work in the remainder of the chapter. Each believer is to recognize who they are in Christ and what their responsibilities are in the church.[10]
As the Body of Christ, we are obligated to live and act toward others around us as God would have us act, i.e., to love one another,[11] to love our neighbor as ourselves,[12] and even to love our enemies and those who spitefully use us.[13]
To accept the tenets of CRT and CRTI in any form is to deny the Lord who bought us.
At one point in Paul’s ministry, there were those who were seeking to undermine his teaching with a different gospel. His response was:
"I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me. "I do not nullify the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly." [14]
Paul, in Colossians 2:6-12, instructed the churches in the Lycus Valley on how to respond to Gnostic heresy troubling the brethren when he wrote:
As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fulness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority; and in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.
To accept CRT and CRTI is to deny our faith in the truth of the Lord Jesus Christ. CRT and CRTI has no place in the church, the Body of Christ today.
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[1] critical race theory | Definition, Principles, & Facts | Britannica
[2] Intersectionality | Definition of Intersectionality by Merriam-Webster
[3] Critical race theory sparks flurry of resolutions for SBC meeting | Church & Ministries News | The Christian Post
[4] Jer 17:9.
[5] Ps 40:1-5.
[6] Ps 40:7-10.
[7] Jn 3:16.
[8] Rom 6:14-18
[9] Rom 12:1-2.
[10] Rom 12:3ff.
[11] John 13:34; 15:12, 17; Rom 13:8; 1 Thess 4:9; 1 Peter 1:22; 1 Jn 3:11, 23; 4:7, 11, 12; 2 Jn 5.
[12] Lev 19:18; Matt 5:43; 19:19; 22:39; Mk 12:31; Rom 13:9; Gal 5:14; Jas 2:8.
[13] Matt 5:44; Lk 6:27, 35.
[14] Gal 2:20-21.