Virgil Walker, James Cone, Black Lives Matter

Michael Coughlin here. I want to invite you to listen to the Things Above Us Roundtable, the other podcast that I'm a part of. I am a regular team member at thingsabove.us, and we talk about all sorts of topics. Most recently, we interviewed Virgil Walker concerning Black Liberation Theology, Black Lives Matter, James Cone, and how that affects our Christian view of things.

And I really thought this interview was so important for people to hear. I wanted to share it on this Be A Berean podcast also. So here it is. And welcome to another episode of Things Above Us Roundtable. I'm one of your hosts today. I get the privilege now to be able to be with Michael Coughlin and Chuck Ivey.

How are you doing, brothers? no i'm doing great doing well george and chuck how is everything going over there with you everything okay we're making it uh so it's obviously not a not a great time for anybody in law enforcement right now but uh definitely keep us all in your prayers uh like i mentioned earlier uh where i'm at we're we're fortunate we don't have it as as bad as some uh folks in other areas but definitely keep everyone in your prayers the community and the police obviously Absolutely. Yeah. Praise God for your safety, brother.

I appreciate that. Thank you. And we have a special guest today. So just to introduce the show real fast, we're going to be talking about Black Liberation Theology, a primer on Black Liberation Theology. We've got a few points to go through the history of Black Liberation Theology. We're going to talk about James Cone, his view of the atonement, his relationship to Black Lives Matter, of course, and then our response.

Lord willing, we'll get through all this within an hour, but we do have a special guest today, and we're thankful to have you on the show. Virgil Walker is from Just Thinking Podcast, and we thank you for the work that you're doing over there. Virgil, how are you doing today, brother? Outstanding, man. I'm honored to be with you guys. Looking forward to a great conversation, man.

Yes, thank you very much for coming. So if you can, just real fast, for those who may not know you, just say a little bit about yourself. What do you do? What have you been doing? And just about the Just Thinking podcast? I am one half of the dynamic duo known as the Just Thinking podcast team.

I am Robin. Batman was not available tonight. He is Darryl Harrison, and he's the lead host. We've had a great time, a great run. We've been together for about two years working on a podcast, and it's been an incredible, incredible run. We never, ever envisioned along the way that we would be talking about some of the subject matter that we are.

The whole thought process behind it was to take what was actually his brainchild of, he was a blogger for years, doing just thinking for myself. And that was his blog. And he and I connected through a mutual friend, Dwayne Atkinson. Dwayne is the executive producer of our show. And Dwayne said, hey, Virgil, I met this guy. He's a great writer.

You guys sound a lot alike. You think alike. I'd love to put you guys together, and we got a chance to sit down and talk, and I did an interview. There was an instant kind of chemistry between us. Loved how he was thinking, and we were all but finishing one another's sentences, and Daryl, unfortunately, did not want to do the podcast. He's more of a behind-the-scenes guy and more of a writer.

I'm more of kind of the talker, though you wouldn't know that on the show. I think we do more of a 60-40, almost a 70-30, where he talks and I kind of back him up. But he writes a lot. He's a great thinker. And I get a chance to kind of come along and be the hype man. I get a chance to kind of preach over the top of what he puts together.

And it's a wonderful blend. We've, like I said, have had a two-year run. We're nearing about a little over 700,000 downloads of our podcast in that timeframe. I think this is episode 99 that will be coming up here pretty soon. And so a little less than 100 podcasts. And we're getting a lot of attention, especially around the issue of social justice, kind of some of the topics we're going to be talking about tonight.

I think the beauty for us was that we had been talking about that for two years prior to this explosion with George Floyd. And so it gave us quite a bit of credibility in this space to say some of the things we've already been saying, maybe with a louder megaphone as a result. So, yeah, about three years ago, I made a video to try to warn people about black liberation theology before Black Lives Matter became super huge.

And now that video is starting to crop up again because obviously it's hitting the search engines. And just like yourself, I've seen you and some of the stuff that you're putting out there. It's incredible. I think your most recent one that probably hit the most, I would say, likes. I don't know. You probably could speak to that is the George Floyd in the gospel.

It was that the probably the more controversial one that you've done recently. Yeah, the interesting thing about it was it was kind of a free form. We spent a lot of time doing research for each podcast. Daryl will send me 15 to 18 pages worth of notes for any particular podcast that we do. And so to have that level of depth and for us not to even start with a note and just kind of turn on record and go was new for us.

But yeah, that particular episode has now received over, I think we're over 106,000 downloads of that one podcast. Well, that's good. Praise God. Hopefully, we're willing people will come to Christ and know through what you guys are talking about. We're going to post that in the description, so we'll have that podcast definitely posted there as well. All right.

So I was thinking, have you ever met Dwayne in person? Dwayne, I did finally meet. Oh, did you? And Daryl, I did finally meet. Yeah, we met, Darrell and I had been doing the podcast for about a little over a year before we actually met in person. We were off and rolling and doing the podcast for, like I said a year worth of podcasts every week for about a year before we actually met in person We were concerned once we met We met in California at Grace Community Church the home of John MacArthur Our concern was that whatever we had in the way of chemistry and mojo might be messed up once we met in person.

So you say you have like 700,000 downloads now? Yes, sir. Okay, so we can now tell people that between Just Thinking and the Things Above Us Roundtable, we have 700,300 downloads. So we've combined for a really big number. We've combined, man. Yeah, that's great.

I'm with that program, man. Let's get it. Yeah. All right, George. So let's try to get to the primer. so with the introduction real fast for those who've never heard of black liberation theology i think the best way to approach this conversation at least in my experience when i've talked to people whether it be in the streets or in the church uh is to bring up black liberation theology i don't think people really even know that black lives matter's foundation is from black liberation theology so when you come at from that angle it tends to change the conversation just a little bit.

So I think it's important first, let's talk about the history of Black Liberation Theology and its formulation. So Virgil, if you want to talk a lot about James Cone and the history of Black Liberation Theology, please help us. Well, James Cone is known as kind of the grandfather or the father of Black Liberation Theology in the United States. Liberation Theology is not new.

It is something that has been around for quite some time. You had it in the 60s. You actually had it in the 1920s. You had it at the turn of the century. So it crops up from time to time in different areas. And what it is, is usually a blend of the idea of kind of socioeconomic overturn of culture to seeing those who don't have have more, maybe seeing an underclass of people who are, quote unquote, oppressed in some way, shape or form. and they want to be released from that oppression.

What happens normally is that that sociocultural idea connects with theology. And when those two things combine, you actually get a train wreck mess. But men like Gustavo Gutierrez, Jose Kamblin, Leonardo Boff, these were men who were predecessors of Cone. In fact, Cone, these were these are men who were in in South America who were with migrant workers trying to make their way into kind of their up and comings, wanting to get out from under being overlorded.

And so as a result, men who were in Roman Catholic circles, we've got to fight for the for the oppressed. We've got to fight for for those who can't, you know, who can't do for themselves. And and they would come alongside and help, quote, unquote, liberate. So you had this liberation theology that took place. Cohen would pick up the ideas because what he saw was that it had a tremendous power in overturning systems and overturning governments.

Actually, from a religious standpoint, combining with economic ideas and power, you had a large group of people who were part of the underclass. What you began to have is this idea of really of a power shift, of an overturn of culture and economics, and really political power came with it. So rather than preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, rather than talking about men's sinful hearts, rather than seeing change take place from the inside out, liberation theologians rather wanted to see change take place from the outside in.

So they were trying to overturn systems. So you had that take place. Now, Cone had his own version of that. So by the time we get to Cohn in the late 60s and early 70s, what James Cohn saw was not only that powerful movement, he also was influenced by the black power movement of the 60s and 70s. And that was from Malcolm X, right? Absolutely.

He sees the black power movement, the civil rights movement and the like. And as a result of after this, really what happened after the assassination of Malcolm X in 65 and the assassination of Dr. King in 68, there was a power vacuum of people who were trying to figure out how to navigate things. And so Cone comes in right at that perfect time and really begins to set the agenda using ideas of the black power movement, of the civil rights movement, also using liberation theology as a result and putting a quote unquote black lens on it so that everything theologically is now seen through the lens of the black experience here in the United States of America.

Yeah. Chuck, did you have something for our, uh, about, uh, some James Cone quotes that you got there? Yeah. Virgil, I would think maybe it'd be helpful to run some quotes by it. I've got a quote here from God of the oppressed, uh, James Cone from 75 and then I guess republished in 97. Um, so to kind of set it up, we talk about the, the danger of using some of the same words, but using a different dictionary.

Um, so I'll read the quote to you and maybe you can unpack So this is from page 47 of God of the Oppressed. Cone says this, For if the essence of the gospel is the liberation of the oppressed from sociopolitical humiliation for a new freedom in Christ Jesus, and I do not see how anyone can read the scriptures and conclude otherwise, and if Christian theology is an explication of the meaning of that gospel for our time, must not theology itself have liberation as its starting point or run the risk of being at best idle talk and at worst blasphemy? So, knowing some of Cohen's background, how do we unpack that?

What does he mean by that? Yeah again the narrative that he is beginning with and really this is important from a standpoint of understanding hermeneutic He beginning with the black experience in America the black experience of slavery the black experience of Jim Crow the black experience of the struggle for civil rights And so he's taking that lens and putting it over the text of scripture. This is the definition, A, of eisegesis, right?

Reading into the text what's not there. But also what he is seeing is that the gospel no longer frees us from the penalty of sin and the power of sin, but that sin becomes the oppression given to us by whites. and we're to overcome that oppression. So Jesus becomes a savior, not for the damned souls of men, but he becomes a savior or a liberator for the oppressed people in America.

And that's a part of the problem in the hermeneutic. Yeah. So it wouldn't be a misunderstanding then to say that Cone had a different definition of the gospel than I think than we would read in the scriptures and then a different definition of theology. Again, it sounds like for him, liberation is, as he says, the starting point of theology, not necessarily the study of God himself.

And again, so gospel and theology, he's coming from a different perspective. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. It's not only fair to say, he says it himself. He's going to point to in specific some of his writings that ethnicity is going to basically say that you've got to abandon whiteness. You've got to embrace blackness.

Your blackness is the way by which salvation takes place. So if whites have any desire to be saved, if whites, and I know this is, I'm trying to be careful because I know you guys have kind of a way in which you're wanting to walk this out. But the manner in which salvation takes place is for you to abdicate your whiteness and to embrace blackness. And he has a specific idea around that.

Can you unpack those two terms? And we have, there has been some discussion of that in the past year or so, I'm sure, as you know, about blackness and whiteness. How is Cone defining each of those, blackness and whiteness? Yeah, we talked about this on an episode that we had called Whiteness. And whiteness, it's as if ethnicity or melanin in the skin is its own entity, right?

So whiteness, and this is really deep, so hang on to your hats. I know you're looking for something incredibly scholastic here, so let me put on my scholarship and wow you with this. But blackness is the absence of whiteness. Okay. Yeah. Blackness is the absence of whiteness.

And their own theologians, their own – I mean the social justicians that you're seeing now are going to tell you that very thing. And so what blackness then becomes, unfortunately speaking, because for the most part, no one wants to define these terms with any specificity. And the reason for that is the bar always moves. So if one day you think, hey, I've abdicated myself of my whiteness, I'm now embracing blackness.

Well, you're only as black as the last woke person told you you were. because as soon as they come into their next level of wokeness, you are no longer as black as you thought you might have been and would need to move further down the road. So this is an arbitrary standard at best. It never means anything specific. Yeah, in that video I was telling you about that I did three years ago when I took one of James Cone's interviews, he said anybody who is in power is white. anybody who is oppressed is who Jesus identifies with.

So Jesus becomes a victim and becomes the oppressed. And anytime you see a black man who was lynched, Jesus is in that black man. Anytime you see a black man who is being oppressed, Jesus identifies with them. So the only way to identify with the crucifixion is to identify with the blackness or the oppressed. And I mean, that's just a complete distortion of the gospel.

I mean, going from the history now to the atonement, I don't know if there's any other way to unpack this, because everything you just said kind of just goes into the atonement. It's just a complete stark contrast from what we know as the gospel, and it's nothing like it, really. It's complete upheaval. So when you talk about oppression, and when you're dealing with, let's say you're talking to somebody about the atonement, and you're talking about black liberation theology, how would you approach them using the atonement?

How would I approach the person? Yeah, because if they're going to talk about atonement in a way that is from the perspective of black liberation theology, you know, obviously you would probably just preach the gospel to them, I assume. But, you know, is there any specific terms you would probably use or ways that you would come across to help them understand and bring them out of that understanding that black liberation theology is not the biblical standpoint?

Well, I think, you know, my approach to sharing the gospel is always the same. I do understand that we're in unique contexts, right? So I'm looking for opportunities to share and to identify with someone in their context. But I think when you're talking about the gospel, you've got to be crystal clear about that. And so I really do my best to not muddy the waters with language that comes from a specific ideology or specific theology that is anti-biblical.

So I not going to use words like oppression or words like liberation or I going to talk about sin I going to talk about repentance I going to talk about faith And what I want to do is I want to shake them from seeing what black liberation theology does is it's a lens by which everyone else is unrighteous except for you. Everyone else is unholy except for you. So what you're dealing with is the ultimate Pharisee in that they've attached righteousness.

And in this instance, they've attached righteousness not to works. They've attached righteousness to the color of their skin. And to abuse someone of that takes some doing. I mean, it really takes the power of the Holy Spirit. But at the end of the day, I'm going to have to go in and talk about sin. I'm I'm going to have to use the law and the gospel to explain their sin in the hope that God is doing a work in their heart so that they can come to repentance and salvation.

I'm not going to doctor things. I'm not going to fix things. I know you've kind of watched maybe some of the stuff that either I've posted in social media or the things that we've said on the podcast. We don't sugarcoat the gospel. We don't placate the gospel. We call sin, sin.

We call black liberation theology heresy. It is a different gospel that does not save. There is no savior in black liberation theology. It's ethnic Gnosticism on steroids. It's ridiculous. Yeah, well, praise God for preaching the gospel, man.

Good exhortation. Can you explain the term ethnic Gnosticism? Yeah, ethnic Gnosticism, it kind of goes in line with the idea of what Cohn does, which is standpoint epistemology. Standpoint epistemology, it's the idea that I know what I know. That's epistemology, the study of what you know. How do you know what you know?

That's epistemology, right? So from epistemology, I know what I know based upon what? My point of view, my perspective, my idea. And so standpoint epistemology says you hear it this way often in the culture. Well, let me share with you my truth. Right.

What are they doing? They have their own point of view, their own perspective from which they believe that they have a standard of truth that's not objective, it's subjective. So that standpoint epistemology, black liberation theology is steeped in that, right? It's steeped in the experiential epistemology of A, James Cone, and B, the blacks who have been oppressed here in the United States.

It's based upon the historic experience of blacks here in the United States. So ethnic Gnosticism says this. You add two standpoint epistemology, ethnicity. So in other words, you could say this. Standpoint epistemology can be used by anybody, and it is used often. It's used by the LGBT community.

It's used by – you name the community. You name the segmented intersectionality, intersectional community that has their own idea about what truth is. That's standpoint epistemology. Ethnognosticism says because of my ethnicity, only I can know what truth is based upon my experience. Because you're the only one experiencing it because you have that ethnicity.

Correct. And if you're not of that ethnicity, you couldn't possibly know what that looks like. Right. You can only know what I'm experiencing because I'm in black skin, right? If you're white and you don't understand that or you're white and you oppose that, then I use a different word, which is white fragility, right? And all that language is designed to do is to shut down the argument.

It's to stop you from speaking in contradiction to any point of view I'm expressing. yeah and then and then in the greatest form of irony of all this when a black person doesn't follow the narrative their black skin has no relevance to the discussion now because obviously it it it's it has to follow the narrative i remember i remember when this stuff started getting big and i remember when when people started calling uh durell uncle tom all over Twitter. Because he wasn't saying the same things that other black voices were saying. And I remember thinking, well, they're telling us we should listen to black voices, but it sounds like we only are supposed to listen to the ones that agree with them.

Right. There's a reason why I've been telling people all along, this isn't a race war, this is an ideological war. This is a worldview war. This has nothing to do with skin color. It has everything to do with your point of view. It's really sola scriptura. what it is.

Either the Bible's sufficient to teach us how to know about humanity, how to know about God, how to know about redemption, salvation, how to live a godly life, or the Bible's insufficient and its worldview is not the way to look at things. And so this is as foundational as it gets, really. Now, I think you're spot on. You're exactly right. This is a frontal attack on scriptural sufficiency.

It is a frontal attack on what the Word says about sin, about anthropology. You guys are hitting it on issues around the atonement, on issues of soteriology. George, I think you're spot on. This is a worldview war, not unlike anything. And we've seen this before, right? This thing has reared its ugly head before.

It's packaged in new language. And I applaud you guys for taking the time to go back historically and look at it. Because once you go back and see what its origins are, it's almost laughable. It would be laughable if it weren't for academia that has drilled this into kids from K through 12. And what we're seeing in the streets with George Floyd and the aftermath of that is the absolute fruit of academicians from K through 12 telling people about the slave narrative or I'm sorry, the slave history that we have in this country, that the country was founded upon slavery.

That's the only ideal that it's that that's been that motivated it, that we have permanent victim classes and that white folks have got to check their privilege. So you've gotten years of that, and then kids go to college, and their college professor is steeped in that. Add to that a little bit of Marxian socioeconomic theory, and the solutions are all anti-capitalistic, right?

The solutions are anarchist, right? So you're seeing the Black Lives Matter movement link up with Antifa. Why? Because their ideological positions absolutely align. They're in for upheaval. George, I think, nailed it when he said this is a battle of worldviews, absolutely a battle of worldviews. yeah i think you're spot on too about how our our theology affects what we do and so if somebody said hey i like coke and you like pepsi okay fine we can have a pretend fight about it or pineapple on pizza i know people like to fight about that and i i hope they're all kidding but this has practical implications where people are actually dying as a result of this yes yes you know we're being told the loving thing to do is to quit our racism and to follow whatever this program is And what we're seeing is we're seeing more people act in what I would consider a racist way, and we're seeing more people hurt by it.

Yes. And so that, to me, that's what's despicable about it all. And, you know, I'm glad people have been speaking about it for years, and it's somewhat scary how little it's been listened to. You mentioned people speaking about this for years. You know, the term that I just used, ethnic Gnosticism, that's a term coined by Dr. Votie Bauckham.

He coined that term almost a decade ago, like at least eight years ago, in a conversation that he had with Dr. James White. I remember listening to that going, at the time, it was just kind of this vague idea. You're like, okay, yeah, I get what he's saying. And it was kind of out there. He was way ahead of his time when he put that terminology out there.

And then we kind of saw the black Hebrew Israelites. I was on today with Jeff Durbin, and I went back and looked at an episode that he did four years ago about the black Hebrew Israelites, and they were showing video footage of these guys talking about, you know, we're going to take the white man down and kiss the feet and all of that, and they had some people that were quote-unquote repenting and were kissed in the feet of these guys who claimed to be black Hebrew Israelites, and we thought that was so strange like four years ago like and that's crazy who's fallen for that right now today in our streets we were witnessing this in fact i was i was looking at a video earlier today of of uh of dan kathy have you guys seen this video uh the dan kathy video where he and lecrae are on a talk show and dan kathy the ceo of chick-fil-a takes out a a brush uh to to to uh to wash the feet wipe the feet of Lecrae in an act of penance for issues around race. Now, let me say this.

I think the world of the Cathy family, I love me some Chick-fil-A. I will still go give me some Chick-fil-A tomorrow. In fact, if y'all want to send me a gift certificate for some Chick-fil-A, I'm good. But what I'm saying is I think ill-informed about things like what we're talking about right now, Our thought process is unfortunately to adopt what the culture is telling us we need to do and bow down in repentance for things that we did not do and had no part in.

And unfortunately, our well-educated, well-known leaders that we respect in other areas, definitely for Dan Cathy in the area of business, but also for his faith in Christ. Doing things that we really shouldn't be doing, that are not helpful. He helped no black person by shoe shining Lecrae's shoes on that platform. He did absolutely nothing for the help of anyone black, not even Lecrae.

He didn't even need his shoes shined. Yeah, and that's the moving goalpost phenomenon that it won't matter that he did it anyway. No. So I was thinking earlier, and then I think George had a couple things he wanted to make sure we get to. but when we were talking about how there's always the oppressed class and the oppressors and and the idea the idea is supposed to be that they're gonna like flip it right but but it seems like they don't actually ever want it to really flip because there's something about being the oppressed class in this situation that actually in a weird way is giving them the power right now right absolutely and so if we ever actually had the thing flipped that they say they want flipped, then they would now be in the class that needed to be flipped back.

And so they have to persist in the oppressed class. And so I don't know, I see what I believe to be like self-sabotage even to keep yourselves there. Do you believe that too? Well, yeah, not only that, but there's been, there's great benefit in being a permanent victim class. And so you'll never be able to flip things from that standpoint. I think you mentioned it earlier, Michael, this goalpost will constantly move.

It'll be a never-ending works-based gospel, right, that doesn't save, that is salvific for no one, that doesn't help anybody, and at the end of the day, you know, just ends up hurting more people than it helps, and unfortunately, Michael, you mentioned it earlier, and ends up causing people to feel justified in the taking of other human life Yeah and you end up with a Protestant doing something he calls penance Absolutely. You know, you start to mix up things here, like you just said, a works-based gospel. It comes out very subtly, though, because these people who I've had interactions with, and I don't mean to dominate, I'll stop in a second, But my experience has been the people I talk to, they affirm good doctrine in one side of their mouth.

And then out of the other side, they talk about their social justice, black liberation theology concepts. And they're not tying together. They're really portraying two different gospels to someone who's discerning. Absolutely. and and i i don't know i i feel like i feel grateful that you've kind of confirmed some of this for me because i don't i haven't talked about it that much with a lot of people and i appreciate your perspective on it absolutely and like um you know virgil pointed out it's it's definitely and you did too it's a self-perpetuating system and you're never going to be black enough you're never going to be victim enough and you're going to have victims fighting over victims it's ready it's already imploding over here in seattle where i'm at um these people cannot sustain because somebody's going to be more of a victim than you are every single time.

And it's just never going to have a state of equilibrium, right? It's just going to continue to just implode. It has to implode on itself. So thus is the wisdom of God, right? You're in Seattle. I'm curious, and I know you've got other questions.

I'm just curious from a standpoint of where you are with all that's going on with the – is it Chaz or is it Chop? I mean, what are the – It's Chop now, yeah, yeah. Occupied or never occupied something, yeah. How are other people in Seattle viewing that? I mean, are there any sane people in the city that are going, this is crazy? Yeah, I mean, the people over here, for the most part, all are outside looking in wondering what in the world is happening right now.

They're confused, right? And I think there's a lot of pressure on the mayor right now. from the talks that I've seen. The mainstream media isn't helpful at all. It never has been. It's the private cell phone videos that people are going there and recording. Some of you guys probably have seen some of them.

There have been people who are from here who have caught wind and managed to go there and just kind of walk around and ask people questions. But from the outside, the people I talk to, the people who I know, the people who are right in the Seattle area, they just can't wait for this to be over because you've just taken hostage six city blocks and nothing seems to be done about it and it seems to be like this now this subliminal political message that the mayor is allowing to happen and people are just standing confused wondering okay when is their action going to be taken because as long as this continues you have businesses and houses and other things that are going on in that area that I can't be function It's not functional. And recently they had a person who tried to break into one of the businesses and tried to set it on fire.

And these citizens took it upon themselves to go to that place armed and to capture this individual. And he got away. But the people of Chopper Chaz decided to make a ruckus about it. They threw the fence down. They were ready to cause the same trouble that they've been causing in other places. But once they saw that they were armed, they changed their tune real fast.

But they were still kind of adamant about it. They were still upset about it. You could see the guys that were being interviewed. They said they just want this to go away. They don't want this to be a problem. There's no reason why you need to come here and burn places down.

They care about all people. They care about black people. We just don't want people burning our business down. And it's sad to see that there was no cop, no cop in sight. And that was the depressing part about the whole thing is that there was nobody they can call. Wow.

So it's definitely something that needs prayer, brother. Definitely. But thanks for asking about that. So the other thing that we wanted to go to, we talked a little bit about James Cone, the history. Obviously, we talked about the view of atonement and salvation. We've seen how heretical it is.

So for those who don't know, all this is obviously connected to Black Lives Matter, which we've kind of implicitly talked about this whole time. But there is a bit of a history of Black Lives Matter. I don't think many people know it started during the Obama administration. and before Obama you had a pastor by Jeremiah Wright right in Chicago and during Obama's administration I'm smiling saying this because I say this to so many people they just don't know and he had to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright and everybody called Obama Islamic but they weren't that far off because he was neo-Islamic which is from the Malcolm X and the Black Liberation Theology side that's where we get that sort of Islamic feel to it so he was Black Liberation Theology.

And of course, Ferguson happened and then continued to happen from that point forward. Could you give us a little bit more, maybe details, fill in some of the details that I missed about the history of Black Lives Matter in connection to Black Liberation Theology? Yeah, well, one of the key components was Jeremiah Wright. Jeremiah Wright, so you got Cone.

Cone is doing his thing. He's traveling. He's speaking in different spaces and places. And he begins to inform and shape the ideas in some of the spaces that you mentioned, whether it's black Muslims, Islam, as well, the biggest influence that he had was Jeremiah Wright. In fact, Jeremiah Wright, in my estimation, was a better version of Cone than Cone was.

What Wright did was he put just kind of an intellectual polish on what Cone actually did. When you read Cone's books, behind me, I've got a library of Cone's books. I've read through them. they're not that deep. You're not going to be so overwhelmed by his theological prowess where you're going, I can't see straight. You have those people who are nervous always to read someone else work because they trying to figure out how do I navigate this well And you grab an open Bible and you take Cone right next to it and I promise you any person worth their salt will be able to see the contradictions and the problems with Cone work from the outset Now, what Wright did was Wright took things to a next level, to a whole other level, and really began teaching the masses.

Unfortunately, Jeremiah Wright was very prototypical of the kind of theological underpinnings that you find in the quote-unquote black church, meaning we had all of our – dotted our I's and crossed our T's about salvation. But there was some of this liberation theology, this black liberation theology that ran its course through the black church at different levels. And so we would get steeped in that in our different pockets and areas.

And then along comes the Trayvon Martin issue and from that the three ladies who began Black Lives Matter. Now, here's the crazy part. They're not coming from a theological disposition. they're coming from the the socio-marxian kind of kind of uh angle at this these are these are women who who hold dear communist ideas and communist thoughts they pick up more of the liberation aspect uh they're informed by by leftists they're informed by a a secular worldview um and and they're adding that to that they recognize that that that this idea these ideas has so permeated the culture that what they're saying sounds normative, right?

So when they talk about black lives and black lives mattering and what they mean by that and what gets attached to that, one of the things I tell, and I know this is kind of a leap, and I had a couple of quotes from Cone that I wanted to revisit that I had for you guys ready as well. We'll jump into that. But one of the things that I tell pastors, current day pastors who are using language like Black Lives Matter, it's incredibly important not to use that language.

I'd prefer they use biblical language. If they're going to say Black Lives Matter, they should say all black lives matter. Why? Because all black lives do matter. Black lives in the womb, black lives murdered by other blacks, black lives. But we only seem to believe that black lives matter as a result of a white cop ending the life of a black victim in this instance.

That's the only time that black lives really matter. And so I prefer us be biblical about it, recognize that all of us are image bearers of God, creating his image and likeness. Genesis 127 and Acts 1726, that from one man comes all of all of the ethnos, all of the nations of mankind. And as a result, we are one human race. We have distinct value, dignity, and worth as a result of being created in God's image in the Imago Dei, rather than thinking that some level of melanin in my skin or lack thereof has some bearing on the value that I bring as a human being.

And so those are the kinds of things that are important. But what I think pastors don't recognize when they use the language Black Lives Matter is that they're creating a soundbite. I love what my brother Daryl says. He calls it hashtag hermeneutics, right? Hashtag hermeneutics. We're grabbing onto a hashtag in order to view things.

And so what we end up doing is we make normative the language Black Lives Matter. We make that normative in the ear of parishioners, in the ear of those who attend our churches. They go back out into the culture and begin validating that same language. companies recognize that's the vernacular of the culture so oh in order to virtue signal what i'll do is i'll write a multi-million dollar check to black lives matter and make it public why because it's in the vernacular of the culture the pastors are preaching it in their platforms in their sermons multi-millions of dollars are now going to companies who are going are going from companies are going into the coffers of Black Lives Matter, and their ideological underpinnings are absolutely opposed to a biblical worldview.

And most of those companies. Absolutely. The amount of the people who are donating them. Yeah. I mean, it's all Marxism, and you have these capitalist companies that have a lot of money because of capitalism. something, right? I just wanted to interrupt you so many times and just shout amen, but that doesn't come across well on a podcast.

If you were preaching or something, I wanted to say it so many times here, brother. That was just a great little, I don't know what it's called, diatribe, or that was good. Yeah, I'll jump in the amen chorus also and mention also that today, you know, We're recording this Thursday, June 18th, 2020. Dr. Moeller on his program, The Briefing, covered a lot of this today also.

He had a good overview, so I'd recommend folks check that out also. He does go into the history and shows the connections between Cone and Wright and so forth. It's funny enough is that Black Lives Matter, when I first did my video, they had James Cone on their website, and now they removed him. I don't know why. I don't know if virtually you have any information as to why they removed him.

I'm assuming because of his extreme views, but I mean, that's just a guess. I don't know. I mean, there was no view that he articulated that they would not embrace. Even the older he got, I mean, there was no real distinction between even the LGBT or anything like that. He had no problem with those issues as well. So I'm sorry.

That's my dog in the background. Even in one of his videos that he preaches talking about the cross and the lynching tree, which you could hear a lot of his views on the atonement, he does talk about how LGBTQ and trans people are oppressed as well, and how black people need to identify with that, and they need to identify with each other. And of course you see that in the Black Lives Matter faith statement Can I say that even though it a political statement It a religious statement Absolutely It not surprising and it disappointing and I think this goes probably into our caveat to our final point.

Leslie Virgil, you want to do your quick quotes, because I really want to talk about our response, so if you could share some of those quotes that would help us. Yeah, I just, I pulled this up from a standpoint of what James Cone looked at as salvific, right? And he says this in Christianity and Black Power. He says, quote, my main concern, my main concern, and this is important to him because he definitely wants to articulate what his gospel is about.

He says this again in his book, Christianity and Black Power. He says this, quote, my main concern was to demonstrate that the politics of Black Power was the gospel of Jesus Christ to 20th century America. Let me repeat that. That's important. He says, my main concern was to demonstrate that the politics of black power was the gospel of Jesus to the 20th century America.

For black power was concerned with the liberation of the black poor from oppression. And Jesus had shown such concern for the liberation of the poor during his earthly ministry, end quote. And now what you see in the culture is you seeing this kind of language in meme form, right? You might've seen the meme of the 99 sheep and then the one sheep goes and Jesus is there and they're all, you know, they're all the all lives matter.

They've got a sign that says all lives matter. And the one sheep that's gone away is called the black lives matter sheep. Right. And so you begin seeing this in meme form. That's how they begin to articulate. But this is this is what James Cone was articulating.

This was not about salvation of the soul. This was not about about anything regarded to sin. This was not about being being one of one of the sheep of God's of God's fold. And they're being goats. This had nothing to do with sin. It's had everything to do with ethnicity and black political power.

Let me give you one more quote, again, from James Cone, Christianity and Black Power. He says this, quote, Jesus's death on the cross represented God's boundless solidarity with victims, even unto death. So now Christ didn't die for sinners, all of us being sinners. He didn't die for the purpose of atoning for the sins of the world or the sins of those who are called.

He died for the purpose of identifying and having solidarity with quote-unquote victims. Let me continue. Jesus's resurrection, I'm quoting from Cone, is the good news that there is new life for the poor that is not determined by their poverty but overcomes it. So now what he's talking about is economic systems being overturned for the purpose of the poor, overcoming their poverty.

So it's not a poverty of spirit that recognizes it's in a sin-filled condition. It's the poverty, economically speaking, monetarily speaking, and temporally speaking, that will be overturned by this Jesus of James Cone. Wow. It's hard to hear. I remember when I first ran across James Cone, it was difficult to hear because I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

And it's counter-racism, I guess. You know, it's, you had a message and I don't know if I could share it here. I don't even know, maybe I can share the link later, which you showed me and I viewed it, or listened to it, it was really good, where you quoted KKK and Black Liberation Theology teachings. And you asked the people to decipher who said it and at times just like in just like you had warned me people couldn't tell the difference because it's the same language but for a particular ethnicity that's all it is right and you're you're essentially you're using fire with fire you're not you're not dousing it with the gospel yeah i i as i walked as i began walking through cone's works um i i just automatically thought, I wonder if I could find a book or books that would tell me about the historic narrative, the history, the theological history of the Klan, like how they came up with some of their ideas and how they recruited people.

And so I found a book by Michael Newton called A History of the Ku Klux Klan and looked that book up. There was a couple of other books that I pulled that where there's an encyclopedia of Southern culture that I used as well. And what I found in pulling those was that some of the same ideological positions that the Klan held sounded exactly the same in the mouth of James Cone.

And so it was just a matter of changing the ethnicity. So instead of saying white, you said black. Instead of saying black, You said white. And so I pitched those that language to the audience for the purpose of trying to get them to decipher which one was which. Was I using the theology of the Klan or the theology of Cone? And at times it was very difficult to determine which was which.

And the reality is they both stem from the same evil, wicked root of sinfulness. Mm-hmm. It's about sin, not skin, right? So what is our response? We see white guilt being played out. We see white privilege.

We see a lot of these terms being thrown out there to get the white or the oppressor to repent and give terms like reparations, giving back what was stolen. There's a lot to unpack there. Obviously, if you can, within the next 10 minutes, try to help us understand some of that, but also give us the biblical response to some of this. So that way, anybody who hears this, anybody who's confronted with anybody who's a Black Lives Matter supporter knows how to respond biblically.

Yeah, well, I think the first is making sure that we're using biblical language. I love spending time with my brother, Daryl. We always try to define our terms according to what scripture calls it. When we're dealing with racism, rather than calling it racism, since the Bible knows nothing of race says of people, it knows of one human race, we begin to look for what is racism.

Racism, A, is attitudinal, right? It's an attitude of the heart. George Floyd was murdered by a man who had a hatred in his heart for another image bearer of God, right? What people try to do with what they see there is to attach motivation. In other words, they say, hey, that was a racist act. Well, how do you know that?

And let's say you can identify that as true. You can identify the motivation of the heart. If you do, does that make, I was asked this question, does that make George Floyd any more or less dead? The answer is it doesn't make him. If I can identify what motivated the act, does that make the man who died any more or dead. It doesn't.

And so while we're trying to figure out what motivated it, was it racism that motivated it? Was it the attitude of the heart? Biblically speaking, what we do know is that was hatred for another man that manifested itself in the fruit of murder, right? And we know scripture is clear that if we have hatred in our heart for our brother, we're a murderer at heart.

So while everybody is trying to identify with George Floyd as the victim, what we need to recognize is that every single one of us who has hatred in our heart for our brother, we are just like the cop who put his knee in the neck of the man who he murdered. that's and that's an important distinction to make and here's why once we recognize that truth we can properly take the log out we could do a Matthew 7 we can probably take the log out of our own eye and recognize our need for the gospel recognize our sinful ways recognize that there was one who came and lived a perfect life and died a death he didn't deserve on a cross in an effort to ransom and redeem us. And it is only through a transformation of our heart, a change in our disposition, God regenerating our heart and giving us a brand new heart, taking out our heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh, will we be able to properly love our brother and love our neighbor as ourselves. And so apart from the gospel, none of this gets fixed.

None of it. everything that we're trying is an effort to to to put it put an outside kind of sugar coat on what is really an issue of our heart so what do you think about the reparations aspect then if if if you know there is there's some people within black liberation theology that'll say unless you give back what you stole you're not really repenting you're not you're not truly doing what Jesus commanded you to do You not loving your neighbor So how do people whether you white Hispanic Asian it doesn matter whoever comes at you with this how do you respond to that Well one is you know we did an entire episode on slavery reparations on Just Thinking It was one of our most popular podcasts. We did an hour and 40 minutes, at least, almost two hours unpacking this. It's on slavery reparations.

And we started out with slave narrative. You guys, Have you guys ever read Slave Narrative? Is it a book or about the topic, Slave Narrative? Slave Narrative is a story told from the slave's perspective. Okay. So when the master beats the slave, the slave is actually telling you how they felt as a result.

Probably one of the most gripping, challenging, heart-wrenching episodes we ever did. And the reason why we wanted to do that, George, was because we wanted people to know we're not shying away from what really took place. But at the end of the day, if we're going to start the idea of reparations, we need to look at it from a holistic perspective. In other words, we don't need to simply look at the white person here in the United States that benefited.

We also have to go back to Africa and look at the African people who benefited from the selling of other blacks into slavery. We've got to have a holistic picture, and I don't know that we're going to properly be able to do that, to adjudicate for that. As a believer, as a Christian, I promise you, we do not want to go back into history and have our sins re-adjudicated in any way, shape, or form.

So how is it that we think we're better than or greater than God himself who we've sinned against that we can put ourselves in a position to go back and adjudicate someone else's sin against us? And we don't even know if it's their sin. It's some forefather's sin. I've talked with brothers who said, my people didn't even show up here until after the slave trade was over.

How do you account for that when your idea of reparations is a taxation on everybody whose melanin is of a certain deficiency? It's really foolishness. It's nonsensical when you begin to think about it. I don't think of it as a deficiency. I get it, man. I get it.

You know what? It's funny because I grew up in Chicago. A lot of Puerto Ricans I heard. I got more criticism from my Puerto Rican brethren than I did ever from blacks. And some people thought I was white growing up. People still think I'm white today.

I thought you were until three days ago when you told me. I had to share with, yeah, I had to blow Michael's mind. I thought I'm Puerto Rican. He's like, you're Puerto Rican? but uh uh even when i went to puerto rico i was called the gringo uh because i was from america i wasn't from the island and this kind of thing it it runs culture culture to culture i think it it's it's not just a black and white issue it's within our own ethnicities as well it really does break my heart listening to this last part um thankful for the gospel that you told us about uh the the way to really cure it because other than that we really don have any hope listening to this about reparations and the slavery those are all hard things to hear because it is a tough history yeah um knowing the history i think is really really important for us but holding it against people uh is i think is an unbiblical response um but you know there's so much more we could talk about virgil but we do definitely appreciate uh some of the things you've definitely brought to the table here today as we try to promise, you know, within the hour, we wanted to talk about a primer on Black Liberation Theology.

Some of the other podcasts that you have are very, very informative. So I encourage anybody who's listening right now to check out Virgil Walker on Just Thinking Podcasts and try to get those other topics he's brought up because he's made plenty. And there's other people like Bodhi. Any other people that you'd recommend listening to on this topic, Virgil?

Dr. James White. In fact, Dr. James White has done a series where he just – I want to say he's got three episodes where he just takes Cone's works and reads them. I heard that one, yeah. I mean, it's just – it's jaw-dropping.

I'd encourage you to check that out. The G3, the folks from G3, Josh Bice, they did a – prior to the G3 happening, they did a one-day kind of deal where they had James White, Votie Bauckham, Josh Bice, Tom Askell, Tom Buck, and they all talked about social justice in the gospel. And so that would be something to take a look at. there's the writing that's out there that John MacArthur signed off on, which is a response to social justice and the gospel.

You could take a look at that as well. We've got a number. I mean, I'd say of our 100 episodes, I'd say probably 60% of them deal with some issue around social justice. I'd encourage the one we talked about, slavery reparations, the one on whiteness, that would be an important one. Black liberation, no, Black Lives Matter and abortion would be a good one to take a look at as well.

We've got a number of them. So as you go through our library, there's plenty of stuff that's out there and available for people to listen to. I'm grateful for you guys doing the work you do, George, putting the stuff out that you've put out, and I'm honored by an opportunity to come. I do hate that there's a sad part about being in so many places, and that is that what it says to me is that there are not enough guys like you guys, like myself, who are saying what we're saying, that we are actually the minority, no pun intended, who are saying what scripture actually says.

And what that means is because there's so few of us, the handful of people who want that kind of content are flooding toward us. I bet money this is a really big episode for you, not because I'm on, but because there's so few people standing on the biblical foundation with regard to this issue. They're all taking part in the culture and the handful of people who want it. there's few places to go get it.

So I just applaud you guys for doing it. That's the good part about that is that I am in a lot of spaces. The bad part about that is what that says is there are too few of us who are actually saying the same kinds of things Yeah it like you feel like a voice in the wilderness concept right I will plug that if you look at the history of the Things Above Us Roundtable episode eight was called the social justice episode, and that's from October of 2018.

And so we actually have an episode where we talked about it, too, if people want to hear what we said a couple of years ago. Those were all really good resources you provided. And I found for my family, we watched, and this might not go into as much detail as some people are asking for, but the Founders Synodoc, by what standard? I thought that that was, I thought it was very well done.

And it's something I watched with my teenagers. And I think because it was a movie and there was more visual there, I think it helped my teenagers to engage in the kind of teaching that maybe they're not as used to just listening to on audio. And so I found it really helpful. And just to warn somebody that watches it, it kind of seems to start talking about things that you don't understand at the beginning, and then it explains them later.

So we were like pausing it and trying to look things up, and then we figured out, oh, they're going to explain all this later. But I thought that really helped us understand critical race theory and intersectionality. And then it featured James Cone, a number of quotes in there that I still – I'm moderately good at impersonations, so I'll imitate Cone and I'll say the things that he said, and it drives my kids bananas.

But it's like a punishment when they don't listen. But, hey, thanks a lot. I'm going to just – I'll sign off myself here. That was a great interview. I really appreciate you taking the time with us. I know I know I'm sure you're a busy guy and you got a dog that wants your attention and and uh but you you took time to be with us and I appreciate that brother well thank you guys so much yeah praise the lord for what he's doing in your in your life right now thank you brother Chuck did you got anything yeah just as a quick plug American Gospel uh they had the first uh film come out last year and then there's a second one out now so I'd recommend both of those uh dig into some of these issues um so and Virgil is good to good to talk with you.

It's neat to hear from you on all this. Privilege is mine. I appreciate it a ton. Brandon Kimber, dear brother, friend of mine, he's looking at putting something together, perhaps down the road, very focused in that area. So be on the lookout for that. He's the guy, the executive producer of the American Gospel.

And then Chocolate Knox and my guys was the one who put together the synodoc. He does great work as well. You guys ought to reach out to him and have him on. All right, brother. Well, thank you very much once again. Like everybody here who's thanked you before, I thank you too as well.

Thank you for taking the time. I know your time is precious. God bless you, brother. And this has been another episode of Things Above Us Roundtable until we go home. Thank you for listening to Be a Berean with your host, Michael Coughlin. I am a writer at thingsabove.us and I also have a personal website michaelcoghlan.net You can contact me by emailing me michael at thingsabove.us I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.