Since Critical Race Theory (CRT) isn’t available as an analytic tool for Christians doing the work, in the ecclesial context, towards working through the racial complex; and if the Gospel itself is Self-sufficient, as the Power of God to do so; this still means that Christians have the responsibility to develop grammars and strategies, rooted in the kerygma itself, that help facilitate a genuinely Kingdom oriented telos (or purpose). Clearly, in my view, appealing to a correlationist frame between a genuinely Gospel oriented praxis, and secular is a non-starter. The particularity of the Gospel is scandalous to the world’s wisdom, so much so that it thinks the Gospel is both foolish and weak. But Christians find their being in this foolishness and weakness; we find our lives in its cruciformed shape; and we live and move out of this orientation. In my view then, appeal to CRT as an analytic tool for attempting to engage in “race relations” in the church represents a copout. It is the hawking off of the church’s responsibility to the world, and asking the world to do the work (i.e. provide the “tools” and “ways”) of figuring out a way to reconcile the races.

I do think there are legitimate racial disparities and even so-called inequities in the world writ-large. And insofar as the evangelical church reflects, and even follows the world/culture at large, and she does in significant ways, these disparities and inequities get smuggled into the ecclesial context. But this really reflects a deeper problem; it is a problem of allowing a natural universalizing theology to shape the church. In other words, the problem, in nuce, is that the evangelical churches (among the other churches) have so collapsed or immanantized the culture into the fabric of the Church, that the very Lord of the Church, Jesus Christ, can no longer be heard. Indeed, the culture so saturates the Church that the Church actually believes it is open to her Lord’s voice, when in fact the voice they are actually hearing is the broader culture’s. This is the deeper problem, and the ongoing racial, and other problems in the Church are really only symptoms (serious ones) of this sort of primal problem wherein the Church at large has conflated the culture’s voice with the Lord’s, thus making the latter self-same with the former. Until this is identified for what it is, as the Antichrist of natural theology, the idea that racial reconciliation, or any other sort of reconciliation might happen, in meaningful ways, will remain a chimera of a never ending story of purely horizontal horizons.

John Webster offers some pertinent insight on Karl Barth’s moral theology and ethical anthropology with reference to the Liberal Protestant church of Barth’s German/Swiss day. Webster writes:

A large part of Barth’s distaste is his sense that the ethics of liberal Protestantism could not be extricated from a certain kind of cultural confidence: ‘[H]ere was … a human culture building itself up in orderly fashion in politics, economics, and science, theoretical and applied, progressing steadily along its whole front, interpreted and ennobled by art, and through its morality and religion reaching well beyond itself toward yet better days.’ The ethical question, on such an account, is no longer disruptive; it has ‘an almost perfectly obvious answer’, so that, in effect, the moral life becomes too easy, a matter of the simple task of following Jesus.

Within this ethos, Barth also discerns a moral anthropology with which he is distinctly ill-at-ease. He unearths in the received Protestant moral culture a notion of moral subjectivity (ultimately Kantian in origin), according to which ‘[t]he moral personality is the author both of the conduct with which the ethical question is concerned and of the question itself. Barth’s point is not simply that such an anthropology lacks serious consideration of human corruption, but something more complex. He is beginning to unearth the way in which this picture of human subjectivity as it were projects the moral self into a neutral space, from which it can survey the ethical question ‘from the viewpoint of spectators’. This notion Barth reads as a kind of absolutizing of the self and its reflective consciousness, which come to assume ‘the dignity of ultimateness’. And it is precisely this — the image of moral reason as a secure centre of value, omnicompetent in its judgements — that the ethical question interrogates.[1] 

I would contend that this mode has taken over the evangelical churches of North America, and the West at large. It seems that the mainline and/or progressive churches have now come to set the ethical space for much of what used to be considered the conservative evangelical churches. They all are operating with this same sort of allegiance to cultural relativism, and the turn-to-the-subject in the name of Jesus Christ as ultimately determinative for what it means to be socially activist and engaged. She can no longer, by and large, hear the voice of her Lord; because her Lord is in point of fact her own voice projected out as the living Lord’s (see Barth’s appropriation of Feuerbach). What the Church is in need of before anything else is systemic repentance. She needs to be willing, corporately, or as large bodies as witness bearers to the rest of the Church, to recognize her sin of syncretism, and cry out for the Lord to ‘liberate’ her from her cultural bondage; just so she can actually hear the lordly voice of the risen Lord once again, afresh and anew every morning in His great faithfulness.  

[1] John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, 35-6.