You Tube Theology

Former PCA elder Greg Thompson, co-author of the book "Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair" with Duke Kwon, says Christians should be able to calculate what each Christian owes each black American in reparations, because Christians already affirm complex ideas like the Trinity and the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

—TRANSCRIPT—

SKYE JETHANI: I want to uh read something from Kevin DeYoung's review of your book, which was quite critical, as you know. He says "restitution makes perfect sense and is imminently biblical when the person who cheats pays back the person whom they cheated. Zacchaeus did not make restitution with the world or with every poor person in Judea. Instead, he sought to restore fourfold anyone he defrauded."

So the argument I hear from Kevin DeYoung and I hear from other folks on social media is, "Yes, restitution is imminently biblical and right, but when you are multiple generations removed from both the perpetrators and the immediate victims of the injustice, then it gets too muddled and there's no way of equitably determining guilt and reparation. Therefore, essentially, it's an argument of "it's too complicated now, so it's not worth attempting." How do you respond to that?

GREG THOMPSON: Well, I mean, it's, in many ways, honestly, the first is that it's simply an arbitrary claim that he is making, that a generation or multiple generations absolves us of obligation. [WPC note: This is 100% a misrepresentation of DeYoung. More coming on that front] That is biblically and theologically false. He just, he just asserts that. He doesn't defend it.

And for the idea that it's too complicated, we're people that believe in the Trinity. We're people that believe in the incarnation, the full divinity and full humanity of a being. We're people who profess the resurrection of the dead and that a divine being can be one in three, simultaneously, in different respects. And what we're talking about is a form of cultural accounting for 400 years is too complicated? I think this is a form of evasion.

And I think that this is part of what we tried to say in our response to Kevin, If the Christian church wanted to try to figure this out, if we wanted to try to give ourselves theologically to it, then we could. And so I think the fact of the matter is that this, the entire review felt like a form of evasion and a dismissal of what African-American Christians have been saying for hundreds of years. And that that is why we chose to respond, because it felt like such an example of the kind of centering of, "Well, we get to determine whether this is too hard or not. We don't really want to go forward with this, and so therefore we're going to dismiss the idea." And that feels egregious to me.

Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFoknTQxk3E

Kevin DeYoung's review of Greg's book with Duke Kwon: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevin-deyoung/reparations-a-critical-theological-review/

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