You Tube Theology

Rev. Duke Kwon, pastor over Grace Meridian Hill, discusses with former PCA elder Greg Thompson (his co-author on the book "Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair") what it means when American Christians insist they are not culpable for slavery and oppression carried out by white people in former generations or outside of their ancestries.

--TRANSCRIPT HIGHLIGHTS--

GREG THOMPSON: In the Christian imagination, I think the real answer to the question, or an additional answer to that, "Am I culpable?" is the Samaritan story, because the notion of culpability is utterly absent. It's, like, disquietingly absent from that story. What you have is a person that came upon an individual who was harmed by other individuals, and they themselves took the responsibility for this.

And so I think part of the genius of what Duke wrote is to show that, where you're culpable and culpability can be established. Like in my case, because, you know, largely, I am a beneficiary of this white supremacy. I'm not saying that it's made everything easy for every white person. I'm not saying that, but I am saying, Du Bois called whiteness a psychological wage that everybody is paid, right? And I'm a beneficiary of that.

But even where I'm not culpable, the moral vision is of moving into places of pain. And so one of the most disconcerting things about this whole conversation for me, culturally speaking is that a missionary community's first response to pain is: "Is this my fault?" And I'm thinking, I cannot think of anything less indicative of a missionary mindset than that question. It would be like me going to Rwanda in 1997 and going, "Okay, y'all. Like, I know some hard stuff went down, but I'm not Hutu!" So it's it's manifestly absurd.

And so I think that part of what we have to do is to do the careful, nuanced work about how we how we understand culpability and the implications of that, but we also have to take a step back and say, "Is that a Christian question?" Did the Samaritan at any point say, "You know, I need to see, like, what I think about this." Or, no, there's this person, in this case, these entire communities are demonstrably harmed. We have a responsibility. And so i think that there's a lot of really important moral complexity with respect to the ethics of the thing, but there's also a need for some real moral clarity that your basic six-year-old would know.

DUKE KWON: I think you're right on, Greg. That there's this fundamental lack of missional integrity. You know, your Rwanda example. But here's the truth. I think we don't do this with any other issue or any other kind of need except race-related needs. I actually think there is demonstrable generosity and quickness to care for wounds without asking this question of personal culpability, but when it comes to racial wounds, thefts, robberies we get kind of bent out of shape. And I think we collectively respond differently to this issue than we do others. and in our context differently than we would in other contexts.

THOMPSON: There's no question about that. Because I can handle Thanksgiving turkeys, and it doesn't require any sort of movement of renunciation on my part. What I sense in this conversation when it happens about, "Well, I didn't own slaves," is a need for exoneration. It's like an exonerative impulse, and I'm thinking: We do believe in Jesus, right? Our life is in him and all that we have is found in him and I don't need to be exonerated from anything. But what I need to do is respond to the world as I find it with love. And I think that that part of the particular aversion to having grown-up conversations around this particular issue is because we can intuitively sense that our own standing is at stake, right?

KWON: That's right. And let's lay down this bottom line, too. There's no person in America that, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, is not a beneficiary of white supremacist theft. Right? It's the very nature of things, and it's the very history that we continue to live in. The legacy of this history, this is certainly something that's true. We all bear responsibility for this.

Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT7wsIV1NPI

WPC on Twitter: https://twitter.com/WokePreacherTV
WPC on Facebook: https://facebook.com/wokepreacherclips
WPC on Gab: https://gab.com/wokepreacherclips