Cranking up his sarcasm to a level 10, Rev. Dr. Matthew Myer Boulton, the (now former) President of Christian Theological Seminary- a small progressive ‘Christian’ seminary in Indianapolis that boasts around 140 students and whose new President prides himself on teaching ‘Queer theology- preached a chapel message back in 2015, before much of Critical Race Theory had become popularized, explaining that the bible is bursting with white privilege ‘starting at page one.”
It would be nice, you know, you go back to the concordance and you look up “white privilege,” where is that in the Bible? “White privilege.” And it would be great, wouldn’t it? It’s really a shame that the Bible says nothing about white privilege at all and we have to kind of improvise, because the Bible just doesn’t provide us any help.
If only there was a narrative, I mean, this is maybe too much to ask, but if only there was a narrative close to the beginning of the Bible that was really all about race and slavery and liberation. If only there was a story like that toward the beginning of the Bible. And maybe it wasn’t just there. Maybe it was all throughout. Maybe the psalmist picks it up. Maybe Jesus picks it up. Maybe Paul picks it up. Maybe this is all through, I mean, wouldn’t that be, and then we could have something to work with…
If only we had the Son of God come down from heaven to the Temple Mount, of course, because that’s where the Son of God would show up is at the temple. Not some little backwater and some little ethnic kind of slum. I mean, that would be helpful if Jesus would show up, if the Son of God would show up in the slum as a little baby boy. If only we had a passage where Jesus was saying the essence of being, the essence of inheriting eternal life, the essence of following what, he was a Jew, he was always a Jew, he loves Judaism. The essence of being a Jew is to follow this other guy, this non-Jew.
If only we had a passage like that where the insider-outsider dynamic, which is of course at the heart of racism, this clannish thinking of us and them. If only Jesus wasn’t constantly working against that kind of us-and-them mentality. If only we had an apostle, an apostle who made his name in persecution and then had a tremendous change in his life and he actually becomes what he was persecuting. If only we had that kind of story.
And then maybe, oh yeah, maybe his whole theme of all of his writing was thinking about the outsider and the nations. And then if only we could have wrapped the whole thing up in the book of Revelation with an image of a tree whose leaves were for the healing of the nations. Then we would have something to work with.
White privilege is in the Bible, as it turns out, starting on page one and ending at the ends. Because the human condition is to think in these us-and-them terms, is to think clannishly, is to have implicit biases, is to mess up the Garden and contaminate it. And yet the human call and the human true identity is to be in the image of the one who wants a beautiful and radiant and diverse and lovely and joyful garden for all. For the healing of the nations and for the joy of the nations, freedom is coming.
h/t to @wokepreachertv for the video and transcript
