Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Doctor Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics, and other miscellaneous items. I'm your host, Joshua Guillotine, and this is another edition of the director's Bag.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Anonymous writes, hey friends, I've been reading the book on critical race theory adjacent called reparations by Duke Kwan and Gregory Thompson.
One of the factors I'm considering helpful in CRT is that society needs to take ownership for their past mistakes, specifically with white Americans who live off of the momentum gained by slavery in the US. Wouldn't it be more christian of us to own our own mistakes and sins and take on communities that have been disadvantaged by slave ownership?
[00:01:06] Speaker C: Yeah, I appreciate the question a lot. Let me answer that by telling a story. My great grandfather immigrated from Ireland, assimilated. He was Irish, as I said, assimilated into the United states and ultimately served in a New York state cavalry branch. That branch ultimately joined General Grant, and my great grandfather was his rifle carrier during the war between the states. That is to say, he fought the oppressive regime of chattel slavery, putting at risk his body, leaving his family to do these things. Now, the question is, how does he be responsible since he liberated slaves and grist his body and blood to do so? And so I think the story points out kind of the unviability of kind of this general aspect of what is called reparations today. So I think we have to put a pause button there and say, could this even be feasible?
Second of all, as a lawyer, I would point out that the scripture doesn't ever speak of reparations, either denotatively nor connotatively. Rather, in scripture, justice requires restitution.
That's something very, very different. And so we see restitution in the main. Restitution is the idea, if I've done something to someone else by taking their property, let's say I must pay back their property and I must compensate them for the privation when they didn't have their property. That could be interest or that sort of thing. A good example of this is Zacchaeus, who cheated people out of their taxes. He paid it back fourfold, not only the original, but because we call it interest today to do that. Now, what Jesus didn't say is, hey, Zacchaeus, I'm glad you're repenting. Come to my house and would you have all those honest taxpayers payback? Reparations. There was nothing like that. Restitution and justice is personalized. It's not intergenerationally. So I would say to anonymous here, they should prayerfully consider, for example, Ezekiel 18. There we see this very question raised as to whether the Son should pay for the sins of the father. Socially, the answer is no.
I'm paraphrasing here. I could read it, but there's like, Ezekiel 18, like 18 through 2017 through 20. My memory serves me correctly. The other thing in the question I would say is you kind of toggled between, in your language, between society should deal with this, and yet christians should own their own sins.
Certainly. So christians should own their own sins. But that limits the liability. I'm not to own the sins of someone who went before me or my neighbor's sins. There's nothing in biblical justice that requires that. But this idea that society. What does that mean?
I am somewhat familiar with that book. And essentially they mean the government, that the state, through its coercive power, should transfer wealth from people who've done nothing wrong. That is not a form of biblical justice. We do not punish those who've done nothing wrong. And then, of course, the question goes to, well, you know, white people have benefited from that, really, each and every person to do that. How would we deal with the rank injustice of abortion on demand? How would reparations work there? How would we address those who aborted children and those who aborted their own children?
It's really not workable. And so finally, I would simply say, I would direct anonymous to find the book review conducted by Kevin DeYoung. Kevin did a great job, a gracious job, a fair job in analyzing that book, and he identified some profound unbiblical assumptions and whether the authors are well intended or not, I don't know them. But DeYoung really points out what's particularly problematic of that particular text, and I believe it's published on the Gospel Coalition's american website. But for a lot of reasons, I think we have to be very careful because the presuppositions of this reparations agenda stands in stark contrast to biblical notions of justice.
[00:05:56] Speaker D: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: And I've seen some of that online, specifically on Twitter. And there's a number of people I've seen argue that covenantally we deal with sins of our forefathers. Any thoughts about. Have you seen that, Jeff? People have argued that covenantally.
[00:06:14] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a book about that, in fact. And a friend of mine, Derek Green, contributed to parts of that. I think that we have to be very careful with our language because we can't just toggle between the committed nation of Israel and our socio political entities today. Those are not the same. And I also think that it is true, for example, covenantally, that the sins of the fathers are visited on the third and fourth generations. That is to say, there are consequences to sin. But what is not true is the obverse. Therefore, the third and fourth generations must make reparations for those particular sins. No, we are responsible for our own sins. You know, there's that interesting.
In some evangelical circles, you know, God doesn't have any grandchildren. You yourself have to, you know, except Jesus as savior, as the saying goes. Well, in fact, that is true in the sense that our faith is both personal, and so the same is true with respect to our sins.
Jesus died for my sins.
So similarly, we have to be responsible, from a legal or restitutionary sense, for our own sins.
I've heard the word, and I guess I'm going on a little bit, that, well, we have covenant responsibility, but I haven't seen that change the argument. I haven't seen, what is it about using the word covenantal changes the analysis in any meaningful way. It's just like, oh, we're calling it this now. And that changes things. I haven't seen that demonstrated.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: And that's helpful and important.
And living here in the south, for me, I've seen quite a bit of that here in Columbia, where you have families that have. Have that generationally, you can link back all the way back into antebellum southern life. And there is a lot of guilt that even some of these families still carry today and even want to hide that. They don't even honor their or keep the fifth commandment. They don't honor their forefathers anymore just because of the sins of their fathers, which is incredibly sad because even there were some very godly men, even that had horrible sins. But if, but who could stand?
None of us are without guilt.
[00:08:53] Speaker C: That's a great point, Joshua. None of us are without guilt. And then how could you? We're talking about here, reparations are used in a sense of atonement.
That can never be the case.
Just a little bit more. Just a little bit more. Four more bulls, six more goats. How much would someone have to do to atone for those particularized sins that you didn't commit? I mean, it's worse than trying to self atone. Here we're now trying to atone for someone else. The only substitutionary atonement that is effective and required is that which God has given to us through his son. Right and so I guess I put it this way. We say that Christ is Lord, but that means he's the Lord of the future. He holds it secure. He is the lord of the present, and he's lord of the past.
And so we've got to come to terms to the fact that, yeah, bad stuff happened. We see that from Genesis three on, and guess what? God is redeeming those things and has redeemed them. And frankly, if we want to sit and stand always on the fall and not look at the redemption, that's where. That's where it ends up. We're always trying to work out by works, by our works, saying, am I good enough? And it's not a matter of just desserts, because you can't possibly understand who someone in the past actually offended en masse. It's just simply not the case.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Yeah, and you have pointed out a number of times in the dictas, specifically when you were dealing with this issue of critical race theory, is that there is the sin of envy is a 10th commandment violation where we're coveting our neighbor's prosperity. We're coveting what the Lord has blessed.
And often what is overlooked is that the Lord is the one who gives wealth, and the Lord is also the one who makes the poor. But he's the Lord over both of them.
[00:10:59] Speaker C: It's exactly right. Exactly right.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: Zachary from Greenville writes, Mister Ventrella, I've been enjoying your weekly dictus, and they have become the highlight in my Monday inbox. Thank you. Your dicta embodied made me think about dualism. I've been following truth exchange for several years, and I have recalled a number of speakers of the past have talked about dualism, as always a bad thing. Are there any types of dualism where this is not the case?
[00:11:28] Speaker C: Thank you for the question. I appreciate it. A couple of thoughts with respect to that. One would be, and I'm gonna get real technical here, when we say dualism, we're talking about a conception of reality that's kind of two tiered, that it creates either false dichotomies or stretches real dichotomies, and it becomes dualistic in application, like sacred, secular, or spiritual stuff, heavenly stuff, and earthy kinds of stuff. And we see this played over and over again. It's a form of Platonism based after the philosopher Plato, where you have the ideals, the spiritual, the non corporeal, and then all this messy stuff that's material. And so it's really just a dualism, is just a rift on a platonic understanding of reality. Which is a false understanding of reality. But the other question is, do we have something called duality or binaries? And the fact is we do. Male and female. Is a duality created good? We have the creator and the creation. That's a duality or a binary. So there clearly are things that have two components. But when we say dualism, we're saying that in the scope of reality, we have these really, we can't bridge the gap between them. We have to keep them separate and apart. They don't really talk about things. Kant really helps in a bad way here. He talks about there are facts and there are values, and then never the 2 may meet. It drives me crazy. Just a matter of personal preference when I have christians talk about traditional values. You've made two mistakes with one phrase there. First of all, just because this tradition doesn't make it right, we certainly know that. And values mean in this era after Kant, that they are subjective, they are personally don't apply to everybody. So it's just we need to watch our language with respect to that. And of course, Descartes, who was a faithful christian man but gave us really bad theology, also gave us, you know, the modernistic view of our rationality is separate from our physicality. And that's just not true. The way we're created. We are created as the question recognizes, as embodied creatures. We have material parts, we have immaterial parts, but we're conjoined together with respect to that.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: Excellent. Thank you, Zachary. And last up we have Ruth from Jackson, Mississippi. Doctor Ventrella, you quoted Andrew Sandlin in your dicta today. The conflict is never between non physical and physical.
What about flesh and spirit? Aren't christians encouraged to walk in the spirit? Not in the flesh. In the end, won't the world be burnt away and the spirit be left?
[00:14:33] Speaker C: Yeah, those are very important questions. Let me ask you this.
Who is the most spiritual being who has ever engaged with mankind?
The answer is the pure spirit of Satan. Satan is a pure spirit and 100% corrupt and evil. So we have to go beyond the label of what's spiritual or what's fleshly. Paul uses the word. It comes from the greek word sarks, flesh. And it can mean simply our materiality, our flesh and blood. Or he can mean it with an ethical connotation, meaning that which is corrupted by the fall. And I think the context will dictate that, yes, we are resurrected. Paul says, with spiritual bodies. What? Yes, in other words, they're material, but they are animated and sustained by the very spirit of God. So it can be a little bit confusing when we begin talk about those kinds of things. Um, we should be careful, too. We don't create, as we said in one, one prior, uh, question, a false duality, right? That the spirit is against the flesh. Well, in a certain sense, it certainly is. And yet we're to be obedient as we walk in the flesh. We're to be animated by that which is correct. And therefore, uh, with our hands and with our minds, we are to do the very words of God. We are to think his thoughts after him, and we're to do the work of God. And we do that as an embodied creature. So there's really not an antinomy with respect to every incidence of spirit and flesh.
[00:16:21] Speaker D: This concludes the recording of the director's bag. For more resources from Truth exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on access as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the director's bag. I'm your host, Joshua Gulo, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
