Fault Lines by Voddie T. Baucham;

Author:Voddie T. Baucham;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

A Christianity Today writer tried to reduce the criticism to some kind of white fragility,14 but that was both inaccurate and disingenuous. In fact, many of those who agreed with Platt’s sentiment acknowledged that his sermon fell short of exegetical standards. At least two high-level evangelical leaders (one closely associated with the conference) said as much to me personally. (Neither, of course, would go on record.)

Moreover, the message fell short of Platt’s own standard: He has a Ph.D. in preaching and served as a professor of preaching and apologetics at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. So if anybody knows better than to misuse Scripture like that, it is David Platt. The obvious question then is why someone of his caliber could preach a sermon that led one preaching professor to tell me privately, “If he had done that in my class, I would have given him a D”?

The answer is simple: David Platt loves Jesus, loves people, and is passionate about reconciliation. I know this because I know and love David Platt. I also know he started reading and being influenced by the woke canon. Consequently, he began to reach beyond the Bible to find God’s truth regarding race.

How did he get to that point? According to an article on the Gospel Coalition’s website,15 9Marks Founder Mark Dever suggested Platt read Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith—a book Dever has publicly praised, saying, “This won’t be the most exciting book you read this year, but it may have the most exciting results in your life.”16

Platt’s message was dripping with the book’s influence, especially his emphasis on the concept of America’s being “racialized,” which is the book’s main theme. Ironically, the book does not make Christianity Today’s list. However, it is arguably the most frequently referenced and recommended race resource among evangelicalism’s “Big Three,” also known as the Gospel Coalition, 9Marks, and Together for the Gospel.

My point here is not whether Divided by Faith has merit. I think it does. My point is this: If someone like David Platt can go off the rails and start reading things into Scripture during a sermon delivered at one of the largest and most influential conferences in evangelicalism due to the influence of a sociology text, what do we think is going to happen when we create a new canon in the form of an “antiracist curriculum” for white evangelicals? Especially when that canon consists of literature from the realm of history, political science, and sociology that is not based in biblical exegesis.

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