If Everything Is Racial, Nothing is Racial

I recently started reading Doug Wilson's blog, cleverly named "Blog & Mablog". He had a post on recent current events, two shootings which occurred within days of each other, one in Atlanta and one in Boulder, CO. Two things that were immediately brought to the fore-front of the national discussion were the predictably tired overtures about gun-control, but this time around we also had a significant racial commentary. Both were knee-jerkingly blamed on 'white supremacy' when it appears that neither really had anything to do with white supremacy (the Boulder shooter, for example, wasn't even 'white'). Anyway, to Doug Wilson's comment that made me think:

"We have a problem, and the problem is one of hyperinflation. If accusations of racism came in a currency like papiermark, and they do, what it amounts to is that we have so much of it sitting around in piles now that it is worth nothing anymore. The printing presses are hot, and you can't even buy a paper clip with paper currency anymore. Being a racist today is like becoming a millionaire in the Weimar Republic." (Strunk & White Supremacy)

In other words, if everything that happens is labeled by race, or framed in terms of racism, then nothing is about race or is racist. The terms, by sheer volume of usage, lose their meaning and importance altogether. This is happening with all sorts of things in our culture and only gets worse and worse the more we allow the elites and mass media divide up the people into 'us vs. them'. The peddlers of 'everything is about race and racism' used to be confined to a small group of race-baiters, with their primary spokesmen being Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Now you have entire media outlets dedicated to fueling this rhetorical dumpster fire, eager for the clicks and views of a nation divided on false premises. The great majority have tuned it out, though some have chosen to wrap their identities around it, eager to play the victim and urged on by media and academia.

I'm not sure where it ends up, but I am sure that if everything continues to be framed in these terms, the terms themselves will become ever more meaningless.

Some More Thoughts on Salvation

This is one of those posts where I just need to go through the exercise of writing something out. Lately, my thoughts have been focused on two main things, "what is salvation" and "what does Jesus mean when he says, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through me"?

What is Salvation?

This question, it seems to me, is the critical one that has to be answered before the second question about what Jesus means in John 14:6. Being saved necessarily means that there was something to be saved from. We could say that we are saved 'from our sins', but that's not quite it. I think the most accurate thing is to say that we are saved from the penalty of our sinfulness. Throughout the New Testament, you get much discussion about sacrifice and atonement, and in Hebrews, about Jesus being the 'better sacrifice'. This is all legal language. Paul says that "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God" (Rom. 3:23). What this means is that we all bear a legal charge against us. In order to clear that charge, a penalty must be paid. We see this drama play out in ancient Israel's sacrificial system. If someone sinned, in tandem with repentance they would bring the appropriate sacrifice to the temple, the priest would then transfer the guilt of that sin to the animal, and then the animal was either killed, or released in the wild. The important thing, however, was that God accredited forgiveness to the sinner in that exchange. There was nothing special about the animal or about the sacrifice - it was God's willingness to consider that sacrifice as sufficient.

In the eternal courtroom, on the Day that Jesus comes back, either you bear that sin yourself and pay the penalty through eternal death and suffering, or Jesus' sacrifice is considered as sufficient atonement, paying the penalty in your stead (by grace through faith, of course).