Evangelicalism, History, and Race: Classic

Darrell Bock:

Welcome to The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Darrell Bock, executive director for cultural engagement at the Hendrick's Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. And my guest in Brandon Washington, who is a pastor in Denver, Colorado. Whenever I say Denver, Colorado when I'm in Dallas I go, "Man, the environment around Denver is completely different than the environment around Dallas. Dallas is flat and boring. Denver's beautiful with mountains." I mean, so I'm jealous.

Brandon Washington:

It's among the reasons I stayed here. Moving to Denver was the first time I experienced four distinct seasons.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, well Dallas has-

Brandon Washington:

Those people in Dallas, it's two maybe.

Darrell Bock:

Dallas has two. Summer and getting ready for summer. But anyway, yeah, and Brandon is pastor at the Embassy Christian Bible Church in Denver and he also holds a master's degree from Denver Seminary where he studied systematic theology and apologetics and ethics. I mean, what a combination. And you did it so well, they asked you onto their board of trustees.

Brandon Washington:

Yes.

Darrell Bock:

So thanks for being with us. He's written a book, I have it here, called A Burning House, which tells you we got a hot topic. And it's redeeming American Evangelicalism by examining its history, mission, and message. So obviously, we're going to be talking about racial perspectives in the church and what God is doing amongst us in these days. And it's been a challenging period. And so, I want to frame this a little bit, Brandon, by opening up and saying that just because you occupy the same space, just because we all walk into a church and we worship the same God, doesn't mean that we see that space in the same way. And your book is an effort to try and write in such a way, in a sympathetic, gentle, but direct way about how many Black people see the space of the church which they share as Evangelicals and primarily with the white majority of Evangelicalism.

So first of all, I just want to commend you for undertaking that task, and the challenge that it represents. But secondly, I want to ask you, as a way in, tell us how you got to this topic and why is it that you decided that this was something you wanted to speak to?

Brandon Washington:

Very good question. I became a believer in the mid-'90s. It was 1997, and I am from Dallas. Born and raised in Dallas.

Darrell Bock:

Oh, wow.

Brandon Washington:

Yeah. So my introduction to the faith was heavily influenced by… Well, much of my understanding of the faith was heavily influenced by a local radio station, that if I were to mention now, everyone would recognize it. And my pastor was Dr. Tony Evans, and that gave me a flawed… it was a skewed sample size regarding seminarians, because until I left Dallas, every seminarian I knew was African-American. There were dozens of them at the church, because of who the pastor is. I received this perception from them of what seminary is, but it was a flawed perception.

I left Dallas and moved to Denver, first, because I wanted to leave home. And the other reason was, I did not want to be a pastor, I wanted to be a professor of philosophy, and that's why I chose Denver Seminary, which at the time had a program in philosophy of religion and ethics. And I realized how skewed my sample size was, because there were so few, relatively speaking, the Black student population was significantly smaller than the overall population. And I noticed, when we were in class, that our questions weren't the same. Our theology was the same, but the practical application of the ideas was not the same.

Darrell Bock:

So the contexts were that different? The context of student experience was that different that it was generating different kinds of conversations about how to think about ministry?

Brandon Washington:

Absolutely. The questions we asked were along the lines of how is this going to nurture wholeness in our community, where we lived in the time, which is in Northeast Denver, which was historically, is historically, an African-American community. And I had classmates who told me that such questions are off the mark, to stick to the gospel. And I always wondered, "Well, why is the gospel not relevant to these questions? Why does the gospel have no bearing on these concerns?" So I noticed that we shared orthodoxy, our ideas were the same, but our orthopraxy, the application, the embodiment of those ideas, were often just askew of one another, enough to be loud. Enough for it to be a stumbling block for many students of color.

So I wanted to address that distinction and the specific moment when it came to a head was the conversations I had around the death of Trayvon Martin. And the idea that people who received the same theological education I did, who were telling me that the gospel and some of the other fundamental aspects of our faith have no bearing on that moment. That was troubling to me and it made me realize that we are in the same house, but I walked away from those conversations feeling like a guest, an unwanted, sometimes, guest, instead of a family member who was in the household that we all share, the family dwelling.

Darrell Bock:

Okay, well you've opened-

Brandon Washington:

So I want to visit that distinction.

Darrell Bock:

Go ahead. You've opened this with a metaphor that I like to use, which goes something like this, I equate the church to a blended family. A blended family, they're not biologically related to one another, but because of a second marriage or a death, there is a second family that is put alongside the original family and they have to blend together. And all those relationships have to be fixed. In a practical space, people who study this say it takes five to seven years for everyone to work out their relationship to one another, if they get there. Okay, if they get there.

Brandon Washington:

If they get there.

Darrell Bock:

And so, the church is like a blended family. And the other metaphor I like to use is God has adopted all of us, but we have not adopted each other. Okay? So that's another way to think about the same image, that we share space, we even share the same set of… well, I'll say it this way, we claim to share the same set of theological beliefs. Okay? But the application of those beliefs, because of the different spaces that we live in, doesn't work out to surface the same kinds of issues and problems, and sometimes we don't recognize the issues and problems that someone in the different space is having to deal with.

Brandon Washington:

Right, right.

Darrell Bock:

And so-

Brandon Washington:

I have a-

Darrell Bock:

Go ahead.

Brandon Washington:

No, I have a mentor here who says that empathy is essential to applying the gospel well, and he says empathy is nearly impossible without proximity. So we have to be in the same space, but we have to do it empathetically. I'm not trying to copy you, but I'm trying to appreciate you and appreciate how you see the same circumstances, which will potentially shape how I apply the gospel to those circumstances.

Darrell Bock:

Exactly. And then, I think the other issue that you've raised in your introduction is that… I'm going to say it this way, is our gospel big enough? Is our gospel big enough to incorporate all the spaces that the people occupy who come into the shared space of the church? And sometimes I think our gospel isn't big enough. I actually have a historical explanation for why this challenge exists. I'll go ahead and share. It works this way, that Christianity was seen as very holistic up until the point of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. You had state churches. Okay? And whatever you think a state church is, the fact that you had state churches says Christianity is designed to apply to every public space. Okay? And then, you had the abolition movement. Okay? Which certainly was, in the way we tend to frame things now, more political than theological, although I would say that, "No, that's not the way to read the space," but that's what happened.

Anyway, so what happened is liberals came along and they said, "Ooh, we like the Christian ethic, but we don't necessarily buy the theological story in the Bible that's underneath it," and they split the two apart. Okay? Conservatives came along and they said, "Ooh, we like that deal, but we're going to flip it." Okay? "We like the theological side of it, and we're going to defend this to death, because the Bible's being challenged. And everything that's over there, that has nothing to do with the Bible, nothing to do with the gospel, et cetera, that's its own separate space." And then, my next line is, what God has joined together let no man put asunder, and both side pulled it apart. And in pulling it apart, then when you go back to try and put it back together and say, "What is that relationship between these two pieces?," you end up in a discussion where, "Well, wait a minute. Does that actually belong together or not?"

And so, people don't see how this could possibly belong together, because we've pulled it so far apart from one another, and then we've labeled it ideologically rather than theologically, and when we do that, we dissipate how big the gospel is, because the gospel not only is designed to save us, it's also designed to reconcile us.

Brandon Washington:

As is your way, you articulated my point in a moment. You just did in 120 seconds what I spent 260 pages doing. I believe we've truncated the gospel and I don't believe that it was one camp versus the other who did it.

Darrell Bock:

That's right.

Brandon Washington:

I believe that each side chose half of the message.

Darrell Bock:

Exactly.

Brandon Washington:

And my goal is to not merely unify us, but to do so by reuniting, redeeming the message and bringing it to its wholeness. Resist the truncation of the message and I think the justice discussion often falls apart because we're trying to seek justice without having the means by which God provides justice in the world. We're trying to get the back half of the gospel without the surrender that the front half requires. And I think that the other camp, it celebrates the sacrifice of Christ, but it's celebrated as a thing that we will experience one day, we'll get the fruits of it-

Darrell Bock:

Or we'll experience-

Brandon Washington:

… one day.

Darrell Bock:

… as individuals and not thinking about what it means corporately.

Brandon Washington:

Oh my goodness. The corporate relevance of the gospel, and the idea that that would require corporate repentance and corporate surrender to that message, that's what we're resisting. I believe that's a Western publication.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I agree.

Brandon Washington:

We're trying to impose a Western value onto a gospel message that is much bigger than Western ideas.

Darrell Bock:

That's right. And just to translate for people, because we're speaking in code. By saying that it's Western, it's so individualized in its focus, and it's directed out of reflection of Western culture being basically individualized. That we miss and don't see the corporate elements and implications that are also wrapped up in that. I tell people, let me illustrate it, we have the Lord's Prayer, right? We call it the Lord's Prayer, because it comes from Jesus. Okay, fair enough. It's actually the disciples' prayer, but the apostrophe goes after the S. And so, we are praying, when we pray the Lord's Prayer, we are praying for one another at the same time, but we don't often recognize that we're praying for one another. We tend to individualize it. And so, it's like a lot of hymns that get expressed in the first person singular and I say, "Man, I would enjoy these hymns a whole lot more if they were expressed in the first person plural." That kind of thing.

So that's what we're talking about in terms of some of the influences. And then, these become, how can I say it? These become blinders, or at least, what's the word I want? Blurred spots in our thinking that need more focus and need more clarity, in order to represent everything that God has intended when we reached out and saved each one of us. And he certainly saved us individually, one at a time, but he saved us for a community and he saved us to see our role in community in the midst of a world that needs what this community represents.

Brandon Washington:

Yes, sir. I think what you're outlining here is not… and this is often the pushback I receive, it's not a new idea, the idea of the corporate representation of our message, the need for corporate repentance and our prayers are extended to one another. God reconciling us to himself and reconciling us to one another. Those aren't new ideas. And I think we can redeem the message if we retrieve the longstanding, well defended old ideas of those communal values, corporate ethics, and a whole gospel message.

Darrell Bock:

And, in fact, it's so important to God, now I'm going to be messing with people, it's so important to God that he says in multiple passages in the Old Testament, and I think he reaffirms it in spots in the New, as well, that if you do not care about how you're relating to your fellow person, then I don't care about your worship. And I tell people, our worship is supposed to be pretty important. I mean, we spend an hour on it every week and it's the main thing that we do when we gather together, so that's pretty important to most people. All right. But God says, "I don't care about that if you don't care about this." And the New Testament passage that shows, it is on the Sermon on the Mount when the remark is made, "If you have something against a brother and you're going to bring a sacrifice, I'm telling you to take a TV timeout, add a two-minute warning and go fix your relationship with your brother before you come bring your sacrifice.

And so, that's making the same point in a different way. And so, those are the images that we're dealing with as we think about this space, which is why I appreciated your book so much, because I thought you made a really full effort to have someone who doesn't share African-American space, to understand how the African-American sees the space that we share, both nationally and in terms of church. And I just thought it was well done, I mean, I'm in these conversations with Black leaders all around the country, and I've had this kind of conversation and sometimes it gets said this way to me, it says, we can't have a meaningful conversation till you understand where I'm coming from and what I've been through and how I see things, which means I have to sit and listen and just work hard at trying to be a good listener. And when you do that, that's that proximity that you were talking about earlier. That's part of what being proximate means.

And then, when we get to the point of talking about genuine repentance as a group, we've shared in that repentance. It isn't that I've applied repentance, so I don't have to go through that space with you. But no, I've come alongside you, and even though I haven't experienced what you're experienced, I've made an effort to try and understand what it is that you've experienced. And therefore, when we get to the point of repentance, we're in a better place to together than we would've been had I not shared that experience alongside of you. That's what you mean by proximity, right?

Brandon Washington:

Absolutely. In fact, you said something earlier that links to this for me. My observation regarding the modernist-fundamentalist controversy is that one of the fundamentalist strategies was isolationism, separate yourself. It's building schools where the fundamentals, as they understood them, were the emphasis of the education, and separating from the world. I would argue that the isolation was not merely immediate, it was not just relational, it was also a historical isolation. Separate ourselves from the values and distinctives of previous believers. It was almost a remodeling of the Christian idea at the expense of its historical worth.

Darrell Bock:

Interesting.

Brandon Washington:

And one of the reasons we try to do that is if you attach yourself, if you're one with the movement, from eras that predate you, and we function corporately, there will be days when I have to repent of my movement's behavior, even if the behavior predates me. On more than one occasion, the individualism that is common to the West was the pushback I'd receive in conversations around this. I wasn't there and I didn't do that. But my consistent refrain on that is, we don't deny the virtues of the movement from previous eras. Let's not isolate ourselves from the failings, and own them, repent of them. It's a witness to the world, if we concede some of those broken moments, concede those moments that are inconsistent with the message we're preaching and publicly repent of them, because we align with the movement, with the camp that committed them. It will be a witness to those who are currently put off by our message and what they perceive to be, sometimes legitimately, and inconsistency between what we're saying and what we're doing.

Darrell Bock:

Okay, so let me illustrate this, and I'm going to do it with something that'll be a challenge, probably, for some of the people who are listening, but I'm going to try it. And I'm going to tell a story, and then I want your reaction to it. This is a conversation I had with someone on our campus, someone who worked on our staff. A student came to them, a Black student came to them, they were white, and said, in effect, "You're a racist." So he came to me later and he said, and was sharing this conversation with me and he said, "I didn't know how to process this. What should I think?" And I said, "Well," I said, "You probably heard one thing, and be probably meant something else."

Brandon Washington:

That is true.

Darrell Bock:

So let me go through this. Most white people, when they hear the term racism think that you've just accused me of having a very malicious attitude towards minorities if you haven't put white sheets over my head and said, "You're a member of the Ku Klux Klan." That's what whites generally hear when they hear the term racism, that there is an active, malicious act towards minorities, particularly towards Black people. And, of course, what the person's reaction is is, "Well, I don't have a malicious bone in my body. I don't have anything consciously malicious that I'm trying to do or do against anybody. I'm trying to live my life as a faithful Christian and have done the best I…" That's the reply you got earlier when the person says, "Well, I never did that." Okay? That's what motivating that. Okay?

And so, then I said to him, "But that's not what he meant. Let me tell you what he meant. He meant that to the extent that you don't care about the society that we function in that continually pushes me down or that risks pushing me down, to the extent that you don't care and don't engage and the society stays that way, I remain in the push down position."

Brandon Washington:

Yes.

Darrell Bock:

Okay? So it's talking about complicity, it's not talking about malice, if I can say it that way. And because we see that term in such different ways, we are literally talking past one another, there's no empathy happening, there's no proximity happening, there's no effort to understand the space where someone else is coming from is happening. And as a result, we miss and then we each continue on our own ways and nothing changes.

Brandon Washington:

Yes. I am reticent to start a conversation regarding any New Testament text in a conversation with you. I'm reluctant to do that, but give me this one moment.

Darrell Bock:

Okay. All right, go for it.

Brandon Washington:

My refrain on moments like that is, are we properly applying the imperative to love your neighbor as yourself?

Darrell Bock:

Exactly.

Brandon Washington:

That is the empathy imperative. Essentially, Christ is saying, as he applies to the New Testament, if you were in the same scenario as this person, what would you need from an observer to help pull you out of those circumstances? And never, never is indifference the answer to that question. Never. Indifference is never an act of loving your neighbor as yourself. Placing yourself in the predicament they're in and being for them, what you would need, if you were in their predicament. The answer is never complacency. That is never the answer to the question.

I don't deny anyone who says, I don't have the capacity to know the inner workings of hearts and minds in the way that individual accusations of racism would require. And I would argue that you're right, and that the conversation regarding racism on the campus there was not an individual confrontation. It was more a matter of do you concede the history that our movement has that results in the present moment, and are you basking in some of the privileges and the benefits that the movement has purchased for us? And are you actively resisting the broken circumstances that we are in? Indifference is not a fulfillment of love your neighbor as yourself.

Darrell Bock:

Exactly.

Brandon Washington:

Are you with me? Are you standing with me? And however God has equipped you, however God has gifted you, are you speaking into these circumstances using your gifts, your strengths, your platform to confront this brokenness with me, because from the perspective of needs to be loved, as you would love yourself, that's what I need from you. And a resistance to that, would land on the one on the downside of a caste system, the downside of a historical racial hierarchy. Bring indifferent to that imperative is properly identified as a racist act.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah. And so, since we're talking New Testament here, and it's good to bring in the Bible, just on occasion when you have these conversations.

Brandon Washington:

Every now and then, yeah.

Darrell Bock:

The other passage that strikes me is the one that involves understanding what it means to be part of the body of Christ, which says, "If one rejoices, we all rejoice. And if one hurts, we all hurt." And so, that's your empathy passage. That's your passage that says, "I am so in touch with the person sitting next to me in church. I am so in touch with the person who is a fellow believer that I am processing their story," and in this case, it's corporate story, their corporate story of how they have to adjust in the life that they have to live. You had a wonderful chapter early on in the book, which talks about we're not talking about assimilation here, we're not talking about making, I'm going to characterize this, making Black people into white people. Okay? We're talking about respecting the cultures that each person represents and saying, "God has made a mosaic out of who we are." And we're supposed to appreciate the depth and beauty of the variation in that mosaic.

And one day, when we all sit next to each other in Revelation 5 or Revelation 7, take your pick, and it's every tribe and every nation praising God, we're going to share that in Heaven together and appreciate it for all that it is. It seems to me that that's what you were driving towards, and the reason I liked where you began the book, is because that was the frame, that was the theological frame that you were coming through. That was not an ideological frame that you were coming through, and that difference is very, very important in this conversation for the church. Because a lot of people are reacting because they think they're getting ideology when, in many cases, what they may be getting is theology.

Brandon Washington:

Okay. Okay, I'm very blessed that you said that. It was very important to me that no one hear my approach to this as ideologically driven rhetoric, and I'm hoping that no one hears partisanship. We tend to think in these terms automatically. So the theology of the matter goes out the window, because we think that by choosing a party or choosing a tribe, all the heavy lifting and the hard thinking is done for us, so we skip all of the process and go straight to the partisanship. I want us to resist that for a moment and just discuss these issues on theological terms, using history as the backdrop. Discuss them on theological terms. I attended a seminary that I love. I love Denver Seminary, and it was a lot of them to drag me from Dallas, because everyone I knew was a Dallas Seminary student. There were times, early on in my Christian life, I thought Dallas Seminary was the only seminary, because I didn't know anyone who did not attend Dallas Seminary. So I attended somewhere I love-

Darrell Bock:

I'm not going to stop you there, keep going.

Brandon Washington:

I forgot where I was. But the-

Darrell Bock:

You love Denver Seminary.

Brandon Washington:

I do love Denver Seminary, but full disclosure, there were times I would notice that my classmates were so immersed in their cultural identity that they didn't realize we're studying theology through that filter. We are evaluating our ideas through that filter. We're applying what we're learning through that filter and they would assume their cultural expectations, their cultural norms, their application of the theology, they would assume that upon me and would even question my Christian identity if I did not land in precisely the same place. There have been friends with whom I graduated from seminary, who asked if I've walked away from the faith. My theology has not changed, and I would argue that I hold to it well and I defend it well. What they're noticing is not a difference in our ideas, they are noticing the difference in how we apply them and it comes down to them expecting me to adopt their culture if I'm going to have what they perceive to be a true Christian identity.

And my question to them is, why can't two legitimate expressions, two doctrinally sound expressions of the common faith, the Lord whom we share, why can't they coexist? Why do they have to be mutually exclusive? Why can't they benefit from one another? And where I need sharpening, I have you, and where you need sharpening, you have me, and we'll have a more comprehensive perspective on the gospel we have in common, if we approach this having one another's perspectives in mind. Instead, the argument is, put down the angle from which you approach the gospel. Put that down and adopt mine. And I would call that assimilation, in its dishonoring of the perspectives that are outside the dominant norm.

Darrell Bock:

Okay, so I'm going to make a metaphor and I want to know what you think, because I think I'm tracking with you. But sometimes when I hear something I say, "Well, let me try it this way and see if I'm actually hearing you." It's like what happened in the music wars in the 1990s and early 2000s, when we had a battle between hymns and praise songs. And I'm sitting here going, all right.I hear the hymn people saying, "Well, our words have substance and we don't say the same thing seven times in 11 verses," however that works. And then, the praise people say, "Yeah, but you do hear the heart and the focus of what goes into a praise song?"

And I'm sitting here going, "Why are you making me choose? Why are you making me choose between the hymn and praise song?" Why don't I come alongside and say, "You know, the hymns do this for me and praise songs do that for me." And I actually am benefited, if I will enter in with empathy. If I will enter in with empathy, I actually would benefit from both side by side, in a way that if I just had one or the other, I would not benefit from.

Brandon Washington:

That's exactly right. I pastor a church in Southeast Denver, that is about 40% Black, it's about 30% white, and the balance is Latino and Asian. And not only do you have that ethnic and cultural distinction, that diversity within one body, we have generational diversity, so the younger adults in the room are young enough to be the children and grandchildren of some of the older people in the room. I assure you, musical styles have been a topic of conversation for us from day one. And my consistent refrain is, we will not choose. We will not choose. As long as the song has theological foundation, if it has a basis in the gospel. If God is the star of the message, we will sing all of them.

And we're not going to have segregation under one roof, where we have a hymn Sunday and we have a contemporary Christian Sunday. That has come up. I will concede the blurred lines that exist between the styles, but I assure you, if we do them long enough, the lines start to become irrelevant and the God of the song, the message of the song, takes center stage. And so, let's stop emphasizing the distinctions between them when their agenda and their message is exactly the same.

Darrell Bock:

Interesting. Yeah. Let's run an experiment here. I want to deal with something that you raise in the book that I think is a good example of the nature of the problem of sharing the same space, but not necessarily seeing it in the same way. And since we've talked so much about empathy and trying to get people to understand, I'm going to ask you to talk about July 4th, and the tension that that represents. Because, for most people, July 4th is a day to celebrate our independence and what a wonderful, great experiment, I'll put it in those terms, America has been and what it offers the world, et cetera. But for a Black person, it's ambiguous.

So I just want you to explain that ambiguity and before you do it, I want to make this kind of caveat as we walk into this, and it's this, that what you're about to hear is descriptive of the historical realities that inform what's about to be said. That's important to just understand that. I've set the table for you as well as I can, and go for it. So July 4th, why is July 4th, generally speaking, harder for the Black community than it is for other people in the country?

Brandon Washington:

Let me briefly tell me where I sit, before I tell you where I stand on that. I celebrate the professed values of our founding documents. And, of course, I stand by the idea of all human beings being created equal by a common creator who bestowed them with inalienable or unalienable rights, and I stand by the language of that. I can do that while conceding, while recognizing that at the country's emancipation, the language and the behavior were inconsistent with one another. And all I'm asking is for us to keep that in mind when you impose certain celebratory obligations upon Black people, around that particular holiday. When I was in high school, I was introduced to a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass entitled What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? And that was the message that made me reassess what it is.

And his argument was not one should not celebrate emancipation or independence, that was not his argument. His argument was, "It is sacrilegious," I'm quoting him now, "It is sacrilegious irony." It is inhumane to force a person to stand before you and deliver the plenary speech celebrating that independence when on the day he delivered that speech he was a criminal, because he was guilty of stealing himself from a Maryland enslaver. He existed in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Darrell Bock:

So you're talking about Frederick Douglass himself. He's describing himself there.

Brandon Washington:

He is. Frederick Douglass is saying to them, "You're asking me to celebrate your independence when the very people to whom you look as the fathers of that independence enslaved my fathers-

Darrell Bock:

So let me say-

Brandon Washington:

… and even now, enslave me."

Darrell Bock:

Okay, so let me paraphrase this. So you're celebrating the independence at the beginning, so this is July 4, 1776.

Brandon Washington:

Yes.

Darrell Bock:

And an emancipation of people who are declaring their independence and freedom from Britain. But at the same time, there were people who were not emancipated, who are a part of that land and a part of that world, that now declaring independence world, who themselves were not emancipated.

Brandon Washington:

Yes.

Darrell Bock:

Until, at least legally, more than 100… well, almost 100 years later.

Brandon Washington:

Almost 100 years later.

Darrell Bock:

And so, the Black person has this, who can I say it? Hybrid relationship to the Declaration of Independence that a white person may not possess.

Brandon Washington:

That is correct. One of the things I took away from that speech from Frederick Douglass, who delivered that speech in the mid-1850s, 1854, I believe, one of the things I took away from that was it is possible for two people or two groups of people to experience the same moment in fundamentally different ways. And because of that, it will effect how each of those groups will interpret the moment. So for those who were among the liberated American populous, they look at July 4, 1776 as a day of freedom, independence. But their slaves didn't see it that way. Their slaves saw it as just another day of bondage. And it's irresponsible to evaluate history from only one of those two perspectives, because it will give you a slanted view of our historical story. It'll give you a flawed view of the narrative.

Darrell Bock:

And that's why I wanted to introduce it as an example, because I think it's an example of something that, perhaps, happens more consistently than we're aware of and why you need the variety of voices that walk into a church building, so that you understand that what you've experienced and what you've gone through is not necessarily what the person sitting next to you, who comes from a different background, has experienced and gone through. And then, we're back to your empathy and proximity thing again, which is empathy means I become a good listener, and proximity means I become a good listener with an attempt not to rebut what I'm hearing, but to actually receive at least sympathetically what I'm hearing with an effort to try and understand.

I tell people, before you go to assessment, you've got to understand where you are first and a lot of times we try and fuse those two together, and when we skip that step, we inevitably will miss something. And this is especially true when people disagree about something. It's very, very important in the midst of a disagreement to have that preliminary step, or else you'll actually end up talking about something without knowing what you're talking about. And so, Brandon, what else would you say to us about that? Let me ask it this way, because your heart's desire, I think, what I hear in the book is a desire to have what I would call a really healthy, worked through reconciliation in the church.

Brandon Washington:

Yeah. I think that you cannot have reconciliation until you have ears that are open to a whole narrative, which means that the two perspectives on history have to coexist. The complication we run into often is we so identify with whatever story holds us up, that we will take any amending of that story, any addition to that story, we will receive that as a personal assault. But it could be that the alternative view is maybe a person adding their legitimate observations of history that are omitted or left out of your story. They're adding them to the comprehensive message. We cannot get to a place of reconciliation until we concede those moments. And instead of resisting the legitimacy of our past, of those bad moments, the legitimacy of those bad moments in our past being a part of our historical story. If we can concede them, and repent of them, and then embrace the one who was injured by those bad parts of our past, we cannot experience reconciliation.

It is one thing for us to say, "I recognize what you've been through, and I want us to grow together and recover from what you've been through. That's one thing. It's an entirely different thing for you to say to someone, "Why don't you just get over it?" That's an offense to a victimized person, to tell them to simply get over something, especially when you identify with the offending party, to tell the victimized family, the victimized camp, they should just get over it. When you identify with the victimizer, that's an additional offense.

Darrell Bock:

You're actually-

Brandon Washington:

But to-

Darrell Bock:

Here's the irony, you're actually asking them to do something that you have not done. In other words, I can see the reply coming back, "Well, you need to get over it. You need to get over it. You need to hear what I'm trying to say to you, and you're not interested." And then, what you get is two bulls, okay, both with horns, running into each other. Okay? And that's not going to reconcile anything, all that's going to do is add injury. I mean, I think what some white people don't understand about the Black community is the level of frustration that the failure to process the Black story is to Black people when it comes from whites, and how that builds up frustration. Tony Evans and I have actually had this conversation, I think, on The Table, that it's like a teapot that just builds up pressure and pressure and pressure. And if you don't relieve that pressure, and empathy is one of the great ways to relieve that pressure, if you don't relieve that pressure, it just explodes.

Brandon Washington:

Yes. Okay, so I think that one of the greatest, and I'll use this word carefully here, one of the greatest offenses, and it's almost weaponized in ways you just described, to do what you just described is the way we handle history. We often treat history as a timeline, instead of a narrative, a story, which allows us to skip some of the hard parts. Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 occurred in 1964, which was after the end of the Civil War, which culminated in 1865, we will make a direct causal relationship, we'll create that from the end of the Civil War to the Civil Rights progress of the 1960s. That ignores nine decades of social bungees that were trying to pull us back to previous times, and the complexities of Jim Crow and red lining and the idea of separate schools and the distinct water fountains. The dehumanization of separate water fountains, it's not something you should expect someone to recover from quickly.

So to just from 1865 to 1964 is a mishandling of my entire story. That's the era in which my father grew up. He is from Natchez, Mississippi. Born during the height of Jim Crow, in what I would call the epicenter of Jim Crow, he raised his children to be mindful of that. To say, "Get over that," is asking me to dismiss formative aspects of my story, which frankly, shaped how I understand the gospel's relevance in a falling world, and how I apply the whole gospel message to reconciliation, both vertically from God to humanity, and horizontally within humanity.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, and I'm reminded, I work very closely with an African-American woman who grew up in East Texas, who's told me stories of how when she would go to, basically a drive-in hamburger place, that the only way she could get food was to knock on the back door and not come into the building.

Brandon Washington:

Yes.

Darrell Bock:

And so, I'm sitting here going, when you're growing up with that as a young person, how does that shape you? How does that form you and what does that mean? And granted, in our world today, generally speaking, that's not happening. Okay? So there's been progress. I mean, we shouldn't deny that, on the one hand, but there are underlying aspects of what that represents that we still deal with today. And to pretend that it isn't there, and we're back to the earlier illustration of to the extent that I don't care about those things or don't engage with those things, and those things perpetuate, those I call it death by a thousand cuts. That damage, that bleeding still happens.

Brandon Washington:

I think that, I want to be careful here, because again, I'm trying to avoid ideology, but I think it's irresponsible to deny systemic racism today. Having said that, even if you do, you'd be hard-pressed to deny historical racism or systemic racism in our past. And our present moment is the last chapter in a series of historical events, which means that all the preceding moments gave rise to the moment that we are in. They shaped the moment that we are in. And there are some practical applications of that. I think that the housing boom of the mid-1950s and the aftermath of Brown v. Board, that resulted in suburbs and it created a wealth gap that we're dealing with even now. If you put aside even those practical realities, those real world tangible realities, you cannot simply tell a group of people, "I know that happened, I know it injured you. I know there has never been a careful, deliberate reckoning or repentance of recognition, a hard recognition of that reality, but get over it."

And, in fact, will cite the gospel, that's happened with me more than once, will cite the gospel as reason you should just get over it. Well, that only adds to this yawning chasm that is growing between Black and white Evangelicals. Frankly, it surprises me that Black Evangelicalism exists to the degree that it does, considering the history that we have, and the role that the church played in much of that history.

Darrell Bock:

And we're rapidly running out of time, in fact, we've run out of time, but we don't have a time limit, so we can keep going. And that reminds me of this, when I get into this discussion, I always go to the prodigal. And the reason I go to the prodigal is because some people say repentance is a biblical idea, and you just need to acknowledge the repentance and move on. But actually, if you look at the prodigal, what the prodigal does is he not only repents, but he apologizes.

Brandon Washington:

Yes.

Darrell Bock:

Okay? So he walks up to his father and he begins by saying… he doesn't just say, "I've sinned against God." "I've sinned against God, and you." He says it directly. He owns what's been done. And then, the beauty of the reception of the father, of course, is that he owns what he's done to such an extent that he says, "I don't even deserve to be treated as a son." Okay? "I've wronged you so much, I don't deserve to be treated as a son." But the father won't have that. Okay? The father says, "No, I go out and get him all the accoutrements that say my son is back." And so, there's something about what I think, what I call deep repentance. There's something about what deep repentance is, that not only says, "All right. Not only am I going to… Okay, I'm changing direction. But I'm going to acknowledge that what I did that's causing me to change direction, I need to be consciously engaged with working through. And if I do that well, than I've had the full spiritual response of what it is I'm being asked to do when I say I've repented."

Brandon Washington:

Dr. Bock, you know I can do this, I believe, because he has done it publicly, but you know Dr. Mark Young. He was a colleague of yours there at Denver Seminary. He's the president of Denver Seminary, and a few years ago we had a moment where we gathered and he gathered with several hundred Black church leaders and he acknowledged the history of Denver Seminary and its role in the broken relationship between the school and many of the churches in our city. And he consulted with me on what to do there, how to handle that. And he went above and beyond my expectations, and among the things that he acknowledged was, "I cannot celebrate the joys of our past. I cannot celebrate the virtues of our past." He would often cite Dr. Vernon Grounds, he in jest refers to him, he says, "If we had patron saints, Vernon Grounds would be a patron saint of Denver Seminary."

Because I cannot recognize Vernon Grounds in our history without also owning the short steps, the failings of out past. I inherit all of them. So as I celebrate one, the virtues, I repent and apologize on behalf of the school for the others. That is a corporate approach to Christianity. That is a recognition of communal sin. Things that predate him. He was not the firsthand assailant in many of these broken relationships, but he, as a part of his leadership, he owned them as a pursuit of reconciliation. That was a turning point, not just for the school, but in the Christian community within our city. And I would contend that that would happen nationally if we as a church, and I use the word deliberately because I am Evangelical, I have not turned from this, I'm speaking from within the house, if we were to own our past and repent of it, and desire restoration as we go forward, it will be a turning point for us nationally and be a witness for the gospel to the world.

Darrell Bock:

One of the things that I think a Christian always has to remember, well two things, is one, they have to never forget where they came from. They came to God because God got his attention when their backs were turned to God. That's the first thing. Second thing is, is that we need God and we need God until God makes us whole, and that hasn't happened yet, which means that we all have shortcomings. We all have things that we do that we shouldn't do or things that we do that ought not to be done. And when we recognize that that's the case, you don't go by and back to the deep repentance idea again, you don't recognize it by saying, "Okay, I'm just going to be different." No, you actually try and come to grips with what brought me here? What caused me to do what I should not have done? And to come to grips with and acknowledge that in such a way that I own my need for God, again.

And when I own my need for God again, that's what keeps us humble. That's also what keeps us dependent. That's what keeps us focused on who God is shaping us to be. He's not done shaping us yet, shaping us to be rather than, perhaps, residing, and perhaps in a misdirected way, and saying, "I am all that I'm going to be." Well, yes, in one sense you are all that you're going to be. You're a redeemed saint, you're set apart to God, you're declared holy because of what Christ has done for you, because of what Christ has done for you. I'll say it one more time, because of what Christ has done for you. But God is also in the business of shaping you to become like Christ at the same time. Okay? And that pressure of that shaping is still a part of our lives that we need to acknowledge.

And so, the beauty of this conversation, and we could spend another hour talking about the other half of this conversation, which is what is it that the Black community needs and how does it need to grow into this space effectively to complete the loop of the reconciliation that we're talking about here? There are conversations to be had there, but I find that they're easier conversations to have once there's a recognition of the pain that's been inflicted.

Brandon Washington:

Precisely, precisely. Whenever I have conversations with… because I'm observing this in my community where the groups that we refer to as BRICs, the Black religious identity cults, they have become a destination for people of color who are leaving the Church and looking for a spiritual or theologically backed experience somewhere else. And the reason they're going to Black religious identity cults is they experience affirmation of their identity there. In fact, I would say they're experiencing an idolizing of their-

Darrell Bock:

Interesting.

Brandon Washington:

… identity there. But the reason that's a draw, is because they are recognized as, from their understanding, they're recognized as less than in the Evangelical camp that they've aligned with for several years. And my consistent message is, while I advocate for the repentance of American Evangelicalism, I had to take a stand among people of color, Black people who are in the same world I am, and say to them that repentance that is not received, that is not responded to graciously is not of the gospel either. That may be the next book, the appropriate response to repentance, but right now the obstacle, I would argue, is not a lack of willingness to receive, it's the absence of the repentance in the first place.

Darrell Bock:

Interesting. So just to fill this out, so when you talk about Black identity groups, is this Black Muslims and other groups like that? Go ahead and name them, because for many people in the white community, they may not even know what their relationship is to the Evangelical Black church and what that migration represents.

Brandon Washington:

Yeah. There are pseudo-Islamic and pseudo-Christian Black religious identity cults. So you you have the Nation of Islam, which would be pseudo-Islamic. It's an Islamic cult. And you also have groups like the Five-Percent Nation, which is a sibling of the… it's actually an offspring of the Nation of Islam. And you have Hebrew Israelites, which is a, I would call it-

Darrell Bock:

That's the one I was hoping you'd mention. Yeah, go ahead.

Brandon Washington:

Yeah. That's a Christianized cult that hyper-emphasizes the presence and role of Black people. Instead of celebrating the Black presence that is legitimately there, the nation of Cush, and movement of that sort and look at the genealogy of Christ himself and seeing that presence there. They will identify the 12 tribes as Sub-Saharan Black Africans, and they will identify people in Black communities in metropolitan cities as the descendants of those people. In the Five-Percent camp, which is an offshoot of the Nation of Islam, Black men are referred to as gods, and Black women are referred to as earths. It is a high standing within the population, and those are a draw.

Setting aside for a moment the absurdity of the theology, I need for people to stop focusing on where people are running and ask, "Why are they going there?" And one of the things I'm pointing out here, is that camp affirms the value of people of color in ways that they're observed is lacking in the Evangelical church. So instead of mocking their destination, let's self-assess and ask, "What did we do? What has happened historically for which we have not repented that results in their decision to flee and run to those aberrant camps?"

Darrell Bock:

So I want to thank you for taking the time to discuss this with us and for the efforts to express yourself in the book A Burning House. I think we've done a good initial dive into the topic. There's a lot more that could be said. I want to thank you for helping us think through what I said earlier, which is God has adopted us, but we haven't adopted each other. And this is a good way to think about how to adopt each other and how to engage with each other in a respectful listening mode that allows us to actually hear about a part of the world and a part of the experience that sometimes we, and now I'm speaking as a white person, as a white believer, that sometimes we don't hear, but that is coming from a voice of a fellow brother or sister in Christ who deserves to be heard, because we're all connected to one another. We're part of this blended family that God has shaped.

Some people say, "Oh, we've never been here before. We've never gone through anything like this." I go, "Have you read the New Testament?" God said, "I'm going to take Gentiles and Jews, whose history with one another was not beautiful." Okay? All right. They were estranged. They did not like one another. They did not want anything to do with one another and God says, "I'm going to make you family through Christ. I'm going to make you family." And the whole New Testament is the story about how God is in the process of making family out of people from varied backgrounds around the one thing that they come to share, and that is they all need God, and they need God through what Jesus Christ has done for them.

And because of that, that's like glue, that not only sticks them to God, it sticks them to one another. And so, and one day, that glue will show itself, when every tribe and every nation gets up and praises God. We all listen to the Messiah together and sing it together and lift up our voice to God together, and we look at one another and we go, "Look at what God has done. Isn't grace amazing?"

Brandon Washington:

That blesses me.

Darrell Bock:

That's where we're headed. That's where we're headed, brother. I want to thank you for taking the time to be with us.

Brandon Washington:

Thank you for having me. This was a blessed time. I appreciate it.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah. And I want to thank you for being a part of The Table. We hope you'll join us again soon. If you want to see other issues of The Table, you can go to voice.dts.edu/tablepodcast, and you can see other topics, as well as this one, other themes related to this topic. And we hope you'll join us again soon.