THE PURITANS’ NETWORK

ADDITIONAL ARTICLES SERIES

A Call to Return to the Mainstream Reformation View of African American Slavery

 by J. Parnell McCarter

 

Date 9/21/2020

 

It is to be lamented that so many professing Reformed Christians have fallen into line with modern Babel’s view regarding African American slavery in American history. We are not compelled to seek a return to African American slavery in order to appreciate that Rev. Cotton Mather’s analysis in the following work (available at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas ) was essentially sound and in line with Biblical doctrine:

 

The Negro Christianized. An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity (1706)

 

Instead, many have swallowed a philosophical view so contrary to Biblical doctrine as Critical Race Theory, and Critical Theory upon which it is based:

 

"...Critical theory (GermanKritische Theorie) was first defined by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of sociology in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", in which it is described as a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. Wanting to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy...He described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory 

 

What in the world does a philosophy rooted in Marxism have to do with Biblical Christianity?  It is like trying to mix oil and water.