Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For May 22, 2019

May 18

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost on a biblical perspective on modern oppression. In his discussion on oppression, he only mentions the oppression exercised by those groups he opposes. This occurred in the Heidelblog.

What is interesting in Clark's list of where oppression has taken place is that it only includes those for those whom Clark opposes: Communists, Nazis, abortionists. Clark did not include the number of Native Americans killed by the ethnic cleansing that took place in America. And though I am sure that Clark opposes both slavery and what Jim Crow was, the stats for the number of those killed by American white supremacists was missing to. Missing too was the number of Vietnamese civilians who were killed by the American war there despite the initial protests of Allies like Great Britain who supported the Geneva Accords. The Geneva Accords called for a democratic solution to the question of reunifying the North and South.

In addition, those killed by oppressive regimes that were or are supported by our government were not mentioned. The number of people killed by the Shah's secret police after we helped a coup that toppled the then democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953. And similar actions took place where we supported other coups that replaced democratically elected leaders with tyrants such as in Guatemala in 1954 and Chilé in 1973. In addition, we interrupted the democratic process in Greece in 1967 and replaced it with a military dictatorship because it appeared that the Left might win the election. Or how many are killed by Saudi Arabia's royal family or el-Sisi's police in Egypt?

Likewise Clark did not include the terrorism we supported which was practiced by the Contras in Nicaragua during the 1980s or the terrorism practiced by military and paramilitary troops we trained in El Salvador during the same time period.

Another missing number was the number of Iraqi children who died as a result of the US-UK led sanctions during the 1990s.

If we are really concerned about oppression, we will not care about the identity of its practitioners. Instead, we will be enough concerned to point out any significant oppression that occurred despite our ties with the oppressors. That was not practiced in the above article. Is it possible that those omissions are the result also the result of sin?


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To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost on how the Church is not to try to challenge oppression in order to help the oppressed. This appeared in Heidelblog.

also see https://www.agradio.org/the-late-modern-oppression-olympics-in-biblical-perspective-3.html

The response below will be to the full article on which the above post is based.
One problem with claiming that Christianity is not oppressive is to look at Church history. Church history is replete with examples of Christians oppressing others.

If we add to that Clark's claim that relieving the poor, which was a job for the Old Testament Church, is not a job for the New Testament Church and neither is trying to end earthly oppression, the problem becomes daunting and perhaps impossible to solve.
The challenge to Clark's position that the Church is only responsible for its own and is not to contribute to ending the oppression of others, one only needs to bring up what happened when American troops captured Nazi death and/or slave camps during WW II. So incredulous and offensive was the discovery that then General Eisenhower commanded his troops to force the nearby townspeople to tour the camps built in their nation's name. He did that so they could see that they, in part, were complicit with the horrors that took place.

Thus, according to Clark's logic, Eisenhower was wrong to make any German Christians feel partially responsible for the horrors that took place in those camps. It was not the responsibility of any Christian living there and then, according to Clark's logic, for what happened in those camps. That is because the Church is only responsible for its own.

The grounds for Clark's conclusions rests in both the lack of New Testament commands and examples of helping the poor outside of the Church as well as the fact that 'Jesus was not a social utopian.'

But helping to relieve oppression does not imply one is a social utopian. Just because liberal Christianity reduced the Gospel to helping and defending the vulnerable does not imply that helping and defending the vulnerable is wrong. Where liberal Christianity missed the boat there was not in the mere helping and defending the vulnerable, it was in reducing the Gospel to helping and defending the vulnerable. There is much more to the Gospel than that.

Furthermore, we are commanded to do good and there are places in the New Testament where the command to help those who were  vulnerable, such as the poor or orphans, doesn't distinguish between the vulnerable who are Christians and those who aren't (Galatians 2:10; James 1:26-27).

Also, challenging oppression involves not just trying to help the oppressed, it involves calling the oppressor to repentance. Of course we might ask Clark whether oppressing others is a sin only if the oppressed are Christians. But other than that, how can calling oppressors to repent not be the job of the Church? It was the approach taken by the peaceful side of the Civil Rights movement. That leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. took. For in calling the oppressors to repent, King and many of those with him did so with an awareness that they too were sinners. That is a perspective that is sorely missing in many of today's social justice movements.

We might also want to consider that when we call ourselves Christians, everything we do and say as well as not do and not say is associated with our faith and our Savior. To be silent in the face of oppression and thus complicit with its atrocities links that oppression and its atrocities with the Gospel and with Christ when we take Clark's approach of not working to end oppression.

Also, we might want to challenge Clark's approach to the New Testament. By the same logic he uses in reading the New Testament, we could easily conclude that we are not to vote in elections. Why? It is because there is neither a command to vote or an example shown by any of the Apostles of voting. Of course we should note that they didn't have elections in Paul's day like they have now. And so neglecting to mention voting is based on misusing the Scriptures. But isn't that the point? The reason why we don't see certain instructions either given or carried out in the New Testament is because we live in significantly different circumstances than Christians did in Apostolic times.

Finally, what is most tragic here is that Clark is a professor of Church History. And Church History is replete with examples of the Church siding with the rich and powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. To remain silent in the face of sin, and oppressing people is sin, is to side with that sin. Thus to remain silent before the oppressor is to side with the oppressor. With those examples comes eventual unnecessary persecutions of the Church and discrediting of the Gospel because the Church had sided with the oppressor.