Yet Another Response From Kwon and Thompson

Continuing on the work of three episodes from last week – ‘An Interesting Back and Forth About Reparations,’ ‘Reviewing the DeYoung TGC Review of Reparations,’ and ‘Unpacking the Response to the DeYoung TGC Review’ – check out those earlier episodes for more on this topic.

Kwon and Thompson have struck once more their hammer blows against DeYoung’s review of their book. Publishing ‘Distinctively Christian? An Additional Response to Reverend Kevin DeYoung’ at The Front Porch, they get more into the substance of DeYoung’s criticism this time. Mercifully, they are more succinct. Yet tragically, they are not more correct than they were before.

Consider again the poem by 18th century Englishman Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism: Part 2.’

“A little learning is a dang’rous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.”

For our part, perhaps reading the entirety of that long poem would be a better use of our time than studying overmuch the tired and very old complaints of Kwon and Thompson.

How Long a Generation Is

Like the house of Israel to which the prophet Ezekiel delivered the word of Yahweh, they contradict the justice of God and say that “The way of the Lord is not right.”

And what is it that Ezekiel 18 says?

“Therefore I will judge you, house of Israel, each according to his conduct,” declares the Lord GOD.”

Even if Kwon and Thompson were correct that we, like the 18th century bishop Tillotson arbitrarily reasoned, should limit restitution for theft to one generation, they wrongly claim that only one generation has passed since Jim Crow laws were struck down in America. 

A quick search of the internet for how long a generation is tells us simply enough that it spans 20-40 years. And even if we take the upper range value and judge the White American Church with the same strictness with which God judged the children of Israel who grumbled against him on the edge of Canaan, we are now more than a generation removed from 1965 – over 50 years ago. So their argument fails here too.

Yet they persist in accusing and condemning the White American Church in the present unjustly on these grounds. And even God himself would seem to be guilty of White Supremacy, in their view, where God gives the Promised Land to the next generation of Israelites after their grumbling generation – save Joshua and Caleb – died in the desert.

Social Justice apparently recognizes no statute of limitations, nor does it respect individual guilt and innocence. Whatever their protests to the contrary, their argument is as simple as all White Americans being guilty merely by virtue of being born White.

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