Thumbnail image by Pieter Damsteegt
On November 1, at the NAD Year End Meeting, executive committee members were given a presentation by Mrs. Krause (associate director of PARL and editor of Liberty Magazine) on the Doctrine of Discovery.
During the presentation, she suggested that this doctrine has implications for the Great Commission.
Krause acknowledged that she’d only scratched the topic of a highly complex issue. But, she said, “the most relevant point for our purposes is that historically, this doctrine has relied upon the distortion of a number of Christian or biblical ideas such as the great commission — ‘go ye therefore into all the world;’ or Romans 13, an interpretation some have said to mean a divine mandate to rule; or the Exodus narrative, the idea of a divinely favored nation going to another land to possess and occupy another land.”
Many Christian denominations are now grappling with how this doctrine has shaped our law and world. “They're also seeking to acknowledge that, at times, Christianity itself has been perverted to justify acts of colonization and oppression.”
This is true. Several increasingly woke denominations are pursuing this line of thinking as the next step in critical theory.
Delegates learned that a writing committee researching the Doctrine of Discovery will present their findings at next year’s NAD YEM. The committee, chaired by Campbell Page, the Indigenous Ministries director of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Canada (SDACC) and an Indigenous Canadian, will work on crafting a division statement. Other committee members include Bettina Krause, Rick Remmers, NAD assistant to the president, Celeste Ryan Blyden, executive secretary of the Columbia Union Conference, and Kenneth Denslow, president of the Lake Union Conference.
Speaking to this initiative, G. Alexander Bryant, NAD president, stated, “Sometimes when you don’t have a seat at the table, your voice is not heard. And what we are trying to do is be a vehicle for this voice to be heard in the church, … so [Indigenous people] know they’re part of our family and we are part of theirs.”
Commentary
And what are the driving concepts of critical theory? That every person or group is either an oppressor or oppressed. If you are caucasian, you are part of an oppressor class by virtue of your intersectional identity.
To correctly identify the problem then, you must locate a sufficient number of victims. This is how victimhood is subsidized in America. Intersectionality was invented to identify new victims for this new racial religion. The more boxes you can check off, the more suited you are to be a member of the new critical racialized religion.
But intersectionality is based upon a completely godless view of humanity. The truth about humanity is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and having offended our Maker, our only hope of redemption is through the gift provided for our salvation, Jesus Christ. Intersectionality recognizes no gospel reality in its quest to create an interlocking hierarchy of victims.
In the spiritual realm, another religion may be the product of a culture, and culture may not be criticized. It must be accepted as valid for the person holding it. The idea of trying to win a person from one faith to another is immoral. All religions are of equal merit and legitimacy, so any attempt to replace one with another is oppression. On these grounds the Christian missionaries who went out from Europe or America, were in fact, oppressors, imposing a foreign religion on innocent victims. Small wonder that those who accept critical theory’s values now avoid all efforts of evangelism.
The notion of melding into a family of God becomes a reject. The impact of such critical thinking increasingly invades our church today.
This has nothing to do with warning the world about the Three Angels’ Messages. It is a mishmash of progressive leftist thought where virtue signalling replaces Christian sanctification and apologies replace missionary courage. It is rooted in cultural Marxism and critical theory. And it is—in our opinion—a complete waste of time.
You may see it differently.
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“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15).