The Bible, Critical Theory, and Critical Race Theory, Part 1

Thomas W. Juodaitis

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A Little History

Throughout human history, God’s Word has been attacked, first by Satan, then by those who follow him. The first instance of this was the temptation of Eve and the Fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden as Satan in the form of a serpent asked Eve, “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Genesis 3:1). Ever since, God’s Word has been questioned, attacked, burned, ignored, counterfeited and changed.

Throughout the Dark Ages, the Roman Catholic false Church-State banned the Bible for the “laity” and burned copies of it translated into the languages of the common people. Then at the beginning of the 16th century, Erasmus “laid the egg that Luther hatched” when he published his New Testament Greek text based on the Byzantine texts, lately come out of the Eastern Orthodox church after the Muslims took Constantinople. This became known as the Textus Receptus, the Received Text, which was the basis for all the Reformation translations of the New Testament from Luther’s German to Tyndale’s English, the Genevan, and finally, the King James Version. It was this English Bible that went throughout the world carried by missionaries to the nations which proved to be a “mortal wound” to the Roman Catholic false Church-State. God’s Word was set free, and the true church of Jesus Christ was reformed and grew in a mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the people of God, and the false church was exposed for what it truly was – Babylon the Great who persecutes the true saints of God.

Rome could not defeat the Word of God. Instead, she tried once again to persecute the saints of God. During the Middle Ages, the Dominicans headed the Inquisition, which tortured and murdered millions of faithful followers of Jesus Christ – men, women, and children, even organizing crusader armies to hunt them down and murder them. After the Reformation, it was the Jesuits who not only took the leadership of the Inquisition, but also were more devious, infiltrating Protestant groups by deception, in order to bring back the “heretics” to the pope of Rome, reestablishing Rome’s dominance in the world, and healing the “mortal wound.” This is demonstrated in the Jesuits’ futurist and preterist distractions on the identity of the Antichrist, whom all the Reformers, as well as the Dissenting church throughout the Dark Ages, knew to be the pope of Rome. Futurism eliminates the need to worry about a present Antichrist, he will come only in the Future and be revealed during the “Great Tribulation”; or Preterism relegates to the first century emperor Nero.Unfortunately, most non-Catholics (one cannot call them Protestants because they do not statnd for the Word of God) believe the Jesuits’ eschatology – mostly Futurism, but a few Preterism – instead of the Historicist eschatology of the Reformers and their descendants.[1]

Another tactic of Rome and her Jesuits was infiltration from within and downright taking over Protestant Bible Societies and institutions of higher learning. All of the Protestant Bible societies with the exception of the Trinitarian Bible Society have been taken over by Rome and her Jesuits and are promoting the Critical Text (now known as the Eclectic Text) revised by Westcott and Hort, based primarily upon two early but suspect manuscripts – Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, either discovered or promoted in the 19th century. The manuscript of the Reformation, the Textus Receptus was eschewed for the Vatican influenced Critical Text, which is the basis for all modern English translations, with the exceptions of the KJV and NKJV.[2] Rome employed the strategy of “If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em.”[3]

It is to the 19th century that we now turn. Despite the relative peace of that century, with the obvious exception of the American Civil War or the War of the Rebellion as it is officially called in the records of the United States, there was a great deal of spiritual upheaval during that century. During the middle of that century the rise and growth of cults and false teaching permeated much of the United States and beyond. After the Second Great Awakening of Charles Finney, in the “Burned-over district” of western and central New York state many cults and false teachers arose, such as Charles Taze Russell of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Joseph Smith of the Mormons, and Ellen G. White of the Seventh Day Adventists. John Nelson Darby gave rise to Dispensationalism, which was later promoted and popularized by C. I. Scofield and his reference Bible, again promoting a Jesuitical futurist eschatology. Many of these cults not only cast doubt upon the Word of God, but also offered up their own false “revelations” and false “scriptures.” This has only increased exponentially in the 20th and 21st centuries. With the growth of Protestant sects, the rise of the cults, the concomitant decrease, in the influence of Biblical, Reformed theology, and the rise of unbiblical doctrine, especially Arminianism, Rome could smell blood in the water.Thus, she sent her Jesuits out to make the texts that dealt her “mortal wound” irrelevant by the growth of a new text based on her manuscript – Vaticanus[4] along with other suspect texts. Additionally, the influence of Charles Darwin and his popularization of molecules-to-man evolution gave a rationale for a new theory of history and human development, including how the text of Scripture was approached. Even in the church God’s Providential preserving of his Word was eschewed, extolling instead the skills of the textual critic, who picked and chose what was really Scripture based on “science” not upon providential history (His story) and the divine preservation of the Word of God.

 

Higher Criticism and Marxism

Another stream of this attack upon the Word of God came from the European Continent in German Higher Criticism, which denied the inerrancy and infallibility of the Word of God, denying not only the divine authorship of the Holy Spirit, but even the human writers who were named as the penmen of the books they authored. This attack on the Word of God spread throughout the world, especially in the institutions of higher learning and especially the formerly Protestant seminaries, universities, and colleges. The critic set himself above the text in authority, not submitting to the authority of the Text as the Word of God.

With this attack on the Word of God, all the major doctrines of Biblical Christianity were attacked from Creation ex nihilo to the denial of the doctrines of Christ – his virgin birth, sinless life, his miracles, his resurrection, even to the subsidiary doctrines of the implications of the Christian system, such as the checks and balances of a Christian representative form of government, and the Christian economic system of laissez-faire capitalism. Another Jesuit-influenced movement arose to attack these latter systems – Marxism / Communism. This attack came with the publications of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, especially their co-authored Communist Manifesto (1848) and Marx’s Das Kapital, which Engels financially supported, allowing Marx to research and write. Later after Marx’s death, Engels edited volumes 2, 3, and 4. It is interesting to note that most, if not all of the planks in the Communist Manifesto have been implemented here in the United States, including free (though citizens pay for it through their property taxes) government education and a graduated income tax, not to mention the Marxist holiday, Labor Day.[5]

Satan laid the intellectual foundations of this attack upon God’s Word and God’s people in the 19th century with all the leaders and movements listed above. In the 20th and 21st centuries these demonic philosophies bore much rotten fruit in attacks on the individual, the family, the institutions of society, and the church. The growth in technology was paralleled by the growth in materialism and naturalism. For many, the god of technology and science replaced the true and living God of the Bible. Further, the ideas of Darwin and Marx were applied more broadly to society with the rise of “Social Darwinism” and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, infusing Marxist coloring and interpretation in academia, all of which took for granted a denial of God and his Word. Along with these the eugenics movement attacked life itself, again denying God and his Word. In the church, God’s providential preservation of his Word was exchanged for the new evolutionary viewpoint, the true Gospel of Jesus Christ was exchanged for the “Social,” “Prosperity,” and other false gospels, and true justice and righteousness were replaced by Marxist “social justice,” and Romanist-Marxist liberation theology.

In geo-political terms, the fruit born of these ideas was totalitarian murder, torture, genocide, and “scientific” experimentation on non-consenting people. Again, God’s people were attacked. Rome gained its revenge on the birthplace of the Reformation in the destruction of Germany in the two World Wars. The bloodline of the Old Testament was again sought out to be wiped off the face of the Earth, and the attack was taken to God’s people – believers in Jesus Christ, as witnessed by the increasing attacks and persecutions of Christians all around the world by her enemies – Islam, Judaism, Romanism, and atheist, rather Satanic, governments.[6]

Satan and his followers have marshalled several weapons in this warfare against God, his Word, his Gospel, and his people, such as: divide and conquer; infiltration – “If you can’t beat them, join them;” and “science [knowledge]” falsely so-called. Rome, as Satan’s masterpiece, has utilized these throughout her history, and has especially ramped up their use in the 20th and 21st centuries with the ecumenical movement. Jesuit-influenced Marxism[7] has used the divide and conquer tactic starting with class but more recently pivoting to “race.”[8] Rome and her Jesuits infiltrated and co-opted most of the Bible Societies that translate and publish Bibles for the nations, with the exception of the Trinitarian Bible Society.[9] Further, the present occupant of the seat of Antichrist, Francis is using the climate change hoax (science falsely so-called) to call for a global order to hold nations accountable for not following the draconian measures of the global puppet masters. To be sure, Francis is not alone in this, as the media, NGOs, and many governments are all pushing this agenda with the mantra of “Believe the Science,” and if one does not, he is a “Science denier.”[10]

 

Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School

In the 1930s the demoralization of the West, especially the attack on the fruit of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, that is Western civilization, began in earnest with ideas coming out of the Frankfurt School founded in 1929 at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany and associated with the Institute for Social Research in the decadent and depraved Weimar Republic between the two World Wars. The Frankfurt School incorporated the ideas of Freud, Hegel, and Marx, applying them to the social conditions of the day, being the first Marxist research institute at a German university. Several of the intellectuals associated with it were philosopher Max Horkheimer who began directing the Frankfurt School in 1930, and fellow philosophers, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. They applied what became known as Critical Theory to the social sciences, again using the ideas of Freud, Hegel, and Marx beyond economic and political thought. The American Council of Christian Churches presented a Resolution on Critical Theory at their 78th Annual Convention in 2019 in which they state:

 

Since the 1930s, Critical Theorists have sought to supplant [B]iblical Christianity with their brand of Marxist ideology. They have taught that the Holy Bible should be superseded by the writings of the Frankfurt School [such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas], Liberation Theologians [such as Gustavo Gutiérrez and James Cone], and / or other false prophets [such as Marx, György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, Derek Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Peggy McIntosh, Alison Bailey, Robin DiAngelo, Barbara Applebaum, George Yancy, and Richard Delgado]. Federal headship likewise should not be found in Adam or Christ, but in race, class, gender, physical ability, age, or any combination of these. Sin should then not be exclusively defined as any violation of God’s law in thought, word, deed, or state of being, but today rather should be predicated on one’s proximity to being identified as an older, rich, white, able-bodied, heterosexual male, which is the chief of sinners [according to Intersectionality Score Calculator found at https://intersectionalityscore.com].

Critical Theorists thereby have taught two false gospels, depending on the group to which they say a person belongs. Salvation for a person in an “oppressed” minority group entails 1) an awareness [sometimes called getting “woke”] of their innocent, victimhood status and 2) a relentless push to overthrow the hegemonic power [such as “heterosexual / straight privilege,” “male privilege,” “white privilege,” or “systemic / institutional / structural racism”] in order to attain social justice. The gospel for a person in an “oppressor” group includes 1) a perpetual feeling of guilt [often called “white guilt”] for the group’s collective sins and 2) a life of penance involving endless apologies, reparations, affirmative actions, and silent listening to “marginalized” groups, as well as the mortification of all purported “microaggressions” of sexism, racism, ageism, ableism, cisgenderism, colonialism, misogyny, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity.[11]

 

Further, David Held of Open University wrote the following about the Frankfurt School:

 

Their work set out to expose the complex relations and mediations which prevent modes of production – perhaps the most central referent of the Marxian corpus – from being characterized simply as objective structures, as things developing “over the heads” of human agents. They took issue specifically with the “determinist” and “positivist” interpretations of historical materialism, which emphasized unalterable stages of historical development (driven by a seemingly autonomous economic “base”) and the suitability of the methodological mode of the natural sciences for understanding the stages….

Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, the Institute of Social Research, under Horkheimer’s directorship, pursued research and analysis in a number of different areas including individual identity formation, family relations, bureaucracy, state, economy, and culture. Although what has become known as “Frankfurt” social theory often began from Marxian axioms, many of the conclusions reached ran counter to traditional Marxist theory as their findings highlighted many obstacles to social transformation in the foreseeable future….

Horkheimer and Adorno believed that the products of the great artists of the bourgeois era, as well as those of the Christian Middle Ages and the Renaissance, preserved a certain autonomy from the world of purely pragmatic interests (Horkheimer and Adorno, [Dialectic of Enlightenment] 1947)…. As such, art has a cognitive and subversive character. Its “truth-content” resides in its ability to restructure conventional patterns of meaning.

By their day, the Frankfurt theorists maintained, most cultural entities had become commodities, while culture itself had become an “industry”. The term “industry” here refers to the “standardization” or marginal differentiation, of cultural artifacts (for example, television Westerns or film music) and to the rationalization of promotion and distribution techniques. Without regard for the integrity of artistic form, the culture industry concerns itself with the “predominance of the effect.” It aims primarily at the creation of diversions and distractions, providing a temporary escape from the responsibilities and drudgery of everyday life….

Using many psychoanalytic concepts, the school examined the way society constitutes the individual, producing social character types. They found that in the socialization process, the importance of parents is dwindling. As families provide ever less protection against the overpowering pressures of the outside world the legitimacy of the father’s authority is undermined. The result is, for example, that the male child does not aspire to become like his father, but more and more like images projected by the culture industry in general (or by fascism in Nazi Germany). The father retains a certain power, but his demands and prohibitions are, at best, poorly internalized. The father’s power, therefore, appears arbitrary. In this situation the child retains an abstract idea of force and strength, and searches for a more powerful “father” adequate to this image. A general state of susceptibility to outside forces is created – to fascist demagogues, for instance.[12]

 

Of the utmost importance here is the epistemology of the Critical Theorists. They have rejected the Logos – the incarnated as well as the inscripturated Word of God – from the outset. Thus, they have no sure foundation upon which to build up society and its institutions; rather, their philosophy is destructive of it and them. Like the critics in the Critical Text movement, replacing the Received Text of the New Testament with their so-called improvement based primarily on texts provided by the Vatican, and another of dubious origin found in a monastery being used for tinder, so too have the Critical Theorists shown their rank unbelief by their absolute rejection of the Word of God and their downright attack on Christianity and all that it teaches. Whereas, the textual critics undermined the Word of God, placing themselves above the Word, the Critical Theorists dismissed and attacked the Word of God completely. This goes back to the first doubt and lie planted: “Hath God indeed said…?”

Once the foundation – epistemology based on the Word of God – has been attacked, then all of society and its institutions are fair game to be reinterpreted in light of the Critical Theorists, which they have indeed done.[13] Witness the attacks on the individual, the family, the church, and the state being waged through the carnal weapons of art and culture – both popular and high – through mass media and elite institutions of highbrow culture. Notice also from the above paragraphs the attacks on those things – “the Institute of Social Research, under Horkheimer’s directorship, pursued research and analysis in a number of different areas including individual identity formation, family relations, bureaucracy, state, economy, and culture…. [T]he legitimacy of the father’s authority is undermined.” Without the foundation of the Word of God being the ground of meaning for those things, the Critical Theorists and other sinful people could then conform those things to the ungodly ideas and agendas they were proposing, most often with a Marxist underpinning.

There were two methods for Marxists to take over a country. Early on, it was by violent revolution, and once established, all traditional culture would be quashed, and new Marxist culture would be imposed, as seen in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, leading to Leninist then Stalinist forms of Communism, the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China, and various violent communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and South America. The other method was far more subversive though less violent, at least at first. The Communists would take over the intellectual and cultural institutions and subvert a society. Witness the growth of Marxism in mass culture and in the educational system in the latter half of the 20th century, even as regional and national cultural traditions were dismissed and replaced by those Marxist ideas. The Frankfurt School with its Critical Theory was instrumental in this regard, even as it gained a stronghold at Columbia University in New York.

 

 

From Critical Theory to Critical Race Theory

Voddie Baucham Jr. has traced the roots of Critical Race Theory – CRT (also known as Social, Emotional Learning)[14] through Marx’s Conflict Theory and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School stating

 

Marx viewed society as a group of different social classes all competing for a limited pool of resources such as food, housing, employment, education, and leisure time [Heather Griffiths, Introduction to Sociology 2nd Edition, OpenStax, 2015]….

After the Marxist revolution failed to topple capitalism in the early twentieth century, many Marxists went back to the drawing board, modifying and adapting Marx’s ideas. Perhaps the most famous was a group associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which applied Marxism to a radical interdisciplinary social theory. The group included Max Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, and Walter Benjamin and came to be known as the Frankfurt School.

These men developed Critical Theory as an expansion of Conflict Theory and applied it more broadly, including other social sciences and philosophy. Their main goal was to address structural issues causing inequity. They worked from the assumption that current social reality was broken, and they needed to identify the people and institutions that could make changes and provide practical goals for social transformation.[15]

 

Owen Strachan, another Christian writer, echoes Baucham on the roots of Critical Race Theory flowing from the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School. He writes the following under the heading “Where Did All This Ideology Come From?”:

 

In two words: Karl Marx. And two more: Friedrich Engels. This duo sent shockwaves through the West following the publication of The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Alongside the economic argument, they made this foundational claim: “Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.” Therefore, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave…lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed” [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 9]. This perspective on human identity and societal ordering fit fluidly with Darwinian cosmology, the spread of which Marx cheered in his era….

…In truth, humanity is divided into two groups: saved and unsaved. But Marx reframed our fundamental categories along economic lines—“class struggles,” to be precise. He saw history playing out as a great conflict between oppressors (those who control the means of production) and the oppressed (those who are not economically privileged).

Marx located this critique more specifically in societal institutions. Jeffrey Johnson concisely captures the anti-authority dimensions of the bibliographic wet bomb that Marx (and Engels) sent into society through The Communist Manifesto:

 

Marx believed that the great moral problem of society could be reduced to the institutions of authority within society. He held that because authority by its very nature is oppressive, all authoritative structures and institutions must be destroyed. And when all decentralized divisions of authority have been dismantled, a globalized classless society must take its place in a new world order. In this new world order, people will no longer have to relate to each other as superiors and inferiors, rich and poor, leader and follower. Not until there are no class divisions, diversity, or hierarchical stature of authority will society be free of oppression. Only then will the world be rid of evil and experience utopia. [Jeffrey Johnson, What Every Christian Needs to Know about Social Justice, (Conway, Arkansas: Free Grace Press, 2021), 28-29.]

 

This worldview was rooted in atheism: godlessness. But Marx did not only shake his fist at the divine. He hated the world God had made. He despised what theologians call “creation order.” He wanted to wipe out every trace of divine making from the earth. We quote Johnson again on this count:

 

But most importantly, because our present institutions derive their delegated authority from God, these institutions (individualism, family, church, and state) must first be deconstructed and stripped of their authority in order to fully eliminate God from society. In fact, for Marx, deliverance from the evils of capitalism cannot occur until all traces of God are removed from this world. [Ibid, 29.]

 

Critical Theory would adapt Marx’s categories and critiques in the mid-twentieth century. It applied the Marxist grid not solely to considerations of class, but also to anthropology more broadly. As Marx maintained, everyone is either an oppressor or an oppressed person. The Frankfurt Critical Theorists like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that bourgeois institutions mediated the oppression in question. People outside the cultural mainstream came off as essentially righteous in their struggle against cultural norms. In essential terms, minority groups gained favored status during this time. The challenge to institutions first posed by Enlightenment thinkers gained serious steam as the Critical Theorists challenged the integrity of the “bourgeois” social order.

In fact, reason itself was lost in modern society, driven as it was by capitalist ideology. Commenting on the thought of Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer, Roger Scruton noted that:

 

Reason, he argues, is corrupted by the capitalist order and loses its natural focus in human life…. For bourgeois reason, therefore, humanity is strictly imperceptible. The true critical philosophy is the one that, by turning the gaze of philosophy on philosophy itself, sees the poisoned sources of its own polluted reasoning.

 

Scruton summarizes Horkheimer’s burden: we must “pass beyond philosophy into ‘critical theory’ and discover the true possibility of emancipation, which begins with the emancipation of thought itself.” [Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2017), 138.] In simpler terms, to understand humanity, the Critical Theorists argued that one must recognize the corrupted nature of society, but not only of society—of ordinary reason itself. It is for this reason that Voddie Baucham Jr. has argued that such thinking—including Critical Race Theory, derived from this system—is gnosticism. [Voddie Baucham Jr., “Ethnic Gnosticism,” in By What Standard?: God’s World…God’s Rules (Cape Coral, Florida: Founders Press, 2020), 105-116.] He means that according to this ideology, there is a higher knowledge that only some possess; ordinary perception alone will not do. The structures of reality, whether economic or cultural or “racial” (in our time), may look sound, but they are not. They must be exposed, for they actually contain surging injustice within them. Only some can see this—the woke. …

There is intellectual lineage here. CRT owes its major categories to Critical Theory, which owes its major categories to Marx. Yet this combative mentality of unfair victimization was whispered long before Marx. The ultimate source of this ideology does not sound like the voice of God, but like the slithery hiss of a serpent.[16]

 

Another voice tracing Critical Race Theory back to Critical Theory is Christopher Rufo, a scholar critical of Critical Race Theory. He said the following in a lecture he delivered at Hillsdale College on March 30, 2021:

 

In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left bult its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society….

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, where there were large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.

But rather than abandon their Leftist political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.[17]

 

It should be clear that Marx’s ideas flowing through the Critical Theorists down to the Critical Race Theorists of our day have their roots in what communist Saul Alinsky in his Rules for Radicals wrote in an epigraph:

 

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer

                                   —Saul Alinsky[18]

 

Part 2 of this article will appear in the next Trinity Review.

 

Items Back in Stock

 

We have more copies of The Presbyterian Philosopher: The Authorized Biography of Gordon H. Clark by Douglas J. Douma. The retail price is $37 but are on sale at 25% off.

 

We also have several copies of the older edition of The Pastoral Epistles by Gordon H. Clark with the artwork cover for $9.95.

 

Update on Thinking Biblically

 

Thinking Biblically by John W. Robbins should be ready by the first week of August 2022.


[1]For more on this topic, see the following Trinity Reviews: “Antichrist,” October-December 1994 and “Antichrist 1999,” May-June 1999, both edited by John W. Robbins; and “Antichrist Is Coming, April 15, 2008,” selected by Thomas W. Juodaitis, March-April 2008.

[2]Unfortunately, the footnotes in the NKJV are influenced by the Critical Text.

[3]See the excellent articles by that title in the British Journal The Reformer published by The Protestant Alliance of Great Britain. See also Paul M. Elliott’s republication of them with added notes in the Knowledgebase at www.teachingtheword. org. Also see the April, May 2019 Trinity Review of the same.

[4]See the excellent documentaries on the history of the Bible produced by Adullam Films: A Lamp in the Dark, Tares Among the Wheat, and Bridge to Babylon. See also Trinity Foundation Radio Episode 12 interview with Dr. Wilbur Pickering.

[5]The official Marxist Labor Day is May 1st, and US lawmakers intentionally selected the first Monday in September as the official celebration of Labor Day.

[6]Please see John W. Robbins, “Religious Wars of the 21st Century,” The Trinity Review, August 2006.

[7]See James Arendt, “The True Authors of Communism and Socialism: The Jesuits,” June 19, 2020, viewed July 11, 2022, https://www.jamesjpn.net/government/the-authors-of-communism-socialism-jesuits/, originally in Walt Stickel, “The Roots of Communism: The Jesuits,” http://www. granddesignexposed.com/eisehower/walsh.html. For the Jesuit influence on Mark, the article notes “For five years Karl Marx went to the Jesuit school in Trier, which during the Prussian period was known as the Friederich-Wilhem Gymnasium.”

[8]There is only one race, the human race, but there are different nations or ethnicities. See Acts 17:26: “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.”

[9]Again, the reader may wish to consult the excellent articles referenced in note 3 above.

[10]For more on this see Ronald L. Cooper, “The Bible and the Idolatry of Science,” The Trinity Review September – December 2019.

[11]“Resolution on Critical Theory,” American Council of Christian Churches, 78th Annual Convention, October 22-24, 2019, Faith Chapel, Carlisle, PA, April 25, 2022, https://accc4truth.org/2019/11/14/critical-theory/. All informa-tion in brackets originally in footnotes.

[12]David Held, “Frankfurt School,” A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Tom Bottomore, editor. Harvard UP, 1983, 184-186.

[13]Epistemology will be discussed more in Part 2, especially the epistemology of Critical Race Theory.

[14]See Nancy Huff, “The Dangers of Social, Emotional Learning,” Intercessors for America blog, March 1, 2022, https://www.ifapray.org/blog/the-dangers-of-social-emotional-learning/.

[15]Voddie T. Baucham Jr., Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe, Salem Books, 2021, xii-xiii. Emphasis original, and bracketed information was originally footnoted.

[16]Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel—and the Way to Stop It, Salem Books, 2021, 19-22. All emphasis original, and bracketed information was originally footnoted. For more information on the topic of this last sentence, please see Richard Wurmbrand, Marx and Satan, 1986.

[17]Christopher F. Rufo, “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It,” Imprimis, March 2021, 1-2.

[18]Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, 1971, ix.