Tag Archives: Redemption

From Heroic to Demonic: The Defacement and Destruction of Memorials

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56401737af6c43a89576d1b493c59027_18In recent days, we have seen widespread defacing and destroying of many local and national statues and monuments.  It would seem that many names and faces of the past are being subjected to a barrage of contemporary scorn, derision, and opposition.

To be sure, some of these memorials have enshrined people and ideals that probably should never have been celebrated in the first place.  They are, in many ways, reminders of a time of racist oppression and godless subjugation.  As such, an honest admission of wrongly hallowing past evil-doers and the need for corrective action to be taken are positive signs of repentance and restitution.  Perhaps some could be moved to museums and we could learn from their wrongdoings and shortcomings, while still recognizing their positive societal contributions.

But having said this, just how stringent should our standards of enshrinement and retention be?  And when past heroes become disgraced by the changing winds of time, what contemporary criteria are we using to disgrace and discredit them?  One problem with judging the past through the lens of the present is that the blind spots of our age can become the embarrassments and sources of shame in the generations that follow.

One example comes quickly to mind: How will future generations judge our confused obsessions with gender and sexuality?  I suspect, for example, that many of the things we find so noble and defensible in these arenas might well be deemed downright decadent and devious by future generations.

Judging the past with criteria from the present is not wholly illegitimate, but it should always be done with circumspect humility and caution versus a bold and reckless sense of self-righteous indignation.  The standards with which we judge the past will often come back to haunt us in the future.  Our contemporary heroes can just as easily be weighed and found wanting in the scales of future generations since many of the standards are based on the ever-changing spirit of the age.  As such, what is considered heroic in one era is often deemed demonic in the next.

All of this highlights the fact that we should be careful and calculated when we start defacing and destroying long-standing historical monuments.  In a recent example, the Black Student Union and the (rather ironically named) Student Inclusion Coalition are now calling for the removal of a statue of Abraham Lincoln from the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  To be fair, Lincoln was not a perfect man and he only became a Christian later in life.  He had to make hard decisions and compromise politically to preserve a fragile union that all Americans (regardless of race) still benefit from today.  Over the course of his life and career, there was plenty to find offensive and questionable.  After all, we are all deficient and if scrutinized closely enough, will be crushed by the demand for perfection.  The only ones who can stand up to the standard of flawlessness are figments of our own imaginations.  And even these figments will compete with one another if they are not grounded in a transcendent standard of determining who or what is truly perfect.

So, if you are looking for dirt on someone, rest assured, look hard and long enough and you will find it since we are all sinners.  No one but Jesus has led a perfect life, and even He gets a bad rap for the misuse and abuse of His name amongst His followers.

In the end, people are not perfect, but they can add value and teach us important lessons, nonetheless. There is a limit here, of course.  We cannot and should not immortalize just anyone at all.  But we can appreciate those whose lives were worthy of emulation and appreciation for the ways they helped change the world for the better, even if there were things for which they should be ashamed.

It is widely known, for example, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was an adulterer.  His honorable work for civil rights, however, overshadows this immoral aspect of his life.  It doesn’t hurt him much right now since adultery (and fornication, I might add) is not currently considered especially immoral when weighed against the sins of racism and racially-motivated murder, for example.  Every generation has its pet moral outrages regarding certain sins and its blind spots and passes toward others.  In our time, extra-marital sexual expression is deemed more akin to authenticity and normalcy than it is to unfaithfulness and betrayal.

Again, regardless of how you assess his sexual lifestyle, Martin Luther King, Jr. was so much more than that.  He was a hero for his moral courage, his persistent vision of equality, his brilliant wisdom in organizing and standing up peacefully and non-violently against the vicious racism of his time, alongside his willingness to suffer and die for what he knew was right.  We should not overlook his serious flaws, but neither should we overlook his many virtues simply because he was also an imperfect sinner.

One of the beautiful features of scripture is its deep honesty about the multifaceted character of its heroes.  The Apostle Peter was a loud-mouthed, boastful, and cowardly betrayer.  King David was a murderer and adulterer.  But the Bible also tells us what these men (and many more like them) became through the process of humble repentance and glorious redemption.  Their colossal failures did not end up defining them wholesale.  God was able to not just see beyond their sins but transform them for His greater glory.

The irony of all this is that no matter who we choose to glorify and remember, every statue and monument will ultimately fall prey to the eroding sands of time.  Percy Shelley’s haunting poem, “Ozymandias,” poignantly remind us of this:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell its sculpture that well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Rest assured, time will pulverize into powder every attempt to immortalize the merely momentary.  And yet, there is hope.  You will be permanently remembered if you surrender your life to the Risen One who was nailed to a cross to die for your sins and your failures.  And when you trust in Him, He will forgive you and transform your life.  Not only that, at the end of the age He “will also give [you] a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it” (Revelation 2:17).  That stone and that name will never fade away and are reserved throughout eternity for all who love and trust in Jesus.

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The Critical Flaw in Critical Theory

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The recent unjust and senseless deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd are truly tragic and reprehensible.  They represent a growing list of needless deaths in a culture of hate.  As individuals, communities, and a nation, our hearts should be bowed down in empathetic grief and enflamed with righteous anger.

Beyond the legitimate emotions, many are also trying to assess the reasons for the profoundly problematic social realities leading to such deaths.  Foremost are claims of oppressive and systemic racism as well as corporate greed among those in positions of power in America.  This may well be true, but at the grave risk of sounding insensitive and uncaring, I believe such appraisals remain secondary to a much deeper question, namely, the best way to solve these kinds of socially systemic issues.

Contemporary Critical Theory claims to answer the problem through three very basic means: 1) A full reversal of power, demoting previous power-brokers and putting the previously oppressed into positions of influence and authority, 2) Widespread restructuring of oppressive social systems, and 3) Compulsory redistribution of goods and services (i.e., wealth).  To be sure, all three—the redistribution of power, restructuring of systems, and reallocation of wealth—are important problems to address, but they are also very often hard to bring about in a fair and just manner.  The first and third, however, can be achieved fairly quickly, so long as those currently in power can be pushed out of the way and the wealth of those with much can be seized and given to those with significantly less.

This is why Marx and other communist theorists (who form the ideological infrastructure for Critical Theory) had no problem with social coercion and, if necessary, violent armed revolution, to accomplish the so-called “greater good” of a “more equal” society through the forcible redistribution of wealth and power.

There are many ways to argue for or against such goals and means, but one of the most critical flaws in Critical Theory is simply this: At best, it provides an inadequate and (at worst) inaccurate understanding of human nature.  Suggesting that whole classes and races of people in society are, for example, primarily victims or villains fails to admit the root problem—we are all simultaneously victims and villains, damaged and damaging, oppressed and oppressing.  Why?  Because we are all sinners: rich and poor, privileged and impoverished, strong and weak, young and old, male and female, black and white—and everyone in between.  You cannot solve social problems by changing social structures alone.  You have to change the social beings—each and every one of us—that constitute, create, perpetuate, mediate—and even deny or ignore—these unjust social systems.

In short, changing human nature is much more radical and difficult than changing social structures and inequalities.  And changing the latter is extremely hard to do at all, let alone morally and patiently.  Consequently, the proposed solutions of Critical Theory and closely related socialist ideologies consistently fail in practice primarily because the diagnosis of the problem excludes a vital aspect of human nature: No matter who we are, we are far too prone to selfishness, tribalism, and abuse of power than we care to admit.

If these internal problems of greed and hatred are not dealt with deeply at the heart-level, they will fester and grow in the lives of those with influence and resources, no matter where they started in society.  This is why when reversals and redistributions occur, even with the best of intentions, those in positions of power almost always become just like the people they previously condemned for their selfishness, tribalism, and abuses of power.

As David Gooding and John Lennox point out, “A movement, while still a minority, will clamour for the right of free speech and protest against its removal; but when that same movement becomes the majority movement, it will in turn seek to suppress all other minority movements.”

Does government need to be involved in trying to assure a fair and just system of opportunities for power and wealth acquisition as well as their distribution?  Of course.  The solution is not a libertarian divestment of all governmental intervention with the assumption that people will do what is right when big government gets its nose out of everyone’s business.  That falls into the same trap of misunderstanding sinful human nature and our need for constant external and internal regulation—something Christians call accountability.  But since those who govern, just as much as those who are governed, are prone to selfishness, greed, and abuses of power, they also must have systems of accountability—real checks and balances—in place to keep them humble, honest, just, and selfless.

The framers of the US constitution believed in the propensity of every human being to turn great possibilities for good into terrible opportunities for godlessness.  In short, they believed in the doctrine of total depravity.  It was this conviction that led them to create a tri-fold system of checks and balances—legislative, judicial, and executive—so that no one person (or class of persons) would gain too much wealth and power and have the potential to become a tyrannical mass-oppressor.

Critical Theory fails and will continue to fail for many reasons, but the primary reason is that it does not understand who we really are—all of us—as human beings.  We are, first and foremost, sinners in need of a loving Savior, not classes in need of a political revolution.  And this is why John Adams, the second president of the United States, rightly noted, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . .  Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  This is why we need repentance and redemption, not merely reparation and revolution, for our lives and our world to truly change for the better.