Written by Darrell B. Harrison |
Friday, January 5, 2024
Where McKinsey & Company’s definition of equity goes wrong – and this is also where many people misunderstand the distinction between equity and equality — is where it states, “Equity differs from equality in a subtle but important way. While equality assumes that all people should be treated the same, equity takes into consideration a person’s unique circumstances, adjusting treatment accordingly so that the end result is equal” [emphasis added]. You see, true equity doesn’t “adjust” for anything.

And He will judge the world in righteousness; He will execute judgment for the people with equity. – Ps 9:8 (NASB)
In an August 17, 2022, article published on the website of the management and consulting firm McKinsey & Company, titled What Is diversity, equity, and inclusion?, the word equity is defined as follows:
Equity refers to fair treatment for all people, so that the norms, practices, and policies in place ensure identity is not predictive of opportunities or workplace outcomes. Equity differs from equality in a subtle but important way. While equality assumes that all people should be treated the same, equity takes into consideration a person’s unique circumstances, adjusting treatment accordingly so that the end result is equal.[1]
That definition starts off pretty well.
In fact, I wholeheartedly concur with McKinsey & Company insomuch that equity, in practice, refers to “fair treatment for all people, so that the norms, practices, and policies in place ensure identity is not predictive of opportunities or workplace outcomes.” (By the way, another way of saying “ensure identity is not predictive of opportunities or workplace outcomes” is “ensure no individual is discriminated against in order to produce predictive opportunities or manipulate workplace outcomes.”)
That parenthetical comment is important because where McKinsey & Company’s definition of equity goes wrong – and this is also where many people misunderstand the distinction between equity and equality — is where it states, “Equity differs from equality in a subtle but important way.
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Written by Darrell B. Harrison |
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
When viewed through the lens of theological anthropology, we would do well to understand that there are no such categories as “black” people or “white” people (Galatians 3:28). They are merely cultural distinctions that serve only to foster and perpetuate animosity between various groups of God’s image-bearers.

Regarding the situation at Harvard University involving allegations of plagiarism by its 30th president, Dr. Claudine Gay, and the subsequent calls for her to resign from that position, what is fundamentally at the root of that institutional kerfuffle is society’s acceptance of the faulty notion that there is such a thing as human “races.”
The legacy of the 19th-century eugenicist and evolutionist Dr. Samuel George Morton, widely regarded as the “father” of scientific racism and a staunch proponent of polygenesis, the idea that each human “race” was a separate act of creation, continues to cast a long and precarious shadow over today’s culture more than 170 years after his death.
Morton’s poly (many) genesis (origin) stands in stark contrast to what Scripture teaches, namely, that humanity originated from one act of creation (monogenesis), not many acts (e.g. Gen 1:27; Acts 17:26).
But let’s take the Bible out of it for a moment.
Science itself acknowledges that there is no biological or scientific basis for human “races,” a fact to which Harvard’s own website attests: “Contemporary scientific consensus agrees that race has no biological basis, but scientific racism still exists. While it’s now more subtle than craniometry, its long history demonstrates the influence social ideas about race can have on supposedly unbiased research.”[1] Conversely, the late Dr. Robert Wald Sussman, in his book “The Myth of Race,” said,
What many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality. Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race. There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be considered human “racial” characteristics. There is no inherent relationship between intelligence, law-abidingness, or economic practices and “race,” just as there is no relationship between nose size, height, blood group, or skin color and any set of complex human behaviors. However, over the past 500 years, we have been taught by an informal, mutually reinforcing consortium of intellectuals, politicians, statesmen, business and economic leaders, and their books, that human racial biology is real and that certain races are biologically better than others. The biologically deterministic, racist worldview…has been tested and disproven consistently and yet its proponents have remained resistant to all empirical scientific evidence for more than 500 years.
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Written by Darrell B. Harrison |
Saturday, October 14, 2023
The Pharisees knew, ironically, as a result of their own zealous study of the Law, that no mere mortal — and every mortal is a sinner (Gen. 6:5; Eccl. 7:20; Lam. 3:39; Rom. 3:23) — could ever make a blind man see. They knew that whoever could perform such a miraculous and merciful act would have had to be as holy, pure, righteous — and sinless — as God Himself. Which is to say, he would have to be God incarnate.

Recently, as I was in my home office studying John 9:13-16, I was taken aback at the blindness of the Pharisees who, upon hearing that Jesus had healed a blind man (John 9:13) — from the formerly blind man himself (John 9:15) — complained only that Jesus has dared to perform such a fete on the Sabbath (John 9:16).
What hardened hearts the Pharisees had (John 9:41)!
To be so obdurately tethered to the Law as to ignore the literal eye-witness testimony of something that was humanly impossible is, frankly, astounding! It is no wonder, then, that Jesus would so severely admonish the Pharisees, saying, “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind” (John 9:39).
Nevertheless, despite their self-righteous incredulity, the one thing for which I do give the Pharisees credit is that they at least appeared to have understood that no sinful person could ever have done what Jesus did by restoring sight to a man who was congenitally blind. That the Pharisees knew this is affirmed by their posing the following rhetorical question in John 9:16, “How can a sinful man do such signs?” [emphasis added]
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Written by Darrell B. Harrison |
Saturday, August 19, 2023
Scripture teaches that all good gifts come from God (Eccl. 2:24-25; 1 Tim. 6:17b), and music is one of God’s good gifts. Sadly, however, many professing Christians today view music as an idol, a “golden calf” that they serve and worship and that they do not want to part with (Ex. 32:4). But as those who have been spiritually reborn in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 2:20), we must not carry on as if music, or any other medium of entertainment in which we engage, is somehow a separate area of our lives to which God’s Word does not apply. 

As professing Christians, the music we choose to listen to can have an adverse effect in terms of our walk with, and witness for, Jesus Christ. Regardless of genre, music can be a tool the enemy uses to draw believers into a state of dullness and apathy about the things of God which, consequently, can impede our spiritual growth (Col. 1:10; 1 Pet. 2:2; 2 Pet. 3:18). As the seventeenth-century Puritan, William Spurstowe (1605-1666), warns in his book The Wiles of Satan, 
“Satan is wholly bent to evil, and makes it his only study to dive and search into men so that he may better fasten his temptations upon them. . . . He does not go forward a step without noting every man’s estate, temper, age, calling, and company so that he may with greater advantage tempt to evil, and thereby bring men into the same misery and condition as himself.”[4]
Music, as well as other forms of media, is not merely a static proposition. What I mean is that the music we choose to listen to never only enters our ears and that is as far as it goes. It is also through our ears that music—and the messages it conveys—enters our minds and, subsequently, our hearts.
There is a dimensional relationship between the music we listen to, our mind, and our heart (1 Sam. 16:23; Ps. 71:23; Prov. 25:20; 1 Cor. 14:15). That is why biblical discernment is so important (Phil. 1:9-10). As Dr. Burk Parsons, senior pastor of Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Florida, writes in the July 2017 issue of Tabletalk magazine,
“Entertainment affects our minds, our homes, our culture, and our churches. Consequently, we must be vigilant as we use discernment in how we enjoy entertainment—looking to the light of God’s Word to guide us and inform our consciences.”[1]
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Written by Darrell B. Harrison |
Friday, November 5, 2021
I believe it to be no disservice to the memory and legacy of Lemuel Haynes to say that the words of W. H. Morse are applicable also in describing what the Reformation accomplished—and is still accomplishing—in that it “revealed the Lord” to many from whom he had beforehand been hidden because of heretical teachings. But praise be to God that, as the apostle Paul declared in 2 Corinthians 3:16, “whenever a person turns the Lord, the veil is taken away” (NASB).

I am a first-generation Reformed Christian. Having been raised in the ecclesiastical tradition commonly referred to as the Black Church, terms such as reformed theology and doctrines of grace were never mentioned. Nor were such names as John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, or Jonathan Edwards referenced or cited. Puritans theologians such Thomas Watson, John Owen, and John Bunyan were equally absent from the preaching I sat under. And the only Martin Luther that I ever knew was the noted civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who, interestingly, had his birth name (Michael) changed to Martin by his father in honor of the great sixteenth-century German reformer.1
Notwithstanding the supernatural role the sovereignty of God played in providentially exposing me to Reformed theology in 2009, it was faithful men like John MacArthur and the late R. C. Sproul who were instrumental in my coming to embrace Reformed theology. But of the five Solas that comprise the doctrines of grace—Sola Gratia (grace alone), Solus Christus (Christ alone), Sola Fide (faith alone), Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone), and Soli Deo Gloria (glory of God alone)—it was the doctrine of Sola Gratia that was especially life-changing for me as God used that doctrine to free me from the erroneous doctrine of salvation by works that I had been taught for many years, a doctrine Charles H. Spurgeon described as “criminal.”2
As an historic event, the Protestant Reformation may very well have been ignited on October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church doors in Wittenberg, Germany. But today, more than five centuries later, the Reformation has become much more to me than a date in history. For me, the Protestant Reformation isn’t simply an occasion to be marked annually on a calendar, but is something very personal, because it is the Reformation that led to my own spiritual reformation; it was the doctrines of grace that God used to remove a veil of ignorance that had for decades blinded me to the truth.
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