WA Schools Adopt Race-Based Discipline, White Students to get Harsher Punishment
Democrats passed a law implementing cultural competency standards and training for schools and school boards. The intent was to provide tools that will lead to “dismantling institutional racism in public schools.” If this sounds like language that would come from CRT evangelists, you’d be correct.
A Washington school board butted heads over a new student discipline policy that considers a student’s race before deciding on a punishment.
The Clover Park School District debated its new “culturally responsive” student discipline policy. It means student discipline would not be consistent based on conduct. Instead, a school considers a student’s race and background. It would likely offer harsher punishments to white students, even if the conduct is identical to that of a Black or Hispanic student.
The disparate treatment is championed in the name of inclusion. But it’s not just a Clover Park School District controversy.
The culturally responsive policy impacts every Washington school district after Democrats passed a law institutionalizing critical race theory in student discipline.
Culturally Responsive Discipline gets Support
The Clover Park School Board adopted a revised student discipline policy at its March 14 meeting by a vote of 3-2. At times, the meeting was contentious as two board members argued it’s wrong to use race to determine punishment. The district is majority-minority, with 28% white students.
According to the policy, disruptive students may face “exclusionary as well as positive and supportive forms of discipline.” But the focus, the policy maintains, is to keep students in the classroom and provide “equitable educational opportunities.”
To make student discipline outcomes more “equitable,” the policy must meet “individual student needs in a culturally responsive manner” via “culturally responsive discipline.”
The state officially defines “culturally responsive” as “knowledge of student cultural histories and contexts, as well as family norms and values in different cultures; knowledge and skills in accessing community resources and community and parent outreach; and skills in adapting instruction to students’ experiences and identifying cultural contexts for individual students.”
In practice, it means favorable treatment of racial minorities.
Race-Based Discipline
The two conservative members of the Clover Park School Board asked what is meant by the term “culturally responsive discipline.” Deputy Superintendent Brian Laubach attempted to explain.
“Essentially they’re referring there, that you look at ‘are you dispersing discipline across the ethnicities, the racial groups equitably,’ right?,” Laubach said. “So, are you disciplining African-American boys more than you’re disciplining white boys, right? So, are you paying attention to all of that in your data?”
He continued by listing some specific data schools would need to compile on student discipline.
“What are their backgrounds? Ethnicity? That sort of thing can be commented in that way about it. Then, asking classroom teachers, asking administrators who dispense that discipline, you know, what brought that about over the other forms of discipline you used in your classroom to make a change happen before sending a kid out, perhaps, for a behavior violation,” Laubach said.
Conservative board member pushes back
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Does It Really Matter Whether Adam Was the First Man?
It has been my contention that the identity of Adam, and his role as the physical progenitor of the human race, are not such free or detachable doctrines. The historical reality of Adam is an essential means of preserving a Christian account of sin and evil, a Christian understanding of God, and the rationale for the incarnation, cross, and resurrection. His physical fatherhood of all humankind preserves God’s justice in condemning us in Adam (and, by inference, God’s justice in redeeming us in Christ), and it safeguards the logic of the incarnation. Neither belief can be reinterpreted without the most severe consequences.
Evangelical Christians have generally resisted the demythologization of the Gospels whereby, for example, the resurrection of Jesus is interpreted as a mythical portrayal of the principle of new life. Indeed, they have argued strongly that it’s the very historicity of the resurrection that is so vital. However, when it regards the biblical figures of Adam and Eve, there has been a far greater willingness to interpret them as mythical or symbolic.
The simple aim of this article is to show that, far from being a peripheral matter for fussy literalists, it is biblically and theologically necessary for Christians to believe in Adam as a historical person who fathered the entire human race.
Adam Was a Historical Person
Textual Evidence
The early chapters of Genesis sometimes use the word ’ādām to mean “humankind” (e.g., Gen. 1:26–27), and since there is clearly a literary structure to those chapters, some have seen the figure of Adam as a literary device, rather than a historical individual. Already a question arises: must we choose? Throughout the Bible we see instances of literary devices used to present historical material: think of Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night, or the emphasis in the Gospels on Jesus’s death at the time of the Passover. Most commentators would happily acknowledge that here are literary devices being employed to draw our attention to the theological significance of the historical events being recounted. The “literary” need not exclude the “literal.”
The next question then must be: does the “literary” exclude the “literal” in the case of Adam? Not according to those other parts of the Bible that refer back to Adam. The genealogies of Genesis 5, 1 Chronicles 1, and Luke 3 all find their first parent in Adam—and while biblical genealogies sometimes omit names for various reasons, they are not known to add fictional or mythological figures. When Jesus taught on marriage in Matthew 19:4–6, and when Jude referred to Adam in Jude 14, they used no caveats or anything to suggest they doubted Adam’s historical reality or thought of him any differently than they did other Old Testament characters. And when Paul spoke of Adam being formed first, and the woman coming from him (1 Cor. 11:8–9; 1 Tim. 2:11–14), he had to be assuming a historical account in Genesis 2. His argument would collapse into nonsense if he meant Adam and Eve were mere mythological symbols of the timeless truth that men preexist women.
Theological Necessity
We can think of these passages as circumstantial evidence that the biblical authors thought of Adam as a real person in history. Circumstantial evidence is useful and important, but we have something more conclusive. The role Adam plays in Paul’s theology makes Adam’s historical reality integral to the basic storyline of the gospel. And if that is the case, then the historicity of Adam cannot be a side issue, but part and parcel of the foundations of Christian belief.
The first exhibit is Romans 5:12–21, where Paul contrasts the sin of “the one man,” Adam, with the righteousness of “the one man,” Christ. Paul is the apostle who felt it necessary to make the apparently minute distinction between a singular “seed” and plural “seeds” (Gal. 3:16), so it’s probably safe to assume he was not being thoughtless, meaning “men” when speaking of “the one man.” Indeed, “the one man” is repeatedly contrasted with the many human beings, and “oneness” underpins Paul’s very argument—which is about the overthrow of the one sin of the one man (Adam) by the one salvation of the one man (Christ).
Throughout the passage, Paul speaks of Adam in the same way he speaks of Christ. (His language of death coming “through” Adam is also similar to how he speaks of blessing coming “through” Abraham in Galatians 3.) He is able to speak of a time before this one man’s trespass, when there was no sin or death, and he is able to speak of a time after it—a period stretching from Adam to Moses. Paul could hardly have been clearer: he supposed Adam was as real and historical a figure as Christ and Moses (and Abraham). Yet it is not just Paul’s language that suggests he believed in a historical Adam; his whole argument depends on it. His logic would fall apart if he was comparing a historical man (Christ) to a mythical or symbolic one (Adam). If Adam and his sin were mere symbols, then there would be no need for a historical atonement; only a mythical atonement would be necessary to undo a mythical fall. With a mythical Adam, then, Christ might as well be—in fact, would do better to be—a mere symbol of divine forgiveness and new life. Instead, though, the story Paul tells is of a historical problem of sin, guilt, and death being introduced into the creation, a problem that required a historical solution.
To remove that historical problem of Adam’s sin wouldn’t just remove the rationale for the historical solution of the cross and resurrection; it would transform Paul’s gospel beyond all recognition. Where did sin and evil come from? If they were not the result of one man’s act of disobedience, there seem to be only two options: either sin was there beforehand and evil is an integral part of God’s creation, or sin is an individualistic thing, brought into the world almost ex nihilo by each person. The former is blatantly non-Christian in its monist or dualist denial of a good Creator and his good creation; the latter looks like Pelagianism, with good individuals becoming sinful by copying Adam (and, presumably, becoming righteous by copying Christ).
The second exhibit that testifies to the foundational significance of a historical Adam to Paul’s theology is 1 Corinthians 15:21–22 and 45–49. Again, Paul unpacks a tight parallel between the first man, Adam, through whom came death, and the second or last man, Christ, through whom comes new life. Again, Adam is spoken of in the same way as Christ. Again, Adam is seen as the origin of death, as Christ is the origin of life.
At this point in 1 Corinthians, Paul is at the apex of a long argument dealing with problems the Corinthian Christians had with the body. As the ultimate answer to their pastoral problems, Paul set out to give them confidence in the reality of their future bodily resurrection by demonstrating the historical fact of Jesus’s bodily resurrection. The historical reality of Jesus’s resurrection is the linchpin of his response. That being the case, it would be the height of rhetorical folly for Paul to draw a parallel between Adam and Christ if he thought Adam was mythical. For if the two could be parallel, then Christ’s resurrection could also be construed mythically—and Paul’s whole letter would lose its point, purpose, and punch.
If I have accurately represented Paul’s theology in these passages, then it is simply impossible to remove a historical Adam from Paul’s gospel and leave it intact. To do so would fatally dehistoricize it, forcing a different account of the origin of evil requiring an altogether different means of salvation.
Is There a Third Way?
Denis Alexander has proposed—substantially elaborating on a theory put forward by John Stott (Understanding the Bible, 49)—that there is a way of avoiding the sharp dichotomy between the traditional view of a historical Adam and the view that such a position is now scientifically untenable (Alexander, chs. 9–10). That is, while we should definitely see Adam as a historical figure, we need not believe he was the first human. According to Alexander’s preferred model, anatomically modern humans emerged 200,000 years ago, with language in place by 50,000 years ago. Then, around 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, God chose a couple of Neolithic farmers, and to them revealed himself for the first time. Thus he constituted Homo divinus, the first humans to know him and be spiritually alive.
It is an ingenious synthesis, to be sure, deftly sidestepping the theological chasm opened by denials of a historical Adam. But it has created for itself profound new problems. The first is raised by the question of what to make of Adam’s contemporaries, those anatomically modern humans who, Alexander says, had already been populating the world for tens of thousands of years. He wisely maneuvers away from understanding them as anything less than fully human, emphatically affirming that “the whole of humankind without any exception is made in God’s image, including certainly all the other millions of people alive in the world in Neolithic times” (238). To have stated otherwise would have landed him in a particularly unpleasant quagmire: the aboriginal population of Australia, who, according to Alexander, had already been living there for 40,000 years before Adam and Eve were born, would otherwise be relegated to the status of non-human animals. And presumably the parents of Adam and Eve, also being non-human animals, would then—along with the Australian aborigines—be a legitimate food source for a hungry Homo divinus.
In avoiding all that, Alexander’s proposal founders on, if anything, even more hazardous terrain. The crucial move is made when he explains what exactly set Adam and Eve apart from their contemporaries. When they were born, he suggests, there was already a vast Neolithic population to be found in God’s image. What then happened to set Adam and Eve apart as Homo divinus was simply that “through God’s revelation to Adam and Eve . . . the understanding of what that image actually meant, in practice, was made apparent to them” (238). It was not, then, that Adam and Eve were now freshly created in God’s image; they had already been born in God’s image, children of a long line of bearers of God’s image. The difference was that they now understood what this meant (a personal relationship with God).
The first problem with this is biblical. In Genesis 1 and 2, it is quite specifically Adam and Eve who are created in God’s image (the event of Gen. 1:27 being presented afresh in Gen. 2:18–25). It is not just that some beings were created in God’s image, and that this could later be realized by a couple of their descendants. Quite the opposite: Genesis 2:7 seems to be an example of the text going out of its way to emphasize a direct, special creative act to bring the man Adam into being. That problem might be considered surmountable, but it has created a second theological problem that seems insurmountable. It is that, if humans were already in the image of God before Adam and Eve, then we are left with one of two scenarios.
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Why Nothing Will Stop Jesus from Building His Church
The church is being built at exactly the rate that Jesus wants it to be built. Not one person faster or slower. Hell has not slowed the construction by even a second. Not one person whom Jesus wants included will be excluded.
“I’m frightened.” These were my Pop’s last words. I saw him just after death, and his face and body evinced struggle. He did not profess to be a Christian, and I asked my pastor whether this struggle was perhaps a sign that God was working on his spirit, and that perhaps he could have come to salvation in his last hour?
My pastor, knowing that Pop had not professed faith, answered with a straightforward “No.”
I was a little shocked. How could he speak with such certainty?
Matthew 16:13-19 explains how, a passage that Michael Green rightly calls “the hinge on which the whole Gospel turns.”When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” (Matt. 16:13-14; all Scripture passages from NIV version)
Caesarea Philippi, at the foot of snow-veiled Mount Hermon (the source of the Jordan river) is in the picturesque northern extremity of Palestine. In Matthew’s day it was the famously pagan center of pan-worship. Jesus probably retreated there with his disciples for a time of rest and instruction.
The lessons begin with this vital question: “Who do the people say the Son of Man is?”
“Son of Man” is Jesus’ favorite designation for himself. It captures both his humanity and, from Daniel 7:13-14, both his divine nature and divine destiny of universal and eternal rule (see Matt. 26:64).
Jesus knows exactly who he is. And by his authoritative teaching, healings, domination over the demonic realm, and supernatural command and control over nature, he has categorically revealed his identity and mission.
Having seen and heard this, what conclusions have the people drawn? “John the Baptist, Elijah, or Jeremiah …” Perhaps these great prophets had been resurrected in the person of Jesus. Without doubt he reprised the spirit of their ministry.
Is there a common thread? Were these three not the more poignant and pessimistic of the prophets? Certainly they were very exalted Jewish figures. Should not Jesus be flattered by the comparison? Not at all. None of them, like Jesus, claimed a divine identity and mission—nor proved it with supernatural acts of power. They were as inferior to Jesus as the ambassador is to the King, as the creature is to the Creator (Matt. 23:37).
What may have been meant as a compliment was in truth a profound denigration, a patronizing and willful denial of Jesus’ manifest identity.
The patronizing has never paused. A person with a passing knowledge of Jesus may perhaps deign to grant his existence, or even his importance as “a great moral teacher.”
Beyond excuse, however, are those New Testament scholars who shut their eyes to the arc-lamp of his glory that blazes from every paragraph of the Gospels, and who demote and disqualify and denigrate Jesus as “a very fine example.” J. Gresham Machen described this:The modern liberal preacher reverences Jesus; he has the name of Jesus forever on his lips; he speaks of Jesus as the supreme revelation of God; he enters, or tries to enter, into the religious life of Jesus. But Jesus for him is an example of faith, not the object of faith. (Christianity and Liberalism, p. 85)
Any conception of Jesus that falls short of what Jesus revealed himself to be is not only an error or lie—it is perverse idolatry. It is to concoct a false image and to call it “Jesus.”
“But what about you?” Jesus asked.
“Who do you say I am?” The NIV captures the urgent personal emphasis and the life and death probing of the original. What do you yourself think? Your answer to this question fixes your eternal destiny!
Notice also how important it is to say what we think about Jesus. Heart and mouth must work together, for a merely inward faith is no faith at all (Rom. 10:8-11).Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” (Matt. 16:16)
The Christ is the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Divine and Saving Prophet, Priest, and King promised on every page of the Old Testament (Luke 24:27). And Jesus is the eternal “Son of the Living God” in a way that no one else is or ever can be (John 1:1-3).
Like King Josiah before him, Peter smashes down the idols to leave nothing but the One True Jesus Christ.Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.” (Matt. 16:17)
The makarios, the blessed, is the one who should count themselves truly happy. This is the person the world should congratulate (see Matt. 5:3-10).
Why is Peter so blessed? Because, literally, no “flesh and blood” had brought him to this truth, least of all himself. He was blessed because the truth he had owned and expressed had been revealed (apokalyptō) by “my Father.” He had only believed and said what the Father had, first of all, placed there.
“You are one of the happy ones, Simon, whose father is Jonah, because my Father in Heaven has come and opened your eyes and mouth to say what you have just said.”
Just as Jesus prayed in Matthew 11:25-26,I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.
And now Jesus, just as he did with Jacob after wrestling with him at Peniel (Gen. 32), confirms a new name upon Peter (John 1:42).
And I tell you that you are Peter (petros), and on this rock (petra) I will build my church. (Matt. 16:18a)
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Sovereignty and Government
Even though the nations rage and plot in vain and the kings and rulers of the earth set themselves against the King of kings, even still “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision” (Psalm 2:4). Our King is laughing at all the geo-political hubbub emerging from our current zeitgeist. As citizens of Christ’s Heavenly Kingdom, let’s laugh with him.
From the very opening pages of Scripture we see God’s sovereign rule over mankind in an authoritative and governmental way. He gives his law to Adam that he is not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And when Adam and Eve do eat of that tree they are depicted as being in rebellion.[1] This is political language through and through. And this rebellion isn’t limited to a vertical warfare, man solely against God; it becomes horizontal—man against man. An unnatural law of sorts has commenced: hating God and hating your neighbor as other than yourself. This is exactly what we see in Genesis 4 with the killing of Abel by Cain and the emergence of depraved societies and power-hungry Cities of Man, Lamech being its most infamous tyrant.[2]
It is out of this dark setting wherein we see God graciously institute government—human government—to mitigate against this hellish proclivity in men to kill fellow image bearers. In Genesis 9 God gave Noah, and hence humanity, the power of the sword, but not a sword grounded in the unnatural law of rebellion and murder but a sword grounded in the God given natural law of life and protection. It is, as Paul will later expound in Romans 13, a ministerial power of coercion to keep men from killing men, a sword handed down from heaven to protect against the swords of fallen men.[3]
“From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.” (Genesis 9:5-7)[4]
The obvious must still be stated: That throughout this history, no matter the evil, no matter the depravity, and no matter the unnatural lawlessness, God is still sovereign, bringing good out of evil. Indeed, that is arguably the “melodic line” of the book of Genesis: What God made good, man corrupted with evil and yet God promised to not only bring good out of evil (Gen 3:15) but ultimately does (Gen 50:20; Rev. 12:13-13:4).[5]
It was from a similar dark setting and scenario that led Augustine to also write his famous City of God. In fact, as Greg Forster rightly argues, “the overarching purpose of The City of God is to vindicate the Christian conception of the good by showing that the world is superintended by God, who is good and is guiding everything that happens in history for good purposes; thus any concept of “the good” is empty if it does not ultimately point to God. The introduction to one modern edition comments that “the great lesson of The City of God is that out of all things comes good.” This echoes Paul’s comment to the Romans that “for those who love God all things work together for good” (Rom 8:28).”[6]
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