“Dr. Thomas Finger, a professor at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary demonstrated how Christians could ‘apply Marxist’s insights’ from ‘Latin America’s Popular theologies.’ Finger stated: ‘Marxism has much to offer: a set of scientific tools for social analysis and projection of strategy.’ Here many Liberation theologians distinguish … between Marxism as scientific analysis, with its own autonomy and objectivity, and as a metaphysical system. Christians may accept the first aspect (as a functional tool) while objecting to the second. Thus, Finger adopted the Marxist critique while objecting to it as an alternative to Christianity. Finger stated, ‘Insofar as capitalism is founded on selfish individualism and monetary motives, Marxist critiques can help flesh out, in economic and social terms, biblical indignation against these things.’ This was a ‘Marxist analysis, understood in the light of scripture and Christian praxis.”
Jon Harris
Social Justice goes to Church; The New Left in Modern Evangelicalism — p. 68
The jaw dropping stupidity of this quote leaves one almost unable to speak, never mind stutter. What Dr. Finger in 1977 was saying here is that we can take the Marxist analysis structure that could not have come into existence apart from the Marxist Worldview it is based upon and yet at the same time reject the Marxist Worldview from which that Marxist analysis structure came from. It’s like saying that one can accept getting pregnant apart from ever having sex. It’s like saying that one can accept a heart transplant without accepting surgery. It’s like saying that one can drink battery acid without being poisoned. Only a Ph.D. could say something this monumentally jejune.
However, it seems this kind of torpidity is not locked in 1977. In 2019 we had this same kind of fatuous reasoning has demonstrated by Dr. Finger brought back to the future by Southern Baptist genius Dr. Curtis Woods in 2019;
“It is our aspiration in this resolution (Resolution #9) simply to say that Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality are simply analytical tools. They are meant to be used as tools, not as a worldview.”
Once again Dr. Woods is involved in Ph.D. dumbassery flights of fancy by trying to extract the tools of analysis from the worldview they were birthed in. These analytical tools could not exist were it not for the worldview that conceived and birthed them. The reality is that just as the analytical usage of Liberation theology can not be abstracted from Marxism so the analytical usage of Critical Race Theory cannot be abstracted from the paleo-Marxist weltanschauung. As analytical tools both liberation theology and critical race theory find their power as derivative of the Marxist world and life view. I would not even concede that these analytics contain insights into reality that are consistent with reality.
