“I fully believe that if Dabney were around today, he would repent of some of his racial views expressed in his writings. When contemporary racists say things like, “You’d excommunicate Dabney if he were around today,’ they are not saying anything useful. I usually counter, ‘If Dabney were around today, he’d repent.’ Why assume that Dabney would not be willing or capable of receiving greater light on the issue of race?… Yes, I think many 19th century Southern theologians (some of the first theologians in history to have to deal with the issue of race in such an experiential way) would gladly receive further light from the Scriptures on the issue. There is no reason to assume their views are frozen in time or that they’d be unwilling to reconsider. I’d like to think that I’d be open to reassessing my views if strong Biblical arguments can be made against something I currently believe. Why not grant Dabney the benefit of the doubt as well?”
Rev. Rich Lusk
It’s hard to fathom how utterly subjective the above quote is. However, we will start by linking to a web page that doubtlessly Dabney, were he alive today, would be familiar with if only because it so thoroughly supports his convictions on race when he was alive.
The Shade of Dabney, being the education man that he was would have pointed Rev. Lusk to this link and asked, “Rev. Lusk, based on the information provided by this study and by these statistics whatever would prompt you to think that I would change my views were I still alive today?”
A Dabney revivified from the dead would have asked Rev. Lusk, given that;
a.) In 2013, a black was six times more likely than a non-black to commit murder, and 12 times more likely to murder someone of another race than to be murdered by someone of another race.
b.) In 2013, of the approximately 660,000 crimes of interracial violence that involved blacks and whites, blacks were the perpetrators 85 percent of the time. This meant a black person was 27 times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa. A Hispanic was eight times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa.
Why would you ever think that being revivified I would not repent of my views at my death but would instead say, “Rev. Lusk, I rest my case that I was right then and you are wrong now and indeed you are the one who is need of repenting.”
Clearly, what Lusk is doing in his quote above is called “projecting.” I mean I can imagine someone writing 130 years after Lusk is dead and buried;
“I fully believe that if Lusk were around today, he would repent of some of his egalitarian and globalist views expressed in his writings.”
Such a statement would be pure projection. Lusk, being a card carrying egalitarian on the issue of race will not repent today and if you could dig him up in the year 2255 and revivify him he would still not repent, even if being presented with a postmillennial culture that is once again Kinist and so Christian. Lusk, is doing the same with Dabney when he, by the way of projection, insists that Dabney would repent were he alive today because he would know better. And this in spite of the fact that all the evidence would give Dabney the ability to say to Lusk and his ilk; “Dude, I told you so. I tried to warn you.”
Also, Lusk seems to assume here that there has been no further light to break out of the Scripture on this subject since this subject was exhaustively debated repeatedly in the 19th century. Has Lusk never read any of those debates? There is nothing being said now that wasn’t being said by the Christian clergy in those debates as they debated the abolitionists, Transcendentalists, and Jacobins. Does Lusk think that merely because today’s clergy like himself are mouthing Jacobin debating points on race as covered in a patina of Christian-speak that therefore Dabney would be convinced and so repent? If so, Lusk severely underestimates the intellect of R. L. Dabney and the work of the Holy Spirit to keep Dabney from wrongly repenting of the truth.
Doubtless Dabney would have presented to Lusk a copy of the slave narratives that were sponsored by the US Government completed some 35 years after his death and would have said to Lusk; “Many of these slaves agree with me and yearn for the days when they were treated so well as slaves.”
I don’t doubt for a skinny minute that any saint gone to be with the Lord, if they could return, might well repent of matters they held while still alive. However, Dabney, with his views on race isn’t one of them. Now, Dabney might well repent over his embrace of Scottish Common Sense realism and agree with me that presuppositionalism is the better way, but on the issue of race Dabney would say, “130 years later my views on race have been substantiated, however given the civil rights revolution that began with the loss of my beloved South continuing through to this day in 2o25 upon my re-visitation, it clearly is the case that my views are even more unacceptable now by Christian clergy than they were when I spoke them in the face of Yankee and Abolitionist Reconstruction. Today it is even more unacceptable to commit the sin of noticing than it was in the days before I left off this mortal coil.”
On this matter it is Rev. Lusk who needs to be pursuing repentance and not Dabney.
