Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн
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After civil rights laws were passed, 1964 and 1965 proved to be a time for significant change in the SBC’s language on race. It began recognizing the need for civil rights legislation, desegregation, and opening up society for housing, voting, and extension of church ministries without racial restrictions. It wrote in 1964 that they acknowledged and repented of their own involvement in discriminatory patterns that have ignored African Americans’ rights and dignity. It wrote, “Our thunderous silence in the face of oppressive injustice for American Negroes has amounted to a serious complicity in the problem … We have been part of a culture which has crippled the Negro and then blamed him for limping.”36
The SBC finally had acknowledged that it had failed to create a “climate” of Christian good will based on justice, mercy, and love. Yet it believed there were avenues for redressing legitimate grievances and for resolving the crisis other than racial protest movements: “Indeed we have contributed to the belief of many Negroes that these movements offer their only avenue of recourse. Is there not in Christ a more excellent way? We believe there is.”37 The SBC did not mention what solutions it would propose to tear down the walls of racism. The SBC seemed to propose that it was Christ’s involvement that would solve the current racial crisis.