If you are a Christian, then you are almost certainly concerned about the underprivileged. Nobody wants any minority group to suffer, but Christians want much more for minorities than the secular world could possibly hope for. Since everyone is born spiritually dead and on a path to hell, Christians want people to receive eternal life. Unfortunately, the world has an ideology of wokism that is in conflict with the Gospel. What is worse, some evangelicals have fallen for wokism. Woke evangelicals keep people on the path to hell in two ways: first by distracting the church from evangelism thereby preventing the unbeliever from hearing, understanding, and believing the Gospel and second by distorting the gospel itself. This second problem, the woke perversion of the Gospel, is the topic of this post.
How Woke Theology Works
Woke theology changes the message of the cross. Instead of accepting the biblical message of Christ’s substitution and His offer of salvation from hell, the woke theologian would say that the cross was about victory over oppression and that salvation is about making a better life and environment for people here and now. For example, the Brown theologian,1 René Padilla, says that the church’s mission is misión integral, which he defines as “the mission of the whole church to the whole of humanity in all its forms, personal, communal, social, economic, ecological, and political.”2 Another Brown theologian, Robert Chao Romero, goes as far as to call misión integral “Brown soteriology—a Latina/o view of salvation.”3 In other words, the woke view of salvation is not about salvation from hell, but rather about salvation from perceived injustice in the world today. This concept of a Brown soteriology should raise concerns with evangelicals. The notion that salvation is not an eternal rescue from hell, but rather a temporal rescue from oppression is a clear demarcation from biblical Christianity.
This false view of the cross is not unique to Brown soteriology; it is the fundamental soteriology of other branches of woke Christianity as well. Crip theology would be another example4 as seen in the writings of Shane Clifton. He begins with the Christus Victor theory of the atonement, which shifts the purpose of the cross away from paying the penalty of sin:
As the incarnate Son, Jesus proclaims the good news of the kingdom of God, the defeat of evil, the overcoming of poverty, captivity, and sickness— a message most fully embodied on the cross where Jesus offers satisfaction for human sin. But satisfaction is not to be understood as divine retribution inflicted on the Son. Rather, it is the Father’s acceptance of the sacrifice of the Son and Jesus’ choice to submit to evil and transform it into a good. And this is the key point: the cross is a symbol of transformation because the evil done to Jesus is not reciprocated but answered with love and forgiveness.5
Since the woke Crip theologian denies the biblical view of the penalty of sin, it comes as no surprise when he casts the Gospel aside and proposes that Jesus did not teach about salvation from hell after death, but rather a salvation unto a more meaningful life now:
Jesus teaches and then embodies a solution to the problem of evil: the divine choice to submit to the injustice and suffering of the cross, and transform the evil done to him into a good by responding with love and forgiveness…What is important is the recognition that the life and teachings of Jesus are not abstract transactions focused on whether or not a person gets to heaven, but, rather, that they are intended to make a difference in human history. It does so by orienting people to meaning, the meaning of the story of Jesus, which gives life purpose. And this purpose is achieved by exercising virtues (charity, hope, faith, forgiveness, mercy, and so on) in the formation of a new community (the church), which is a vessel of the good news of the kingdom of God (God’s just rule) for the wider world.6
Such views are often grounded in a short-sighted theory of the atonement. Rather than seeing Christ’s work on the cross as relating to men’s salvation from hell, woke theologians will often accept a kingdom-inaugurating view of the atonement. Instead of seeing Christ expiating sin for men to be saved from hell through faith in Christ, these theories see Christ’s task on the cross as removing the curse (which is often described mythologically rather than literally) so that man can live more comfortably on earth. Such perspectives gained traction after the release of a book that Gustaf Aulén wrote in 1931, which describes the work on the cross:
The victory of Christ over the powers of evil is an eternal victory, therefore present as well as past. Therefore Justification and Atonement are really one and the same thing; Justification is simply the Atonement brought into the present, so that here and now the Blessing of God prevails over the Curse.7
This is the view of the atonement that fits best with woke Christianity.
Before moving further, it is worth mentioning that woke Christianity, much like the secular woke Marxism that inspires it, is not only focused on social justice, but on eco-justice as well. Woke eco-justice Christianity shifts the church away from the biblical mission of evangelism to a secular mission of healing the planet. This shift would be bad enough as it inhibits people from hearing the Gospel, but the theology also prevents people from understanding and believing the Gospel. For example, the eco-theologian, Willis Jenkins, exposes his view of the atonement by writing:
Inhabiting the reconciliation accomplished by Christ, human relations with all creatures are restored and redeemed. When Christ sets the captives free, he frees them to restorative service in a land damaged by sin. The Christian mission to all the earth means becoming physician and healer to the earth, priests and ministers to all creation.8
Notice that the mission is not proclaiming the message of salvation through faith, but rather the mission is to repair the environment through works. This is a works-based religion that shifts the responsibility of restorative work from Christ to men, but it also neglects entirely the real problem of sin and its consequences. This is the message that Jenkins and others preach and it is nothing short of a false gospel.
An Example in Evangelical Missions
In 2020, almost 90 years after Aulén’s book originally came out, America was being ravaged by critical race theory in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. One of the biggest Evangelical organizations in the world, Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ), was submitting to critical theology, which is essentially woke critical theory that has been rebranded into woke critical theology. The doctrinal and missional drift into wokism caused some internal strife in the organization, prompting several staff members to write a 179-page document entitled, Seeking Clarity and Unity9 in November 2020. The document circulated internally before being released to the public in May 2021. Cru has since then withdrawn the document from its website.10 The bulk of the social justice concern is related to critical race theory as Cru staff accepted the anti-biblical agenda of BLM,11 but the presence of queer theory and related issues in Cru are also covered in the document.12 The background of Seeking Clarity and Unity is worth bringing out here, because it is a testimony to how widespread wokism has become within evangelicalism. Each missionary has a team of supporters behind him, so each woke theologian within Cru represents a team of Evangelical supporters who are backing his theology. Fortunately, there is still a core of Cru staff that have not fallen for Critical Theology.
The authors of Seeking Clarity and Unity respond well to Christus Victor and Social Justice:
If you hold to this Christus Victor view of the atonement, where salvation and sanctification are inseparable from participating in “kingdom building,” then what you are really saying is: we are not saved by faith, but by ongoing “allegiance” to Jesus and his kingdom… So, what is this new gospel we are hearing? It sounds like: Jesus destroyed the powers of sin and Satan on the cross, and we respond by giving him allegiance as king, which we demonstrate by building his kingdom in the world, primarily through feeding the poor, liberating the oppressed, and razing social structures of injustice. In a sense, this new gospel was inevitable because it is the only gospel that can support and justify the social justice agenda.13
Not only does wokism prevent the church from doing the tasks to which God has appointed her, wokism stands in direct opposition to the true message of salvation! The woke agenda is not the biblical gospel.
Conclusion
It must be remembered that woke Christianity is not true Christianity. Woke Christianity is a new religious movement that has abandoned actual Christianity in favor of heretical teaching. Woke Christians, much like other cult members such as Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Moonies, reject the biblical message of the cross but pretend to be Christians in order to infiltrate the church. This should be no surprise, since Peter warned his audience, “But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction” (2 Peter 2:1).
To be clear, not every woke evangelical is a full-blown woke cultist. As the woke cult infiltrates Christianity, sincere Christians have unknowingly merged the cultic doctrines with their evangelicalism in a way that maintains core doctrines of the faith in an inconsistent manner. The inconsistencies are often unstainable, so it is not uncommon for such evangelicals to fall into deconstructionism. Since wokism has become a significant cause of apostasy, it is important to understand it in order to protect ourselves and others.
- Brown theology is a form of woke theology that emphasizes Hispanics.
- Tetsunao Yamamori and C. René Padilla, eds., The Local Church, Agent of Transformation: An Ecclesiology for Integral Mission (Buenos Aires: Kairos Ediciones, 2004), 9; quoted by Robert Chao Romero, Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 38.
- Ibid.
- Crip theology is the woke theology that relates to the disabled.
- Shane Clifton, Crippled Grace: Disability, Virtue Ethics, and the Good Life (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018), 42.
- Ibid., 67.
- Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, A.G. Herbert, trans. (London: S.P.C.K., 1975), 150.
- Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 89.
- Scott Pendleton, et al., Seeking Clarity and Unity (Cru, 2020). Available online at https://languagendreligion.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/seeking-clarity-and-unity.pdf (accessed August 17, 2022).
- In the Christianity Today article, “Cru Divided Over Emphasis on Race” (published on June 3, 2021), Curtis Yee gives the history of the document and links to a page on the Cru website that is not functional, presumably because the document has been withdrawn. It is still available online elsewhere. See Yee’s article at https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2021/june/cru-divided-over-emphasis-on-race.html (accessed August 17, 2022).
- Scott Pendleton, et al., Seeking Clarity and Unity (Cru, 2020), 4, 6, 9, 29, 40, 41.
- Ibid., 4, 12, 24, 35, 40, 45, 47, 50, 56, 59, 73, 74, 75, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 101, 103, 104, 110, 122.
- Scott Pendleton, et al., Seeking Clarity and Unity (Cru, 2020), 20.