To those familiar with the state of Southern Baptist education, the passage of Resolution 9 came as no surprise. Dr. Walter Strickland, who heads up the Kingdom Diversity Initiative at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has for years been promoting liberation theology, which informs CRT.
Not only was Strickland on the committee that produced Resolution 9, but earlier in the year, the New York Times
noted how “significant” it was “that Mr. Strickland has brought a thinker like Dr. [James] Cone into the heart of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention.”According to Loudon,
“There is zero doubt that James Cone was a Marxist.” In 1984, he even joined a delegation to Cuba along with Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s famous pastor. Cone’s radical and heretical views were enough to raise eyebrows when it was found that a Southern Baptist professor was promoting him.The president of Southeastern, Daniel Akin, quickly reacted by claiming that Strickland was teaching Cone negatively. The seminary did not endorse “liberation theology.”
He assured critics that Strickland was confessional and orthodox.
Since that time, a 38-page document outlining the positive teaching of CRT, liberation theology, and social justice surfaced, along with a video from 2016 in which Strickland unequivocally endorses liberation theology books from James Cone and J. Deotis Roberts in a positive manner. Though much of Strickland’s public work has been scrubbed from the Kingdom Diversity website at Southeastern since the controversy over Cone, the course catalogue still lists him as teaching “Liberation Theology” this fall.
It is clear that contrary to the presidents attempted clean-up effort, liberation theology, at least on some level, has been embraced at Southeastern. It is any wonder Resolution 9 passed?
In the words of Trevor Loudon, “The Southern Baptists, the most conservative major Protestant denomination in the United States, have started down the Marxist road.”