Condescension has a bad rap as a rule. That’s because we generally assume that a condescending person is condescending toward people who are their social/intellectual equals. You know the old joke:
“Some people think I am condescending. For all you little people out there, that means they think I talk down to others.”
But here’s the thing: we are all condescending at times and we think nothing of it–when the person we are condescending to needs us to condescend to them. We condescend to children all the time, putting complex things into terms they can understand, stooping to consider their fragile feelings, offering exaggerated praise and affirming language that, addressed to adults, would make us look either insane or sarcastic.
“Oh! You made a stock spreadsheet for the board meeting, Laura? You are such a clever, grown-up girl! I’m so proud of you! Herb! You bench-pressed 300 whole pounds? You are such a big strong grownup! Very good! Here’s a special treat for trying so hard! What a pretty picture you drew, John! I’m going to post this on the fridge so everybody can see how good you are.
We are, in short, right to treat equals equally and unequals unequally. Adult are our equals. Children are not. Treating children like adults would crush them just as surely as treating adults like children insults them.
But it doesn’t stop there. Teaching almost anything requires a certain kind of good condescension too. Every science explainer on TV condescends, of necessity, to translate stuff that is really expressed in the mathematical language of physics into the language of ignorant people like me so I can grasp how solar panels work, what relativity is, and how atoms are structured. Everybody with expertise in any field has to likewise condescend to the level of those who lack the expertise if they want people to understand them. Bad condescension only comes in when the teacher imagines that the student is stupid, morally inferior, etc. merely because they do not have the knowledge he has.
God works under the same constraints of necessity for good condescension, since that which is received is received according to the mode of the receiver. The Incarnation is the supreme act of divine condescension. God stooped down to us since, both as creatures and, worse, sinful creatures it was impossible for us to come to him.
Accordingly, God’s divine pedagogy is unfathomably patient with our feeble attempts to learn from him–far more patient than we are. An example of this is found in Ezekiel:
The word of the LORD came to me again: “What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’? As I live, says the Lord GOD, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sins shall die.
“If a man is righteous and does what is lawful and right—if he does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, does not defile his neighbor’s wife or approach a woman in her time of impurity, does not oppress any one, but restores to the debtor his pledge, commits no robbery, gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with a garment, does not lend at interest or take any increase, withholds his hand from iniquity, executes true justice between man and man, walks in my statutes, and is careful to observe my ordinances—he is righteous, he shall surely live, says the Lord GOD.
“If he begets a son who is a robber, a shedder of blood, who does none of these duties, but eats upon the mountains, defiles his neighbor’s wife, oppresses the poor and needy, commits robbery, does not restore the pledge, lifts up his eyes to the idols, commits abomination, lends at interest, and takes increase; shall he then live? He shall not live. He has done all these abominable things; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon himself.
“But if this man begets a son who sees all the sins which his father has done, and fears, and does not do likewise, who does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, does not defile his neighbor’s wife, does not wrong any one, exacts no pledge, commits no robbery, but gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with a garment, withholds his hand from iniquity, takes no interest or increase, observes my ordinances, and walks in my statutes; he shall not die for his father’s iniquity; he shall surely live. As for his father, because he practiced extortion, robbed his brother, and did what is not good among his people, behold, he shall die for his iniquity.
“Yet you say, ‘Why should not the son suffer for the iniquity of the father?’ When the son has done what is lawful and right, and has been careful to observe all my statutes, he shall surely live. ¶ The soul that sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.
“But if a wicked man turns away from all his sins which he has committed and keeps all my statutes and does what is lawful and right, he shall surely live; he shall not die. None of the transgressions which he has committed shall be remembered against him; for the righteousness which he has done he shall live. Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord GOD, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live? But when a righteous man turns away from his righteousness and commits iniquity and does the same abominable things that the wicked man does, shall he live? None of the righteous deeds which he has done shall be remembered; for the treachery of which he is guilty and the sin he has committed, he shall die.
“Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way not just? Is it not your ways that are not just? When a righteous man turns away from his righteousness and commits iniquity, he shall die for it; for the iniquity which he has committed he shall die. Again, when a wicked man turns away from the wickedness he has committed and does what is lawful and right, he shall save his life. Because he considered and turned away from all the transgressions which he had committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die. Yet the house of Israel says, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ O house of Israel, are my ways not just? Is it not your ways that are not just?
“Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, says the Lord GOD. Repent and turn from all your transgressions, lest iniquity be your ruin. Cast away from you all the transgressions which you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of any one, says the Lord GOD; so turn, and live.” (Eze 18:1–32)
Moderns are tempted to read this revelation with maximum snark and reply, “No durr! Just because Grampa was a horse thief does not mean you’re one! Big insight! Ancient people were stoopid!”
But, of course, we moderns take that for granted, not because we are smarter than Ezekiel, but because of Ezekiel. We are the beneficiaries of the staggering insight he was granted. It is the fate of all successful revolutions to be taken for granted.
That said, the reality is we still struggle with the sins of our ancestors, particularly over the question of whether we really reject them or still commit those sins as they did.
Case in point: Corey Mahler, racist weirdo Protestant. I mean he literally has an essay on his website declaring, “I am a racist“. He promotes antebellum bullshit about the Curse of Ham, paeans to the Confederacy, as well as all the other misogynist and anti-semitic crap (slathered with pious Christian goo) you’d expect. All this filth comes, not from the gospel, of course, but from his refusal to face the fact white conservative American Christians are still, to a shocking degree, committed to defending the sins of their fathers and mothers.
I had never heard of Mahler until somebody sent me this recently:
First things first: In the land of Normals, two white guys debating the question of “Black Sanctification” is, not to put too fine a point on it, horrifying just as a debate on whether Jews should be gassed or children have their brains bashed out or whether some women just deserve to be raped is horrifying. There are, in the Land of Normals, certain kinds of questions which, even to ask them, is to put oneself outside of decent human society. Indeed, in the Land of Normals, the obvious thing to do when you want to understand the lives of black people in the Church is to LISTEN TO BLACK PEOPLE IN THE CHURCH:
The trouble is, people like Mahler are proposing such vileness for Christian consumption anyway and MAGA has made great strides in selling such filth. So when a MAGA theopolitical antichrist cultus is making headway in selling racism as Christianity, we reach a point where somebody needs to object. White objects.
Now here’s the thing: James White, who I have not thought about in years, is an old Reformed Protestant nemesis of Catholics. Back in the Before Times, when conservative Christians both Protestant and Catholic had not whored themselves out to Trump and conversations used to be about 16th century theological quarrels and not defenses of white supremacy, felony and rape, he and I used to periodically tangle about stuff like sola scriptura and Mary and sola fide. Stuff like that.
Now, however, White is apparently turning his energies to debating ultra-weird racist kooks like Mahler in arch-conservative white Protestant circles. He even did a video some years back saying we could not trust Trump (though I don’t know where he stands now).
My point is this: Ezekiel working out that we are each responsible for our sins and acts of virtue and figuring out that concepts like racial guilt (with attendant genocidal punishments) were wrong may be no-brainers for lots of people living 26 centuries down the line from him, but they were still giant leaps for his time and culture. Not everybody is all on the same page and humanity is given to backsliding.
And that is a permanent reality for people for all time. Given the profoundly dark turn that conservative American Protestantism has taken in the past 25 years, White could have taken Mahler’s way by swallowing MAGA racism and barfing it up for consumption by MAGA Protestants. He did not. That does not make him a White Savior of black Christians. It makes him, at best, somebody who is attempting to inject a bit of virtue into a suffocatingly racist subculture.
George McDonald tells us “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy” and CS Lewis remarks that when the will to obey God is there, God is pleased even with our stumbles. That too is divine condescension.
Nobody need feel any obligation to watch James White debate an evil proposition with a deeply corrupt man. If you want to understand the Christian faith of black people, get to know black Christians and learn about the lives of black saints who put bigots like Mahler to shame. On the level of theological discussion, the Mahler/White debate is the sub grade school equivalent of five year olds arguing about who would win if God and Superman got in a fight.
Meanwhile any conversation with Gloria Purvis and the other people in the video above is graduate level discourse and yet another act of good condescension as black brothers and sisters in Christ graciously try to educate a Christian people that still includes an appalling percentage of Mahlers about what it means to be Christian.
That said, though White has essentially nothing to teach Gloria Purvis or the entirety of the black Church in America, he is attempting to obey Christ and Christ honors that. More than that, the existence of Mahler and his audience bears witness to the fact that while White is in no position to be a White Savior who condescends to “save” black people, he may yet be, entirely by the grace of God and not by his own desserts, an instrument through whom Christ–the only Savior there is–saves some white sinner desperately in need of salvation.
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