Owen Strachan > Quotes

“Whatever response we draw, we’ve got to know this: evangelism is not easy. It’s not supposed to be. It’s challenging to tell someone that he or she is lost, in danger of coming judgment, and in need of wholehearted repentance. That’s not a light and airy message. It’s a world-changing message, one that calls our entire lives into question. It’s a loving message, but love in a biblical sense is not mushy or weak. Biblical love is transformative, powerful, renewing, redeeming, cleansing.”
― Owen Strachan, Risky Gospel: Abandon Fear and Build Something Awesome

“Jesus came to embolden us, not to anesthetize us.”
― Owen Strachan, Risky Gospel: Abandon Fear and Build Something Awesome

“You follow God, and you just might get asked to walk in the wilderness. For forty years.”
― Owen Strachan, Risky Gospel: Abandon Fear and Build Something Awesome

“The police are not above scrutiny; no public official is. But Scripture would have us see police as a gift from God to humanity. Fathers and mothers should train their children to honor police officers (and military members and others in similar roles). In many communities, police officers restrain wickedness and do so at tremendous personal risk. In fact, according to PragerU, a police officer is eighteen times more likely to be shot than a “black” man is.55 Our culture is shaping and promoting a narrative that is seriously flawed—and flawed in the anti-institutional form that fits wokeness more broadly. We recall here Marx’s hatred of God-ordained elements of society, and we note that it is alive and well today. We must reject such a mindset.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Whatever we are deprived of, no one can rip Christ away from us.”
― Owen Strachan, Always in God's Hands: Day by Day in the Company of Jonathan Edwards

“The Christian church is losing its grasp on heaven and hell.”
― Owen Strachan, Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell

“The broader project of “social justice” thus advances the “rights” of minorities of many kinds to remove inequality—or even difference itself—from our world. Men must be removed from positions of authority, and boys must be trained to see strong manhood as akin to “toxic masculinity.” Income must be taken and redistributed. Capitalism should be strenuously resisted, for it was built on the back of racism. Reason must be opposed by “personal narratives” driven by a belief in “standpoint epistemology,” the view that one’s minority status gives one a unique ability to see truth that privileged peoples necessarily cannot comprehend.31 Public spaces must be redone to accommodate the fluid “gender identities” of individuals. And more broadly, all forms of personal identity (and “orientation”) must be affirmed without question and accepted as a positive reality. (As I have noted, a thorough critique of these views comes in Chapters 3 and 4; we’re seeking, in all fairness, to describe the system in a compact way here.)”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Scruton summarizes Horkheimer’s burden: we must “pass beyond philosophy into ‘critical theory’ and discover the true possibility of emancipation, which begins with the emancipation of thought itself.”36 In simpler terms, to understand humanity, the Critical Theorists argued that one must recognize the corrupted nature of society, but not only of society—of ordinary reason itself. It is for this reason that Voddie Baucham Jr. has argued that such thinking—including Critical Race Theory, derived from this system—is gnosticism.37 He means that according to this ideology, there is a higher knowledge that only some possess; ordinary perception alone will not do. The structures of reality, whether economic or cultural or “racial” (in our time), may look sound, but they are not. They must be exposed, for they actually contain surging injustice within them. Only some can see this—the woke.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“The world is not a neutral place. It is the site of a great war for souls between God and the devil. But the fight is not on equal terms. The Lord is awesome in strength, “mighty against his foes.” When he joins the battle, the battle is over.”
― Owen Strachan, Always in God's Hands: Day by Day in the Company of Jonathan Edwards

“Should we always watch for oppression? Indeed, we should. Evil does not sleep. In fact, we should watch out for authoritarian evil from every corner, knowing that it is all too easy for those who are supposedly “anti-authoritarianism” to end up oppressing others. Surely a good number of those inclined to wokeness do not start out with such intentions. But movements are strange and unpredictable things, and they are especially ripe for exploitation when not grounded in sound principles and Christian ideas.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Prayer is not an escape from the world. It will not physically launch us into the heavens (that would make for an interesting church prayer meeting), but it can bring the peace of God to our hearts, causing them to soar. Prayer is the active exercise of trust. In prayer, we hand our cares and hopes to God, and commit them to him.”
― Owen Strachan, Always in God's Hands: Day by Day in the Company of Jonathan Edwards

“Christ deals with his church as a father…He has not contented himself with only saying, ‘Be kind one to another,’ knowing that a care that lies in everybody’s hands equally is like to be neglected, but he has appointed officers, that his children may be fed in both body and soul as their necessities require”
― Owen Strachan, The Essential Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to the Life and Teaching of America's Greatest Theologian

“But as Ken Ham has shown, the “so-called ‘racial’ characteristics that people think are major differences (skin color, eye shape, etc.) account for only 0.012 percent of human biological variation.” On the specific subject of skin color, the presence of more melanin means “lighter” skin color; less melanin means “darker” skin color. So Ham concludes: “No one really has red, or yellow, or black skin. We all have the same basic color, just different shades of it. We all share the same pigments—our bodies just have different combinations of them.”11 In scientific terms, this means, according to Ham, that the differences between people groups are “absolutely trivial.”12”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“The cross of Christ gives us God’s ultimate resolution of the justice-mercy conundrum. The same cross satisfies divine justice and secures divine mercy. This shows us that justice is retributive, not distributive, even as it reveals that the satisfaction of justice enables the experience of mercy. God does not set aside His justice in the death of His Son; He meets the full terms of His holy nature through the cross.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“There is no common grace in wokeness; there’s just the righteous (the woke) and the guilty (ordinary white people).”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“There is at least a whisper of doubt over my entire generation of educated blacks—a whisper, frankly, of inferiority. Are we where we are because of merit, or because of jerrybuilt, white guilt concepts like affirmative action and “diversity”? How different, really, is diversity’s stigmatization of us as “needy victims” from segregation’s stigmatization of us as inferiors? In either case, we are put in service to the white American imagination.… In both cases we were a means to a white end.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“But wokeness overturns these truths. Its fundamental anthropological categories are not the biblical ones of believer or unbeliever, but oppressor or oppressed (“anthropology” means doctrine of humanity, or what makes us human). As we have seen, wokeness renders “white” people as oppressors and people of color as the oppressed. This is true racially, but as we saw in handling intersectionality, these categories apply much more broadly today to “underprivileged” peoples of all kinds. The Marxists first used this pairing of the rich and the poor, reading the former as evil and the latter as innocent. Today, these same identifiers apply along the lines of skin color, weight, the sexes, disability, the police, and more.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Proposals for reparations, we note here, actually yield no justice at all in the end, for the people who suffered in past days see no satisfaction from them, and people living today must thus chip in to pay for crimes they did not commit. Here we see that much of what is called “justice” today is actually injustice and does not do anything to make wrongs right.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“The response to such behavior was mixed among BLM supporters; but for many, such violence and mayhem was not lamentable, but a sign of righteous agitation and even real progress. This is because of America’s evil societal nature. As a society built on “white supremacy,” America deserves to be targeted, demolished, and built afresh on “antiracist” principles, they say. Again, in some cases the need for such cleansing is stated metaphorically. But it is impossible to miss that in many instances, when the theory escapes the classroom, it does not land softly. As numerous examples show, teaching that “white supremacy” deserves nothing other than destruction has led to real-life consequences.27 For its unbiblical teaching and its ungodly violence, Black Lives Matter and woke activism must be rejected—by Christians, certainly, and by any citizen besides.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Men still build walls of partition and division like the terrible Berlin wall, or erect invisible curtains of iron or bamboo, or construct barriers of race, colour, caste, tribe or class. Divisiveness is a constant characteristic of every community without Christ.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“The police are not above scrutiny; no public official is. But Scripture would have us see police as a gift from God to humanity. Fathers and mothers should train their children to honor police officers (and military members and others in similar roles). In many communities, police officers restrain wickedness and do so at tremendous personal risk. In fact, according to PragerU, a police officer is eighteen times more likely to be shot than a “black” man is.55 Our culture is shaping and promoting a narrative that is seriously flawed—and flawed in the anti-institutional form that fits wokeness more broadly. We recall here Marx’s hatred of God-ordained elements of society, and we note that it is”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“You don’t end racism. You repent of it.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“This is especially poignant when one thinks about social fragmentation. So-called “interracial” adoption is a lovely thing in basic human terms. Yet not long ago, Ibram Kendi tweeted this amid media coverage of Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s adoption of “black” children (two from Haiti): Some White colonizers “adopted” Black children. They “civilized” these “savage” children in the “superior” ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.19 Kendi then argued that adopting such children in no way makes someone “not a racist”: And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. It is a belief too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can’t be racist.20 A writer for Christianity Today, Sitara Roden, spoke of her own adoptive background in a positive way, but also agreed with Kendi’s perspective on bias: This is a conversation I’ve had with my own white family. Just because I am not white and a part of their family does not mean their implicit biases are any less real. How you view the nonwhite person in your family, that you might have raised, is bound to be a different valuation than”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“In much of the “convinced and committed” literature cited, the formal term “Critical Race Theory” does not appear—in most volumes, not even once. However, our brief summaries have demonstrated that these works are soaked in a worldly ideology of wokeness. The enemy does not always appear in robes of darkness. He often masquerades as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). It is past time for Christians to wake up—not to the so-called “truths” of CRT, but to the deception that is creeping into our churches.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Pastors are appointed by God to help their people see that the church walks in the light and all others in darkness. We, the “in Christ” people, are the true culture (John 14:6). We say this without arrogance, but with a sense of surprise.”
― Owen Strachan

“The work that we have to do to prepare for eternity must be done in time, or it never can be done.”
― Owen Strachan, Always in God's Hands: Day by Day in the Company of Jonathan Edwards

“God is not limited by anyone or anything. He doesn’t tremble at challenging circumstances”
― Owen Strachan, Always in God's Hands: Day by Day in the Company of Jonathan Edwards

“The Gospel announces forgiveness and resulting innocence; wokeness announces guilt and unending condemnation.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Economist Walter Williams explains why: “The relative color blindness of the market accounts for much of the hostility towards it. Markets have a notorious lack of respect for privilege, race, and class structures.”63 If woke leaders truly wanted “fairness” and “equity,” they would be unabashed supporters of the free market.”
― Owen Strachan, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It

“Our chief need is not affirmation but transformation.”
― Owen Strachan, Good: The Joy of Christian Manhood and Womanhood