OK I'll admit it since certain people seem to be subtweeting instead of engaging me directly. I'm not always precise in my terminology. There's a nihilism in a prominent Christian theology that I sometimes shorthand as "Calvinism" or "Augustinianism." So sure #NotAllCalvinists.

My concern with the "total depravity" view of human nature is that it seems to have led to European colonialism, namely that European Christians gave themselves the duty and mandate to civilize the rest of the world out of their total depravity.

I've read some primary documents in this regard for a term paper I wrote in seminary on the 16th century debate between Bartolome de las Casas who defended indigenous religion and Juan Gines de Sepulveda who promoted conquest on the basis of the Great Commission.

Based on what I've seen, I do put forward as a *hypothesis* that the doctrine of total depravity historically tends to become the total depravity *of the other*, which is the basic stance of Christian exceptionalism that became #WhiteSupremacy.

While I see a valid role for those who seek theological precision, I don't see them wrestling with the historical colonial implications of their theological commitments. For me, colonialist #WhiteSupremacy is a theological crisis that warrants rethinking everything.

I don't think trying to find a way to narrate Christianity as having always been right can rescue us from the #WhiteSupremacy that was the result of sincere orthodox Christian theology. For that reason, I follow a revisionist Christianity drawing upon liberation theology.

To me, insofar as Jesus' cross expresses solidarity with those whom the world has crucified, it becomes relevant in a way that it isn't in the atonement theories that treat every human as a generic sinner and ignore our social locations within sinful realities of oppression.

I'm not going to try to pretend that the solidarity of the cross with the oppressed was ever on the church fathers' radar screen. But it sure was on the radar screen of the people who wrote spirituals in the plantation fields. And I think God has used them to correct "orthodoxy."

While I suppose I'm technically part of the same religion as people who don't engage liberation theologians like James Cone and Gustavo Gutierrez, my differences with them seem more radical than the difference between a Christian and a Buddhist.

And the other side of this is I think that Jesus' atonement is supposed to save us from trying to prove ourselves with performative orthodoxy. So I don't believe there's value in proving myself to be orthodox. I think performative orthodoxy is "filthy rags," to paraphrase Paul.

It's okay if nobody reads this and it disappears into the Twitter ocean. I'm in a learning process where I hone rough drafts of my thoughts that evolve hopefully to a better understanding. Good night.