RACISM VERSUS OUR COMMON HUMANITY

All forms of racial discrimination are an evil. No biblical Christian can be a racist. Paul in his speech to the Athenian Areopagus made that plain (Acts 17:22-31). The Athenians were racists, proud of their racial superiority. Greeks despised non-Greeks as ignorant barbarians. They divided humanity into two categories – ‘Greeks’ and ‘Barbarians’. Paul demolishes every conceivable ground for racism.

First, God is the creator of all nations: ‘He made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth’ (Acts 17:26). We are one in our human origin. We have a common humanity.

Secondly, God is the disposer of all history. God who created the nations in the beginning has controlled their destiny ever since: ‘he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live’ (Acts 17:26). From the point of view of a human observer the times and frontiers of the nations had been settled by power politics, by the invasion of armies from without or by coups d’état from within. Nevertheless, behind and beyond the activities of men the apostles detected the hand of God in providence, salvation and judgment. The simple truth is that the Lord our God is one Lord, the Lord of all history.

Thirdly, he is the God of all humanity. Paul states that the reason why God created every nation from one and allotted to every nation its periods and boundaries is that he might make himself accessible to all, ‘that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us’ (Acts 17:27). God is the God of all humanity, the object of worship after which all men and women grope. That is, the unity of humanity is seen in religion as well as in creation and history. Our universal religious quest is another evidence of the unity of humanity.

Fourthly, God is the giver of all life. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your poets have said ‘for we are his offspring’ (Acts 17:28,29). He has already said in verse 25 that God himself ‘gives to all men life and breath and everything’.

Fifthly, God is the judge of all the world. In verses 30 and 31 Paul goes on to say that God overlooked the times of human ignorance in the past. Now that the light of the Gospel has dawned, however, ‘he commands all men everywhere to repent’. This repentance is to be universal because the judgment is going to be universal also. Already God has fixed the day and appointed the judge. By Christ he will judge the world. Every single man and woman, of every nation and race, will stand before the same throne of the same judge and give account of himself.

These are the five bases of our common humanity. Everything proclaims the unity of the human race – everything except sin, self, pride and prejudice. There seems to be a threefold practical conclusion.

First, we need to repent. No one is free from some taint of racial pride because no one is free from sin. A sense of racial superiority is natural to us all, even if it is secret and undiscovered. Further, there is a black racism as well as a white. Everyone assumes that his race and color are the norm, and that others are the abnorm, the deviation. This is simply the self-centeredness of sin. But there is no norm in the color of the human skin, any more than there is in the color of bird plumage. The norm is humanity; the races are variants of this. This means that all forms of racism are wrong.

Secondly, we must work for justice. All forms of racism should make us hotly indignant because they despise not only humanity but God.

Thirdly, we are called to demonstrate that it is in Jesus Christ that humanity’s ultimate unity is to be found. We become more deeply one in Christ by redemption. The tragedy and disgrace in the Church is that we who are in Christ enjoy a deeper unity than any other, yet sometimes manifest a shallower unity than the world already possesses. We should take active steps to make our local congregation a truly racial and international community, to make friends across racial barriers, and to open our homes to those from other races.

(Summary of a sermon by John Stott, All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, May 1968)