African Americans are a people who care deeply about history. And yet, we are a people who know so little about our history. Three centuries of American chattel slavery did much to uproot generations of American-born Africans from specific African linguistic, cultural, religious and historical soil. The result, as Deborah Dickerson observes in her irenic and insightful book The End of Blackness, is that African-Americans are at once a history-conscious people and “a people with no return address.”
When Jesus explains “You shall not murder” (Matthew 5:21), he says if you treat someone with contempt, calling him or her ‘Raca’ or ‘fool,’ you are violating the principle of the command and are “in danger of the fire of hell” (Matthew 5:22). To modern ears this seems excessive, but behind the sixth commandment is the doctrine of the image of God as expounded in James 3. It is a sin to treat any class or group unequally, as being less worthy of respect, love, and protection.
Next to sex and gender, the subject of race is the most discussed topic in our culture today. Storms of rhetoric and conflict swirl around it every day in politics, the arts, business, the media, and especially social media. It is natural and right for Christians to speak in these conversations out of their personal experience, but since we believe that the Bible has the right to interpret our experience and to critique every culture, we must look to it as our final authority.
The giant of Old Princeton, B. B. Warfield, outspokenly condemned the racism and rigid segregation of American society of his day. His views were remarkably ahead of his time with regard to an understanding of the evil of racism and even somewhat prophetic with regard to the further evil that would result from it. His convictions were explicitly grounded in an understanding and faithful application of the unity of the human race in Adam and the unity and equal standing of believers in Christ. This brief essay surveys Warfield’s arguments within the context of his day.
Racism is the denial of the image of God and its implications to someone of another ethnicity. Racism in the church is a contradiction of the visible unity of all believers in Christ. Racism inside and outside the church is a contradiction of Jesus’ command to love our neighbor as ourselves and of God’s creation of all people in his image.
If you asked the average Christian to define legalism, the answers may not come so quickly. What exactly counts as legalism? How do we know it when we see it? The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that the term can be used in different ways. People can use the same word but infuse it with very different meanings.
Eve... was not the villain in the story; she was a beloved, restored, redeemed child of God. The way we view her impacts the way we see ourselves and the women around us. Eve was not the mess-up and, for the sake of our hearts and the hearts of the women around us, we need to go back to her story and get to know her better. We need to cut through the misunderstandings that have clouded our view and remind ourselves of the truth of who she was before God—and who we are as well.
Christianity teaches that human dignity is rooted in the holiness of God; it reflects God’s dignity.
Ursinus wrote: "Christ was miraculously conceived in the womb of the Virgin, by the immediate action, or operation of the Holy Ghost, without the seed and substance of man, so that his human nature was formed from his mother alone, contrary to the order of things which God has established in nature, as it is said, "The power of the Highest shall overshadow thee" (Luke 1:35)... So we understand and believe that Jesus Christ is a real, historical man.