A Modest Defense of A Recent Post

In the 1950s, Billy Graham, like many other evangelicals, held segregated revival meetings in the South. However, as he spent time overseas, Graham came to realize that segregation was just plain wrong. He grew into that understanding through his experiences and through his study of God’s Word.
Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1953. Graham was preparing for another revival meeting when he removed the ropes cordoning off the black section of the auditorium. When the ushers threatened to put them back up, Graham told them, "Either these ropes stay down or you can go on and have the revival without me." (We might also add, you can go on and have the revival without the Holy Spirit.) Graham never held another segregated meeting.[i]
A short while ago I posted this statement: “The church has not been silent; the world has been deaf.” I intended it to refer to any issue of evil or injustice across the board, but of course the immediate reaction pertained to racial injustice; specifically, African American and White American relations.
Nobody can ever deny that atrocities were committed, or that injustice persisted, or that challenges remain. I’m not going to deny that, and even attempting to do so would be impossible. My only desire is to defend my statement that (a) the church has not been silent, but rather (b) the world has not listened to her.
Go back two thousand years, and you’ll discover that the church basically invented the concepts which have turned into our ideas of “justice” and “equality”. When the church was born, the first major crisis it faced was how to deal with persecution. The second major crisis it had to face was the integration of two races which were previously hostile: Jew and Gentile. Of course, “Gentile” is too broad, but that’s how the Jews organized the human race for the most part. It was “Us” and “Them”. Incidentally, that’s basically also how every people group throughout history has organized the world population.
The Jews thought they had a good reason for it, because the Torah listed many daily habits which were partly designed to maximize the differences between the Jews and Gentiles – food, appearance, even Sabbath keeping. Specifically, non-Jewish slaves were only allowed to eat Passover after they’d been “Judaized” by being circumcised,[ii] and only non-Jews could be charged interest.[iii] In the Torah, Balaam verified this quality of Separation when he called down a blessing upon the Hebrews, instead of cursing them, as he’d been hired to do: “behold, a people dwelling alone, and not counting itself among the nations!”[iv]
Starting with these principles, and after many long centuries of complex interrelations, the Jews finally established a strong, tough attitude of hatred toward non-Jewish practices and beliefs, which reached an apogee during the Roman occupation.
So, when Gentiles started to presume entrance into the church – which at that point was rightly seen as the culmination of Jewish history and faith, embodied in the Jewish Messiah – many of the Christian leaders (all Jewish at the time) assumed that coming into the church meant becoming Jewish.
The first church council was held over this very issue, and it’s recorded in Acts 15. The opening argument was put forward this way: “It is necessary to circumcise them and to order them to keep the law of Moses.” In other words, Gentiles who wanted to be reconciled to God through Christ had to commit to living like Jews. They had to become Jewish.
Against this view, three arguments were raised. First, Peter recounted his direct experience of the Holy Spirit being given, by God, to a Gentile – a Roman officer, no less – without regard to any Jewish observance; it happened merely on the basis of his faith and trust in Christ. Second, Paul and Barnabas recounted all of the experiences from their first missionary journey, confirming Peter’s account. Third, James determined that these experiences were reconciled with holy scripture. At that point it was decided: race and racial affiliation had nothing to do with full, unequivocal inclusion in the family of God. The church had become the world’s first and only institution to incorporate equality. But the world doesn’t acknowledge that fact, and many people have never even heard of it.
Even at the very beginning, some Christians resisted, and in so doing, they were deaf to the voice of the church. Paul was speaking on behalf of the church when he summed up the new reality of the church this way: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 2.27-28). The brand-new dream of unity, according to the scriptures, was to be found in Christ. No wonder the world is deaf to such a message: the world says it wants unity and/or equality, but only on its own terms.
The multicultural consequences of such a message go beyond discussions of “faith” vs. “works”, and they quickly became manifest over the whole globe. Today, we’re used to seeing Christians on each continent. In reality, it was that way from the very beginning. In response to the wide-openness of the church’s message, great Christian centers arose in Syria, modern Iraq and Iran, China, India, Mongolia, Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia.[v] Even the greatest church father of the first four centuries was the son of an African Berber woman: St. Augustine of Hippo. The history and the personalities are there for all to see; but many people ignore this testimony, remaining deaf.
The church has been given this message; thus, anyone who fails to speak of (or treat) all races as equal and integrated is not speaking for the church. In reality, this message has been preserved against all the odds of a world which can’t hear it, and in 1953 this voice eventually convinced the most famous evangelical preacher in America that he’d been wrong to segregate his congregations, and to take a stand for justice before he stood behind the pulpit.
In order to demonstrate that the church has not been silent, I’ve pointed to the very earliest shared experience of the church’s founders, the reality of the early worldwide church, and the founding documents which they produced, all in order to demonstrate that equality and inclusion are not only the voice of the church, but also its true outcome. I’ve also demonstrated how that truth – though it took time to develop – gave birth to tangible action in our own country at the very time and place where the civil rights movement was fomenting. But many people will counter by pointing to the negative examples, and many others will assume that the silence which they perceive in their own experience is the true reality.
First of all, there are people who’ve claimed to be Christian who’ve tried to defend slavery and white supremacy (although none of them as effectively as Charles Darwin). When such people speak, they are not speaking for the church. You might think that I’m just making excuses, but this is a legitimate and necessary position. On social media, there are some black people speaking out against the BLM movement. What do BLM supporters say about those people? They say that those others “don’t speak for all African Americans”. In the same way, anyone claiming to be a Christian who violates the scriptures by promoting racism does not speak for the church. In fact, such a person is anti-church, anti-scripture, and anti-Christ.
Those Christians who have spoken the truth have done so loudly. Although it would be possible to demonstrate how the words of the New Testament have been rightly acted upon throughout the whole history of the church, I’ll restrict myself to our modern era. For example, William Wilberforce, the British politician who led the movement to end slavery in Great Britain, was motivated to lead reform only after his conversion to Christ.[vi]
In America, as the Civil War increasingly became identified specifically with the single issue of slavery,[vii] not only the fiercest abolitionists, but also Abraham Lincoln spoke about the evils of slavery in specifically Christian terms:

"'Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?"
-A. Lincoln, 2nd Inaugural Address

At the forefront of these biblical public statments was the support of the abolitionists, so very many of whom were deliberately outspoken Christians. But today, many people are trying to cover up the Christian anti-slavery motives of those who supported Lincoln, and by doing so they are deaf to a historical voice of the church.
Who was the most influential leader of the civil rights’ movement? Martin Luther King, Jr., a Christian and member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.[viii] Today, many people want to remember MLK but they rarely mention that his faith was the defining characteristic of his identity. He was a gloriously imperfect, but also courageous and faithful, vessel of the church’s message. Without true Christianity, we wouldn’t have had MLK; by segregating his faith from his political action, many people today remain deaf to the fact that his was a true voice of the church.
As a young man growing up, I knew precisely one African American boy in my school. Everyone liked him. I had one favorite show – the Cosby Show. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t racist, it does means that I had no idea racism was a thing because I was sheltered. When did I finally meet more people my own age who weren’t white? When I went on a missions trip, joining other young Christian teens who were different from me. When was I challenged to think about the dangers of racism? At a church-sponsored event in the early 90’s (a Promise Keepers’ event) at which numerous speakers, black and white, took turns speaking to us and challenging us to listen to the true voice of the church. Up till then I assumed racism was a problem in the past; the church was trying to tell me differently.
When I took my first pastorate in rural Montana and worked in a community fueled with racism, I wondered what it would take to challenge that reality. When I invited a Native American speaker to come to our church and preach, he did so – right before he performed a foot-washing ceremony for myself and the elders, an incredibly humbling experience which modeled Christ to the entire congregation.
Over and over, the voice of the church has found expression in truth and in courage. Over and over, the testimony of those who speak for the church has been shouted down, ignored, or erased. But the reality cannot be erased. In the denomination which I serve, the immigration of people to the United States from other countries has resulted in ethnic churches serving alongside and sometimes outnumbering our white congregations. Recently, on behalf of a friend, I performed a search for congregations in another state. Typing in the name of the city which we were looking for, five separate churches were found... three of them are non-English-speaking ethnic churches. Again, the church is demonstrating its true nature, but who notices? Not the deaf world.
At this precise juncture, there’s so much sheer noise out there in the news and on social media that the only way to be heard is to shout louder than anyone. The only people willing to shout are those who don’t care what anyone else is saying, who demand to be the only audible voice. In that kind of environment, for the church to try to shout down the world would be the worst possible idea. Not only would it drive people away, it would increase others’ determination to be heard, rather than to listen. No, the only way for the church to be heard is to speak with a different voice, one which is comprised of actions more than abstractions, one which speaks through obedience to our Jewish Messiah. And that is what the true church has been doing for two millennia; it’s what the true church is doing now; it’s what the world denies is going on because the world can’t hear.
Because the world is deaf.
So let me close with a call to action, using the incomparably superior words of One who has the power to cut through all the noise and nonsense, all the blather and bile, all the garbage that’s filling my depressingly unwieldy Twitter feed: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
 
[i] http://www.thearda.com/timeline/events/event_36.asp
[ii] Exodus 12.43ff
[iii] Dt. 23.20
[iv] Numbers 23.9
[v] see Jenkins, Philip. The Lost History of Christianity; the Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia – and How it Died. HarperOne, NY. 2008.
[vi] “Wilberforce’s abolitionism was derived in part from evangelical Christianity, to which he was converted in 1784–85.”  https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wilberforce.
[vii] Many people question whether the civil war was fought over slavery, but Lincoln didn’t: In his second inaugural address he stated, “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” https://www.nps.gov/linc/learn/historyculture/lincoln-second-inaugural.htm. So much for the revisionists. Of the many, many explanations of how this worked out in practice, try John Daniel Davidson’s article, in which he explains “...the entire history of the United States prior to outbreak of war in 1861 was full of compromises on the question of slavery... which... eventually led to the election of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent secession of the southern states. Through all this, we inched toward emancipation, albeit slowly.” https://thefederalist.com/2017/11/02/shelby-footes-civil-war-history-defends-america-insatiable-haters-like-ta-nehisi-coates/.
[viii] Colson, Charles. How Now Shall We Live? Tyndale, Wheaton, IL, 1999. p. 397 ff