This year I’m writing a series of talks thinking about big questions that lots of us have about Christianity, Jesus and faith. Some of them are about how we can live well, some are doubts we often have but don’t know how to express.
In preparing these talks I have used a book that I whole-heartedly recommend: Rebecca McLaughlin’s, “10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (And Answer) About Christianity”.
Everything I’m saying, Rebecca said first and better. In fact, more than that, I want to urge you to get and read, particularly if you are under 25 (but also if you’re older than that).
Summary (TL;DR)
I always try to give a summary of what I’m going to say in one or two sentences so it is easy to remember. Here is today’s:
Jesus creates and delivers the most diverse movement in human history. If you value diversity, follow Jesus.
- Jesus Creates Diversity (or why believing in the dignity and equality of all depends on there being a Creator).
For Jews and Christians, the equality of every person, whatever their race, ethnicity or background is rooted in our belief that every person is made in the image of God. That is why they are worthy of respect.
To be made in God’s image doesn’t particularly mean to look like him physically. It means to be like him, to reflect something of his character and what he is like. Jesus did this perfectly. St Paul tells us that he was the exact image of the invisible God.
If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.
That applies perfectly to him but in a distorted and different way to every human being.
This belief is the foundation of all modern movements for equality, inclusion or justice.
Secular society takes for granted that everyone is of equal worth and dignity. But that idea comes from the Christian (and Jewish) commitment to the concept that everyone is made in God’s image.
This is a historical fact.
Historian Tom Holland explains that the idea of human rights – that human beings are equal and all of value arose specifically out of Christianity in Europe.
It was Christians, reflecting on the central idea of Genesis 1:27 (that humanity is made in God’s image), who argued for this. And in doing so they changed the world. Without that, and without the idea that human beings are made in God’s image, it wouldn’t have happened at all.
In case you think Tom (who isn’t himself a Christian) and I are making this up, we know what happens when you reject the idea that human beings are made in God’s image.
In 1859, Darwin published his book, commonly called On the Origin of Species. It’s full title was actually: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
In it Darwin specifically commented that:
The western nations of Europe … now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilisation … The civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races through the world.1
This led to the Eugenics movement (getting rid of the weak), to scientific racism and then inevitably to Nazism and the attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish race.
This isn’t to reject evolution as a scientific idea. It may well be a brilliant description of a tool that God, as the great designer and Father of all, has used to shape the world around us. (For what it’s worth, I can quite see how the development of speciation fits with Genesis’ symbolic description of humanity formed from the earth and yet filled with the presence of God but I wouldn’t insist upon it).
But a solely material picture of human origins without God in the picture gives us no reason to believe in equality or dignity – and every reason to reject it.
Without the Christian commitment to the idea that God made us and that we all bear his image, then we are left with no reason to believe in equality, in dignity, in diversity at all.
This has been taken up by the contemporary historian, Yohann Harari. Harari rejects the idea that human beings are made in God’s image. He is a materialist. And that means he doesn’t believe in human rights or equality as anything other than a nice idea:
“The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’?”2
We believe in equality, in diversity, in the rights of all, because we are Christians.
Jesus creates and delivers the most diverse movement in human history. If you value diversity, follow Jesus.
- Jesus Delivers Diversity (or why Jesus is the root of movements for justice).
So it is a Judeo-Christian view of humanity, made in God’s image, which is the foundation of modern commitments to equality and human rights. It is the root of why we value diversity.
But what about Jesus?
Jesus’ Teaching
Jesus explicitly taught and demonstrated that his kingdom went beyond ethnic, racial or class boundaries. It was truly diverse.
The most famous example of this is the parable of the Good Samaritan. We tell this story as an illustration of how we should help one another. That is a part of its meaning. But it is more profound than that.
When Jesus said that the second greatest commandment was to ‘love your neighbour’, he was immediately challenged by another teacher: but who does that mean? The other guy wanted to keep his obligations narrow – I love them, because they are like me but I don’t need to love them because they are not.
In particular, in that period there was an ongoing religious and racial conflict between the Jews and the Samaritans. They hated each other in part because the Samaritans were ethnically different.
Jesus’s parable is designed to cut through that. The one who shows mercy, who keeps the commandment, is not the pure, religious Jew. It is the unclean, alien Samaritan.
The whole parable is about welcoming in a stranger and recognising that all are equally in need of God’s grace and all can equally receive it. It becomes the ultimate anti-racist message.
Early Church Teaching
This wasn’t just Jesus. St Paul explained the logic of it in his earliest churches.
The gospel, St Paul explains, requires that we treat all people equally.
- Everyone, without exception, is made in God’s image and is loved by him.
- Everyone, without exception, sins and needs Jesus.
- Everyone, without exception, is made a Christian only by trusting in Jesus.
So no-one can be treated better or worse because of where they come from or their ethnic background or their social class.
This was taken up by the later Christian leaders. The church fathers always accorded equal rights to people irrespective of whether they were slaves or free. Augustine, a Bishop working in an African city and probably the third most influential man in Western history after Jesus and St Paul, denounced slavery as against God’s intentions in creation and tried to organise for the church to intercept slave traffickers and set the slaves free.
St Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great theologians of the church condemned the institution of slavery outright and called for its abolition.
The Horror and Rejection of Slavery
Now I want to acknowledge later on, some Christians were complicit in the horrors of American slavery.
Historians and sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith have shown that that came about because men and women bowed to the pressure of their society to turn their back on the teachings of Jesus and the early church in favour of the apparent progress of their society. The dominant view, the view of the elites and of business, was that slavery was necessary to build their empires.
And so elements of the church bowed to the demand to get with the times, to move with the forces of progress, to change their faith to gain favour with society because it was apparently outmoded.3
My friends, in passing, never forget – never – that when we change the teachings of Jesus to keep up with the changing mores and values of society, the world is a worse place. Christian involvement in slavery was a progressive heresy. And the ones who overturned it were Evangelicals and Catholics who wanted to return to the old-faith, the faith of Jesus.
Even then the movement to stop the slave trade and liberate slaves will fight for equality was led by committed Christians who acted not in spite of their faith but because of it.
Time won’t permit me to name them all but here are just a few of the fathers of the anti-slavery, anti-racism movement who named Christ as the reason for their work:
- William Wilberforce, the MP who campaigned to end the slave trade:
“God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners”. - Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave, nicknamed “Moses” for helping others to escape:
“I always tole God, I’m gwine [going] to hole stiddy on you, an’ you’ve got to see me through.'” - Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights campaigner:
There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul.
In other words, where parts of the church gave into the temptation to go along with slavery, and even baptise it in Christian language, it was Jesus and the Christian tradition that led to the error being corrected and overthrown.
The Diversity of the Church
But did it work? Is the church actually a place for every race and ethnicity?
Yes.
According to the researchers at the Gordon Conwell Centre for the Study of Global Christianity, the elite, the cream of religion researchers, “[i]n 2000, 62% of Christians globally were of colour (1.2 billion). In 2015, 68% of Christians were of colour (1.6 billion).”
In other words, Christianity is incredibly diverse. It could not be more so.
This isn’t just an abstract idea. We live in one of the whitest, most British parts of the UK. Yet a couple of years ago I counted the number of different nationalities in this church. We had people regularly attending from 15 different countries, from 4 different continents while our material is regularly read and watched on another 2. I’m working on Antarctica but it’s harder than you’d think to convert the Penguins.
That is just our little church. But it is typical of other, bigger churches too.
The average Anglican is a Sub-Saharan woman in her 30s.
God made diversity, Jesus commanded diversity, the Spirit delivered diversity in his Church.
Jesus creates and delivers the most diverse movement in human history. If you value diversity, follow Jesus.
Application
What does this mean for us as we try to know hope, show hope and share hope:
- First, don’t feel challenged or threatened by contemporary criticisms of Christianity as intolerant or anti- diversity. They are founded on ignorance and reliant upon the values given them by the faith they despise.
- Second, don’t form in-groups and out-groups. Everyone has a measure of dignity + value because of their Creator. Everyone is a potential brother or sister in Christ. There will be times they need to be resisted. It doesn’t mean being weak. But it does mean being merciful even when we have to be strong, playing the ball and not the man.
As part of this we must be as clear as possible: discrimination or hatred on the basis of race or ethnicity is morally wrong, against Christian doctrine and has no place in the Church or society. For the avoidance of any doubt, that includes antisemitism. - Finally, think about those you find hardest to love or to include and set your heart to pray for them regularly. That might be someone with a different ethnicity. It might be someone with different politics or a different faith. It might be a bully.
Pray for them because they need Jesus just like you need Jesus.
Jesus creates, commands + delivers the most diverse movement in human history. If you value diversity, follow Jesus.
Deep Church 