Racism is surely one of the worst evils that has ever afflicted mankind. There is perhaps a spark of instinctive racial pride in every one of us, even if it never breaks out into discrimination against minorities, positive persecution or so-called ethnic cleansing. But not so long ago racism, deliberately formalized into a rigorous system of political thought, engulfed Europe and Asia in a hideous conflagration.
The first stage came in the nineteenth century with thinkers like de Gobineau of France who held that of the three principal races in the world, only the white was truly noble; and that among the whites the Aryan race was supreme.
Then came James Hunt, founder of the London Anthropological Society. He taught that the moral and intellectual aspects of a person were as much racial qualities as were the size and shape of the cranium; that all racial qualities were innate and unchangeable; and that therefore belief in the ‘equality of all mankind’ was an unscientific prejudice which should be abandoned.
[p 55] To this already dangerous brew, thinkers like Vacher de Lapouge of France and Otto Ammon of Germany added the deadly poison of social Darwinism. They proclaimed it to be a law of nature that, in the struggle of life, races with the fittest qualities survived and become dominant, while other weaker races were subdued or eliminated. To them it was self-evident that the Aryan race was the fittest in every way and so had been predestined by the irresistible deterministic laws of the universe to be supreme over all others.
The result of such theories was an immediate, catastrophic devaluation of human beings generally. Since human life was no longer believed to have been created in the image of God, it was not regarded as sacred. Millions could rightly be eliminated, without ground for complaint. It was nature’s law that only the fittest should survive.
Finally came theoreticians like the notorious Germanized Englishman, H. S. Chamberlain. He it was who preached that the Jewish race was evil and a threat to world society; and that the Germans were the chosen people destined by nature to eliminate that threat. Such ideas intoxicated and deranged Hitler, with results which we know only too well.
Now anti-Semitism is not the only evil to which racism has given rise; but it has been, unfortunately, an all too frequent blot on the history of Christendom. It is true that from its inception, as Luke’s history shows, Christianity was obliged to diverge from Judaism over a number of fundamental issues, and in particular over the matter of race. In Judaism, race was vitally important; in Christianity, irrelevant. In order to understand this [p 56] difference, however, we must first try to see why the question of race was (and is) so significant for the Jews; and then we must allow Luke to show us why, and in what sense, the Christian gospel proclaims that in Christ ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, ... for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal 3:28).
The nation of Israel (they were only called Jews later in history) was a comparative late-comer among the nations of the ancient world. But from the start, the nation claimed—according to the Old Testament—to be a special race, destined not by the automatic, deterministic forces of social Darwinism, but by the Creator himself to play a unique role in history. The claim is credible; for throughout many centuries Israel was, in one particular, literally unique. All the other nations, however brilliant in civilized arts, administration and engineering, were sunk in the demeaning absurdities of polytheism, worshipping the deified forces of nature, the sun god, the moon god, the god of fertility and such like.
By vivid contrast, Israel—and not just a few advanced thinkers among them but the nation as a whole—stood out solitary and distinct in its witness to the one true God, transcendent above the universe and all its forces, the Creator and sustainer of all. It is understandable, then, that Israel should have considered their monotheism superior to the other nations’ animism and polytheism; but their monotheistic doctrine, unlike the theory of Aryan superiority, did not imply that the Israelites were a super-race. Quite the opposite. Israel’s Old Testament doctrine of creation taught that all men everywhere, of whatever race, are creatures of God, made in his image. In that respect all are equal; every [p 57] individual and every race, even the weakest and not just the fittest, is equally valuable and significant. All human life is sacred.
Moreover the Old Testament repeatedly asserts that God’s call to Israel to fill their unique role in history was not given to Israel primarily for Israel’s own sake, but so that through Israel all the other nations of the earth should eventually be blessed. One day through Israel God would send the Jewish Messiah to be the Saviour of the world, and when he came millions of Gentiles would find salvation through him.
Meanwhile, to the Jew, membership of this unique race with its unique role was all important. If Gentiles converted from paganism to faith in God, they could of course be adopted, so to speak, into the Jewish race. But for that to happen, males had to undergo the Jewish rite of circumcision, the badge of spiritual, if not physical, descent from Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish race; and both men and women had to submit to the Jewish food laws and purity laws, which made unrestricted social contact with other Gentiles difficult if not impossible. Some submitted, like Helena, the Queen of Adiabane, and her son Izates. But many others deeply resented it, for it seemed a form of bigoted religious racism which held that Jews were inherently better than all other races.
It was not so, of course. Parents who forbid their teenage daughter to attend parties where some use drugs are not saying that their daughter is inherently better than other teenagers. They are admitting that she is inherently just as weak as the rest, and if not protected from mixing with drug addicts, might well succumb to peer pressure.
[p 58] So it was with God and Israel. The Gentile world around them was rife with every kind of sexual perversion; with infanticide; with deceit; with commercial, social and political oppression; with cruelty and murder. God therefore set up the food and purity laws to act as perimeter defences around the Jews to protect the inner citadel of Judaism’s social and religious values. The constant complaint of their own Old Testament prophets is that when Israel disregarded those laws, it led to compromise with decadent Gentile practices, and to moral and spiritual disaster.
It was, then, no insignificant matter when, as Luke tells us, the early Christians, themselves Jews, abandoned these defences, these rules and regulations. They did not, of course, abandon Israel’s monotheism or the moral standards of Israel’s law. But they did abandon Israel’s preoccupation with the special privileges of their race. They tore down the barriers between Jew and Gentile, and declared that, through Christ, God was doing a new thing in the world. He was reconciling both Jew and Gentile, first to himself and then to one another through one and the selfsame Christ. He was creating a ‘new man,’ a worldwide fellowship in which race was irrelevant and mutual love reigned instead of hostility (see Eph 2).
The worldwide implications of this change were momentous; and Luke was not slow to recognize them. He has in fact devoted a whole section of his history to describing the incident that proved the catalyst in provoking the change (Acts 10:1–11:18).
The first things to go were the food laws and the ritual purity regulations which inhibited social fellowship between Jew and Gentile. Christ himself had pointed [p 59] out that external ritual washings are, after all, only symbols. They cannot touch or cleanse the corruption of the human heart; but they can, and often do, become a substitute morally, and blind a person’s eyes to his real moral and spiritual uncleanness. Christ therefore, with divine authority, abolished the food laws and the ritual purity regulations (Mark 7:1–23). And when the apostle Peter was invited by a devout Roman centurion to visit him in his home to explain the Christian gospel, God intervened with a vivid object lesson to confirm to Peter directly that he was now free to go and eat with Gentiles.
Then God taught Peter another, more fundamental, lesson. Many Jews had fallen into the trap of thinking that, in spite of their personal and national sins, their privileged role meant that they were by definition better than Gentiles; and that, however noble and morally upright individual Gentiles were, nevertheless, being Gentiles, they were by definition unclean and unholy. Peter had to be taught that there are no such first class and second class human beings: no one, whatever his race, is to be regarded by definition as common or unclean (Acts 10:28).
Already, then, these two lessons had prepared Peter the Jew and his Jewish friends to come and stand side by side with Gentiles on the platform of their common humanity. But it was the gospel of Jesus—the crucified and risen Son of God—that welded their Jewish and Gentile hearts together. It is at the foot of the cross of Christ that Jews and Gentiles discover their common guilt. That cross declares that, whether we have sinned much or little, there is no difference between any of us in this respect, that all have sinned and do come short of the glory of God. We can be justified, [p 60] but only through God’s unmerited grace made available to us through Christ and the redemption achieved by his sacrifice for sin. The cross of Christ, by the very salvation it offers us, proclaims all of us morally bankrupt, with no grounds for boasting one over the other (Rom 3:21–31).
It is through the resurrection of Christ that Jew and Gentile also discover who their common judge will be (Acts 10:42) and their common need of salvation. And it is through the resurrection of Christ that Jews and Gentiles can receive forgiveness of sins on exactly the same terms, namely, by simple, direct, personal faith in the living Lord Jesus (Acts 10:43).
There was more. When Cornelius and his Gentile friends put their faith in Jesus, God gave them his Holy Spirit in the same way as he had earlier done to Peter and his fellow Jewish believers (Acts 11:15–18). To their surprise and then to their exuberant joy, these Jews and Gentiles found that they were now sharing a common life, nothing less than the life of the Holy Spirit dwelling within them which automatically formed them into a spiritual unity, one body in the Lord. This was for them an immediate end of racism, the dawn of true internationalism.
Still today this is the basis and this the power of that worldwide unity that binds together all true believers in Christ, regardless of race. And it is this same power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, rather than a system of food laws, rituals, rites, and social segregation, that enables true believers to resist the pressures of a sinful world and to live a life of genuine and increasing holiness.
All too realistically, however, this glorious slice of history from Luke’s Acts ends on a sombre note. Judaism’s orthodox establishment at Jerusalem was dismayed at the [p 61] way the Christians were seemingly throwing away Jewish privileges and uniting with Gentiles without requiring Gentiles to become Jews. The establishment therefore connived with Herod when he used his political power to ban and persecute the Christian leaders and preachers (Acts 12:23). This, however, is no ground for Christians to feel superior to those ancient Jews. From time to time in the course of the centuries, decadent Christianity has itself used the same tactics against those whom it has considered to be its enemies. The better reaction would be first to learn from Luke what true Christianity is, and then, embracing it, to renounce all racism of every kind and all attempts at political discrimination on the ground of religion.
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