Friday, September 07, 2007

Race, Sin, and the Cross

Paul Helseth (Associate Professor of Christian Thought at Northwestern College) pens a thoughtful article in Touchstone magazine on a much-neglected aspect of racial reconciliation discussions, namely, the objective work of reconciliation accomplished by the cross. Helseth also has some helpful correctives to offer on the notion of collective sin and guilt. It's a piece well worth reading.

Here is the conclusion:
All Christians ought to rejoice at the prospect of worshiping in a Revelation 5 and 7 kind of Christian community, for the kingdom of God in fact is multicultural in the plain—as opposed to the ideological—sense of the word.

All Christians ought also to be concerned, however, about the means used to achieve this good end. Indeed, the means to a community that reflects the diversity of the universal church in our day is not found in the implementation of an agenda that is informed by one vision of social justice or another.

Rather, it is found in the indiscriminate proclamation of the finished work of Christ to people “from every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9), and in the exhortation of believing individuals to be by faith what they already are in Christ. God is building his church by calling his people to himself through the efforts of “authentic” believers to promote not what they presume social justice demands, but what they know the Great Commission requires.

Let us therefore oppose the pernicious groupthink that undermines the gospel by presuming to burden believing individuals with the “global” task of racial reconciliation, and let us acknowledge that Christian institutions remain faithful to their calling, and faithfully facilitate the reconciliation of the estranged, when they champion the word of the Cross “to those who are perishing” and when they exhort those “who are being saved” by its “foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:18) to lay hold of and rest upon its sufficiency as they “run with endurance the race that is set before [them]” (Heb. 12:1).