What Whites Owe Blacks

The bankruptcy of evangelical "reparations," ecclesial Romanticism, God's wrathful love, and more.

Sep 25, 2020

Dear friends and Supporters:

Sharon and I will be on the road the next two weeks (see personal note below), so this e-newsletter will be shorter than usual and carry a collection of brief but important observations.

What Whites Owe Blacks

Fledgling editor Timothy Dalrymple of Christianity Today (Astray?) has called for the evangelical church to pay blacks reparations for the Unites States’ history of slavery and 19th century ministers’ defense of it. Dalrymple invoked the biblical account of Zacchaeus to buttress his proposal:

In the story, an unscrupulous tax collector, upon meeting Jesus, promised to “give half of my possessions to the poor” and make reparations to those he had cheated (Luke 18:8).
“Zacchaeus had not personally designed the unjust system of Roman taxation. But he had not denounced it either; he had participated in it and profited from it. So Zacchaeus did not merely repent of his ways; he made restitution,” Dalrymple said.

Problem # 1: Zacchaeus didn’t repent of participating in a cheating, stealing system. He repented of cheating and stealing. He didn’t make restitution for somebody else’s sins. He made restitution for his own sins.

Problem # 2: Nobody today “participated in it [slavery] and profited from it.” No evangelical today has refused to denounce it, either. All to the contrary. They tend to denounce slavery more enthusiastically than they do same-sex “marriage.”

The fact that the editor of the flagship evangelical publication can make such a blunder in reasoning and application testifies to the sorry state of scholarship in that sector of the church. CT founding editor, the late Cary Henry, was a first-rate scholar who would cringe at such shoddy reasoning.

Still, whites do owe blacks. What do we whites owe them?

We owe blacks to treat them with dignity, kindness, honesty, and integrity, as fellow humans created in God’s image, and without condescension, patronization, and insult. We owe blacks a colorblind society.

Further, we owe our black brothers and sisters in the Lord our brotherly love, and self-sacrifice, and deference. We owe blacks a colorblind church.

Supporting racial reparations is to commit the sin of partiality (Jas. 2:1) and set the church against God and his Word.

This means that “woke” theology and racial preferentialism set us against God and his Word.

The only important color in the church is red — the blood of Jesus Christ that unites all the seed of the second Adam to one another.

No Worship Without Holiness

One of the encouraging theological developments over the last few decades has been a revival of interest in worship, particularly in church worship music.

Unfortunately, it has not been paralleled by a revival of emphasis on holiness. But in the Bible, God does not accept the worship of unholy people. We must be holy to come into his presence.

Because the church has a diminished sense of the imputed righteousness of Christ to justified sinners, and, in addition, the experimental righteousness of Christ in holy living, much of what passes for modern worship is actually brazen presumption.

I’m afraid that in many cases, when we think we’re worshiping the Lord, we’re in fact dishonoring Him.

Romanticism Goes to Church

We live in a time drenched in the Romanticist notion that spontaneity is king. In the church, this means that godly habits and customs are sub-spiritual, while spontaneous, carefree, “Spirit-led” actions truly please God. Nothing could be further from the truth. The same Spirit who leads prophets to speak spontaneously leads them to spend time in prayer every day at the same time, and in the same way. Godly habits and customs aren’t somehow less spiritual than godly spontaneity.

Coming soon:

Jeffery J. Ventrella, Senior Counsel, Senior Vice President, Academic Affairs & Training, Alliance Defending Freedom, writes:

“Rare is it that the typical theologian’s work is simultaneously crucial, cogent, and clear. Yet, Andrew Sandlin is not the typical theologian, thanks be to God. Rather than forcing the reader to taste a few moral McNuggets doused with narrative dipping sauces, Sandlin instead sets before the reader a sumptuous feast: multi-course, coordinated and comprehensive. This banquet is prepared in the cosmic kitchen of a crucial — yet largely AWOL — foundational truth: Creation by the Bible’s God, the very first article confessed by the orthodox Christian faith and thereby serves as the crucial and non-negotiable context for the Gospel itself. Distort or ignore Creation, and redemption is compromised and truncated as Sandlin effectively demonstrates.

Sandlin shows that by digesting this truth, the everyday Christian can every day apply his or her faith in a fruitful, life-affirming, sin-denying way privately, socially, and publicly. Understanding Creation and the purpose of Redemption as valorizing and restoring Creation as designed by the Lord - as the Bible teaches it - corrects errors and distortions of all sorts – in the church and in the culture - by providing a proper lens for cultivating true human flourishing. Yes, this work is a corrective, but it’s more than that; it’s a celebration and relishing of truth, and in doing so, we learn many ways to “taste and see” that the Lord is good, including in what He has created and redeemed.”

Find Ways to Inspire Your Faith

Seek out ways (Bible, prayer, church, friends, books, music, preaching, podcasts) that inspire faith. Faith flavors and sanctifies and energizes everything it touches.

Similarly, avoid anything (people, books, music, TV, websites) that fosters skepticism, doubt, and unbelief.

Just as faith always enlivens, unbelief always kills.

When we stand before the Lord, we'll never need repent for having trusted Him too enthusiastically.

The Strangeness of Justification

Hendrikus Berkhof has noted that the Christian doctrine of justification is utterly strange to human reasoning. Only God could have devised it. We humans believe in earning our way. Everybody gets his due. If you are evil, you should suffer. If you do right, you should be rewarded. This reasoning isn’t wrong. In fact, it’s palpably biblical. God is a moral God and this is a moral universe.

But in addition, God has devised a way of salvation that overturns and frustrates man’s moral expectations. God saves sinners in a moral way, but he justifies the ungodly (Rom. 4:5). To justify means the declare righteous. How can God declare sinners righteous? Only by conferring on them the status of another. This means justification is synthetic, not analytical. That is, God adds something to the equation. He doesn’t simply analyze sinners as they are (if he did, he could never justify them), but imputes the righteousness of Christ’s atoning death and bodily resurrection. He evaluates us as we stand in his Son. When we trust in Jesus Christ, we stand clothed in his righteousness — we can then be justified.

This arrangement is a deep affront to moralistic man, who wants to be judged on his own merits. Unfortunately for him, those merits are demerits (sin) that expose him to God’s judgment.

But if we’re willing to submit to God’s strange work of justification, we can stand without demerit — in the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

Berkhof suggests that this arrangement is so counterintuitive that even Christians must constantly remind themselves of it — and spiritually pinch themselves.

Creation Resists Ethical Viruses

We look at our world, and it’s easy to be weighed down: Grief over the riots and hatred, over oppressive political edicts, over illness and death very close to us, over division in the church, over broken friendships, over grave disappointment. And we might get the impression, “Well, the world is just that way. The world was made for disappointment. I may as well get used to it.”

But it wasn’t, and we shouldn’t get used to it.

Evil doesn’t sit well on the world, because the world wasn’t made for it. In fact, although creation is vulnerable to evil, it was made to resist evil. Evil is alien to God’s good world.

If we could personify creation, it would say to sin: “Keep your filthy hands off me. I’m here to honor my Creator. I’ll do everything in my power to resist the evil.”

Sin is the virus, and creation is the healthy human body. Our bodies are vulnerable to viruses, but God made your body and mine to fight back. This is why we get a fever, suffer chills, and feel weak. Our body is fighting an alien invader. That’s the white blood cells, the little soldiers in our bloodstream, fighting to get rid of the alien element.

If you’re a Christian, would you like to know why you’re grieved with the evil you see in the world? Because creation itself is grieved. It’s getting a fever. It’s getting the chills. It’s feeling weak and shaky. Creation is fighting the evil, resisting it.

We live in a God-rigged universe. Evil can win battles, but it can’t win the war. To use another metaphor: God has rigged the house. All sin, all evil, is failing, and will ultimately fail.

That failure was graphically displayed at the old rugged cross and empty tomb 2000 years ago. Jesus Christ triumphed over the alien virus, sin. The alien is still around, but it’s fighting a losing battle.

Take heart today. Jesus crushed the Genesis 3 serpent’s head. This world isn’t made for sin. God’s good world resists sin through the power of Jesus Christ, who is both the Redeemer and the Creator.

When Love Is Wrath

Another counterintuitive observation, this one from Archibald M. Hunter.

Hunter interprets Paul’s view of God’s wrath as his “holy love reacting against evil.” To objectors who see God’s love in conflict with his wrath, he writes that “the opposite of love is hate, not wrath.” Indeed, if we don’t have the capacity for wrath, we lack the capacity for love. If I can unleash no fury on genocide or rape, if I can look on them with indifference or tolerance, I cannot love the people whom those evils would violate.

If you and I can rightly exercise wrath, imagine God, supremely holy, supremely loving, turning away in diffidence when the objects of his love are subject to evil — or who commit it themselves.

He would then not be a God of love, but of craven moral indifference.

Will you consider a tax-deductible donation to CCL via PayPal or Venmo? God uses you to keep us going — and expanding.

Personal

Later today Sharon and I head for Pratt, Kansas. I’ll be speaking twice on October 4 at Trinity Evangelical Church, first on “Dead to Sin, Alive to God” and then “Our Promissory God.” Audio should be posted next week.

The 2020 CCL symposium is set for November 7, four days after the election, and again in San Francisco.

The theme is: “2020 Vision for a Blurry Year: The Election, COVID, Wokeness, and Social Justice Analyzed.”

Everyone will get a chance to contribute.

There’s no charge, but the event is by invitation only, so if you haven’t yet done so, please contact me privately (FB message, or sandlin[at]saber[dot]net) if you wish to attend.

Yours for the King,