Allow Me to Clarify

As is often the case for anyone with a public facing platform, when specifics are not given then the general can be left up to interpretation.  Unfortunately, in this unique cultural moment, rather than seeking clarification through conversation people will often sit on their assumptions or bombard people with accusations.  So rather than allowing some to assume I have been hijacked by critical race theorists or become a Marxist, which tends to be the accusations hurled at those who try to lean into the discussion on race by challenging historic sins and the structures they created, I want to clarify one point from our most recent sermon, ONE Savior. 

Toward the end of the sermon, I said that “surrendering the hill to Jesus always involves repentance” and then attempted to explain what I meant by repenting from every other form of supremacy.  I was speaking specifically of white supremacy, which has a long and well documented presence in the American Church through deplorable doctrines like the curse of Ham and the founding of denominations to perpetuate slavery.  My goal was not to demonize every white man, woman, boy, and girl by accusing them of being a racist or harboring hatred for ethnic minorities.  While that type of animus is in fact present and active in our community, it is not present in the heart of every person by virtue of them being born with white skin.  If we demonize every person made in the image of God born with white skin, then we make the same mistake as our forefathers who de-humanized every person made in the image of God born with black skin.  Just because you are white does not make you a racist. 

Now, with that out of the way, let me clarify then how we ought to repent from those things we are not personally culpable for because we ourselves have not done.  If you listened to the sermon, you heard me cite two seemingly contradictory passages:

The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself. [Ezekiel 18:20]

“But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers in their treachery that they committed against me, and also in walking contrary to me, so that I walked contrary to them . . . then I will remember my covenant” [Leviticus 26:40-42]

In Ezekiel we are told that both our righteousness and our wickedness are our own personal responsibility.  In other words, we alone are culpable for our actions which means I am not responsible for what my father did, and my son is not responsible for I do.  Praise God!  However, we read in Leviticus about the people “confessing their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers”.  This is set in a larger context which describes God’s people “walking contrary to Him” and results in God “walking contrary to them”.  When this takes place, God says that the people ought to not only confess their iniquities but also the iniquities of their fathers.  So, which is it?  Are we or aren’t we responsible for the sins committed by those who came before us?

I agree with Reed DePace when he says that resolution to the apparent contradiction, we need to understand the different ways the Hebrew word “iniquity” is used in the Old Testament.  Sometimes iniquity refers to the act itself and sometimes it refers to the results or the consequences of the act.  So, in Ezekiel, we are not personally responsible for the actions of our fathers but in Leviticus we do bear the results and consequences of those actions.  This is what DePace calls the difference between “culpability” and “corruption”.  So, while we are not personally culpable for the actions of the generations that came before us those actions have had a corrupting effect in our culture and in our churches.  So while we cannot turn from the actions themselves, we can turn from their corrupting influence.

Let me illustrate.  If a man grew up in a home where he was abused by his father and saw his father abuse his mother, he is not personally responsible for the abuse he endured or the abuse he witnessed.  However, when he emerges into adulthood, marries and starts a family of his own, he is responsible to root out any of the corrupting influence his childhood may have had on him in terms of the way he treats his own wife and kids.  He has a responsibility to “turn his back” on the sins of his father, the corrupting influence of his childhood, and tell his family that there has been a break with the past.  Those same patterns that he experienced as a child will not be expressed as the norm for his family because he has repented from the sins of his father.  Now, at times there is even a need to say that publicly.  So often the axiom “hurt people…hurt people” comes true in terms of domestic violence as abuse victims become abusers themselves.  So, if I knew my daughter was dating or engaged to a man who had been physically, emotionally, sexually, or verbally abused as a child and seen his father treat his mother as an object rather than a person during his formative years, I would want him to say to my wife and I, “this is the horror of what I experienced in my home, but by God’s grace I have repented from it…I am turning my back on those patterns of behavior in order to break the chain of domestic violence in my family…because I can’t always see clearly myself, any residue you see that is left over, would you please say something and help me put it to death so that I might honor God by honoring your daughter who is to be my wife”. That is “repenting” from the corrupting influence of his father’s sins.

So, when it comes to repenting from other types of supremacy, the church has a responsibility to publicly break with the sins of our fathers and the corrupting influence of the past on the present.  We have a responsibility to deal with any of the residue that remains from the way the church was “raised” in America.  Even though I, as a white male, am not personally culpable for the sins of every white person who has come before me, I still have a personal responsibility to turn my back on the corrupting influence of the past and seek to recognize and root out any residue that remains in me.  The church has a corporate responsibility to turn our back on the sins of our fathers by publicly breaking from their corrupting influence around the issue of race and root out any residue that remains in us.  Finally, the church has a responsibility to speak prophetically to the culture around us when we see injustices that are “framed up by statutes” in our nation.  That is what I meant by repenting from any other type of supremacy.  It is not a blanket accusation that all white people are racist by virtue of their white skin, but a call to turn our backs on the corrupting influence of our fathers.     

One final note.  The American Church’s failure in race relations does not mean that everything the white church has done in America is suspect or evil.  Much good has been done as well.  Let me compare it a college exam filled with essay questions designed to allow you to express your grasp of the course content and its application to particular cases.  Just because you got one of those questions horribly wrong does not mean you also, at the same time, did not get the other nine questions right.  We cannot throw out everything the American Church has done because she was so blind and callus at this point.  Much of the American Church’s past failure in this area was a failure of courage and a failure of discipleship.  The church often mirrored the culture in their view of race, but even when they didn’t, they lacked the courage to confront the fallacy of white supremacy.  It was a failure of discipleship because it failed to apply the whole counsel of God to the realities of life in the church and help the church see how to relate to the larger culture.  So, as we move forward with courage, repenting from the sins of our fathers and refusing to embrace postmodern theories as the solution to those sins, only then can we realize the hope of being one.  We must look into the mirror of God’s word to engage in wholistic discipleship and be filled with courage from Holy Spirit so that we would not shrink back from declaring and applying the whole counsel of God when it would be easier to say nothing at all. 

— Written by Pastor Shannon Collins