Racism and the Doctrine of Imago Dei

I hope with this open letter to help the few who read this to better engage the discussion of racial injustice in the church and in American society.

I am convinced that we cannot be true to the call of the gospel if we do not act justly. Our God of love and justice made all of us in His own image, and racism denies that. It is an offense against God and yet it remains a sinful reality in our culture.

I wish it went without saying, but I’d like to clearly state three basics before I begin:

1.) Racism is a sin. It is a sin that attempts to divide the family of God, blotting out His image and violating the dignity of specific members of His family.

2.) Racism still exists as a very present sin among us. Racism continues to deeply wound our humanity and is a ruinous force in individuals, society, and the church.

3.) Individual racism and structural racism both require attention. Structural racism is constructed over time through patterns of racial injustices that are nested in the institutions of the culture. This type of racism is embedded in many of our social structures, including the church.

I’d like to do my part in helping along the conversation in each of these three areas.

We will not get very far in this conversation unless we acknowledge that racism presses on in America today. It remains among our most serious unresolved evils. It threatens the dignity, and even the lives, of millions.

I’ll skip the statistics and fact-finding to try to persuade you of this. Any effort at all on your part to research this subject will produce more than you’d ever need to know to grasp the weight of the issue. Our individual lives and our society as a whole are rife with racial disparities, injustices, and prejudices.

So I’ll start here: your denial of the problem is a sin.

If we are to pursue redemptive restoration in the area of racism as individuals and as a community, then we must come to terms with the sin of racism in our own hearts and the structures of our society and churches.

Why is racism such a serious moral evil? Because scripture loudly proclaims the oneness of God’s creation ­– from the first words of Genesis to the promises of Revelation. All men and women are created in the image of God, bearing the imprint of the Creator and given life by the breath of His spirit. Racism is a mockery of this design. And it scoffs at the teaching of Jesus and denies the truth of the dignity of every person that is revealed to us in the incarnation.

When Jesus took on flesh, he entered human history to overcome the divisions of our sinfulness— the division between us and God, and the divisions between ourselves. He calls us to a unity that reflects the unity of God’s own being. Jesus modeled this for us in his deep respect and care for the dignity of every person he met, from the Samaritan woman to the tax collector, from the leper to the prostitute. Jesus regarded all people with a dignity befitting an image-bearer of God.

Racism is a serious offense against God because it violates the innate dignity of his people. At its root, racism is a failure to love our neighbor, and we cannot claim to love God unless we love our neighbor. Every offense against the dignity of mankind is an offense against the God in whose image mankind has been made. This dignity has no exception, since all have been created in the image of God.

Within the church, we must come to understand that the dominant characteristic of a people adopted into the family of God is their unity and oneness. The church is extremely diverse, representing people groups from every part of the world. In America, we oftentimes forget that from a global perspective, the majority of the members of the church of Christ aren’t white.

So what do we do?

Firstly, we can’t respond to the sin of racism without first searching our own selves. We must plea with the Lord as David did in Psalm 139:23-24,

Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting!

And then we must be opened to a change of heart.

We must ask the Lord to remove from us our own tendencies for racial prejudice, and then ask Him to help along our ability to see Jesus in people who look, speak, or act differently than we do.

But being cleared of prejudice and racism from our own hearts doesn’t end our responsibility. It is morally inadequate. We are not absolved of all responsibility in the absence of personal fault. The church must always seek to undo injustices she has not caused, just as Christ was our advocate in overcoming the problem of sin in which he had taken no part.

So how do we as a church pursue something more beautiful than simply not being racist? I think the answer is less in what we don’t do, and more in what we actively pursue.

How might our individual lives and our church life look different if the Lord grew in us a love of racial diversity based on our familiarity with the rich contributions to expressions of worship that are being made by diverse cultures? Homogeneity in our churches is often a hindrance to encountering the wide array of expressions of worship that exist in our communities. We need to see more clearly the myriad of cultural gifts that the Lord has gifted our communities to be offered back to Himself in worship! Every culture in our communities is making immeasurable contributions to the mosaic of worship that is our human family. The varied life experiences as expressed in various forms of music, art, food, values, writing, and more in each of our unique communities serve to enrich not only our society, but our churches, and together, they make us more fully human.

We will never grow this appreciation until we are engaging regularly with people from backgrounds that differ from our own. Are we hearing each other’s stories? Are we working and worshiping together? Are we finding our commonalities and enjoying our differences? It is in these things that we may find a unity that reflects the presence of God in all his people.

How fragrant the church’s offering of worship would be if it would strive for the voices of every culture within our church communities to be integrated into the structures of church life!

It is my wish that in the area of racial injustice, the church would shine the light of the unifying gospel throughout the world, shaping our communities into places of unity among people of all races and cultures. Oh, that the church would make Christ’s unifying love and perfect justice a more present reality for a world marred by racism.