"WE HAVE SINNED" - Daniel 9:5
That people are in an important sense held responsible for things that happened before they were born is a frequent theme in Old Testament descriptions of humanity and how the world works.
There is in the collective biblical mind such a thing as social, intergenerational, and even national sin.
We are responsible for each other. This is Judaism and it is Christianity.
It surprises me how often those who are seeking to expose and bring justice for systemic racism are told by some Christians that they cannot be held responsible for something their grandparents or great grandparents did.
There is an important sense in which this is true. I cannot be tried for a murder my great grandfather committed.
And yet the Scriptures describe how the collective sins of a people are eventually judged by God, even judged by the creation. And this judgment can be experienced generations after a societal transgression (often a systemic and ongoing one) occurs.
While I am at it, I find it strange that when folks try to address racial hatred and injustice some Christians will respond that the only way to ameliorate racial hatred is by converting hearts, not by marching in the streets or passing legislation.
Ironically, it’s often those same Christians who will march in the streets to end abortion, spend enormous energy on Supreme Court appointments, and hang their entire vote on the question.
It seems to me there are practical things to do to combat sin and there’s also the need to recognize that God alone is capable of converting our hearts and minds and that all of it—the converting and the marching, the inner renewal and the outward rectification—are gracious participations in what *God alone is doing.*
There’s this complexity to existence that binds us to what every other human says and does, and that something like a mystery of inherited guilt is real.
God alone is capable of removing this guilt and it is what one human being says and does and endures on the cross as God that removes this stain, and yet the new life beyond death into which we Christians are baptized involves also our free participation in God’s works of justice that reconcile the world to himself.
It’s all grace and it’s all work. It was and is and will be the grace and the work of the human God alone, and the human God alone is glorified in all the things he creates and forever sustains in life.
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