Social Holiness: The Prism of the Cross
The Cross is the Ultimate Revelation of God
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
Rev. Tim Callow
Preached Sun. Nov. 5th, 2023
C.S. Lewis said that we ought to read books from different eras because each era has its own blindness. That’s a piece of advice I’ve taken to heart. When I prepare for sermons I make sure to read commentaries not just from the last 50 years, but from hundreds of years ago. I don’t just read contemporary theology but works from the Church Fathers or the Reformers or from wildly different contexts. It’s hard to see beyond ones own blinders but also very rewarding. You also get a deeper sense of the blinders of past generations. I remember reading a book from 1907 on Christianity and politics, as one does, and there was a strange aside about the dysgenic consequences of medieval monasticism. You may wonder, what does dysgenic mean? It means the author feared monasticism decreased the quality of the racial stock. In other words, he was using the language of eugenics.
In case anyone isn’t familiar eugenics is the pseudoscience that says we can improve the quality of human beings through breeding. As one improves a dog say, or cattle, one can improve humans. Find a stud, have them breed. Find people with disabilities and keep them from breeding.
Eugenics was once taken very seriously as a science in the United States. In fact one of the centers of eugenic activism and thought was in Michigan. I don’t need to get into that sordid history. Ultimately the Nazis in Germany took eugenics to its logical conclusions and people saw it for what it is. What I really want to focus on is the way eugenics was preached. The American Eugenics Society once held a competition for sermons on the topic of eugenics. Luckily we have the submissions. I want to share a few quotes.
“The Bible is a book of eugenics. The opening chapters of Matthew and Luke are virtually chapters on eugenics. Christ was born of a family that represented a long process of religious and moral selection. He came from a stock of priestly and prophetic men; a stock of men that represented the highest product of religious and moral selection in the history of the world. “
“From Mount Sinai, God is thundering his commandment against bowing down to idols, a sort of worship which an unobserving man might say would do no harm, but which God knew would poison the bodies, minds and morals of not merely the generation that sinned, but of the generations to come. God is warning most solemnly that the iniquity of the fathers will run in the blood of the coming generations, and is pointing out that terrible law of heredity, so clearly established now by scientists, that blood will tell, that criminality, insanity, idiocy, tuberculosis, alcoholism, and other vices, whose strong corruption inhabits our germ-plasms, leap from parents to children, damning the offspring before it is even born.”
"But the fact is that long before a child is born the germ plasm which he will transmit and which will determine the heredity of his offspring has been set aside in little glands and can in no way be affected, except by gross chemical disturbances of the blood, as in alcholic [sic] poisoning, or the penetration of disease germs within these reproductive glands themselves. … The flippant may ask, "What responsibility have we for our neighbors' children?" But those who have apprehended the spirit of religion will reply, "we are one body in Christ Jesus. "And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member is honored all the members rejoice with it." There is a sickness in our body, a faintness and a spread of disease. And we shall seek healing, redemption and salvation, till we behold the coming of the Community of God and its peace.”
These are all men of God, students of Scripture, going to their bibles and producing arguments as to why the disabled should not be allowed to reproduce. We find that morally abhorrent today. We may also think their biblical examples are total stretches. Do the genealogies of Jesus really exist to show us Jesus’ great racial line? Did God really say the sins of the fathers will be visited on the sons because of heredity? Does being one body in Christ Jesus really mean we have an obligation to keep disabled people from having children? But they clearly thought they were preaching the gospel. That the word of God, in their day, meant promoting eugenic theories. What are we to make of this?
This question is no mere academic or intellectual exercise. It’s not an idle matter. It ought to strike us as deeply relevant. Because people did not just turn to their bibles to justify eugenics. They turned to their bibles to justify slavery. They turned to their bibles to justify segregation. They turned to their bibles to justify genocide. All sorts of hellish justifications have been made from scripture. And let us not forget that when Satan sought to tempt Jesus he did so with the words of Scripture.
Paul tells us this morning that when the Church in Thessaloniki received the word of God they recognized that it was not a human word, but it is God’s word. And that God’s word is not idle but is at work within them. That word being the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen. The key to the Scriptures. That is where we must go.
The Gospel of Eugenics, the Gospel of Slavery, the Gospel of Genocide, does this reflect Christ crucified and risen? In all the sermons from the competition that I read, none of them reference the Cross. They cannot. Because they do not present a cruciform Gospel. It is, as Paul would say, another gospel. They may know the words of scripture, but they’ve lost the plot as the British would say. They don’t know the story.
The rule of thumb for Scripture is everything must go through the prism of the ultimate revelation of God, and that is Christ on his cross. Does this reflect the love shown to us in Christ? Does this reflect the gracious action of God in delivering us from sin? Does this reflect Christ’s self-emptying, Christ’s self-donation? Or are we twisting the words to feed another narrative? Do we use Christian like language, and give the words a different meaning? So grace is no longer grace, forgiveness no longer forgiveness, love no longer love.
We must continually challenge ourselves to see clearly, read rightly, and love one another as Christ loved us. This is why we cannot pursue holiness alone. We pursue holiness together in the life of the Church. This is why discipleship cannot be a solo endeavor. Why there is no holiness but social holiness. God brings us together that we would build one another up, and point each other to the Cross and empty tomb.