The Divine Intention
Is unity a central biblical concern or is it just peripheral to the life of faith, something to be engaged in as an optional extra by those who are temperamentally suited to do so? No, the scriptures declare that the unity of the entire creation was God’s intention from the very beginning of creation.
The biblical account of creation depicts the primal state of affairs as being such that harmony, unity, fellowship and friendliness abound. Poetically and symbolically this is done by saying that every living creature was at this stage a vegetarian. There was no bloodshed in God’s creation according to His will and intention. The Bible declares that things then went horribly, badly wrong because sin entered God’s creation. The primal unity was disrupted. Where there had been unity, there was now disunity, harmony was replaced by disharmony. There was alienation and hatred and enmity. Fellowship and communion were destroyed; there was murder and death, war and strife. And the Genesis stories culminate in the shattering story of the Tower of Babel, where human community and fellowship became impossible. That is the ultimate consequence, according to the Bible, of sin: separation, alienation, apartness. It is a perverse exegesis that would hold that the story of the Tower of Babel is a justification for racial separation, a divine sanction for the diversity of nations.
The entire situation at the end of the story of the tower of Babel cried out for reconciliation, for atonement. Please note that this word ‘atonement’ is also ‘at-one-ment’, meaning ‘at-one-ing’, the reconciliation of those who are separated, divided; reconciliation means creating friendship, bringing together, uniting those who formerly were at variance, who were enemies before, who were alienated.
The story of the Bible could be said to be the story of God’s mission to restore the harmony which was there at the beginning, when His rule, His reign, would be acknowledged once again. In the descriptions of the Messianic age (after Messiah, God’s Anointed Representative to inaugurate God’s rule, God’s Kingdom) we hear echoes of the time at the beginning. So, Isaiah in Chapter 11 says of the Anointed One:
He shall judge the poor with justice and defend the humble in the land with equity.
Note the following verses:
Then the wolf shall live with the sheep, and the leopard lie down with the kid; the calf and the young lion shall grow up together, and a little child shall lead them….They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for as the waters fill the sea, so shall the land be filled with the knowledge of the Lord.
(Isaiah 11:4 — 9)
And so God sent His Son to effect reconciliation, to bring about the atonement that would achieve the unity, harmony, peace, justice, fellowship, friendliness, compassion, wholeness which were His intention for His creation from the very beginning. Saint Paul says
God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.
(2 Corinthians 5:19)
Jesus, speaking about His coming crucifixion, declares —
I, if I be lifted up will draw all men to me
(John 12:32)
— underlining that His chief work in the salvation of the world would be a uniting, a reconciling one. At the heart of Jesus’ prayer in John Chapter 17 is the petition that His followers will be one, with a unity that reflects the unity that subsists between the Father and the Son (John 17:11, 20–23); the unity is not for merely pragmatic reasons that it is economical to have one church building rather than several serving the same community and locality, but because a divided Church is a scandal, making it difficult for people to believe the Gospel of God’s love.
The only separation the Bible knows is between believers on the one hand and unbelievers on the other. Any other kind of separation, division, disunity is of the Devil. It is evil and from sin.
Do I still need to demonstrate that apartheid is evil after all that I have said about the centrality for the Bible of unity and reconciliation? Apartheid is evil for at least three reasons:
- The Bible declares right at the beginning that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. What makes any human being valuable, therefore, is not any biological characteristic. No, it is the fact that he or she is created in the image and likeness of God. Apartheid exalts a biological quality, which is a total irrelevancy, to the status of what determines the value, the worth of a human being.
- Secondly, the chief work that Jesus came to perform on earth can be summed up in the word ‘Reconciliation’. He came to restore human community and brotherhood which sin destroyed. Apartheid quite deliberately denies and repudiates this central act of Jesus and says we are made for separateness, for disunity, for enmity, for alienation, which we have shown to be the fruits of sin. For this reason alone apartheid is totally unchristian and unbiblical, for it denies not just a peripheral matter but a central verity of the Christian faith.
- Thirdly, apartheid treats human beings, God’s children, as if they were less than this. It manipulates persons and treats them as if they were means to some end. Immanuel Kant declared that a person is always an end, never a means to an end.
It is a part of God’s mission and purpose for His world to bring about wholeness, justice, good health, righteousness, peace and harmony and reconciliation. These are what belong to the Kingdom of God, and we are His agents to work with Him as His partners to bring to pass all that God wants for His universe. He showed Himself as a liberator God. When He found a rabble of slaves in bondage then, because He is that kind of God, He set them free as the God of the Exodus who takes the side of the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the widow, the orphan and the alien. God can’t help it. He always takes sides. He is not a neutral God. He takes the side of the weak and the oppressed. I am not saying so. I have shown it to be so in the Bible.
Where there is injustice, exploitation and oppression then the Bible and the God of the Bible are subversive of such a situation. The Bible is the most revolutionary, the most radical book there is. If a book had to be banned by those who rule unjustly and as tyrants, then it ought to have been the Bible. Whites brought us the Bible and we are taking it seriously.
This is part of the text of Bishop Tutu’s testimony before an inquiry set up by the South African Government to investigate alleged financial irregularities within the South African Council of Churches in 1982. Its aim was to attempt to discredit and render ineffective the assistance given by the SACC to the victims of apartheid.