One Blood: The Unity of Humanity

Today's Reading

Read Acts 17:24-28: "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth."

Then read Genesis 1:26-27: "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.' ... So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

Reflection

Every honest conversation about race must begin with a theological claim so foundational that its implications are still being worked out two thousand years later: God made every nation from one man.

Paul's address on Mars Hill in Acts 17 is one of the most subversive speeches in the New Testament. Speaking to Greek intellectuals who took for granted a hierarchy of peoples — with Greeks at the top and barbarians at the bottom — Paul declared that the God who made the world made every nation of humanity from a single source. There is no master race. There is no superior ethnicity. The Athenian philosopher and the Scythian slave share the same origin, the same Creator, and the same dignity.

Genesis 1:26-27 grounds this claim in the very nature of what it means to be human. Every person — every person — is made in the image of God. This is not a metaphor. It is the foundation of all human rights, all human dignity, and all human equality. Augustine, in City of God, returned repeatedly to the unity of the human race as a theological bedrock, arguing that all of humanity shares a common ancestry and therefore a common nature.

Tim Keller stated the implication bluntly: "The Bible does not rank ethnic groups into a hierarchy of value. It says God made all nations from one blood — the implications of which the church has been catastrophically slow to grasp." That slowness is not merely an intellectual failure. It is a moral one. Christians who affirmed the image of God on Sunday morning owned enslaved people on Monday. Churches that sang about the family of God enforced segregation in their pews. Denominations that preached universal human dignity were founded specifically to defend slavery.

The gap between the doctrine and the practice is not an argument against the doctrine. It is an indictment of the practitioners. And it should make every Christian ask: where am I affirming the unity of humanity in theory while denying it in practice? This question is not comfortable for anyone. Racial prejudice is not confined to one political party, one region, or one era. It takes different forms in different contexts — from overt hostility to patronizing benevolence to simple indifference — but it always represents a failure to see what Genesis 1 declares: every human being bears the image of the living God.

Going Deeper

The theological claim of human unity is easy to affirm and enormously difficult to live. As you begin this plan, ask yourself with ruthless honesty: are there groups of people whose dignity you affirm in principle but deny in practice — through avoidance, through assumptions, through the neighborhoods you choose, the friendships you form, or the news sources you trust? What would it look like to take Acts 17:26 seriously in the concrete details of your life?