The Racialist Lens Disrupts True Christian Unity: A Response to Thabiti Anyabwile

Thabiti Anyabwile is a council member of The Gospel Coalition (TGC) and the pastor of Anacostia River Church in Washington, D.C. .....

But then he added this short paragraph, which garnered a great deal of attention:

"My white neighbors and Christian brethren can start by at least saying their parents and grandparents and this country are complicit in murdering a man who only preached love and justice."

James White is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the author of more than twenty four books, a professor, an accomplished debater, and an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

The Catholic Church in this country, though centrally governed through a structure of Popes, bishops, etc., for many years maintained ethnic parishes in an era when the Mass was in Latin. Italian, Polish, German, Irish, etc., parishes were established primarily because it was believed that the parishioners would be most comfortable with people of their own background and native language. If whites and blacks are similarly more comfortable in churches where the respective groups are in the majority, what is wrong with that?

Thabiti has been playing a racial tune for a bit. Not sure why. It is certainly not germane to the outreach of the gospel.

We must see history through a much larger lens than two or three cultures over 500 years. If we don’t, our sample size of what happened and what to think of it gets distorted.

The fact is, nearly every people group in history has been badly treated by some other people group, going all the way back. Then they recover and move on and there’s no hard feelings. Except in Arab culture, where revenge is the air they breathe. Do a quick study of how the Brits hosed the Irish over the last 400 years, particularly during the potato famine. Did you know Irish were sold as slaves across the ocean?

Now blacks want to be the exception in history. They want people to pay based on melanin content, even if they weren’t a part of it. They think that it will empower them. In truth, it demonstrates weakness, myopia, the absence of resilience and resourcefulness, and an ignorance of history.

Christians especially should recognize this as a repudiation of the Sermon on the Mount.

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