We Are His Offspring

“Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 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, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for

‘In him we live and move and have our being,’

as even some of your own poets have said,

‘For we are indeed his offspring.’” [1]

“I don’t like those people. They are not like us!” Are you quite certain of that? It is distressingly normal that people will segregate into tribes; and usually the tribes are composed of people that share some physical similarities such as melanin content. The influx of illegal immigrants flooding the United States are forced into tent cities in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. They segregate into tribes defined by melanin or language, and the tribes have proved hostile toward one another. [2]

Modern western society increasingly segregates into tribes. Modern social tribes frequently do not necessarily have a racial aspect, but the greater distinction is in the worldview held. Our political expression blinds us and divides us so that we are unable to recognise the similarities we share. We tend to adhere to our own tribes, categorising those who belong to another tribe as somewhat less human than our own people.

The United States fought a war over this issue—brother fighting against brother, families torn apart as fathers chose one side and daughters chose the other, and as mothers chose one side and sons chose the other. The nation invested another one hundred years before coming to the place that such discrimination based on race, place of origin, or religion would be outlawed. In the past few years that nation, indeed almost all western nations, have once again moved toward rigid segregation. This time, however, the separation into tribes is pushed by people who wish to be called POC—People of Colour. And these who are choosing such segregation appear to be having considerable success as they drive others who have not grown up with such prejudice in their hearts.

The justly celebrated historian, Victor Davis Hanson, provides disturbing insight into a modern phenomenon that is driving societal changes in contemporary society, changes that must conclude in disaster for the nations of the west. He writes, in an editorial published this past year, “Few Romans in the late decades of their 5th-century A.D. empire celebrated their newfound ‘diversity’ of marauding Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals. These tribes en masse had crossed the unsecured Rhine and Danube borders to harvest Roman bounty without a care about what had created it. Their agendas were focused on destroying the civilization they overran rather than peacefully integrating into and perpetuating the Empire.

“Ironically, Rome's prior greatness had been due to the extension of citizenship to diverse people throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia. Millions had been assimilated, integrated, and intermarried and often superseded the original Italians of the early Roman Republic. Such fractious diversity had led to unity around the idea of Rome. New citizens learned to enjoy the advantages of habeas corpus, sophisticated roads, aqueducts, and public architecture, and the security offered by the legions. The unity of these diverse peoples fused into a single culture that empowered Rome. In contrast, the later disunity of hundreds of thousands of tribal people flooding into and dividing Rome doomed it. To meet the challenge of a multiracial society, the only viable pathway to a stable civilization of racially and ethnically different people is a single, shared culture.” [3] And this is a lesson that political and cultural leaders of the modern western world seems to have forgotten, if they ever knew it.

It is a tragedy of colossal proportions when such segregation such as is increasingly promoted and tolerated within a society. It is more tragic still when segregation such as we now witness characterises any society. When an attitude of divisiveness, an attitude that originates in the world such as attitudes that now appear ascendant throughout contemporary society, is brought into the congregation of the Lord, the presence of such an attitude serves as a sign of terminal illness for that congregation, just as the promotion of segregation—on any basis—constitutes a terminal condition for any society. When I make the observation that such segregation is found among the churches of this day, I don’t mean to imply that the Faith is susceptible to disappearing from the earth, but I do mean that the practise of the Faith among the churches is being changed in ways that ensure that the Spirit of God is no longer working in power among too many churches that have been infiltrated by the spirit of this age.