We Are All Children of God
Jesus Loves the Little Children - ALL the Children of the World
In a speech given at the Democratic National Convention, Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, Senior Pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church and Senator from Georgia, closed with the idea that we are all children of God and that should determine how we treat one another. Almost immediately, Christian X (Twitter) erupted in protests and claims of apostasy by mostly white evangelicals. A decade ago, this would not have been a controversy, but many evangelicals are so steeped in the political idea that those who disagree with us are evil, not us, or not included in God’s wider family that they began to use the language of the past in which those who were not like the majority are not the children of God. It is much easier to kill, enslave, and oppress people who are not considered worthy of respect and care.
The idea that some humans are not children of God is not found in scripture. instead it is an idea steeped and rooted in white supremacy of the past in which humans who were enslaved were seen as less than human and definitely not the children of God. This is an idea which was used as justification to treat others with violence and enslavement. The contemporary use is often an excuse by some to not treat others as neighbor. But even if we assume that some are not neighbor, even as Jesus claims otherwise in the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus also tells us to pray for and care for our enemy. There really is no excuse for the follower fo Jesus to treat any human being as other than family.
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We are all children of God and we should treat all human beings as family with all of its complexity. When in conversations with fellow clergy about this topic, the doctrine of adoption is mentioned. The issue here is that we have no concept of what adoption was in the culture of first century Roman law. When Paul, a Roman citizen, speaks of adoption he is using the context of the adoptions of Roman culture. In this context, the head of a household would adopt a person (usually an adult) for alliance, or to give that person special legal status as heir. This understanding of adoption extended to biological children of the head of household. So when adoption is used in the New Testament scriptures for followers of Jesus, it is in the context of being legal heirs within the larger family. But even without that idea, the scriptures have instances of referring to all humanity as children of God.
One prominent example is Paul speaking in Athens in the public forum of philosophy in which we states that we are all children of the “unknown God.” Paul quote Greek poetry to say that there is an idea of the God who is incarnate in Jesus and that we are all offspring (children) of this God.
For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’
Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.
Acts 17:28–29 - NRSVCE
Any time we have a reaction when others are considered part of the family, we need to ask ourselves why we feel that way? What are we afraid of or worried about if others are part of the family? Humanity is divided by selfishness, fear, and evil intent. Humanity is united by love, grace, and care. Which sounds better? The deep truth of Jesus' claims about God is that there is no us and them. There is only us and those who appear to be them need to be treated as us so they know they belong and are invited into the work of the family. John Wesley’s sermon Heavenly Treasure in Earthen Vessels contains Wesley’s claim that each and every human being we encounter carries some piece of the image of God (imago Dei). Wesley’s sermon can be argued to claim that even those who follow other religions are part of the family, but they still need to be invited to become heirs so that they can experience the full restoration of the imago Dei.
Why is this important? Because the current cultural assumption is that we must “other” people who disagree with us. In fact, the social media algorithms work their insidious narrowing to force us to take sides and see others as “them” rather than as “us.” This idea of other worms its way into our conscious and demands that we separate and allows us to use violence, hatred, and exclusion. It is an anti-Christ idea and needs to be named as such. The best way to counter this attitude is to see each person we encounter as carrying the imago Dei and thus a member of the family of God. Rather than asking “who is my neighbor,” we need ot be saying “hello sibling.”
“In him we live and move and have our being”, for we are all children of God.
https://carolashby.com/adoption-in-the-roman-empire/