On Indian Fort Mountain in southern Madison County in Kentucky, off KY-21 near US-421, there is a nice network of trails. Walk up to the kiosk at the trailhead and you will see a nice topographic map showing those trails. And on that map is something that you won’t see at every trailhead that you might walk up to — a verse from the Bible (arrowed, below), namely Acts 17:26:
God has made of one blood all the peoples of the earth.
This verse is also on the visitor center for the trails.
The verse is from St. Paul’s speech in Athens at the Areopagus, about the Athenian altar ‘to an unknown god’.* It is the motto of Berea College, the owner of the land containing all those trails. That verse from Acts is, in fact, all over Berea.
That verse has been the motto of Berea since its beginning in the 19th century. The idea of Christian inclusiveness, of the “Kinship of All People”, has always been central to the college, as can be seen in an article in The Twenty-Ninth Annual Report of The American Missionary Association, and the Proceedings at the Annual Meeting held at Middletown, Conn., October 27th and 28th, 1875, reporting on the “Berea College, Kentucky … Commencement Exercises – Large attendance of both white and colored people [etc.]”:
It was a magnificent day, and at 8 o’clock in the morning the country people were coming in, and at 10 about twelve hundred were gathered under the arbor in the college grove, attentively listening to the essays and orations of the young ladies and gentlemen. At no other place can be seen such an illustration of the college motto, “God hath made of one blood all nations of men,” as here, in the centre of Kentucky. Of the nineteen performers, twelve were white and seven colored, six were entering college, and three were graduating. All did well, and some very finely.
Or this, from the 1875 Berea College, Kentucky: An Interesting History, on the geographic location of the college:
But the location is well chosen for a more important reason. It is on the line of separation between two classes of people, as unlike each other in their physical development, their habits of life, and their views of society, as if they belonged to distinct races; and when we see them, on the morning of our Annual Commencement, pouring in by thousands — the rich in their carriages from the plains, and the poor from the mountains on horses and mules — and meeting on this common ground, we feel that the place was selected by Him who is “the Maker of them all.” And when we look upon the crowd of three thousand people, white and colored, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, mingling without distinction and with perfect order, listening to speakers and singers of all shades of complexion, the words on the College seal seem wonderfully appropriate: “God hath made of one blood all nations of men.” Twenty miles from this line, on either side, such a company could not be gathered.
It is refreshing to see this motto everywhere. No, it is more than refreshing — it is uplifting. Berea College has it right. And they had it right, in a time when, whereas the worldwide Catholic Church may also have had it right, certain Catholic institutions in Kentucky did not (as discussed in my post from two weeks ago).
But if you’ve read my posts here at Sacred Space Astronomy on 19th-century polygenism, or if you’ve read the book Br. Guy and I wrote, When Science Goes Wrong, you’ll know that when Berea was founded in the 19th century, their motto would have been what today would be characterized as “fundamentalist”, and maybe even “anti-science”. There was lots of science in the 19th century supposedly showing, through science, that there was no kinship of all people, but rather that there were different species of human (-looking) beings, and that the offspring of these different species were, in the long run, inherently infertile — like a mule (the offspring of a horse and an ass).
But that science (now typically called “pseudo-science”) was wrong, and Berea was right. Science now says all people absolutely are “of one blood”. Just a little reminder that in the much-ballyhooed battles between science and religion — between cool, objective, rational people on one hand and those Bible thumpers quoting their verses on the other — the score is not so lopsided as we tend to think. And if we weight the scores by the consequences of the ideas involved, how would the lopsidedness look then?
*Acts 17:16-34 (New American Bible)
While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he grew exasperated at the sight of the city full of idols.
So he debated in the synagogue with the Jews and with the worshipers, and daily in the public square with whoever happened to be there.
Even some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers engaged him in discussion. Some asked, “What is this scavenger trying to say?” Others said, “He sounds like a promoter of foreign deities,” because he was preaching about ‘Jesus’ and ‘Resurrection.’
They took him and led him to the Areopagus and said, “May we learn what this new teaching is that you speak of?
For you bring some strange notions to our ears; we should like to know what these things mean.”
Now all the Athenians as well as the foreigners residing there used their time for nothing else but telling or hearing something new.
Then Paul stood up at the Areopagus and said:
“You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.
For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’ What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands,
nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything. Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything.
He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions,
so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.
For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’
Since therefore we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination.
God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent
because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world with justice’ through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.”
When they heard about resurrection of the dead, some began to scoff, but others said, “We should like to hear you on this some other time.”
And so Paul left them.
But some did join him, and became believers. Among them were Dionysius, a member of the Court of the Areopagus, a woman named Damaris, and others with them.
