Brightening God by Darkening Humanity?

 Hello All,

William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), in argument against the low views of humanity propagated in and before his time by mainline Christianity (and being horrified specifically by slavery and the apathy of some Christians toward it), eventually wrote the following:

“There can be no spirit of brotherhood, no true peace, any farther than men come to understand their affinity with and relation to God and the infinite purpose for which he gave them life. As yet these ideas are treated as a kind of spiritual romance: and the teacher who really expects men to see in themselves and one another the children of God, is smiled at as a visionary. The reception of this plainest truth of Christianity would revolutionize society, and create relations among men not dreamed of at the present day. A union would spring up, compared with which our present friendships would seem estrangements. Men would know the import of the word Brother, as yet nothing but a word to multitudes. None of us can conceive the change of manners, the new courtesy and sweetness, the mutual kindness, deference, and sympathy, the life and energy of efforts for social melioration, which are to spring up, in proportion as man shall penetrate beneath the body to the spirit, and shall learn what the lowest human being is. Then insults, wrongs, and oppressions, now hardly thought of, will give a deeper shock than we receive from crimes, which the laws punish with death. Then man will be sacred in man's sight: and to injure him will be regarded as open hostility towards God.” 

Channing profoundly suggests the above would only have been possible had religion not, in its effort glorify God's splendor, negated humanity's worth; had it not sought to "brighten" God's goodness by emphasizing humanity's "darkness." Imagine how the world would be different if the dominating Christian conceptions of God and people had been different for the last 200 years.

Grace=Peace,

Jeremy