The Problem With Land Acknowledgements
From the Boniface Presbytery of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC):
The practice of land acknowledgements has become customary in many Canadian institutions. However, our churches do not participate in this practice because the theology undergirding such acknowledgements is incompatible with the Christian faith.
The Scriptures teach that the entire earth belongs to God by right of creation: “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (Ps 24:1). God is the sole proprietor, and we are all his tenants. But God’s ultimate ownership does not nullify legitimate human possession. Indeed, God has ordained private property as the normal way that men exercise dominion under him. The eighth commandment, “You shall not steal” (Exod 20:15), presupposes that men rightfully own things, including land. You cannot steal what no one owns.
Sadly, property rights were deliberately excluded from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Nevertheless, the right to own property is grounded in the Decalogue itself, and it is Scripture, not the Charter, that governs the Christian conscience.
God assigns nations their lands by his sovereign providence. 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” (Acts 17:26). He moves peoples according to his will. The boundaries of nations are fluid across history, not fixed by ancestral occupation. When God settles a people in a land over the course of centuries, that settlement becomes their legitimate possession.
History is not tidy. Every nation on earth sits on land that was once held by someone else. The peoples of Europe conquered and were conquered. So did the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Indigenous peoples warred against one another, displaced one another, and took one another’s territory long before Europeans arrived. To single out one moment in this long and tangled history and declare it the permanent baseline of legitimate ownership is not a historical judgement but a false theological claim. It assumes that one particular configuration of peoples and lands is the “true” arrangement, frozen in place by right, and that everything since has been a deviation. The Scriptures know nothing of this. God is the Lord of history, and his providence does not come with an asterisk.
At his ascension, the Lord Jesus Christ received from the Father the nations as his inheritance and the ends of the earth as his possession (Ps 2:8). The Apostle Peter, preaching at Pentecost, interpreted Christ’s enthronement as the fulfilment of this very promise: the risen and ascended Son receives the Spirit and, with the Spirit, the nations themselves (Acts 2:33–36). The Abrahamic promise of land, which in its Old Covenant form pointed to Canaan, has in its New Covenant fulfilment expanded to encompass the whole earth. As Paul explains, the promise to Abraham and his offspring was “that he would be heir of the world” (Rom 4:13). That heir is Christ, and in him, all who believe.
This means that no land on earth is “unceded” in any ultimate sense. All land has been ceded by the Father to the Son. Jesus Christ holds title to every square inch of the universe, including the land on which our church buildings stand, the land on which Parliament sits, and the land from “sea to sea.” The question of who rightly inhabits any portion of the earth is answered not by ancestry but by the lordship of Christ and the providence of the Father, and therefore by biblical principles of justice.
A land acknowledgement is not merely a historical observation. It is a liturgical act, a public confession that operates within a particular theological framework, whether or not its participants recognize it as such. That framework holds that a people’s claim to land is grounded in ancestry and prior occupation; that the current inhabitants are essentially trespassers; and that the appropriate posture of the trespasser is one of perpetual, unresolvable guilt.
The Christian faith rejects each of these premises. Land is not owned by ancestry alone but granted by God and held as a rightful possession by those to whom he gives it. The eighth commandment protects this possession, not as a concession but as a matter of divine law. Current inhabitants are not trespassers but providentially placed. And guilt – real guilt, for real sins – is not a permanent condition to be performed in public rituals. Vague collective guilt, ritually expressed, is a substitute for repentance, not an expression of it. It identifies no specific wrong, names no specific wrongdoer, and proposes no specific remedy. It is a liturgy of permanent accusation, and the gospel does not authorize permanent accusation. The gospel does not leave men in a state of guilt but delivers them from it. Where identifiable wrongs have been committed by identifiable wrongdoers, the Christian response is concrete repentance and, where the wrong constitutes a crime, proportional restitution.
The gospel calls us to something far greater than acknowledgement. It calls us to proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord of all nations and all lands, that in him the dividing wall of hostility between peoples has been broken down (Eph 2:14), and that the inheritance promised to Abraham belongs to all who share his faith, regardless of ethnicity or ancestry. The deepest need of every people is not acknowledgment but redemption from sin.
We confess that the land Canadians lawfully possess ultimately belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ, and that we gather in his name to worship the Triune God who made all peoples and all lands, and who is reconciling all things to himself through the blood of the cross (Col 1:20).
Rev. Garry Vanderveen
Presiding Minister, Boniface Presbytery
