Race and Scriptural Theology

Gerald R. McDermott, who has just retired as the Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Theological Seminary and is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, has edited a book which is soon to be released by Acton Books entitled Race and Covenant: Retrieving the Religious Roots for American Reconciliation. The subject is remarkably timely, especially considering that the work on it must have begun long before the death of George Floyd sparked the present racial conflagration that threatens to raze all of Western Civilization to the ground. Will this book be an attempt to extinguish these flames or simply another pouring of gasoline onto the fire?

Judging from an article by McDermott that appeared on First Things website last week, I think there are grounds to expect it to be the former rather than the latter. He begins by saying that while Churches are "rightly trying to respond with compassion" to the death of George Floyd, "many church leaders and parishioners are adopting a race narrative that is empirically and theologically suspect." He then provides three examples of what he is talking about. The first is a letter addressed to the clergy of the ACNA (Anglican Church in North America) which was written by four of that body's clergy and published on the Anglican Compass website. A joint-statement by the presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention and its seminary in New Orleans is the second. A twitter post from the Roman Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut is the third. McDermott says regarding these that "White Christians, many influenced by Critical Race Theory, are eager to demonstrate their virtue by confessing their 'white privilege'." He then offers arguments as to why the Critical Race Theory interpretation of Floyd's death, which is being pushed by well over ninety-nine percent of the mainstream media and which many people seem to think they are obligated to accept uncritically - note the irony - is dubious. The arguments are ones that my own readers will be familiar with by now - the evidence that American police are not in fact racist as an institution, the institutional discrimination in favour of blacks known as affirmative action, and that the narrative is harmful rather than helpful to its intended beneficiaries.

McDermott then goes on to say that "there are even better theological reasons to reject the mainstream narrative." The rest of his article is the unfolding of what those "better theological reasons" are.

Unfortunately, while well-intentioned, and generally aiming in the right direction, his exposition of this theology is flawed by numerous factual errors and a couple of serious misinterpretations of Scripture.

It is not true, for example, that "Nations (ta ethne), in the New Testament world were often multiracial." This would be true if predicated of cities and larger polities such as empires, but not of the term he uses here. His mistake seems to be derived from his equation of race with skin colour. These are related but not identical concepts. Race is derived from words that denote common descent, not skin colour, and until very recently this was still the predominant association with the word. This very much was an aspect of what it meant to be a nation. The general North American confusion regarding the distinction between "nation" and "state" undoubtedly also contributes to this mistake. It is extremely misleading to say "both Greeks and Jews came in various colors" in this context, for while this is true, the colours were not the hues that are commonly associated with races today. Indeed, if we were to speak of the ancient Greeks and Jews in terms of the races first identified as such by physical anthropologists but now generally spoken of as genetic populations for purposes of political correctness, both Greeks and Jews as nations, were members of a single race, rather than transracial entities.

The more important flaw, however, is in his interpretation of Scripture.

Take his interpretation of Acts 17:26 for example. He clearly understands it the same way in which prominent creationist Ken Ham explained it in his book One Blood. He says of it "Ironically, Critical Race Theory teaches something similar: that races as we conceive them are not rooted in biology or anthropology, but are socially constructed." This, however, is to torture the verse into meaning the exact opposite of what it says. This verse, which is part of St. Paul's address to the philosophers assembled at the Areopagus, says that God, and not man, is the author of the nations - ethnic groups not states, Who sets their boundaries, physical and temporal. The "one blood" in the verse identifies the material God used to fashion the nations, not the end towards which He was working. He started with one bloodline, and from it made the many nations. We all share in the common blood and therefore are of the race of Adam, but this is not stated in a way that can be rightly interpreted as consistent with Critical Race Theory's claim that the races today are socially constructed. It flat out contradicts it.

McDermott would undoubtedly recognize this to be true if it were applied to the sexes. Are man and woman not both made of "one blood" as well?

Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory in general, which also asserts that "sex", which it calls "gender", is a social construction. Would McDermott be comfortable with interpreting the Scriptural references to the common humanity of men and women as saying that the sexes are social constructs?

I am certain the answer is that he would not. Yet this directly relates to his main argument which pertains to the Pauline distinction between the old and the new creation. For just as the Scripture states that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek"(Gal. 3:28) it also, and in fact in the same verse, says "there is neither male nor female." Are we to interpret this as meaning that the distinction between male and female has no relevance in the new creation?

St. Paul himself didn't seem to think so. He made numerous distinctions between men and women when it came to authority and teaching in the Church. While some dioceses within the ACNA, like the older Episcopal Church and my own Anglican Church of Canada, do not follow St. Paul's restrictions, apparently interpreting them as being culturally particular rather than Catholic, which is the opposite of the Catholic interpretation if we define Catholicity in terms of St. Vincent's canon, the ACNA has not followed these older bodies in taking the elimination of the distinction between male and female to its logical, if absurd, extreme, which is that if there is no male nor female, then there is no reason to oppose men choosing other men, women choosing other women, or each choosing to decide that it is the other, or something else altogether. Sane and orthodox theologians recognize that this is a nonsensical extrapolation from what St. Paul actually said. This means that "there is neither male nor female" emphasizes the unity of the two in Christ, but not in a way that eliminates either the distinction or the importance of the distinction altogether. If this is true of the unity of the sexes in Christ, it is not logical to deny it of the unity of the races in Christ.

It is also interesting to observe what is curiously absent from his discussion. There is no mention of the Tower of Babel, which is the Scriptural account of how God took the one bloodline of Adam and made the many tribes, nations, and races out of it by confusing the tongues. Nor is there any mention of Whitsunday, the Christian Pentecost, on which people of a multitude of tongues each heard the Apostles proclaim the Gospel of Christ in their own, and were baptized into the one body, the Church. Since the former is the account of a judgement of God upon the old creation, speaking about how in the latter the curse of the former was lifted to establish the unity of the new creation in the Church is pretty fundamental to the topic. Especially since it points in the right direction. Since the Church is where the unity of the new creation is to be sought, her task is to invite people to enter that unity by believing and being baptized, not to support activists, let alone subversive radicals, who seek to impose an artificial substitute for it through political force.

The above criticisms having been lodged, McDermott is definitely on the right tack when he says:

As Green and others have noted, the new anti-racism has become a new religion with its own original sin (white racism), baptismal liturgy (confession of whiteness), and new birth (to wokeness). But there is no redemption, and its ethic encourages people to practice what Jesus condemned, “Do not judge, lest you too be judged” (John 7:1). It imputes motives to others based on skin color—bad motives to one skin color and good motives to other colors. This is racism by another name. It is also sinful judgment. (The "Green" to whom he refers is a black political scientist named Derryck Green whose contribution to the forthcoming book, McDermott had just quoted).

The reason this new religion offers no absolution - apart from the fact that it is a false religion and absolution is only to be found in the true religion of Christ - is because it serves the interests of a seditious and revolutionary ideology. Revolutions are the outcome of thinking that imperfection in society and civilization means that the whole thing must be torn down or burned to the ground so something new can be put in its place. Since the imperfection is inherent in fallen human nature, that which is rebuilt will be just as imperfect as what it replaced, and usually more so. Revolutions lead to nothing but needless and pointless violence, hurt, and destruction. In the false religion of wokeness, whites must perpetually abase themselves and give in to a never-ending list of non-white grievances, because the revolution can never achieve perfection, therefore the revolution can never end. This path leads to never-ending racial strife, not to the racial peace and harmony which is the true meaning of us being "one in Christ."