God, Race, Scripture, and the Churches

 Preamble note: This month I was feeling a bit more topical than expository, so forgive the free-form flow of my chat.  To clarify, an “expository” discussion focuses on a specific Bible text and extracts ideas, principles, and thoughts from that text, as I did with my posts examining the Epistle of Jude and the “cast your bread upon the waters” verse.  A “topical” discussion, on the other hand, adopts a theme up front and hunts down a variety of Bible verses to bolster that theme, an ad hoc approach.

Each is a valid way to address an idea biblically, although I confess a preference for the expository.  I also confess I feel disappointed when a speaker/writer claims to be taking an expository approach but is really only doing topical verse-fetching.  That’s why I’m advising about this month’s approach up front.

***

      Do a Google search for “What the Bible says about race” and you’ll get dozens of links to sites proclaiming that God shows no favor to any particular races or ethnic groups.  You’ll find citations showing we’re all made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), that in Christ there is no difference between Jews, Greeks, or anyone else (Gal. 3:28), that God made from one blueprint of man every nation of the Earth (Acts 17:26), and that God shows zero partiality among humans (Deut. 10:17).

     Therefore, slavery is wrong, interracial relationships are fine, mixed-race children are a blessing, and everyone should have equal civil rights regardless of color or culture.  God is a 21^st-century gentleman.

     This is an example of what I call “revisionist exegesis” – Bible interpretations that have changed so dramatically over time that they’re nearly the opposite of what many of our churches used to believe.

    Don’t get me wrong.  I’m totally down with 21^st-century gentleman God and equal protection under any law for any human.  I’m mixed-ethnicity myself and in a marriage my extended family would consider mixed, so I’m pleased most churches have moved on.  Should we forget our churches’ pasts, though?  Is there something to be gained by remembering that each and every one of the above egalitarian positions were at one time staunchly considered by many Christians to be unbiblical?

 

REMEMBERING THE PAST

     I once upset a local prayer-meeting leader by mentioning over coffee that many U.S. churches previously claimed a Bible-based justification for enslaving Blacks.  She insisted that couldn’t be true since the Bible is very anti-slavery, so I made matters worse by pointing out that, technically, the Bible never specifically condemns slavery as an institution.  The discussion got heated – not loud, since we’re both users of American Sign Language, but I’m sure it caused other diners at the café to wonder what all the soundless, histrionic signing and arm waving was about.

     It was not my finest hour.  I’d yet to learn that I should be explaining my beliefs and reasoning in a less sarcastic, more humble and charitable manner (2 Pet. 3:15-16).  I don’t like recalling how wry and caustic I got in my argument with the woman.  I can be in the wrong, it turns out, even when my facts are right.

     It was one of the sins of my youth, the kind David prays that the Lord not remember (Psalm 25:7).  I could smooth it over for myself by claiming it wasn’t as bad as I thought, or that the woman needed firm correction and guidance, or that she was probably happy to be given better information from a superior intellect.  After all, I had the Bible on my side.

     Handy rationales – and exactly the type that 17^th century Christian slaveholders used in order to justify their treatment of the enslaved:

• Slavery wasn’t so bad; many of the enslaved benefitted from skills they learned.
• As a lesser race, the enslaved needed regular correction and guidance from superiors.
• Many slaves were very happy with their regular work and reliable meals.
• And the Bible says they should obey.  It’s the Curse of Ham.

     I’ll be picking on those preachers of the past.  But I’ll also be remembering the cautionary verse of Rom. 2:1 – “Passing judgement on another, you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”  Et tu, Yoli, I’ll be telling myself.

 

SIDENOTE ON PSALM 25

     One very short language observation before I move on:

     I just cited Psalm 25, in which David asks the Lord to forget his youthful sins.  One feature of the psalm which we as English readers don’t notice is that it’s an alphabetic acrostic.  Each word at the beginning of its twenty-two verses starts with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet – aleph, beth, gimmel, daleth, and so on through the end of the psalm.  Only five other psalms have that playful acrostic pattern (9, 10, 24, 37, and 145).

     Plus, one fascinating point from the Bible’s document history:

     Together, Psalms 9 and 10 make up a single acrostic poem, which led some Bible editors to conclude they were the same psalm.  The Septuagint combines them.  It also combines Psalms 144 and 145, but it still ends up with 150 psalms by splitting both Psalm 116 and Psalm 147.  All this splitting and recombining leads to a psalm citation oddity you may have noticed, the occasional use of multiple numbers (e.g., “Psalm 22 (23).”  That’s the history behind that unexpected notation.

     This is a geek point, not some deep Bible truth.  As my first pastor liked to remind me, Bible verse numbers, chapter breaks, and titles are all later inventions, not part of the original, inspired text.

 

BACK TO CONSIDERATION OF THE RACES

     We’re a tribal species.  If tomorrow we found a way to equalize everyone’s skin tones, eye shapes, hair qualities, and body types, we’d still find ways to throw up tribal boundaries (“Oh, you’re one of those BlueEyesies.  My GreenEyesies parents would never let me date a BlueEyesies boy.”)  Group unity certainly helps humans coordinate our civic structures, our farming, and our towers-of-Babel building, but unity comes at a cost.  To be “Us,” there must be a “not-Us.”   We must identify a “Them.”

     Was I wrong to marry one of the Thems?  My mom had no issue with it, but a 1950s preacher may have taken me to task for violating Deut. 7:3-4, when the Israelites found themselves among the Hittites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Amorites, and a bunch of Other-ites:

“Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons and taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following Me.”

 

     Our modern eyes immediately twitch over to the “turn away from Me” part of that prohibition, deciding that the ban on intermarriage was about escaping the false religion of outsiders, not about Israelites sidestepping the barely distinguishable genetics of fellow Middle Easterners.  A mere sixty years ago, however, any number of U.S. Christians would have insisted that the whole verse applied, every letter, not just the spirit of the edict.

     Sixteen states still had laws against interracial marriages (down from a high of thirty-eight in the late 1800s) before Loving v. Virginia declared bans on such marriages unconstitutional in 1967.  It took until the year 2000 for Alabama to officially rescind its interracial marriage ban from the law books, and until 2009 for at least one Louisiana Justice of the Peace to let it go.  These weren't simply cultural tenets of the time.  They were butressed by Christian doctrines.  Fifteenth Circuit Judge Leon Bazile, who adjudicated the Loving case before it went to the Supreme Court, directly ruled: "Almighty God created the races ... and but for interference with His arrangements there would be no need for such marriages."

     In addition to Deuteronomy 7, other passages of Scripture are similarly re-envisioned by modern eyes, departing from an era of more provocative, racialized interpretations:

• The “Curse of Ham” I referenced above is an Antebellum belief that Blacks were descendants of Noah’s son Ham, whose own son was cursed by granddaddy after Ham saw Noah drunk, passed out, and naked.  Canaan, Ham’s son, was cursed to forever be the servant to the descendants of Shem and Japheth (Gen. 9:20-27).  Canaan’s offspring were imagined to be dark-skinned after that point, a belief never fully explained or even appearing in the Bible text.  The idea did, however, work well within the social conventions of the day.
  
  
• The Tower of Babel story (Gen. 11:1-9) is another favorite of Antebellum exegetes who promoted a proslavery, anti-intermarriage Bible view.  God clearly didn’t want humans unified.  He confused their languages and scattered them.  For us to bring them back together and to intermingle them would be an act of treason against the Almighty (said some of our Christian forebears), which is why interracial and interethnic marriages should be banned.  We, like our languages, are meant to stay separate.
  
  
• Acts 17 records Paul’s speech in the Areopagus of Athens, revealing to listeners the nature of “the unknown god” for whom they'd built an altar: “From one [ancestor] He made all peoples to inhabit the whole Earth, and He allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live” (v. 26).  God made the people; God made the boundaries.  Early American preachers used this verse to oppose immigration by the Chinese, Italians, Irish, and others deemed too unamerican at the time.

      Those are just three examples of passages used in days past to promote race-separation ideologies within parts of U.S. Christianity – one example based on people’s skin color, one based on their languages, and one based on their culture of origin.  As tribal creatures, we’re predisposed to find any way possible to draw and redraw the lines to exclude the Them from the Us.

 

DENOMINATIONAL BREAKDOWN

     Not all our Christian forebears agreed with this particular method of interpreting Scripture.  And where there’s disagreement, there’s opportunity for schism.

     Methodists were founded by profoundly anti-slavery proponents like John Wesley.  In time, however, the denomination split into pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions, north vs. south.

     Also splitting over slavery, Southern Baptists broke from their northern American Baptist brethren in order to maintain the rights of slaveholders to be appointed as missionaries.

     Presbyterians, already dividing over Old School and New School theologies, suffered a final blow on the slavery issue, splitting like the others along north/south boundaries.

     These three (and subsequently six) denominations represented the bulk of Christians in the continental U.S.  All were evangelical.  All were Bible-based denominations.  All embraced the concept of salvation by faith rather than by works.  Yet they were rent asunder over the concept of whether a human can own another human … biblically.

     Their split widened over the concept of whether schools should allow the educational intermingling of children from different races.

     They continued to preach against each other’s stances regarding interracial marriage and dating.  (Yes, I’m looking at you, Bob Jones University.)

     They solidified their divide arguing whether their country should adopt civil rights legislation and voter equality acts in Congress.

     Only one group, the Presbyterians, managed to overcome their rift, reuniting in 1983 at an Atlanta, GA conference to form the current Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  The others remain split – not over doctrine, but over cultural interpretations of Scripture and the inertial drag of history.

     Speaking of Scripture … I haven’t referenced it for a dozen or so paragraphs, so let’s bring it all home there.

 

SCRIPTURE AND THE RACES

     I’ve only danced around the edges of what Scripture has to say about slavery.  I’ll leave it at that, since this is just a blog post and not an academic text.  But I will revisit interethnic and interracial marriage, a theme dear to my heart.

MOSES WAS IN AN INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE.  Ancient Egyptian records detail that Cush was a land south of Egypt, now a part of what's known as Ethiopia.  Moses married a native Cushite woman, much to the consternation of his co-leaders, older brother Aaron and sister Mariam (Num. 12).  God stepped in and put the siblings in their place, affirming that marriage outside the color lines of the Hebrews was absolutely fine with Him.

RUTH WAS IN AN INTERETHNIC MARRIAGE.  The whole gist of the Book of Ruth is the story of her accepting her dead husband’s mother as her own kin, pledging that Naomi’s people would now be her people and Naomi’s God would be her God.  A Moabite outsider, she marries into the Hebrew tribes thanks to her late husband’s distant tribal relation to her new husband, Boaz.  This works out well for Israel, since Ruth is King David’s great-grandmother.

RAHAB OF JERICHO MARRIED A HEBREW: Only four women are mentioned in the genealogies of Jesus.  Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute who helped two Israelite spies escape detection in the enemy city of Jericho (Josh. 2:9-13), is one of those four.  At the conquest of her Canaanite city, Rahab and all her family were spared.  Good thing, too.  Praised for her faith in Hebrews 11 and for her works in James 2, Rahab’s first Hebrew son was named Boaz, that dude up in the last paragraph who married the immigrant Ruth, great-grandmatriarch to King David, all of whom contributed to that mixed-ethnicity ancestor named Jesus.

     There are more examples, but …rule of three, enough said.

     Here are the reflections I take away from this month's reading and writing experience:

Large groups of people can make massive mistakes when interpreting Scripture.  Do I do that?  Are there areas where I let my pre-existing biases color my experience of the Scriptures?  Do I read to validate what I already think, or do I let the words change my thinking?

We’re thoroughly afflicted by our Us v. Them perceptions.  Do I carve out niches in my church, my community, my life, instinctively cutting off those who might benefit most from seeing the light of Christ in me?  Have I “Other-ed” the very ones I’m meant to serve?

I’m wrong about things.  There are firm assurances in my faith – that Jesus is my Lord, come in the flesh to ensure that I was saved (Titus 3:5), that I am being saved (1 Cor. 1:18), and that I will be saved (Rom. 5:9-10).  But I am wrong about some nonessentials I imagine are so important.  Which ones, specifically?  I don’t know.  I just know I’d be a fool to think they’re not there.

I should listen to, not break with, Christians with different ideas.  I shouldn’t live in fear of being sullied by wrong thoughts.  As one of His sheep, I know His voice.  As one of His listeners, I hear His word and read it, studying it to learn what’s true.  But do I listen carefully to what other Christians think, how they interpret?  Will I find flecks of gold in the sands they shift?  Are there pearls where I thought there was only mud?  Most important, am I showing love to build them up instead of being contentious when I decide I disagree?

     Here ends this month’s topical free-walk.  I think I’ll go hug my gringo husband now and let him know that his different ethnicity is all right by me.

 

Marana Tha,

YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx