Emily Maxson: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion,
the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the
Promised Land and talk about life, the universe,
and everything along the way. I’m Emily
Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan
Broome, and we are talking about racism, or
more accurately the non-racism of the Biblical
faith. Where would you like to start, Greg?
Greg: There’s a couple places we could start.
Let me start with a personal story. When I
was much younger, not married, and could stay
up to ridiculous hours and often did, on cable
TV there was this older gentleman who would
sit behind a desk with flags behind him and
teach the Word of God, and a lot of it seemed
good, but something seemed off.
Not having the internet back in those days
when there were dinosaurs, I could not simply
go look him up, so as I was doing channel-surfing
I would stop now and then and listen and say,
“A lot of this is good but something’s
just not right here.”
One of the key things in these kinds of situations
is he never identified what theological connections
he had. He didn’t associate with a denomination
or a specific church or creed or confession
or anything like that, which is a red flag
for sure. It was months before finally I ran
into a broadcast where he sort of laid all
his cards on the table.
The man’s name was Arnold Murray and he
was a racist, and he used the Bible as his
springboard for racism. He got at it in two
different ways, both extremely creative and
extremely ridiculous.
First, he looked at the creation accounts
in Genesis 1 and 2 and said, “Obviously
these are two very different stories. In the
one case we have God creating man in his image,
but in the second we have God specifically
creating a different man, Adam and his wife
Eve, so we have the Adam and Eve line, but
there are also other human beings out there
as well who are not associated with Adam and
Eve, because Adam and Eve don’t show up
until Chapter 2. Mankind is already busy in
Chapter 1, so obviously there’s already
two different sorts of origins.”
Now, if that’s not bad enough, he went on
to talk about the temptation story and, by
some again very imaginative and very ridiculous
use of Hebrew verbs, he tried to argue that
the relationship between the serpent and the
woman was a sexual one, that Eve basically
got pregnant from the serpent, so the child
she bore, Cain, was half-human and half-demonic.
Emily: This is extremely creative. In case
that’s not clear when I use that in connection
with theological thinking, it’s not a good
thing. We’re not supposed to be creative
when it comes to the Bible.
Greg: So this allowed him to argue for an
Adamic race, which is apparently the pinnacle,
and then other races which are not bad, but
they’re not that particular race, and then
there is a race that is actually half-demonic.
Apparently, by his reckoning, and I’m not
sure how he got around the Genesis flood,
that race continued up into Jesus’ time
and into our own, so that when Jesus spoke
of the Pharisees as the seed of the serpent
he wasn’t speaking spiritually or morally.
He was speaking genetically. There were actually
demonic genes in the Pharisees’ DNA.
I didn’t listen to a whole lot more, nor
have I ever felt a need to go back, until
like an hour ago to refresh my memory on this.
If I have not reported it accurately, my apologies,
but I think I’m pretty close to what he
actually said. I’m certainly not trying
to misrepresent him. I don’t think I would
have to.
I think if you go back and do the research
you will find that not only does he say pretty
much, if not exactly, what I’ve said, he
says things that are worse. If God Answers,
which is a fairly reliable evangelical website
that tries to teach the Bible and does a good
job of it--if it’s to be believed, Arnold
Murray’s basic defense was to criticize
anybody who criticized him, to do ad hominem
attacks and suggest that very probably the
reason they were opposed to him was that they
too were seeds of the serpent and of this
demonic race.
This is an extreme example of racism cloaking
itself in Christianity, and we probably should
look at this just for a second and point out
what’s wrong with it. The truth is, there
have been lots of Christians down through
the ages who have adopted one kind of racism
or another, and have tried to paint it with
the colors of scripture.
Having said that, we can turn and look at
the rest of the world and say, “They have
too, and they’ve done it a whole lot more!”
but that doesn’t excuse us from pointing
out where our brothers and sisters in Christ
have done some very wicked things at times
in the name of Jesus.
Looking at Arnold Murray’s weirdness just
for a second, first of all, the two accounts
in Genesis 1 and 2 are the same event. God
makes man in his image. Genesis 2 then is
simply a flashback showing Day 6 in more detail,
and any careful study of the rest of scripture
is going to make that really plain. It’s
not hard. Jesus said, “He who made them
in the beginning made them male and female.
They were at the beginning male and female,”
and he’s speaking generically of humanity.
As you read through the rest of scripture,
we keep getting this. We have Paul on Mars
Hill. Let me read from Acts 17. Paul says
of God:
God that made the world and all things therein,
seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth,
dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither
is worshipped with men's hands, as though
he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all
life, and breath, and all things; And hath
made of one blood all nations of men for to
dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath
determined the times before appointed, and
the bounds of their habitation; That they
should seek the Lord…
Of one blood, all nations. There’s no room
for God creating various kinds of races. I’m
not enough of a biology student even to know
the proper words here, and maybe you can help
me out. Are we dealing with genus or kingdom
or what? Humanity is humanity. Human beings
are human beings.
Man is made in the image of God, and although
there is great diversity in that, there is
no place where you can draw a line and say,
“This diversity means inferiority. You are
lesser than you people over here because of
your skin color, your eye shape, the shape
of your nose, your height…” We run through
all the things whereby people have tried to
draw lines and say, “You are an inferior
people, and therefore ultimately a disposable
people.”
The Bible will have none of that. The diversity
of the image of God is not inferiority, it
is simply spectacular beauty, something we’ve
talked about before and we might come back
to again.
Emily: There’s also the passage in Romans
5 where he says, “By one man came death,”
which seems to forestall any idea of multiple
races. We all as humans die. This is self-evident.
It’s the one thing everybody knows, is that
everybody dies.
Bryan: There’s a problem there too, because
essentially if you’re positing that there
are multiple fountainheads of the human race
or races, if you want to go that direction,
then the gospel doesn’t work because the
whole purpose of the incarnation itself was
that Christ would come as the second Adam
– or I should say it doesn’t work consistently
with the rest of scripture. It’ll work in
their own schema where they want to denigrate
other races as something sub-human, but for
any serious review of the Old and New Testaments,
this kind of thinking makes salvation impossible
for anyone who has a genetic difference, according
to demonic ancestry or anything like that.
Emily: The flood is one obstacle, and then
there’s also “Jacob have I loved, Esau
have I hated,” where you literally have
twin brothers and God is choosing one and
not the other, when there’s no genetic disposition
one way or the other. It’s clearly just
the will of God.
Greg: In the wake of the flood we get this
document in Genesis 10 called the Table of
Nations, and it ends with these words:
These are the families of the sons of Noah,
after their generations, in their nations,
and by these were the nations divided in the
earth after the flood.
It’s very universal. We can look at that,
if we cared, and we can see that even at that
very early date, about 4,000 years ago, Shem,
who’s the recorder or writer here, recognizes
Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, Egypt, the Greek
islands, the city of Sidon. All kinds of things
where humanity first burst out from its cocoon
at the Tower of Babel and began to spread,
he lists 70 different nations. But this was
early on, and those people kept moving, as
is the way of people. They keep moving to
the ends of the earth.
This was during Earth’s Ice Age when the
sea levels were lower, there were more land
bridges, and Noah and his family had built
a ship, so people could and did build boats.
Traveling the world was not a great difficulty.
Mapping the world was not a great difficulty.
This is what the Bible presents, and that’s
Chapter 10.
Chapter 11 again does a back space and shows
us why and how that happened. It talks about
the Tower of Babel and traces the genealogy
of the covenant line 10 generations to Abram,
and right off the bat God tells Abram, “I
will make of thee a great nation and I will
bless thee and make thy name great. Thou shall
be a blessing and I will bless them that bless
thee, curse him that curseth thee, and in
thee shall all the families of the earth be
blessed.”
This promise of Messiah – the blessing of
all the families, all the nations, indeed
the whole world – is something that’s
carried on throughout scripture, throughout
the Psalms and the prophets, through Jesus
who speaks of God loving the world and God
giving his son to save the world.
We get to Paul, who looks back and says, “A
promise to Abraham that he should be heir
of the world.” You can’t cut and say,
“It’s just talking about this part of
the world or this part of the lands or this
section of geography or this section of beings
you seem to think are human.”The language
of scripture is universal throughout. Jesus
came for all sorts of people – nations,
peoples, kindreds, tongues. We get it in Daniel
and Isaiah. We get it in the book of Revelation.
There’s no red flags saying, “Oh, but
watch out for those things you think are people.
They’re not really people. They’re something
else. They’re out to deceive you,” or
even, “Yeah, well, God has plans for them,
but not this one. God will deal with them
someplace else.” There’s nothing of that
in scripture. One of the easiest cures for
racism is for God’s people to start reading
the Bible.
One of the sad things about black slavery
in the United States before the Civil War
was that blacks and whites in the south particularly
were segregated into different churches. If
they had sat side by side, hearing the same
preaching from the same scripture, from Genesis
through Revelation, without being doctored
or tinkered or colored, they would have come
to the conclusion that, “Hey, we’re brothers
in Christ. There’s no division along this
new-fangled term of race or skin color or
place of descent or place of continental origin
or whatever.”
We probably should come back to this at some
point, but when Paul writes Philemon he doesn’t
say, “Don’t you all know that slavery
is an abomination before God and it’s abolished
forever now that Christ has come as the servant
of servants?” He simply says, “He’s
your brother. Start treating him like it.
You’ll do that because you’re a godly
man, and you’ll do even more than that.
And make sure that this letter gets read in
the church.”
The Bible’s approach is not revolutionary,
and for this Christianity gets flak. “If
you’re so opposed to racism and racial slavery
and other things like this, why wasn’t there
an immediate call for tearing it all down?”
For a very simple reason, the same reason
the apostles did not demand an immediate end
to polygamy. What are you going to do with
people who have no education, and there’s
a market system that does not support them
in any fashion, and they have no marketable
skills? What’s going to happen to them?
Rather, the apostles let the slow work of
the gospel transform the culture so that more
and more slavery of whatever sort would become
a non-issue, but it would not be such a rapid
shake-up that individuals would be horribly
hurt in the process.
Emily: Also, if I can interject, it’s important
not to conflate slavery with American chattel
slavery of black people. These are different
institutions. We call them by the same name
so often today, but American chattel slavery
is quite a different sociological phenomenon.
Greg: And it’s different again from what
Israel practiced. Yes, it’s easy to use
the one word and lump in all sorts of things.
The true Romantic – the child of Rousseau
and the French Revolution – will look at
that and say, “But no injustice may be tolerated
even for a moment, so if you’re not part
of the immediate solution, you’re immediately
part of the problem and you are just as bad
as the slaveholders,” and so on.
That’s not the Bible’s way of looking
at things. The Bible believes and teaches
that political, cultural, and social stability
is a good thing, and that change can happen
slowly, and that in general it’s best for
it to happen slowly, not in the sense of slowly
forever, but that not everything has to be
fixed today.
Everybody knows that evangelical orthodox
Christians are opposed to abortion. Nobody
expects us to go out and start shooting abortionists,
at least no one should, nor do we plan on
it. That would be horrible because that’s
not the way the gospel works. That’s not
the way Christianity works.
Emily: And people who have done that are clearly
misapplying the term Christian to themselves.
Some of them do it in the name of Christianity,
but we would denounce that and say, “You’re
wrong about that.”
Greg: And generally whatever churches they
were associated with do denounce them and
say, “We’re not part of this. This is
not us.” So we get kudos for that, but the
flip side is there are other social problems
that we can’t fix immediately. We don’t
have the social leverage right now, and when
we did we didn’t always use it properly.
We can distance ourselves and say, “You
know, if Christians in this age or that age
had opportunities to make changes, they weren’t
mature enough. They weren’t ready enough.
That’s unfortunate. Shame on them. They’re
going to have to answer to God for some of
those things.” In approving their faith
we’re not approving their mistakes, any
more than future generations will look back
and, in accepting some of our orthodoxy, they
will not necessarily accept all the things
that we screwed up either.
Christianity leaves room for sanctification,
both for the individual and for the Church
and for the Kingdom as the centuries unfold.
That’s not excusing our sin, but it’s
realizing that generation by generation we
have to reckon with our sins – the sins
of the past and the sins of the present – and
pray and hope that the next generation will
know the Bible and apply it better than we
did.
Having pointed our guns largely at ourselves
now, and there’s a whole lot more we could
say and we’re not shying away from it, but
we do want to kind of point out the window
and say, “There’s this thing called Darwinian
evolution.”
Years ago I wandered into a bookstore because
someone had published an anniversary copy
of Origin of Species, and I picked it up and
noticed that the title said, Origin of Species.
The title page said, Origin of Species. Then
there was lots of intro and preface and prologue,
all that stuff that you tell your students,
“No, you don’t have to read this,” then
finally about 30 pages in I got to the facsimile
of the original title page, where for the
first time, 30 pages in, it admitted the original
title – The Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection and the Natural Preservation
of Favored Races. There’s a reason that
wasn’t on the cover or the new title page
– “preservation of favored races.”
Now, some people will jump forward and say,
“No, no, all that means is that some animal
races are favored above others.”
Emily: And what is man in this worldview?
Is man not an animal?
Greg: Yeah, that’s the whole point of the
book, that man is the most advanced type of
animal. Is not the implication of this then
that some branches of what we may broadly
speak of as humanity are more evolved than
others?
Just in case we’re wrong there, Darwin told
us in pretty flat language in another of his
books what he’s talking about. This is from
The Descent of Man, which he published in
1871. You have to picture Darwin saying these
things with a sense of regret and almost tears
in his eyes as he looks at the less-favored
races that remained in the world. He writes:
At some future period, not very distant as
measured by centuries, the civilized races
of men will almost certainly exterminate and
replace the savage races throughout the world.
At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes
will no doubt be exterminated. The break between
man and his nearest allies will then be wider,
for it will intervene between man in a more
civilized state even than the Caucasian and
some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as
now between the Negro or Australian and the
gorilla.
In case anyone out there didn’t understand
what he just said, he’s bemoaning the fact
that within centuries, not millennia but centuries,
not very distant in terms of centuries, the
civilized races – and he marks the Caucasian
as the most civilized and most advanced – are
going to exterminate the savage races.
It doesn’t say whether this will be accidental
along the road of progress, or whether it
will be a big hunting party, nor does it matter
at all, but when this happens he says the
more savage races will be exterminated and
the more advanced apes like the gorilla will
be exterminated, so that in that day the gap
between the more evolved race, something even
more splendid than the Caucasian race, and
something as low as the baboon, these will
form the edges of a huge gap, which currently
is filled by the Negro, the Australian Aborigine,
the gorilla, and so on.
He lumps these categories – the black, the
Aborigine, the gorilla – together. Some
are the lower end of the savage races, presumably
human after a fashion, but destined for extermination,
and the highest of the gorillas. He says that
gap isn’t nearly as far as between some
future white race and the baboon.
I was impressed with both of your reactions.
I mean what other reactions could you have?
Emily: Just stunned.
Bryan: Clearly the only reason he felt that
way was because of ingrained British Imperialism.
(That was sarcasm.)
Greg: We can pursue this, and again this is
something where there’s a lot of room to
look backward and forward to its application
to society and social Darwinism in the hands
of Spencer, and the development of sociology
and all that.
We can look at the origins of Planned Parenthood
and Margaret Sanger, who swallowed this hook,
line, and sinker and decided that blacks and
Jews and Hispanics need to be eliminated for
the sake of America, so that only whites should
remain and the nation would grow strong, so
set about extinguishing these races at the
fountain by setting up abortion clinics.
We like to blame the Nazi party for instigating
racism, but the truth is they looked over
at what we were doing and said, “Wow, that’s
cool! Let’s imitate that.”
This is also a good time I think to look back
to the ancient world and to the fringes of
what we think of as the civilized world. When
missionaries go into the far distant corners
where the gospel has not reached, they universally
have found that these unreached peoples have
a word for themselves which translates roughly
into English as “man.” The tribes beyond
them they call by different names.
They are men. They are people. They are, we
would say, human. Those other creatures, things,
mobile sentient beings out there are something
else.
Bryan: Barbarians.
Greg: Barbarians. We can look at ancient Greece,
where we have exactly the same sort of thing.
Every city-state was a world unto itself,
and the thing that made you human, as Aristotle
reminds us, is you belonging to that particular
polis. If you have no polis you are an animal
in the most basic sense. Humanity or man is,
by definition he says, a political creature,
a political animal, an animal who lives in
a polis. If you’re not in a polis then you
are, in the most literal sense, an alien.
You are outside of this defining circle of
humanity.
The only way that the Greek city-states could
ever work together – since each polis was
dedicated to the worship of a particular dead
ancestor – was to find an ancestor further
back that everybody shared, and then worship
him.
These city-states were rooted in religion.
They were religious to the core. Everything
about them was religious, despite what the
secular textbooks tell us, so the only way
to grant humanity to the other Greek city-states
was to find someone you could worship who
went back and preceded all of you. And they
didn’t do a great job at it, by the way.
They spent a lot of the time fighting with
one another.
Emily: I’m still kind of stunned by that
Darwin passage. Blech!
Identity in the Bible is not wrapped up in
this word that is not really in the Bible,
of race. Identity in scripture is rooted in
family, tongue, and covenant especially. There’s
a passage in Revelation that talks about all
nations, tribes, and tongues. I think you
pointed out in one of your writings that race
is not a category there. Race doesn’t matter.
Greg: It’s worth pointing out that the word
“race” has undergone transformation since
Darwin. Originally it meant about the same
thing that we mean by ethnic group. It was
kind of a vague generic term that you could
pretty much fill in as you wanted.
Emily: The English race, the French race.
Greg: Exactly. It’s still perhaps not the
best word to use, but it didn’t have the
connotations, let alone the definitions, that
we have since given it. But when you go back
into the Bible, and you mentioned the book
of Revelation, we see in Chapter 7 the heavenly
crowds that surround the throne of the Lamb.
They are all nations, kindreds, peoples, and
tongues.
Nations are covenantal groups. Kindreds and
peoples, that’s extended family. That’s
covenant and extended covenant. Tongues is
a little more difficult, but when we look
at the book of Genesis and we see where language
came from, and the passage I read earlier,
we’re told that these languages divided
people according to their families and nations.
It was not some odd genetic quirk. God did
not cause a husband to speak Phoenician and
a wife to speak Ethiopian. He divided them
in terms of language groups. The language
groups carried with the covenant covenantal
people-ness, the kindred-ness, the tribes.
We talked about this last time, that it is
very significant when we see the book of Revelation,
both there and then later on, that tongues
does not disappear as a category, nor do these
kindreds, nations, and peoples disappear.
It’s not that when we get to heaven we will
all have the same color of skin, the same
eye color, the same kind of hair, nor will
we all speak the same language exclusively.
Apparently, people are able to sing together
and yet all tongues are represented. How does
God do that? I have no idea, but I’m sure
it will be really cool.
Bryan: Everyone is going to know Latin.
Emily: Not Latin, Old Solar.
Bryan: Oh yeah, you’re right.
Emily: It’s a C.S. Lewis joke.
Greg: Or God will enable us to understand
one another, though we continue to speak in
different languages. Whatever it is, it will
be a very beautiful thing and not something
to be afraid of.
We talked earlier about Adam. Adam is the
covenant head of a race, the human race, the
human family. Jesus came into that humanity,
true God of true God, taking to himself true
humanity. And by the miracle of the virgin
incarnation and virgin birth he became a second
Adam, the last Adam, the head of the new race.
These races, these families, these covenant
groups overlap in that we are all born from
Adam and we all are born sharing his curse
and are all guilty in Adam, and yet when Christ
comes to us and saves us, begets us again
by the gospel and by the power of his Spirit,
we become members of a new race, a new family,
a new people, a new kingdom.
This has nothing to do with genetics. It’s
not that only white people or only black people
or any designations you want to use get a
place in the kingdom of God. It’s not just
the Gentiles and not just the Jews. It’s
open to all the sons of Adam generically.
If you’re human, the invitation is there.
Come and drink. Believe on the Lord Jesus
Christ and thou shalt be saved.
This sets Christianity apart from all the
religions of the ancient world, not only in
that you could conceivably become a Christian
if you were born in some remote country or
spoke some remote tongue, but they actually
came looking for you saying, “Come along
and join us! You’re one of those language
people groups/nations/covenanted entities
that Jesus died for. Come and be part of this
miracle of re-creation, the new heavens and
new earth.”
It’s a sad thing that somewhere along the
line the outgoing missionary zeal of the Church
dwindled and we became content with, first,
Christendom of the Middle Ages that lost a
good deal of its missionary enthusiasm, and
then even when missionary enthusiasm came
back in the wake of the Reformation and the
Puritan movement, very quickly it too got
secularized and channeled into – Bryan mentioned
British Imperialism, but the British were
by no means unique in that.
Then along comes Dispensationalism and says,
“But wait. All we really need to do is save
a few people from every group. As long as
every group is represented even by a token
number, that’s enough to fulfill the gospel
being preached to all nations, and then the
end can come and Jesus can come back. So we’re
not really interested so much in the salvation
of these nations, the discipling of these
nations as nations. We just want to evangelize
and preach and witness so that the rapture
can happen so we can be done and get out of
here.”
That’s just skimming the surface, but there
are a lot of factors that led into this, “Well,
we’re in! We got saved. We’re good! Who
cares about the rest of the world? Surely
God doesn’t care that much.” We’ll die
over “God loves the world.” We don’t
die to go tell the world that, though, and
that’s been a very sad thing where the Church
has failed many, many times in many, many
centuries.
Of course, today if we do that we’re called
all kinds of nasty names for trying to impose
our religion upon these innocent naïve peoples
who are quite content with their own religion
and don’t need to hear from us.
Emily: And it is important to distinguish
between bringing the gospel to people and
bringing the trappings of the way we do church
in evangelical America. I remember hearing
stories of some tribes in some country in
Africa, and they had been evangelized by some
American missionaries and they asked for music
instruction. “We need to do worship like
you do worship.”
Thankfully the missionaries said, “No, you
have music. Let’s write some songs in your
language and you can dance the way you dance,
and do music the way you do music.” There’s
a beautiful diversity in musical styles and
things like that. We don’t need to sing
four parts to an organ to be worshiping God
faithfully, as much as I love organ music.
Greg: As much as we all love organ music.
Yes, we have to be sensitive going down this
way because there are so many ways to offend
absolutely everybody with this discussion,
but some people need to be offended anyway.
Bryan: You already offended the hard-core
old Presbyterians by mentioning writing songs.
Emily: Yeah, only psalms.
Bryan: We’ve already lost them.
Greg: Sorry guys. We don’t mean to be divisive,
but of course, you’re right.
We started by talking about the wonderful
diversity of the image of God in man. Every
nation is different from every other nation,
and that’s not a bad thing. If we looked
at America at its hypothetical best, “one
nation under God, with liberty and justice
for all” –
Emily: I’m not sure we’ve had a “best.”
Greg: But imagine that there were such a thing.
There’s nothing in scripture that says,
“Yes, and every nation in the world must
look like that, with that kind of Constitution,
that kind of national laws, that kind of markets,”
and you can go through the things.
Yes, there are absolutes. God’s law speaks
to every nation, but we’re all going to
work differently. Every culture is going to
be an expression of our history, of what we
understand of the faith now, which will change,
Lord willing, as we grow and as generations
pass, and of the technology available to us.
We look out the window, and do we see mountains
or do we see deserts? That’s going to make
a difference as to what kind of people we
are, and that’s okay.
There are things that you can say in French
that you really can’t say very well in English,
and even probably less well in German. German
has its own beauty. You want to make a new
word? Take old words and just tag them on
and then you’ve got new words. The French
would never do that, but the rest of us look
at French and say, “What are all those letters
at the end for? We don’t understand.”
Emily: I’ve heard a theory about those,
that newspaper writers and printers were paid
by the letter. I haven’t looked into it,
but I would believe it.
Greg: I’ll leave you to look that one up.
Bryan: Maybe German writers were paid by how
few spaces they could use.
Emily: That’s how they counted the words
maybe? I don’t know.
Greg: All right, getting us back on track
here, we’re talking about covenant. Covenant
is rooted in the fellowship that is the life
of the Trinity. It is expressed in God’s
relationship with us, and in our relationship
with one another.
It assumes a sovereign God who could tell
us what to do because he made us and owns
us, but that God is love and he invites us
to love, and he lays down the rules and boundaries
for love that he enables and enforces from
one generation to another, with the goal of
growing a people, building a kingdom and a
holy city.
We’re going to come back to our ongoing
theme of Zion, of the new Jerusalem. What
we see and what we’ve been talking about
when we look at the end of the story is that
God takes all sorts of peoples from all sorts
of environments, historical traditions, geographical
locations, skin colors, eye shapes, and he
pulls them into something of incredible beauty.
The Puritans wanted to be faithful to God
in their worship, so they tended to worship
in white-washed rectangular buildings so that
nothing would be a distraction from the worship
of the soul. While I can appreciate what they
thought they were doing, they missed a good
deal in the process.
First of all, they tended to identify worship
with intellectual processing, which is not
a biblical concept, but they also divorced
themselves from a good deal of Christian tradition,
some of which, yes, was dangerous and wrong,
but some of which was beautiful and glorious.
The new Jerusalem is not a white-washed cube.
It’s a cube, but it’s a cube of immense
size filled with gardens and jewels and gems
and people and trees and rivers. It’s a
wonderful blending of city and garden all
together, and it’s full of life. It’s
an incredible and wonderful thing of all nations,
peoples, kindreds, and tongues.
Any kind of deviation from that vision should
catch our attention. We should wonder, “Wait,
it seems like there’s some people you want
to exclude from that end story, and that bothers
us. Something is not right here. We need to
inquire further.”
Emily: I was Googling around, and I wouldn’t
want to Google “proof that the Bible is
racist” because that would be leading, so
I just Googled “Is the Bible racist?”
and I got several pages of Christians showing
that no, in fact, the Bible is not racist,
but mixed in among there were a couple of
articles that claimed that the Bible was racist,
mostly Huffington Post, which is not really
surprising. Huffington Post is like a blog
aggregate.
Bryan: Of all the things that surprise me,
this did not make the list.
Emily: But it was funny because I found two
articles that came up with significant results
in the first couple of pages, and both them
were like, “You know, Bob Jones Sr, founder
of Bob Jones University, said thus and such;
therefore, ergo, and without any possibility
of the contrary, the Bible is so racist.”
Bryan: It’s so racist because of the reason.
Greg: Isn’t it conceivable that Bob Jones
Sr was mistaken? Let us leave it that Bob
Jones Sr was grievously, seriously mistaken,
to the point of sin, and leave him to God.
He said and did a good many wonderful things.
This wasn’t one of them, and the institution
that he helped found was tarred by this for
a very, very long time. I would like to believe
that they are past it.
My martial arts instructor was a Navajo Indian
and he went to that particular school and
met his wife there. She was not a Navajo Indian,
she was as white as they come, and they were
told that they basically had to stay apart
from each other for exactly these sorts of
reasons. We’re not making this up. This
was a thing, and it’s a thing that we hope
is long gone, and that apologies and repentances
have been made, both to the wide world and,
most of all, to God.
We also have to be very, very careful. It
is so easy for us to look at ourselves and
make ourselves the standard for how the world
ought to be. “People like me are cool. People
who are not like me are iffy.” You can extend
that to the point where they become aliens.
We start with classless clueless and we end
up with barbarian. We end up with beneath
our notice and contempt and hardly worth crossing
the street with the gospel to reach them.
We do have to be very, very careful and acknowledge
that although the image of God manifests itself
in, say, us who are lovers of books, lovers
of music, lovers of good food, a bit nerdy,
a bit intellectual, a little bit creative,
who stand in the Reformed Presbyterian tradition
and have high respect for the creeds and confessions
of the early Church, the church Catholic,
and who love Lewis and Tolkien and things
like that, and yet we don’t say that people
who aren’t any of that aren’t worth our
time, that they’re not our brothers and
sisters in Christ because they don’t like
Tolkien or they don’t like organ music or
they’re not intellectuals or they’d rather
spend a day playing soccer than reading a
good book.
The kingdom of God and the image of God in
man is infinitely diverse, and we have to
get beyond ourselves and say, “You know
what? I could never do what you’re doing
and it doesn’t even really interest me a
great deal, but there’s skill and there’s
wisdom and there’s beauty here. That’s
a gift from God. I can take a few minutes
and watch you do that and try to learn and
try to appreciate it. I can shut up for a
minute and let you talk to me about this wonderful
thing you do.”
The moment we start thinking, “We are the
people and wisdom dies with us,” we’ve
got a problem.
Bryan: Another thing that this kind of brought
to mind is how when you read the scriptures
in such a way that there’s this genetic
difference that determines a person’s ultimate
allegiance – if someone who in their ancestry
has a demon, because the demons laid with
the sons of God in Genesis or something – then
you can’t think of them as your equal and
you certainly would never think to bring the
gospel to them, like you said. But more than
that, they’re the enemy, and that’s wrong,
obviously. We all agree that’s wrong.
I immediately thought of Ephesians 6 where
we’re told we don’t wrestle against flesh
and blood, but against principalities, against
powers, against the rulers of the darkness
of this world, against spiritual wickedness
in high places.
Those may express themselves in particular
earthly ways to us through mediums, through
wicked rulers who denounce the Lord and put
restrictions on the worship of his church,
but that doesn’t mean those people are irredeemable
from our perspective. It doesn’t make them
less than human.
Emily: Yeah, look at Nebuchadnezzar.
Bryan: Exactly, Nebuchadnezzar as well. This
is a human tendency. The human tendency is
always to find a scapegoat and find something
to blame that you can put your hatred on.
That’s not the way we’re supposed to deal
with sinners who need Christ. Even the people
who reject it over and over and over again
can still come to Christ. Their repeated rejection
of the Lord doesn’t make them less worthy
of his grace, because Christ chooses weak
vessels to showcase his power and his glory.
Greg: If it was a question of worthiness,
none of us would make it in. As you say, God
often glorifies himself most in choosing the
weak, imperfect, non-glorious things of this
world. So with someone who has rejected the
gospel again and again, it doesn’t mean
we give up. It may mean we get kinder and
more subtle in our approach, but if they’re
human and they’re breathing they’re still
within the call of the gospel, and we are
to offer the gospel in humility and love and
not give up and not treat them as non-human
because they’re not like us.
Emily: I think there’s an application of
this idea. It seems so trivial in comparison
to how you treat your neighbor and how you
treat people of different backgrounds, but
in art criticism it’s so much easier to
say, “Oh, I just hate country music,”
because it’s fun to hate country music.
It’s much harder to take something that’s
not what you usually listen to, and listen
for things that are good about it.
I’ve been kicking around this idea in my
head for ages, and I’ll let you know if
it ever actually happens, but I want to start
a podcast called Country Music That Doesn’t
Suck and Why It’s Tolerable. I hated country
music as a child, but I want to learn to listen
for things that are good. It’s really easy
to find things that are bad, and I think a
lot of us don’t enjoy country music, but
there are things that are good.
Greg: I don’t like it very much, but my
girls have discovered it and they play it
quietly in the background and I am learning
to appreciate a good deal of it. Their tastes
are such that they like good music of all
sorts and they come up with the strangest
things, but it’s all good. Their tastes
are better than mine and I’m trying to have
the humility to say, “Yeah, that’s not
my music, but maybe it can be. I’ll listen
and I’ll appreciate,” again recognizing
the wonderful diversity of mankind that often
does get tied to ethnicity.
The songs that came out of black slavery and
later out of New Orleans and Chicago, the
beat sound, and there’s the wheat fields
of Kansas, there’s the wide open range of
the American southwest – lots of different
kinds of music and different kinds of art
forms.
We don’t have to say, “I have to enjoy
that the way you enjoy that,” but we can
say, “Just because it doesn’t ring my
bell doesn’t mean it’s not good, and I
can appreciate you appreciating it,” and
not yell, “Hey, turn off that noise!”
unless of course it actually is noise, but
that’s another thing way beyond my competence
to decide.
Emily: Speaking of music and things that we
like, let’s recommend some things. How is
that for a segue? Pretty good, huh?
Greg: It was a wonderful segue. I was wondering
how you were going to pull that off.
Bryan: Of course, we made it less smooth by
talking about what it was. Thus is the tragedy
of segues.
Emily: Speaking of segues, do you want to
give us a recommendation, Bryan?
Bryan: Unless Greg wants to go first.
Greg: No, Bryan, you go ahead.
Bryan: Fair enough. It’s actually very relevant.
I was thinking of this before the episode
started. I actually have a musical thing to
recommend. It was recommended to me over this
past weekend from a band, also fittingly,
that I did not have a lot of respect for.
But I am going to heartily recommend the Linkin
Park album, A Thousand Suns.
It’s a phenomenal story album. The melodies
are fantastic. There are two tracks that have
explicit language and they’re marked E for
Explicit for curse words. If that is something
that you’re sensitive to you may skip those
tracks, but it’s a very good album.
It talks about war. The album title is a reference
to something Oppenheimer thought of when he
saw the first successful nuclear detonation,
something from the Bhagavad Gita, which reads,
“If the sky were to fill with the radiance
of a thousand suns, would it not be like the
appearing of one of the divines?” Later
at a different point they actually sampled
this audio clip from him in one of the tracks.
There are several quotes throughout the album
and it’s very well put together.
The quote where he says, “A few people laughed,
a few people cried, most were just silent,”
I remembered that line from the Hindu scripture,
the Bhagavad Gita, where Vishnu was trying
to convince the king to do his duty, and he
takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
I suppose we all felt that in some way or
another.
The whole album kind of just carries this
whole thing through with war themes. It’s
very good – A Thousand Suns by Linkin Park.
My tastes and perceptions of the band were
challenged.
Greg: Emily, how about you?
Emily: I have so many things I want to recommend.
I want to recommend my father’s ginger molasses
cookies that I’ve been enjoying. I want
to recommend gardenias because they smell
wonderful, especially if you’re trapped
in your house and don’t want to light incense,
like I would normally do, because my husband
doesn’t like the smokiness in the air.
I was afraid to light incense for a while
because I was afraid people would think I
was going Eastern mysticism or Greek Orthodox
or something. Then I thought, “Well, I light
candles and no one thinks I’m Catholic.”
What I also want to recommend is 
Living Life Backward by David Gibson. It’s
a short little commentary on Ecclesiastes
that I found very edifying and sound and just
very well-rounded and wise.
Greg: I will recommend a book, because what
we’ve been talking about spins around its
major theme. It’s Ken Ham’s One Blood:
The Biblical Answer to Racism, published by
Master’s Books in Green Forest, Arkansas,
1999.
Ken Ham, of course, is a central figure in
the new generation of creation scientists,
and he is a presuppositionalist and he does
a marvelous job of pointing out all the kinds
of stuff we’ve been talking about, so if
someone wants further sources and more discussion,
this is the book to go to.
Bryan: I didn’t realize he was a presuppositionalist.
Greg: He is. I’m not sure how much he uses
that word, but when you listen to him it doesn’t
take very long for him to get the point of
saying, “The proofs are never going to convince
anybody. We’re dealing with religious assumptions,”
and that’s what the creation science movement
has needed.
It’s needed someone to say, “Arguing details
is not arguing, it’s standing basically
on their ground. You want to shoot down their
beliefs? That’s fine and good as far as
it goes, but of course they’ll simply say
you’re wrong until they have no choice.
Then they’ll jump ship and say, ‘Oh yeah,
we were wrong, but look, we have a new idea
that’s even better.’”
Emily: You have to have that ‘something’
to fill the place of the things you’re shooting
down.
Greg: The amazing thing about Darwinism is
that it has never been science. It has always
been speculation, and as soon as they’re
forced to admit that their current position
is not scientific, they will abandon it and
jump to something else that also does not
have sufficient scientific background, but
then the argument has to start over.
The one thing they will never abandon is the
basic assumption that somehow man evolved
from lower races, and that of course presents
this inevitable issue of, “Well, then what
about racism?” They don’t like that and
they want to get away from that by and large,
but given the whole mechanism it’s something
they haven’t really been able to find a
way out of yet.
Anyhow, Ken Ham, One Blood.
Bryan: That’s interesting as well because
I had taken several science classes, not that
that makes me a scientist or an expert on
science in any case, but one of the criticisms
that was put forward in either the textbook,
or maybe it was the teacher speaking in lecture,
was that he was criticizing the God of the
gaps. That is its own error where Christian
people will say, “We don’t know how gravity
works, so that’s something that God does.”
Then it gets explained more thoroughly. Now,
gravity is not anywhere near being perfectly
explained by physicists.
Greg: No! They have no idea what it is. They
know how it works, which is where Newton started.
Sorry, but I do have a degree in physics.
Bryan: You’re right, but once the thing
gets explained they’re like, “Oh, okay,
now we know how that works, it can’t be
God,” which is wrong at the start. But what’s
ironic is this teacher or the textbook, whichever
it was, made that comment and that criticism
of the Christian faith, but Darwinism follows
the exact same thing. They just replace what
God is.
Emily: It reminds me of the line in Terry
Pratchett’s book, part of the Tiffany Aching
cycle, I forget which of the four books it
is--but he says, “Just because you know
how it works doesn’t mean it’s not magic,”
which is a great line.
It’s also just, like you said, replacing
God with something else. For the secularist
it’s magic. You have to believe in something
beyond what you can explain, because you’re
human and you can’t explain everything.
Greg: It’s been good to talk to you all
again.
Emily: You as well. Thanks for being here.
Bryan: It’s a pleasure.
Emily: Thanks to David, our producer and my
lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our
supporters. If you would like to join their
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you’ve enjoyed this episode as much as we
enjoyed making it. Have a good night.
