A Borrowed Category We Were Never Meant to Keep

The word "race," applied to human beings as a biological taxonomy, comes to us largely through François Bernier, a French physician who published a 1684 classification of humanity into four or five distinct types based on physical appearance. The church did not produce this framework. Scripture certainly did not produce it. A traveling doctor sorting people by complexion produced it, and the colonial enterprise found it enormously useful, and it spread. That history matters because Christians sometimes speak as though racial categories are simply there, given in the nature of things, when they are a relatively recent intellectual invention that served specific political and economic functions. Genesis knows nations and languages and families. It does not know races.

What the Bible does know is that every human being descends from Adam and Eve, which is a theological claim about solidarity before it is anything else. Acts 17:26 puts it with unusual directness: from one man, God made every nation to inhabit the whole earth. The genetic science, for what it's worth, has been catching up to this for decades. The variation between populations typically classified as different races is smaller than the variation within them. Bernier's categories were always more ideological than biological, and the ideology they served was one of domination.

Racism as a system of belief holds that these invented categories correspond to meaningful differences in human worth, capacity, or dignity. That is evil, stated plainly. It assigns to a human being, made in God's image, a diminished standing on the basis of melanin or ancestry, which is to say it attacks the doctrine of the imago Dei in practice while perhaps affirming it in theory. The two positions cannot coexist without one quietly gutting the other. A person who holds a racist hierarchy of human worth and also claims the lordship of Jesus Christ over all things is not occupying a tense but coherent position; the positions are simply contradictory. Christ died for every tribe and tongue and people and nation (Rev 5:9), which makes the church, of all institutions on earth, the one where a racial hierarchy is most obviously out of place.

The future the New Testament describes is not a colorless abstraction. John's vision in Revelation 7 is a crowd no one can number, drawn from every nation, standing before the throne. The ethnic particularity is still there; what is gone is the hierarchy. That vision has present obligations attached to it. The church is called to embody now, in its common life, what the kingdom promises for then, which means that indifference to racism is not a neutral posture any more than indifference to any other active evil is neutral. Repentance, in this case, looks like a sustained refusal to let the categories Bernier's century handed us do theological work they were never meant to do.