THE BIBLICAL DOCTRINE OF RACE
THE
PILGRIMS:
The Pilgrims were under no illusion concerning race or racial equality. They
belonged to no cult of equality, but to that people whose only law was a “thus
saith the Lord.” They saw their inheritance in New England in terms of
another conquest of Canaan, where, like under Joshua, God had driven out an
idolatrous and accursed race that he might give the land to his elect. Thus in
Virginia John Rolfe, a young colonist, who was contemplating marriage with the
Indian princess Pocahontas, reflected, “that
God had visited the sons of Levi and Israel with his displeasure, because they
sanctified strange women; and might he, indeed, unite himself with ‘one of
barbarous breeding and of a cursed race?”
(Bancroft: History of
the United States, Vol. I, p. 146).
To the Puritans all men were not equal—not
equal on the individual level as testified to by the parable of the talents, and
not equal on the collective level with mankind being divided between the elect
and the reprobate, God himself declaring, “Jacob
have l loved and Esau have I hated.” Such a theology (in the face of the
scriptural testimony of the distinctives of God’s creation) had little room
for a humanistic declaration of the equality of the races.
BIBLICAL
EQUALITY:
Much of what has been said in the previous issues on “Women’s Liberation”
concerning “Biblical Equality” and “Biblical Sociology” is as applicable
to distinctives of race as it was to those of sex. The Jacobin theory espoused
by the infidels of the French Revolution states that all men are born equal, are
born with the same rights, start off with clean (or at least equal) slates, and
concludes that therefore all distinctions of caste based on heredity, race, or
birth are necessarily and intrinsically evil. This theory will soon make all
deceived Christians who advocate it, choose between their Bible and their
politics. The Scriptures teach no such theory and a sovereign God, who deals
with his creatures according to his righteous pleasure, has decreed otherwise.
God is under no obligation to treat each person as a sovereign individual and
often deals with them as families, nations, and races. Neither is God under any
obligation to treat all men alike, himself declaring, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy” to which the Scriptures add,
“and whom he will he hardeneth.” God
is the potter and we are the clay, and the cult of equality is but a cry of
blasphemy for “Shall the thing formed
say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?”
“The
Jacobin theory totally repudiates all imputation of the consequences of moral
conduct from one person to another as irrational and essentially unjust. It
declares that ‘imputed guilt is imputed nonsense.’ From its premises it must
declare thus, for it asserts that each individual enters social existence as an
independent integer, possessed of complete natural liberty and full equality.
But the Bible scheme of social existence is full of this imputation. I shall not
dwell upon the first grand case, the sin and fall of the race in Adam…I add
other instances, some of which are equally extensive. ‘The woman was first in
the transgression,’ for which God /aid upon Eve two penalties (Gen.
3:16), subordination to her husband
and the sorrows peculiar to motherhood. The New Testament declares (I
Tim. 2:11 to the end)
that it is right her daughters shall continue to endure these penalties to the
end of the world…Amalek met Israel in the time of his flight and distress with
robbery and murder, instead of hospitality. Not only were the immediate actors
punished by Joshua, but the descendents of Amalek are excluded forever from the
house of the Lord, for the crime of their fathers (Deut.
25: 19)…Jesus said to the Jews of
his own day (Matt. 23:32-36):
“Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers… that upon you may come all the
righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the
blood of Zacharias…whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily l say
unto you, all these things shall come upon this generation” (Dabney:
AntiBiblical Theories of Rights, Discussions, Vol. 4, pp. 503-504). The point
being that the God who declared, “I the
Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me,” does
not deal with his creatures as autonomous individuals, nor does he regard all
men and races alike; but rather he deals with them in terms of their history and
his historic judgments, blessings, and cursings on the ancestors and forefathers
of their race and nation.
THE
HAMITIC CURSE:
Many of the patriarchs of the godly seed, both before and after the flood, made
inspired and prophetic utterances, when they passed the patriarchal blessing on
to their sons. These decrees were not restricted in application to their
immediate progeny, but affected their descendents for untold generations to
come. It was with such prophetic decrees for the race that Israel blessed his
twelve sons, and that Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau; and it was such a decree
that God issued to Rebekah declaring, “the
elder shall serve the younger,” which determined the national destinies of
Israel and Edom and the lot of millions as yet unborn. And it was such an
utterance that Noah prophesied concerning his three sons.
Noah, as the first great post-diluvian patriarch, has a special place in history. If Jesus Christ is a second Adam, theologically, of a new and redeemed humanity, Noah is a second Adam anthropologically as the second progenitor of the human race. All of humanity, since the flood, have descended from Noah; and all post-diluvian humanity, including the entire present human race, have descended from Noah’s three sons. Thus the human race, Biblically speaking, are divided into three great major races—the descendents of Shem, Ham, and Japheth. That God not only ordained this distinction, and continues to recognize it and uses it to fulfill his purposes throughout history, is clear from the inspired and prophetic decrees that Noah gave concerning his sons as found in Genesis 9:2527. The Shemites (Semitic peoples of the Middle East including the Hebrews) are blessed in that the Lord will be their God and this is fulfilled in God’s covenant with Abraham and his seed, and especially with the national covenant God makes with Israel at Sinai. Japheth (the Gentiles of Europe) is promised that he shall be enlarged. This has certainly been fulfilled in that all the great empires from Alexander the Great, through the Roman Empire to the British and other European colonial empires were all the enlargement of Japheth. That Japheth should enter the tents of Shem foretells the apostasy and rejection of Israel, and the grafting in of the Gentiles with the gospel and the resulting Christian civilizations predominantly flourishing in Europe and her colonies. The Hamites (The Third World including Negroes, Orientals, American Indians, etc.) are cursed and designated to the role of servants, especially the servants of Japheth. This too has been historically fulfilled in all the Japhetic Empires of history, until the Marxist Liberation movements which have subjected them to a still worse, but still Japhetic bondage. This does not necessarily justify abuses in the historic workings out of the Hamitic curse, but it certainly identifies it as the judgment of God and the fulfillment of his plan and purpose in history. And as such, to espouse total equality of the races is to war against the sovereign God of history. In passing it should be noted, lest some refute the validity of the Hamitic curse on this ground, why Canaan is cursed instead of his father Ham. In Biblical sociology the actions of the son abound to either the credit or discredit of the father. Thus in I Kings 11:9-12 God punishes Solomon’s apostasy in the days of his son so that it will not reflect badly on the righteous David. (See also I Samuel 17:50-58, Luke 11:27 and Custance, “Noah’s Three Sons”, pp. 144-150). Thus Noah when blessing his sons does so directly that the credit for such blessed sons might abound on the father. But lest Noah should be dishonored by such a reprobate son as Ham he curses him in his (that is Ham’s) son so the effect is the same, but the discredit abounds to Ham, not Noah himself.
BIBLICAL
DISTINCTIVES:
If racial equality is God’s way and plan, if it truly is scriptural, then we
would expect the Scriptures to bear this out. However, God’s ways with man as
decreed in Scripture abound in racial distinctions. Although we ought not to
confound physical Israel with the True Israel of God, yet one cannot deny the
favored position of Israel after the flesh in the Old Testament economy. As
Paul declares in Romans 3:2, “unto them
were committed the oracles of God.” That God would for centuries
restrict his revelation, his scriptures, his prophets and his electing grace,
almost exclusively to one small racial group is a mighty testimony to how God
looks at man and deals with him. The Old Testament church abounds with racial
and hereditary distinctions in its laws and ordinances as commanded by God
himself. Ammonites and Moabites were perpetually denied membership and access to
the privileges of the Jewish church as were Edomites and Egyptians to the third
generation regardless of their faith. The distinction was purely on race as a
judgment on the sins of the forefathers (Deut. 23:1-8). Similar rules covered
access to the Passover feast as found in Exodus 12. There were other hereditary
distinctions. Only those descended of Levi could minister in the sanctuary and
only the descendents of Aaron could be priests of God. That these divine
distinctions were severely enforced, witness the cases of Uzzah (II Sam. 6),
Jereboam (I Kings 13), and Uzziah (II Chron. 26). This emphatically proves that
the principle of racial distinction practiced in the state or even in the church
cannot be morally wrong.
THE NEW TESTAMENT:
Although we have demonstrated that racial distinctions cannot be inherently or
intrinsically wrong, it yet remains to
be established that such distinctions
were not abolished in the New Testament. That some particular racial
distinctions peculiar to the Old Testament were abolished, none would dare deny.
The peculiar position of Israel under the Sinaitic Covenant and the ceremonial
law passed away as the gospel went out to all men. As Paul teaches in Galatians
3:28 and even more clearly in Ephesians 2:11-22 that the Gentiles, “aliens
from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise…
now are made nigh by the blood of Christ…who hath broken down the middle wall
of partition.” As Noah prophesied, Japheth entered the tents of Shem.
However, this does not preclude that others were maintained or new ones
instituted. Neither does the free offer of the gospel to all men necessitate the
integrated society of a one race, one world order. The decision of the council
of Jerusalem in Acts 15 clearly conceives of there being a Jewish Church and a
Gentile Church and lays down separate directives for each. The fact that Paul
dealt with Timothy as a Jew and had him circumcised in contrast with his dealing
with the Gentile Titus demonstrates another New Testament example of racial
distinction within the very Church of Jesus Christ. Christ’s own dealings with
the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) and the SyroPhoenician woman of Tyre
(Matthew 15) on the basis of their race should silence forever those who claim
that Christ instituted a new policy on this subject in his earthly ministry.
SEGREGATION:
One corollary of the fact that God has ordained mankind to exist in various
races and that he deals with them as such is the doctrine of the separation of
the races. Even as God created them male and female, and considers unisex an
abomination, even so does God regard the obliteration of all racial
distinctions. Even as men are not to tear asunder that which God has joined
together, so men are not to amalgamate that which God has segregated.
From the beginning mankind was separated
into two races, the godly seed of Seth and the ungodly seed of Cain, and this
separation was racial as well as ecclesiastical. When this separation was broken
down (Genesis 6:1), it produced the wicked generation of the flood. Immediately
after the flood the human race was
again divided into separate races by the three sons of Noah as we have already
seen. And indeed this separation of the races is according to the Biblical plan,
the very foundation of nationhood. Indeed, logically to postulate one race is to
postulate, therefore, one nation, one world. Thus the drive to deny race is the
very spirit of anti-Christ seeking to establish the new one world order of
Revelation 13. It is the drive to return to Babel and deny the judgments
and decrees of God concerning that one world state as it existed under Nimrod.
Both the fulfillment of Noah’s divinely
inspired prophecy on his sons and of God’s directive to multiply and replenish
the earth necessitated that mankind should separate and spread out over the
earth. At the beginning of Genesis 11 we find all mankind congregating together
in an amalgamated state under the great apostate Nimrod. In Genesis 10 we find
the fulfillment of God’s dispersion decree to the society at the Tower of
Babel. Here we find the foundation for nationhood and here the parameters of
nationhood are clearly defined. Mankind is to be divided according to their
language and race (i.e. family), and on this principle, established into
separate nations. And certainly the New Testament does not teach the abolition
of nationhood; and therefore, it cannot teach the abrogation of racial
distinctions, but rather right through to Revelation 22:2 it teaches nationhood,
even nationhood in the new earth. The
New Testament Apostle Paul, who declared that God had made all men and appointed
the bounds of their habitation (Acts 17:24-26), is but echoing Moses in the Old
Testament who taught, “When the Most
High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of
Adam, he set the bounds of the people” (Deut.
32:8). They both teach the same doctrine—the Biblical separation of the races.
SLAVERY:
Historically the theologians of the church have never debated segregation very
much because it was never the issue. The issue, especially in this country,
always was slavery. Clearly one cannot postulate radical equality of men and
races, if the Bible allows for masters and slaves. If slavery can be justified
scripturally, then all socalled moral arguments against segregation and in
favor of integration and amalgamation, must fall to the ground. Shortly after
the “War Between The States” Robert Lewis Dabney published his Defense
of Virginia, a theological defense of slavery, at least as practiced in the
Old Testament. Scripturally it is unassailable and irrefutable, and many a
Northern theologian, including the infamous Albert Barnes and even the more
orthodox A. A. Hodge were led to complain that a Bible that taught slavery was
no Bible to them. When they had to choose between their Bible and their
political convictions, they presumed to sit in judgment on what the Scriptures
taught. Condemning the slave trade, Dabney upheld the institution of slavery as
regulated by the laws of Moses. He established that:
1 )
Abraham was a slaveholder and was never censured for it.
2)
Christ met Hagar as a runaway slave and exhorted her to return to her
mistress and submit unto her. (Gen.
16)
3) The laws of Moses recognize and regulate
slavery (i.e. Lev. 25).
4) The Ten Commandments do not abolish
slavery but recognize and regulate it in the 4th and 10th
commandments.
5) Christ applauds a slaveholder (Matt. 8:5-13).
6) Slaveholders are admitted into membership
in the N.T. church (Acts 10).
7) The N.T. scriptures teach the proper
relationship of masters and slaves (Eph. 6:5-9; Col. 3:22-4:1; 1 Tim. 6:1-2;
Titus 2:9-12; 1 Pet. 2:18-19).
8) Paul commands a runaway slave to return to his master (Philemon), to which he adds many other scriptural arguments.
(Dabney went on to find much that was unscriptural and immoral in slavery as practiced in the Old South for which he called the South to repentance and urged reform.)
All of this does not require us to practice slavery, but it does teach that it is not necessarily sinful, and it does lay the axe to any form or application of the cult of equality that seeks to establish itself on a scriptural foundation.
THE FOUNDING
FATHERS:
For those who argue that abolition and integration are required, if not by
Scripture, at least by the Constitution, and is the natural outcome of the faith
and philosophy of our nation’s founders, let us examine their teachings also. “Except for the Adamses, all of the Presidents from Washington through
Jackson were slaveholders” (Weyl & Marina: American Statesman on
Slavery and the Negro, p. 118). Most of the founders were opposed to the slave
trade and a few, such as Jefferson (although himself a slaveholder who kept a
Negro mistress) and Franklin, opposed slavery altogether. They were unanimously
segregationists, and most of them favored the repatriation of the Negro race to
their scriptural homeland in Africa according to the principles of Genesis 10
and Acts 17:26. This was the best and indeed the only solution to the growing
race problem that was threatening the young republic. The founders have been
misquoted and deliberately corrupted on few subjects as much as they have been
misrepresented on race. While the Jefferson monument records for all posterity
the words, “Nothing is more certainly
written in the book of fate than that these people (the Negroes) are to be
free,” it absolutely fails to record the subsequent phrase of Jeffersonian
thought, “nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in
the same government “ Jefferson’s
highly touted abolitionism was tempered by a full separation of the races,
effected by total repatriation of the Negro race to Africa. Similarly Lincoln,
proclaimed as the Great Emancipator, freed the slaves as a wartime expedient to
excite social revolution in the South and win the diplomatic favor of Great
Britain. The decision was void of any personal commitments in principle against
slavery. Lincoln who subsidized with federal funds several ill-fated
repatriation schemes, was a staunch segregationist.
HISTORY:
From the days of the Puritans through all the founding fathers, as long as we
were a Christian Republic, the social practice of the nation was segregation,
the Biblical separation of the races. The drive for abolition and integration
was chiefly spearheaded by apostate sects such as Quakers and Unitarians with a
social gospel axe to grind. Even so, although it was preceded by a century of
radical propaganda, it was not until 1954, when the social foundations of the
republic had been sufficiently eroded, that the most liberal, Marxist, and
pro-communist Supreme Court in the nation’s history awarded us with its
infamous school desegregation decision. And all on the flimsy foundation of the
social theories of a Swedish socialist, Gunnar Myrdal, whose book, An American Dilemma, cited by the court as its chief authority for
overturning 350 years of Christian social practice, declares that the “American
Constitution is in many respects
impractical and illsuited for modern conditions and that the Constitutional
Convention of 1787 was nearly a plot against the common people”
(Putnam:
Race and Reason, p. 22).
IMPORTANCE:
Like all other ideas, ideas on race have their practical consequences. And they
are far from negligible. Misconceptions on race had their share in precipitating
the “War Between the States” and provided the excuse for the brutal tyranny
of the “Reconstruction” regimes in the Southern States. Similar fruits of
the same racial heresies are being reaped today The cause of racial equality has
produced political tyranny as well as social revolution. The American federal
union was based on a Constitution that severely restricted the powers and
functions of the central government. However, if all racial distinctions, and
the necessary discriminations that arise from recognizing them, are termed evil,
then the federal government will soon become a mighty engine to regulate all the
actions of every citizen to ensure the entire purging of all discrimination.
Thus even the liberal American Bar Association termed the 1964 Civil Rights Act
as 90% federal power grab and only
10% civil rights. Similarly, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 usurped, to the
federal government, total control over the franchise and the voting patterns and
practices of the sovereign states. The coerced elimination of all discrimination
based on race requires a totalitarian socialist bureaucracy, and therefore the
total destruction of limited government as it has been historically practiced in
the United States. All institutions, both public and private, all educators and
employers are now under the federal gun and the threat of court ordered
“affirmative action” programs regarding the racial make-up of their
applicants and membership. Liberty has fled and has been replaced with a
shackled submission, the fearful price of worshipping at the shrine of racial
equality.
THE
FRUITS:
If integration is sin and if the wages of sin are death, then those societies
that practice it will die. The following statistics, which speak for themselves,
are the 1972 crime figures for the two largest cities of the Western world.
Murder
113
1,691
Rape
135
3,271
Robbery
3,167
78,202
Assault
7,861
37,130
After a careful comparative analysis of
these two cities the only major and significant difference is that New York is
one of the most integrated cities of the Western world. While Africa was
peaceful under colonial and segregated rule, “liberated” Africa has been the
scene of destructive race war and tribal conflict, degenerating into one-party
Marxist dictatorships led by a president for life. By contrast segregated South
Africa of “apartheid” fame remains the only stable and prosperous stanchion
in a continent of misery and chaos.
IMMIGRATION
AND IMPERIALISM:
Conquest can be both military and ideological or it can be genetic and racial. A
society can be subverted racially, as well as culturally and ideologically. Like
Israel of old, whose culture and people were highly segregated from alien people
and influences, so our founding fathers dreamt not of a pluralistic society, but
rather envisaged at first a Puritan commonwealth and later a white, Anglo-Saxon
Protestant republic. Their immigration policy was structured accordingly,
emigrants from conflicting faiths, cultures, or races being rejected. The slave
trade was the one major exception before the “Civil War,” and we have paid a
high price for that one breach of a sound and a Scriptural policy. Later on not
only was the immigration barrier thrown open but the problem was compounded by
the new imperialism of the nation. As the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, etc.
were annexed, it introduced major breaches in the cultural, racial, and
religious integrity of the nation. Today we live in a pluralistic society where
those who would live in a Christian culture and shield their children from
wicked influences, face an impossible battle as a persecuted minority. A high
price to pay (see Judges 1:1-2:15) for forsaking the God-given decrees
concerning race.
THE
CHURCH:
Having forsaken the faith of their forefathers in this respect by adopting an
unscriptural theory of race, the church has become vulnerable with a serious
chink in her armor. Chinks in the armor can be dangerous as Ahab discovered (I
Kings 22:34), and the enemies of
Christ have been neither slow nor reluctant to exploit the weakness of their
foe. When James Foreman delivered his revolutionary “Black Manifesto,” the
liberal church was without a defense. Cowed and thoroughly convicted of their
guilt by their new, if unscriptural, sociology, they had neither the will nor
the breastplate to resist the devil and their capitulation was complete. But the
liberal church is far from being alone in that regard for the evangelical church
has been just as severely afflicted with this curse, having retained as little a
theological defense against it as the liberals. Radicals such as Tom Skinner and
Bob Harrison, writing racist polemics against the “white church” with such
“discriminating” titles as, Words of Revolution,
When God Was Black, and How Black
Is the Gospel, have run the church through and through, and she is far from
being in a position to staunch her wounds. The scriptural doctrine has long been
cast aside and the infidel theory just as thoroughly embraced. Having long
wavered between Baal and God, she must now choose between her politics and her
Lord. Having so long worshipped her idol of equality, she must now either repent
or be harried to further apostasies and more radical measures by the apostles of
the ‘Black Theology.’ As Dabney complained of the abolitionist preachers a
century ago, “Meantime the authority of
Holy Scripture as an infallible rule of faith sinks lower and lower with the
masses of Protestant Christendom…The most sorrowful aspect of the matter is
that, as fast as the candor of these Christians forces them to recognize the
contradiction as real, they usually elect to throw their faith overboard rather
than their politics” (AntiBiblical Theories of Rights; Vol. IV,
Discussions, pp. 514-516).
CONCLUSION:
As a church and as a nation we must re-examine our position on these issues. The
church has no defense except the word of God and absolute and implicit faith
therein. As a nation only the truth will set us free from these afflictions to
the body politic. The path of blessing for both is the one that was well trod by
the Puritans, the path of stern obedience to the ways of the Lord. If not, then
we must pay the price. “The wages of sin is death.” Christ declared,
“all they that hate me love death.” As
Moses said to Israel so might it be said to American Republic, “I cal/
heaven and earth to record this day against you, that l have set before you life
and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy
seed may live.” AMEN!
