(Click here for the other posts in this debate.)
Dear Friends, This is a guest post in a debate I’m having. I, Pastor Wolfmueller, argue here the position that, according to the Scriptures, there is only one human race. This is the argument against that thesis by a man calling himself Linneaus. You can read all the posts in this debate here. Please read with discernment, noting that the view expressed in this argument are not those of Pastor Wolfmueller. Lord’s Blessings, PrBW
Title: Denying that there is only one race, the race of Adam
Dear Reader,
At the outset, I would like to thank my opponent, Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller, for being willing to engage on this critically important topic. As we are both aware, the subject of race continues to be a flashpoint for all manner of discussion and dissension among the brethren, and this is waxing, not waning. In light of this recognition, we have agreed to bring our opposite views on this matter into collision in this written debate, in order that the truth may be made manifest, and that understanding—if not agreement—be sought, if not obtained.
The thesis of this debate is phrased as follows: There is only one race, the race of Adam. My opponent affirms this statement without qualification. My task in this debate is to show why Christians should not affirm this statement, as it is misleading and, ultimately, quite incorrect.
My thesis is simple: Race as a category is an extension of the category of family, and exists with it on a continuum with intermediates like clan and tribe. It is a derivative of the concept of consanguinity. Consanguinity denotes (1) proximate shared common descent, and (2) shared observable traits as reflective of shared genetic inheritance resulting from proximate shared common descent.
But before expanding upon these points, let me first step back in order to give the fullest view of the facts possible. Although I am taking the opposition position on our debate question, I will start off with some affirmations. This will have the effect of framing my arguments in the proper light, and demonstrating agreement with Wolfmueller in the areas where it exists, in order to throw our differences into higher relief.
Biblical Affirmations
I believe in a literal Adam and Eve, from whom all mankind (Adamkind, if you will) are descended.
Noah was a real man, whose immediate family (wife, sons, sons’ wives) were the only descendants of Adam and Eve to survive the global deluge that destroyed all land-dwelling animal life save what was present on the ark.
All men since this global flood are descended from Noah through these three sons and their wives.
Again, for emphasis: These wives were also descended from Adam and Eve; whether patrilineally through Seth or through a brother such as Cain, God only knows.
Man’s Promulgation
The children of these patriarchs increased in number, and those that had not already begun to spread abroad were ultimately dispersed from the plains of Shinar according to their new tongues. We have reason to believe that God did not put husband and wife and young children at odds with one another in the confusion of their languages, and thus that the new tongues were applied along natural family lines.
To go further: Josephus indicated that the people groups separated from one another according to patrilineal descent from Japheth, Shem, and Ham. Various of the sons and grandsons of these patriarchs set up colonies comprised of their respective clans, wherever it was that they chose as their portion to settle. From there these clans followed God’s command to be fruitful and multiply and begat successive generations, generally by taking wives from among their own clan (I will return to this). In time, such clans through multiplication became entire nations occupying the territory their forbears had chosen to inhabit.
This was not without churn, as over the ages one nation may take another nation’s habitation through conquest, erasing them from the face of the earth, or mixing with them to create a new nation, derivative of both, thus joining their inherited destinies.
In sum, it was in the foregoing fashion that God “has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings,” per Paul as recorded in Acts 17.
On this point I know Wolfmueller and I have complete and total agreement: That God took one man (Adam), and through his descendants created the differentiated people groups of the world.
And the English language provides for us another word, for which “people group” has become modernity’s euphemism: Race.
The Taxonomy of Man
Thus we return to the question, is there only one race, the race of Adam?
If “races” is truly the right term for these differentiated people groups of the world, then no, for while there is only one mankind, there are many kinds of men. Let me elucidate.
The simple fact is this: Race is a category of taxonomy, above individual, family, clan, and tribe, approximately—though not inevitably—synonymous with nation, and below species or “kind”.
Taxonomy, from the Greek taxis (order) and nomos (law), is simply the practice of grouping things according to a hierarchy of relatedness, anywhere from very closely to distantly. When it comes to living things, this can take the form of grouping creatures by morphological likeness, or by family tree. And, because morphology (i.e., form/appearance) is due to heritable traits coded for by the genes passed on in the act of reproduction, usually both at the same time.
“Race,” then, is one of several nesting terms used to taxonomically classify men according to shared inheritance, in narrowing concentric circles all the way down to the level of individual.
Lest anyone think otherwise, such taxonomical grouping is eminently Biblical, as we see in the public selection of Saul for kingship over Israel.
Then Samuel brought all the tribes of Israel near, and the tribe of Benjamin was taken by lot. He brought the tribe of Benjamin near by its clans, and the clan of the Matrites was taken by lot; and Saul the son of Kish was taken by lot. (1st Samuel 10:20-21 ESV)
We see then the narrowing concentric circles come to focus upon Saul, from his nation (Israel), to his tribe (Benjamin), to his clan (Matri), to his family (Kish), and then finally to Saul himself. If we take what the rest of Scripture has to say in addition to these two verses, Saul’s taxonomical structure could even be extended outward past nation, acknowledging that Saul was a Hebrew, a Shemite, and ultimately from Adam.
Scripture itself gives us the taxonomic model to follow.
Let’s take our Lord Jesus, according to His humanity, as another example in the Biblical taxonomic structure, from more related to less related.
Individual: Jesus
Family: Joseph
Clan: David
Tribe: Judah
Nation/Race1: Israel
Race2: Hebrew
Race3: Shemite
Species (Kind): Adam/Mankind
As you can see from the thrice repeated use of race, this term does have a range of applications. Broader senses and narrower senses, all of which are correct, and not contradictory or mutually exclusive. In fact, technically and according to the broadest use of the word, there are as many races as there are fathers, for each is the origin of the race of those who come from him. However, for the sake of utility, most usage has historically been preferentially applied to those degrees between tribe and species.
The old saw that “there is no White race, only Anglo/Saxon/Germanic/Celtic races” deceives by taking advantage of equivocation regarding the level of magnification employed by the term. There are of course Anglo/Saxon/Germanic/Celtic races, which are sub-races to the broader White race, just as the Israelite and Edomite races were sub-races of the Hebrew race.
It is likewise technically accurate to call mankind “the race of Adam”. Mankind, Adamkind, is the ultimate race, if you will, under which all others are subsumed. We might do well to call the race of Adam “the terminal race”, insofar as there are no others at its level, nor above it.
However, in referring to the “race of mankind” we again run into the difficulty of utility in several ways. In the first place, “mankind” communicates the truth of universal descent of man from our common ancestor perfectly well, and renders the use of “race” at this level of taxonomy superfluous and even redundant. In the second place, this use—while again technically accurate—is itself turned into a lie through the sleight-of-hand of equivocation. That is, through the demand that, because Adam is the sole universal progenitor of the human race, the category of race must have no other referents but him.
We would do just as well to say that because God is the Father of mankind, the term father must have no other, more proximate referents.
Or we can make an analogy to the taxonomical term “family”, which also displays a range of meaning: that all men are part of the family of Adam does not void the categories of immediate family or extended family.
And this is precisely the dispute which has occasioned this debate. “There is only one race, the race of Adam” is a statement which must be denied on purely lexical grounds, right from the outset. To state my thesis again: That there is only one terminal race does not mean that there is only one race.
But I would delude myself to believe that this debate can be settled merely on the basis of such logomachy, as if my opponent’s true objection was only to the combination of letters upon the labels affixed to a family tree. I believe we could still readily agree to the foregoing, and perhaps Wolfmueller will acknowledge as much in his response.
Rather than simple terminology, what is really at issue here is the underlying biological realities that flow from how God made His creatures to differentiate in the course of our multiplication. That is, most people, and I suspect Wolfmueller is here representative of most people, prefer to reject the nature and scale of heritability in order to avoid certain downstream implications (particularly in terms of how we think of people, and how we treat people).
Those downstream implications are beyond the scope of this debate, but the genetic components themselves must be addressed in order to get at the core of the disagreement between us.
The Biological Reality of Race
At the outset of this section, I must address the inevitable charge of equivocation. The critic will say that, whereas up until now I have applied “race” merely to denote familial relation—as one might use “great-grandfather” or “second cousin twice-removed”, I am now changing its point of reference to apply to cohorts with high degrees of genetic overlap. This is because the critic sees two distinct concepts and demands a strict separation between the two—one that nature itself does not observe.
To be sure, if creating children was done by some central global agency, whereby men and women submitted their gametes to be paired by lot, then we could envision a situation in which genes were distributed more-or-less randomly across the face of the earth, with no discernible patterns or groupings. But that is not at all how God has designed human reproduction. Rather, producing offspring requires sexual union—and for those not in-the-know, that union requires nothing if not, ah, close proximity.
Indeed, a man and a woman must occupy essentially the same space in order for this act to occur, which necessarily rules out the vast majority of the world as breeding partners for any given person. Because of this, a man’s access to genes has historically (before industrialized forms of travel) been restricted to the pool of people born within several miles of himself. Denizens of Europe were not traveling to Africa for wives, nor the converse.
Returning to the above retelling of the spread of mankind across the earth, it would have been the case that as linguistically unique small clans settled various areas, they would have married within their own ranks. In the first place because of their relative isolation from other early clans, and in the second place because of the language barriers that initially forced them apart from other clans. This restricted mating pool would have had the effect of standardizing the genetics of the group, where essentially every child would have been related to their great or great-great grandfather on both their father’s and their mother’s sides. This created a situation where said children received an inheritance of their patriarch’s (and his matriarch wife’s) genes from both father and mother.
For evidence of this see Isaac, who received a portion of his grandfather Terah’s genes from both Abraham and Abraham’s half-sister Sarah. This had the effect of making Isaac the genetic equivalent of a 3/4 brother to Abraham, and the same to Sarah. He then took to wife his first-cousin once removed (on both sides!) Rebekah, the great-granddaughter of Terah. Hence, Jacob and Esau were the great-grandsons of Terah on their father’s side (although they genetically received the inheritance of grandsons, as Isaac passed on the genetic inheritance equivalent to a full son of Terah), and great-great-grandsons on their mother’s side, respectively. And we may speak further of how Jacob took to wife Rachel and Leah, his first-cousins on his mother’s side, and his second-cousins once-removed on his father’s side! The sons of Rachel and Leah would have displayed what we would consider an uncanny resemblance to Terah, because they were far more genetically “of him” than modern great-great-grandchildren are of their great-great-grandfathers. Their resemblance to one another would have been uncanny as well.
As this example shows, the repeated genetic overlap in these situations was immense. During these early days, such close intermarriage served to greatly amplify the degree of relatedness of those within a given community, while simultaneously widening the genetic gap between the members of that community and non-members outside it. Certainly, sometimes intermarriage would have happened with neighboring communities, as was done by Jacob’s brother Esau when he took to wife two Canaanites and broke off to found the race of the Edomites. But Esau did not take to wife daughters of Magog, for that clan had ventured North, and were beyond his reach. Thus, without the proximity required for intermarriage, over subsequent generations the gap between the Edomites and the sons of Magog continued to grow further, and further, and further, even as the genetic overlap between any two random Edomites was growing closer due to the same layered intermarriage effect.
As you can see, the matter of a label on the family tree has tremendous implications for the genetic, biological “closeness” of the populations which resulted from these various colonies which went forth after the flood. Not to mention their relative distance with regard to other populations. It is entirely because of this phenomenon that the following command from the Lord to Israel could make any sense at all.
You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were an alien in his land. The children of the third generation born to them may enter the assembly of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 23:7b-8 NKJV)
How were the Israelites supposed to identify these Egyptians they were ordered to exclude from the assembly? Well, the Egyptians, like the Israelites, had practiced generation after generation of, and there’s no other way to say this: Inbreeding. They shared a gene pool in common with one another that was not common to other groups, hence they were recognizable as Egyptians on sight. As their DNA expressed itself in their bone structure, their fat distribution, their skin texture, etc., they simply looked like Egyptians.
And despite the fact that the Israelites had lived in their land for 400 years, the two populations had not intermarried to any appreciable degree. They were still two different peoples from two different branches of Noah’s descent, and they bore the evidence visibly. The Israelites were no more made Egyptians by living on Egyptian soil than Egyptians were made Israelites by living in Israel—else the above command would be incoherent. Rather, each designation is entirely racial.
To further show that this concept is in no wise alien to Scripture, we can look to other places in which Scripture gives examples of traits belonging within the gene pools of certain lineages.
There is the propensity for large stature found in some of the races of Canaan, which the Israelite spies discovered to their dismay.
Consider also the tribe of Benjamin, which boasted 700 elite left-handed men, as well as the left-handed judge, Ehud. The ironically named “son of my right hand” certainly carried a propensity for left-handedness as a group.
Or consider Jeremiah 13:23: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots?”, a rhetorical device which assumes the immutability of an Ethiopian’s skin color, a racial trait so universal to the people that it is their defining characteristic—all the way down to their name itself!
Even Paul, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, opined, “One of them, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’” (Titus 1:12 NKJV)
So to say, Scripture is very well-acquainted, not just with race, but with racial stereotypes as well.
Conclusion
We have now seen that race is a taxonomical designation applied at the nexus of common descent and heritability. Race, put simplest, denotes shared blood—consanguinity. We know that we are all one blood with all mankind through our shared father Adam, as well as Noah. Yet not all were fathered by Ashkenaz, Eber, or Cush, and thus we do not all share their genetic inheritance.
All, to put a positive spin on a negative phrase, are consanguineous, but some are more consanguineous than others. This fact gives rise to taxonomical grouping by race.
These are indisputable categories of the natural order, and the Word of God assumes knowledge of and agreement with this fact. Any attempt at refutation of this will necessarily employ equivocation and special pleading, most likely through (eisegetical) appeal to Galatians 3:28. However, the Gospel does not destroy lineage according to the flesh, nor natural differences between races of men—nor between man and woman, it may also be observed with thanks.
