Dear Reader, this piece is a guest post, and part of a larger debate on the Thesis, “There is only one race, the race of Adam.” You can find my opening statement here. The following is Linneaus’ rebuttal of that opening statement. You can also find Linneaus’ opening statement here, and my response here. All links for this debate are here. Please note that the following statement is contrary to my views.
Thanks again to Reverend Wolfmueller for the continuance of this debate.
Before I respond to Wolfmueller’s thesis, let me lay out the victory conditions for both sides.
I must show that within God’s creation there is a real category of consanguinity entailing different degrees of relatedness between men.
Wolfmueller must show that there is no such category, or that there are no such degrees.
The term “race” itself is largely incidental; the sweet-smelling rose doesn’t care what you call it.
As of the opening statements, I have fulfilled my victory condition, and Wolfmueller has not. This is the state of play.
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On to the content of Wolfmueller’s thesis. I must deal here with a number of non-sequiturs and category errors that inform his incorrect views on this matter.
Universality
Wolfmueller opens by making much of the universal aspects of humanity. As he notes, I do agree with him that:
- God made all mankind through Adam
- All sinned in Adam
- Christ accomplished his redeeming work on behalf of all
- All will ultimately be raised bodily
However, universality in some things does not override particularity in others. None of the foregoing universalities change the fact that Wolfmueller and I do not share a father, or that the African and I don’t share a common ancestor more recent than, approximately, Noah. Wolfmueller believes it a danger to consider humanity according to non-universal categories, for fear of setting the universals aside. However, he himself does this every day in honoring his own father more than my father, or some abstract universal concept of fatherhood.
The fact that he only insists on this principle when it comes to race is evidence enough that his position is an ideological commitment, not a rational one.
Boasting
Next, arguments over boasting in one’s ancestors are beyond the scope of this debate, which is strictly on the existence and nature of race, not any concerns about what we might subsequently do with that reality. This is a fallacious argumentum ad consequentiam, and I will not address Wolfmueller’s comments on it here, other than to observe that he routinely assumes the validity of race as a category of the natural world, only to argue that we must reject it because he fears what men may do with this truth. He uses the word “danger” as regards acknowledging race seven times in his statement. This, again, is the mark of a rejection of an inescapable truth on purely ideological grounds.
Immutability
Wolfmueller’s third section advances the argument that Scripture does not recognize a category for any “grouping of humanity” that is immutable. He reasons from this that we, too, should not deal in race, an immutable category, because he fears to do so is “dangerously reductionistic.” If he were consistent, he could not consider his children according to the immutable grouping category of “Bryan’s children,” but rather only as part of the universal undifferentiated mass of humanity.
Contra Wolfmueller’s protestations, some of the very examples he gives of people changing their “grouping” by fiat are themselves instances which simultaneously demonstrate Scripture’s willingness to continue to employ the immutable category of race, even after said change!
Ruth was called “the Moabite” by Boaz. The fact that he did not call her “the Israelite” on account of her change of allegiance to Israel proves that he did this according to her racial designation.
The mixed multitude was “mixed” because it contained different races, including Egyptians (as discussed in my opening statement). If Egyptians become Israelites just by beating town with them, then the multitude was not “mixed” at all!
Despite his loyalty to Israel, Uriah was still called by the epithet “the Hittite,” denoting his race.
To be certain, there is a legal and spiritual category for being joined to a group that was not formerly (or, “naturally”) your group. This is called adoption.
Hans Fiene, a European man, adopted an African girl; she legally belongs to him and is called by his name. When that girl goes to the doctor she will be asked for her family health history, but they won’t mean Hans’. If she ever needs a bone marrow or organ donor, no Fiene will be of any use. They are legally a family, but her physical racial heritage has not changed.
In the same way, we are adopted by God into a new people, but our physical race does not change. You see an analogy to this in that women are adopted by God as sons (Ephesians 1:5, Galatians 4:5-7); however, this is a legal reality, not a physical transmutation.
Again, that God takes men irrespective of race, class, or sex and joins them to Himself and one another in sacramental unity (Galatians 3:28) does not thereby abolish these categories.
Summary
Wolfmueller expresses his through-line thusly:
“The way the Bible teaches us to speak of humanity excludes speaking in terms of races.”
I disagree, and assert the following counter-thesis:
The Bible speaks about race so casually and without fanfare—because its authors assumed that their hearers were capable of grasping self-evident truths about the natural, created world—that it is too subtle for Wolfmueller to apprehend, trapped as he is in a modernistic “color-blind” zeitgeist.
I provided Scriptural examples of this in my opening statement, and added more above. I could add still more, such as the instance where Paul had to correct a Roman who had gotten his race wrong (Acts 21). No doubt all these Levantines looked the same to the poor man.
Or each and every use of “-ite,” denoting a member of a race founded by a man named in whatever precedes that suffix.
Conclusion
In light of the above, it is clear that Wolfmueller is willing to suspend the normal rules of logic and exegesis to claim that race is an invalid, anti-Gospel category. This betrays a pre-commitment, not to truth, but to the Enlightenment ideology of Equality, which is in danger of collapse.
I suggest that such loyalty is misplaced.