The Bible and Racism

Our church's Adult Sunday school class has been studying Ruth, and I have been using David Atkinson's excellent commentary in the Bible Speaks Today series, as a guide to my preparation. Although filled with all sorts of useful information, Atkinson's book is rife with little theological excurses, from a Reformed perspective, which are thought-provoking and so well written they make this study a must-have for the pastor's shelf.

I mention this because the topic of race comes into play whenever one studies Ruth, for she was a Moabitess, a foreigner, a pagan, and lived her early life outside of the covenant of Israel with Jehovah. Since I have chosen to post on racial matters lately, I thought it would be of interest to discuss race from an ancient Israelite perspective. Atkinson quotes John Austin Baker's comment from an article entitled, "Racism and the Bible": "When we turn to the Bible for guidance and wisdom in our problems about race, the first and most important thing we have to say is that the Bible has nothing whatever to say to us" (italics mine).

Atkinson then adds, "What he means by this rather bald statement is that "race" in our terms is not a concept of which the writers of the Bible have any idea (emphasis mine). The distinctions, indeed antagonisms, of the ancient world were not about race in our sense of ethnic or colour distinctions; they were about culture and tradition and religion. The only kind of discrimination of which we find in the Old Testament is cultural and religious, not ethnic. In fact the Deuteronomic prohibition about intermarriage...was not a concern about race but about religion" (p.67).

There can be, then, no biblical basis for racial discrimination. There is in the Bible, one people of God, who are so designated because they have been graced by faith in the Lord. This "catholic" image of humanity is beautifully depicted in Acts 2:5-11. "Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem...Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappodocia, Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphyllia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs..." A similar vision is found in Revelation 7:9, "After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands."

There are two points I would like to draw from this. First, when we speak of race, we are using a modern designation that has no biblical foundation, and one that is physiologically, the least distinctive thing which separates human beings. Race is merely a phenotypical bagatelle - something ephemeral and of no real consequence in the estimation of a person's worth.

Second, if the Bible knows nothing about race as we currently define it, then there are surely other areas of life and knowledge which are similarly absent; ideas which are modern discoveries or presuppositions, and therefore inappropriate hermenuetical principles to impose upon the sacred text. I would cite biology, astronomy, cosmology, paleontology, and geology as areas in which the Bible has nothing to say to us, as these subjects do not fall within its purview or authority. There are other sociological areas for which one could make the same statement, but I would prefer readers work those out for themselves.