Understanding Racialization Using Biblical Theology

Critical Race Theory is getting a lot of attention these days, but given how few people have actually read the work of Critical Race Theorists, it’s fair to argue that CRT is not the real issue. There is a deeper concern with racial justice that White Evangelicals have, and while those deeper concerns may involve a number of things, I believe that the most significant of them is racialization.

Racialization is the concern that race is being ‘made’ or ‘constructed’ or ‘imagined’ when it should not be. This concern may be expressed as statements like “We shouldn’t see color” or “They’re playing the race card” or “They’re finding race in everything”. It’s also expressed in the widespread apprehension among White Christians at talking about race in public. People are worried that by talking about Black, White, Asian, and Hispanic people, and their cultures and social issues, race and racism are being allowed to persist when they would simply disappear if people stopped talking about them. Craig Mitchell perhaps best summed up this perspective for the Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel when he said that, “Race is a harmful concept that is best forgotten.”

The trouble with this, however, is that in order to undo a lie or a sin or a heresy, we cannot just ignore it. Harmful things are not best forgotten; they will persist until they are identified and opposed, as is the case with all sin.

So how should we understand racialization in order to identify it and oppose it?

One helpful way to do this is to look at racialization in light of the story of the Bible. D. A. Carson, in his book Christ and Culture Revisited argues that using the 4 key turning points in the Bible — Creation and the Fall, Israel and the Law, Christ and the New Covenant Redemption, and Heaven and Hell — is the most effective way for Christians to interpret cultural ideas and positions.

So here is a look at how the story of the Bible in those four parts helps us understand racialization:

Creation & Fall

• As real physical people from whom the human race descended, Adam and Eve should not be racialized; that is, they should not be thought of as ‘white’, as has been frequently suggested and imagined in the past
• The fall has resulted in all forms of sin, including prejudicial behavior which is favoritism/partiality (James 2:1)
• The fall has also resulted in a weakened and corrupted mind (WLC Q. 28), leading to widespread lies about other people groups to support nationalistic/ethnocentric partiality (Numbers 11, Jonah 4, Matt. 9:11, Luke 4:25–28, etc.); the heresy of the Judaizers that Paul confronts (Gal. 2:11–14) plays out as a corrupted social imagination where segregated, hierarchical, social constructs are imagined in order to oppress others
• The contemporary version of race was not initially created until the mid-1400s and was not formally established among the English-speaking world until the late 1600s; the sinful root of racism is pride, the social root of racism is greed, and the ideological root of racism is supersessionism, which is an imitation of the Judaizer’s misappropriation of Jewish identity
• Creation and the Fall require that we recognize and distinguish between God’s created order (especially his intentions for human beings made in the imago dei) and the sin-cursed way the world currently is; that is, our world has become racialized even though that was not God’s intention, and we must see that both of these concepts are true

Israel & the Law

• God established the Jew/Gentile distinction by calling his people out of Egypt and giving them the Torah
• The Jew/Gentile distinction is intended by God to be a spiritual distinction and the law is a guardian of that spiritual identity (Rom. 4:9–25; 9)
• God intended to draw the nations into worship and obedience as they saw his goodness to a people fully committed to him (Deut. 4:5–8, Eze. 16:14)
• God called Israel a holy nation, but also a kingdom of priests, so that part of their identity was to be a mediator (Exod 19:6–7)
• Entry into the covenant community was through circumcision, not birth, so what was perceived as an obstacle to ethnic unity was in fact an opportunity for other ethnicities to join (Ex. 12:43–49; cf. Rom. 4:9–12)
• The Jews frequently mistook their identity as one that is exclusively ethnic (or physical and ancestral) and marked by circumcision
• This mistaken understanding of identity, demonstrated strongly by the Judaizers in Galatians can be called ‘proto-racial’ in that it used an immutable fact or marker of a people group to create conceptually segregated and hierarchical identities
• Though the development of the modern concept of race by using skin color did not happen until many centuries after the events of Galatians 2, the same mistaken concept of Jewish identity was used to reinforce colonialism and slavery where the White/Black distinction directly replaced the Jew/Gentile distinction (cf. Psalms of David by Isaac Watts, especially Psalm 100 and 147; the sonnets of William Strachey in 1612; Colonial Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws in 1662 and 1691)

Christ & the New Covenant Redemption

• In the Gospels, we see Christ opening access to redemption to all peoples through his ministry to and teachings about Samaritans and Gentiles (Mt. 8:5–13; 15:21–28; Mk. 7:24; Lk. 7:1–10; John 4; 12:20–26 etc.)
• While Jesus clearly prioritized the people of Israel in his ministry, that limitation was not an impediment to but a catalyst and empowerment for Christianity to reach all peoples, much like strengthening a tree trunk that will have other branches grafted onto it (Rom. 11:17–24)
• Paul’s writing confirms this open access to God to all peoples through the gospel (Romans, Galatians, Ephesians etc.)
• Paul models how to navigate racialization particularly in his writing to multi-ethnic/multi-racial churches
• Paul works against the ‘racialization’ of the Gentile believers by Jewish believers (in Galatians) and that of Jewish believers by Gentile believers (in Romans) by recognizing and confronting the specific ways that this was occurring, and noting the theological and gospel implications of the respective errors
• Even when an identity is socially constructed, such as that of the Hellenistic Jews, the early church recognized that identity and addressed it with systemic reforms (Acts 6)

Heaven & Hell

• Heaven and Hell will be multi-ethnic with people from every tongue, tribe and nation (Rev. 7:9, 20:15); this means that ethnic diversity is not eliminated, so colorblindness is biblically unfounded
• Racialization, as the process of imagining conceptually segregated hierarchies out of differences in people groups will be completely undone, except for the marker of trusting in Jesus for the forgiveness of sins
• There will remain an absolutely segregated and hierarchical status between those who are saved and those who are not, which can be understood as the fulfillment of the original Jew/Gentile distinction
• Whether we will recognize social constructs in heaven is unclear: languages like English are socially constructed but language in general has roots in creation as a ‘God construct’; this means we must be flexible and understanding with one another in processing how to undo social constructs today
• Given that the modern version of race is based on a twisted understanding of the Jew/Gentile distinction, and was created and reinforced for the sake of establishing and legitimizing colonialism and slavery, it is not likely that we will use White and Black to describe one another in heaven; however, this does not mean that those identities have not, cannot and will not be reconstructed in socially healthy ways that do not violate Scripture

Key Takeaways:

• It is arguable that racialization was the secularizing of heresy, where a theological aberration was embedded within social strata, and hidden to avoid ecclesial consequences. That is, the racialization of Whiteness in the 1600s and 1700s made common and atheological that which needs to be addressed as a theological wrong. Colorblindness and the dismissal of concepts like systemic racism are a form of continuing to hide a theological problem.
• All of this necessitates upholding the already/not yet distinction, and using eschatology to interpret racial problems in the church
• Upholding the already/not yet distinction includes accepting the tension between social constructs and God constructs, ontology and phenomenology, and theological ideas and sociological ideas
• The temptation to use one aspect of theology to eliminate uncomfortable sociological ideas is a theological problem

Racialization is a bigger problem than is generally thought, and connecting it to the biblical story is helpful for understanding that. It should be clear that God’s grace and mercy must be central to how we differ with one another on racialization: we must oppose the creation of hierarchies and divisions but this can be done in various ways and requires clear social diagnoses which can be very challenging. God help us.