The Theology of Race

1st Fall Lecture for the Koinonia School of Race and Justice, given September 28, 2015 at Richmond Hill by the Rev. B. P. Campbell

Introduction: Constantine and King James

In 325 A. D. the Emperor Constantine, who had just, after 13 years of battle, murder and intrigue, secured his position in control of the Roman Empire, locked all of the Christian bishops he could find into a room in the tiny town of Nicaea, about 60 miles from Constantinople — modern Istanbul.

Until that moment, Christianity had been a kind of liberal clone of Judaism, so far as the Roman Empire was concerned. It was far more racially inclusive and culturally diverse than its parent religion. In many cities of the Roman Empire Jews and Christians hung together, and empire policy toward the religious groups changed with the moods and preferences of successive emperors. Barely 20 years before Constantine’s accession, the Emperor Diocletian had instigated murderous policies calling for the elimination of the Christian religion from the Empire altogether.

But this was not Constantine’s narrative. In fact, he wanted to go exactly the other way. He told the Bishops at Nicaea that a decade earlier, before he decisively defeated his rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, he had seen a cross in the sky with the inscription IHS – in hoc signo — “In This Sign Conquer” on it – and took this as an instruction to make Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire.

Under Constantine, Christian church membership would become virtually identical with citizenship in the new Rome. The price was imperial control of the church, bishops, appointments – and above all the definition of Christianity as a religion which attempted to shape only religious ceremonies and personal behavior in personal settings. Public behavior and opinion were regulated by the state, which was assumed to be the proper representative of God. The essential job of religion was to prepare and qualify people for a rewarding life in Heaven after death. Thus its task was also to excommunicate people who did not, by their quiet and obedient lives and loyalty to the state, qualify, and to condemn them to a fiery punishment after death.

Constantine took Christianity’s multi-racial form of Judaism and repackaged it as Roman citizenship, trading justice among the living for utopian life after death, and making himself de facto Messiah of the earthly realm. The only characteristic of Christianity that really suited itself to Constantine’s action was that it was multi-racial, and therefore able to fit the multi-national, multi-racial quality of the Roman Empire and its legions.

Constantine’s version of Christianity was still around when John Smith, Christopher Newport, and a dozen or more sailors bumped their boat onto an island down near 14^th Street Bridge on May 24^th, 1607.  The religion they carried used the word “Christian” as a synonym for “white European.” The goals and limitations of their version of Christianity were the same as its goals in the Roman Empire, but it served a state which was less racially tolerant than Constantine’s Rome. In King James’ Virginia, full credit as a child of God was not usually available to a non-European individual, and when it was, only if the individual was assimilated both into the Christian religion and the culture of the conquering race.

It is the contention of this lecture that Race is one of the central themes of the religion of Jesus. I will elaborate on that theme, and then leave it to you to judge how much relationship the religion you have received, or the religion you observe, has to the simple mystery of racial justice and reconciliation which Jesus presented as the work of the Messiah.

The Tower of Babel

To begin at the beginning: Every culture has myths of origin – stories which explain the way things are. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the diversity of languages and races is explained through the myth of the Tower of Babel, recorded in the 11^th Chapter of Genesis:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

And so the inhabited world was divided among different nations, each of them distinguished by race, language, and territory, and each having its own god.

Judaism: Chosen People

The Hebrew people emerged, according to their own history, out of the area of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers – ancient Babylon and Assyria, modern Iraq. Their progenitor was Abraham. They served as slaves in Egypt, but escaped and were led out by Moses — a person of their own race who was raised in the household of the Pharaoh. When they were in the desert, according to their tradition in the Book of Exodus, “The LORD said to Moses, “Go, leave this place, you and the people whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, and go to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, ‘To your descendants I will give it.’ I will send an angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.” (Exodus 33:1-2)

The Hebrew people had come to believe that their god was not simply a national/ethnic guardian, but superior to other gods, thereby giving them preference over over other ethnic groups and entitling them to take their territory by force. Canaanites, Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivies, and Jebusites became subject or displaced peoples.

Their God was superior to other gods: “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.” (Isaiah 43:28-29) This God had chosen the Hebrew people over what they now referred to as the “Goyim,” – the other race/nations, — in English, the Gentiles; in Greek, ta ethne, the ethnic groups. “You are a people holy to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.” (Deut 14:2)

The stories of the Jews told baldly of racial preference. No story was more formative in this regard than the story of Abraham’s children. Abraham’s wife Sarah was barren, so he first had a son by Hagar, an enslaved Egyptian woman. That son was called Ishmael. Afterward, he had a son, Isaac, by his wife Sarah. Abraham and Sarah banished the mixed-race Ishmael from their tribal lands. Ishmael is considered by Muslim tradition to be the ancestor of Arab tribes and of the Prophet Mohammed. In Judaism Isaac is the preferred son, the progenitor of the race, and is the father of Jacob, whose other name was Israel.

The Hebrew stories could not help but breed a sense of racial superiority, confirmed and supported by a God who was superior to the gods of all of the other ethnic groups. The Jews regarded their God as the supreme God and their culture and religion as superior to other nations. It was a religion of inclusion and exclusion. Jews had preferential treatment from the God of the universe.

But in the radical preaching in Israel, prophets said that the divine preference included higher demands and sometimes resulted in harsh treatment. God’s chosen people did not simply receive preferential benefits. God expected higher performance from them. This teaching did nothing to decrease the narrative of racial preference, but in the hands of some of the best Jewish theologians it instilled a sense of divine purpose which benefitted other races as well.

Just before 700 B.C., the prophet Isaiah said that Israel’s culture and religion was meant to be a model for the world, ultimately resulting in the gathering together of all the world’s races. The great gathering, the prophet said, would happen in Jerusalem:

In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the races (the goyim) shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the races, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isa. 2:2-4)

The independence, unity, and ascendancy of the Jewish nation eroded steadily from the time of King David, known as the Messiah, and his son Solomon – who reigned from 1000 to 900 B.C., until the nation was finally conquered and completely destroyed in 586 B.C. The destruction of Israel seriously challenged the narrative of racial preference and superiority, demanding reinterpretation.

The most powerful reinterpretation of chosenness came from a theologian we know as Second Isaiah – a prophetic preacher whose writings were attached to the writings of the earlier prophet of that name. He wrote sometime around 540 B.C., when what remained of the Jewish people had been enslaved in Babylon and were being freed by the Persians. [Yes, that’s right. The Jews were saved by the Iranians.]

This second Isaiah said that God chose the Jews to reunite the races of the world. The reunification would come, he said, not by conquest, but by service. And the definition of that service, the sign of God’s victory, would be the establishment of justice. Speaking of the Jewish people he said this:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the races.

He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.

He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching. (Isaiah 42:1-4)

The Jews had developed a religion of powerful personal and collective discipline and laws. They also had created a narrative of divine preference, which translated pretty directly into racial preference. I am absolutely certain that these narratives of racial preference have emerged in every tribe and race that had any self-respect throughout the world. But the Jewish narrative has been formative for Christianity and for this nation, and it is the topic of tonight’s lecture.

Jesus and race

What happens with Jesus and with the advent of the Christian movement is dramatic. You can evaluate it as a historian, or as an anthropologist, — or you can see in it, as I do, the clear identification of the holy spirit of God in the world and the ultimate intention of creation.

In any case, the developments and the teachings are there for all to see. Nearly 2000 years ago, Jerusalem was the definitive home of the Jewish people, centered on the ancient mountain where Abraham learned God did not want him to sacrifice his first-born son. Now it was the site of an enormous Temple built by Herod the Great as the religious center of the nation.

But at the turn of the Milennium, Jerusalem was not simply a single-race city. The Mediterranean world had been swirling around for five or six centuries in successive empires – most especially the Greek empire of Alexander the Great and its successor, the Roman Empire. All over the empire different ethnic groups learned Greek and Latin as second and third languages. All of the major cities became multi-ethnic, just as all the world’s major cities are today.

Jesus emerged in that context.

The religion of Jesus cannot be understood without affirming the spirit in which it is offered and practiced. There was clearly a spirit in his being that drew people to him and communicated the truth of the words which he spoke. That spirit accompanied all that he did and said, and what he did and said is understood today when the spirit which enlivened the words and actions is admitted and affirmed.

So his simple criteria for life and truth were not in any sense a lessening of rigor in the human journey. They did not reflect the absence of value, but rather a clarity of deepest meaning.

Jesus believed that The Kingdom of Heaven is coming from heaven to earth. It was his privilege to be present as that was happening and to point to its arrival.

The poor were hearing good news, he said; captives were being freed, blind persons were recovering their sight, the oppressed were being freed, and people were hearing good news and finding hope. This, he said, was proof that the kingdom was now coming. He invited people to look for the good news, and to help to bring it to the community. (Luke 4:14-21; cp. Mt. 11:2-6, Isa. 61:1-4) Along with this came the forgiveness of sins – and therefore the abolition of the authority of religious authorities over heaven and hell.

Jesus said that God was not recruiting privileged membership or establishing hierarchy; he was seeking servants for the kingdom.

Jesus adopted the theme which the second Isaiah had identified. So far as God was concerned, whatever chosenness he might be involved in was not about privilege. It was about service. It is important to understand what this means: If Jesus was recruiting servants, then the banquet was for the entire population. He was not recruiting privileged membership in the Halls of Heaven, but rather committed persons who would help bring heaven’s kingdom into the earthly races.

Those of you who are familiar with Christian scripture know the story of James and John the Zebedee brothers, two of his twelve interns, who came to Jesus and asked if they could have privileged positions in the Kingdom – if not here, at least hereafter. Jesus replied that this kind of hierarchy was natural in every nation and race in the world, but it could not be in the Kingdom of Heaven. Here in this order the greatest would be the servant, the first among all would be the slave of all. (Mk. 10:35-45)

He used the word servant. He used the word slave. No privilege of race or religion or education or family was of any account. No hierarchy would serve this kingdom.

For Jesus, whatever choosing God may do has nothing to do with race. Servants of God may be of any race, gender, vocation, or personal history.

In Jesus’ teaching, and in his behavior, it becomes abundantly clear that race is not a criterion that determines who will serve or be served, or for choosing the servants of God.

He begins by declaring that family lineage – tribe or race – has nothing to do with what he is looking for. Early in his ministry they told him that his mother and brothers were trying to get him to come outside and talk to them. “Who are my mother and brothers?” he asked pointedly. “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:31-5) On another occasion he was arguing with the religious leaders who constantly confronted him, not least over his indiscriminate associations with persons of another class or race. “A certain man had two sons,” Jesus said. One said he would help his Father but didn’t. The other said he wouldn’t help but did. Which son served the Father?” (Mt. 21:28-31) The point was that it was spirit, intent, and behavior which empowered one for service, not religion or kinship of race.

John the Baptist, whose language and presentation was far more harsh than that of his cousin Jesus, shouted at the Jewish leaders – the Pharisees and Sadducees – who came to hear him, that he was tired of their acting as if being Jewish was in and of itself a virtue: “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’,” John said. “God can raise up children of Abraham from these stones.” (Mt. 3:7-9)

The most convincing testimony of Jesus about race was not what he said, but what he did. He constantly and consistently spoke with all comers. He did not overtly recruit people to his movement, but the presence of their stories in the New Testament all but assures that a great diversity of people were members of early Jesus fellowships, telling one another the stories of their transformation.

We don’t know the race of many of the people whom he served, but if he was dealing with prostitutes and beggars and persons in outcast professions, we can be fairly certain that many of them were not Jews. We know specifically of

• A woman who was Syrian and Phoenician: This woman approached him when he was in what is now Southern Lebanon. She asked him for help for her daughter. His Jewish disciples tried to send her away. Jesus repeated a direct racist epithet to her: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs!” She came right back at him, as I am certain he knew she would: “Yes, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the children’s table.”   She and her daughter were healed right at that moment. (Mk. 7:24-30)
• A Samaritan woman: Jesus met a Samaritan woman – of a different race and religion than his own – at a well and had a long discussion about the different beliefs of Samaritans and Jews. He summarized the discussion by saying that the fundamental issue was that people, regardless of race, should worship God in the right spirit and in truth. (John 4:4-42)
• A Roman centurion, who could have been of any race among those many recruited or compelled to serve in the Roman army. Jesus was so impressed by the man that he said his spiritual commitment exceeded that of all the Jews he had dealt with. (Mark 8:5-13)
• There was a demented man named Legion who was of some non-Jewish origin and who lived in a town where pigs were the business – anathema to Jews. (Mark 5:1-20)
• Finally, Jesus told a very pointed story about a good Samaritan man who got what Jesus was putting down better than a Jewish priest or Levite who ignored the man in the ditch. (Luke 10:25-37)

These encounters, no doubt representative of what happened with Jesus, define his spiritual teaching and his attitude toward ethnic and religious privilege.

The early church seems to have been composed of small fellowships of varied race and gender in the cities throughout the Eastern Roman Empire. Paul discovered that persons of other races – Gentiles – were responding to what he was saying better than many Jews. Peter had similar experience. In a powerful dream sequence described in chapter 10 of the Book of Acts, Peter saw a great net coming down from heaven filled with all kinds of creatures, and he understood this to be God telling him that persons of all races were of equal concern to God. Jesus’ own brother James, who was the leader of the Jesus followers who stayed in Jerusalem, said he was convinced that the whole movement affirmed a prophecy “that all humankind may seek the Lord– all the races over whom my name has been called. (Acts 15:17)

One of the most significant revelations about race in the New Testament is detailed in Luke’s description of the celebration on the Jewish festival of Pentecost in Jerusalem soon after Jesus’ resurrection. According to his account, there were Jews and non-Jews from every race – literally “every nation under heaven” who heard Peter and the other apostles preaching and understood it in their own language. The spirit in the place was powerful. You knew it was right. People of every race were joined together in fellowship. The event was seen as a reversal of the tragedy of the Tower of Babel in prehistory. Because of the spirit of God, people of every race were able to understand each other even though they spoke different languages. (Acts 2:1-13)

It was a joint Jewish-Roman cabal in Jerusalem who eventually killed Jesus. Both Romans and Jews conducted his trial. It is obvious that the religion which Jesus preached and taught by his life and action held everyone to account, regardless of race. Jesus served people indiscriminately and recruited followers indiscriminately. The only criterion of choice was that they should seek to do the will of the father. Their participation was determined not by their race, but by their commitment to service.

To be clear: The multi-racial, inclusive quality of Jesus’ message and ministry related not only to the people whom he served individually, but to his larger work as Messiah. He had rejected the route of military power – offered to him by the devil in the desert Temptations at the beginning of his ministry. The devil suggested that if Jesus would adopt satanic methods, he could have all of the races kneeling at his feet. But Jesus intended to inaugurate the work of the Messiah – to bring the Kingdom to the earth and reconcile the races. He understood, and taught, that the methodology of the Messiah would be dependent on a different spirit. He seems to have followed the methodology of the servant-Messiah that was described in the writing of the prophet we call Second Isaiah which we quoted earlier:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching. (Isaiah 42:1-4)

Why is Christianity inseparable from the issue of race?

What is powerful in Jesus’ presentation about race is that he attacks the issue of hierarchy and privilege. He does this indiscriminately – making it the central issue of his religious critique. The judgements and promises of God are to all people of all races. Jesus serves people of all races. He invites all to true leadership and service, and his criticism of false privilege and leadership is directed, in his situation, more at the religious people than at any one else.

Since racism is always the handmade of hierarchy and privilege, race is a central issue for Christian theology. A Christian theology that says nothing about personal and structural racism misses the point desperately. Race is the most powerful and obvious handle on the spiritual sickness of humankind. The dismantling of racist structures and righting of racial wrongs is the inescapable service of those who wish to follow Jesus.

I’m a Christian – I guess it’s obvious – but Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and persons of no religion can work at this as well and many do – they know that the God of their understanding has no favorites, as Peter said in Acts, “but in every race anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” As Jesus said clearly, It doesn’t matter what you call yourself, it’s what you do that counts.

The Feeding of the 5000

In the early Church, there was one story from Jesus’ ministry that was told more frequently than any other. It occurs six times in the four Gospels. It is called the Feeding of the 5000.

It’s clear that Jesus’ work was consistently interracial, and his most famous gathering clearly was. The event became one of the most storied in his entire ministry. It occurred in Galilee, where his teaching and healing ministry began. Galilee was known as a multi-racial area. Jews were in a minority there. Arabs and Phoenicians were the most numerous inhabitants.

While teaching and healing in Galilee, Jesus became exhausted, and decided to go off with some of his disciples in the boat, away from the crowds. But people followed him from all of the towns, and when the boat landed a crowd was there to meet him. Rather than leave again, he decided to address the crowd. They sat down on a hillside, and Jesus taught. It seems the people could not get enough. The day went on and on, and as it came to evening, the disciples told Jesus it was time to disperse them.

You’ll just have to imagine who was in the crowd. If you can’t imagine it yourself, try seeing the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian and see what the producers of that film imagined it was like. This must have been an incredible group of people – hardly the crowd from the Lincoln Center – more like a crowd in the center of Mumbai. They were of every conceivable race and culture – a few well-to-do, a lot of women and children as well as men, many sick, many poor. Thieves, prostitutes, and village elders. Each town had its own racial composition and religion. Here they all were mixed together in a crowd.

The disciples wanted to get them out of there before it got dark, but Jesus knew it was time to eat. He invited them to sit down together. A young boy offered his bread and fish. Touched by the offering, Jesus raised it up, gave thanks for it, and gave it those nearby. Then, as if by signal, food spontaneously appeared all over the hillside. People fed one another. People shared with all their neighbors the bag lunches, the wine, the fruits and breads that they had brought with them. According to all the accounts, everyone ate and all were satisfied.

The Feeding of the 5000 was a miracle, but I don’t think the miracle was in the multiplication of fish and loaves in a magical act. The miracle was the feast of at least 5000 random people from every race and religion, every social class and profession, in which all ate and all were satisfied. The spirit of Jesus was shared by the crowd. It was an incredible celebration. The story was told over and over again in the early church. Someone in the fellowship would say, “I was there,” and tell his or her version of the story.

It was, they would say, a sign – a sign of the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven to earth, what they had been taught by Jesus to pray for daily. It represented the economics of the kingdom. It represented the justice of the kingdom. It represented the service of the kingdom. It represented the racial and ethnic respectfulness of the kingdom.

These characteristics – effective economic sharing, justice in social organization, people committed to service and citizenship, and racial and ethnic respect – have from the very beginning been the characteristics of the spiritual and social movement which Jesus identified, which he called the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. They are not peripheral, they are central. And no Gospel which does not enjoy their presence can survive as true religion.

The question which we must answer is this: Can we honor what we know of the spirit of God and remain passive before the serious and sophisticated structures of racial discrimination which have been carefully erected in metropolitan Richmond since its beginning, or does the spirit call us forth into the unknown territory of justice and repair, the righting of racial wrongs? Can we, who know the truth of God and must tell the truth about what we see, tolerate a transportation system designed a half-century ago to perpetuate racial segregation? Can we accept the drastic under-funding of schools into which are crowded the racially segregated young persons of the center city?

Or are these matters which do not belong to true religion, matters which we are powerless to address, matters which should be left to others who will not address them?

Can anyone doubt that race is central to the Gospel? And where that is denied, can we be silent about it?

— Reverend Benjamin P. Campbell
at Richmond Hill
September 28, 2015