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Reformed Classicalist

Race, Social Justice & the Church: Part 1

A Letter to a Young Church Planter


RTS Papers / Pastoral & Social Ethics / Summer 2018


Greetings, my Fellow Laborer in the Gospel!


Concerning the matters about which you wrote, I couldn’t be more pleased to hear that you are planting a church in such a racially diverse context! You should be greatly encouraged, and yet your email makes it sounds as if you are backed into a corner, as if the current pronouncements over racism in the church are the wave of the future! If there is any pressure on you to formally adopt positions that are coming out of the recent conferences, you may be forgiven for asking, “Which ones?”


The exchanges that Thabiti Anyabwile has had were certainly illuminating, particularly concerning the use of labels. For instance, “It’s become fashionable for some people to toss about the charge of ‘Marxism’ or ‘Neo-Marxism’ any time ‘race’ and racism are a topic of discussion.” Perhaps “some people” are merely tossing around labels to shut down debate. It may also be that some have intelligently read the Marxist perspective and recognize some alarming, common threads. Should this be off limits?


The very definition of racism is up for grabs. As you know I am currently taking an ethics class. In our main textbook, John Frame defines racism as “hating people because of their race or color.” To me that is uncontroversial. Then again, as John Piper said in his book on the subject, “the existence of the reality of race itself is disputed.”


Dr. King provided a helpful contrast in his famous speech: that his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” What else is racism but the reverse of this ideal? Racism is to judge precisely by the color of skin rather than by the content of personal character. And yet what have we seen in recent years? We have seen something nearer to racial determinism, as I will argue.

Racism is aptly named an “ism.” It is a way of viewing the world. It may be more, but it is never less. To pit error against sin as the essence is to make two things compete that in fact do not.

Should anyone say that racism is hatred and therefore not an idea, I can only ask whether or not the hateful person has some reason to hate or else no reason. My point is to show that the person who does not think racism is an idea has robbed himself of the tools of personal rebuke.


The whole question of defining racism is actually crucial to a meaningful solution. But in order to show that I would start by remembering some church history, then begin to look at what Marxist thought has done to our definitions of race, culture, and “social justice.” Only then will we have a sufficient backdrop to compare how the biblical worldview would solve these issues. I am convinced that the church is being pressured to choose a set of Marxist definitions and solutions to racial problems over a genuinely biblical alternative.


Christian Tradition


Reckoning with “how the church has fallen short” on the matter of race is a bit misleading. For starters, Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius, Cyril, and Augustine were all Africans. Perhaps they were not all dark-skinned, but neither can their theologies be reduced to “Eurocentrism.” This at least shows that their Christianity was not “the white man’s religion.”


On the other hand, we Calvinists have to face the fact that newer Evangelical movements answered the call of fighting bigotry where the older Reformed tradition did not. There were always exceptions of course. Edwards and Whitefield were weak on slavery, while Wesley was vehement in condemning the slave trade. His views were part of the influence upon William Wilberforce, the other being the more Calvinistic hymn writer, John Newton. So there is something of a mixed bag. Moravians led the way evangelizing blacks. Baptists and Methodists picked up the slack throughout the following century.


Charles Finney echoed the divine judgments of Wesley on racism. It is to our shame that so many of these socially conscious revival movements departed from orthodox doctrine. The Pentecostal movement is another case in point. One of their defining features was the breaking of racial barriers at the highest levels of leadership, as in the famous case of William J. Seymour at the Azusa Street revival meetings.


The greatest theologian of early southern Presbyterianism, R. L. Dabney, requires more explanation. The center of his argument was that if God had sanctioned slavery at all, then its justice could never be called into question. It was not merely tolerated by God, as Jesus said divorce was in Matthew 19; but there was that “tribute” of captive slaves (cf. Num. 31:25-30). Moreover, “heathen slaves were not to go free at the year of Jubilee, like Hebrew slaves.” Hence not all biblically sanctioned slavery was indentured servitude.


Things were different in the northern Presbyterian stronghold of Princeton. In 1911 B. B. Warfield wrote a little known essay entitled “On the Antiquity and Unity of the Human Race,” in which he decried the “wicked caste system” in America we would now call racism. A century after the Civil War, John Murray’s view seems at first indistinguishable from that of Dabney: “If slavery per se is immorality and, because of its prevalence, was a rampant vice in the first century, we would be compelled to conclude that the high ethic of the New Testament would have its issued its proscription. But this is not what we find.” The reader is bound to find this rather anticlimactic.


The Dutch Reformed Church had a main hand in setting up Apartheid in South Africa. Allan Boesak describes the paradoxical experience of being black and Reformed there: “The God of the Reformed tradition was the God of slavery, fear, persecution, and death. Yet, for those black Christians this was the God to whom they had to turn for comfort, for justice, for peace.” South Africans increasingly heard that God’s elect were white and that the world was the inheritance of the Afrikaner. The liberation theology of Boesak was one that appealed to the Kuyperian notions of all things under the Lordship of Christ and that “Reformed Christians are called on not to accept the sinful realities of the world. Rather we are called to challenge, to shape, to subvert, and to humanize history until it conforms to the norm of the kingdom of God.”


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