In the church today, many are confused about what place race, spiritual unity, extended family, and other family relations have in the spiritual community of the church and in society at large. Of primary importance in modern times is the relationship between our spiritual unity in the doctrines of the church and the separation of races, peoples, and nations as God has chosen for men. God has ordained the separation of men in separate races, nations, and peoples for our social order. God does this while affirming the spiritual unity of the church in the doctrines of the truth. These principles of both spiritual unity and racial plurality will be demonstrated from Scripture as the purpose for which God has designed mankind.
I would first like to examine the meaning of spiritual unity. Consistent Christians through the ages have believed that God has laid out a set of moral laws which all men are bound to practice. God has also revealed the truth about nature and its Creator in His Scriptures. Because truth is objective and not subjective, everyone is required to acknowledge God as the Creator of the universe and their Lord and Master regardless of their race. Thus, the same morality and set of beliefs about the Creator God should be held by the European, the Asian, the Levantine, the African, the Jew, etc. In Christianity, this knowledge in manifested in and communicated by Jesus Christ: thus all men should follow Jesus Christ. To be unified in doctrine is to be bound in spiritual unity.
When we as Christians are involved in building societies or in any other form of cultural undertaking, we model our societies around what God wishes for His created order. Thus, if God wished for an order of a racially amalgamated society, we believe that He would have said something to that effect. Yet, contrary to the insistence of the modern church, the Bible nowhere speaks against the idea of ethnic nations or racial solidarity. Extended familial groups form the most concrete societies, whereas racially pluralistic societies will be unstable. The basic idea behind divine law is to decree the best uses of matter and the ways in which matter is not to be used. Human social law has the same purpose as the laws of nature, to provide order to matter. God decreeing these laws has laid out the best order for men to follow, and that order is tribalistic. In the Old Testament, God chose to work through a specific people, Israel, for His divine revelation. This meant that He chose a certain seedline and passed over others. Thus, it follows from this premise that God affirms the ethnic order, since He is unchanging. Instead of reading the New Testament as being entirely spiritual in nature, whereas the Old Testament was concerned with an ethnic people, one can easily see that the New Testament is expanding the promises and not destroying all ethnic ties. In reality, it is the cultural saturation of multicultural and multiracial doctrine that has led to the church’s adoption of anti-racial and anti-ethnic interpretations after 1960, before which the church did not speak against ethno-nationalism.
The insistence of the modern church is that the only important distinction in a marriage is faith in God; each individual ought to be a Christian. The case for the sole decisive qualification of marriage as a shared faith is made from texts such as 1 Corinthians 7:39, which advises widows to marry “only in the Lord” (though the text advises against widows remarrying), in addition to the supposed cases of intermarriage in the Bible. In general, alienists offer a libertarian appeal with the premise of Christian liberty and a general assertion of racial egalitarianism. Often the modern church also takes the view that separate races do not exist, because the position of monogenism is that all men are from the Adamic race. Thus, the only racial division that exists to the modern church is spiritual in nature, consisting of Christians on the one hand and unbelievers on the other hand. Common Adamic lineage typically forms the strongest argument for the the alienist (“Christian” Cultural Marxist) position. The basic assertion by the alienists regarding the common origin argument is that having a common origin means that all men are equal in essence.
There are many problems with this appeal to common Adamic lineage to advocate racial egalitarianism. First is the plain fact that the Bible makes many racial distinctions throughout its many pages. From the curses against different races and nations, to the blessings of certain nations, to the anti-interracial marriage laws of the Bible (such as Deuteronomy 23), the Bible makes many distinctions based upon lineage. Some lines are good and some lines are corrupt. Second, we have many cases in the Bible of brothers being completely different. This is especially true in the Old Testament differences between Isaac and Ishmael and Jacob and Esau. One brother was the chosen son to carry on the line, the son of the spirit. The other son was a son of the flesh. God simply chooses to make it that way: the children of the flesh will have evil lines while the children of the promise will have righteous lines. Herein, there is a sufficient refutation of the claim that descent from Adam implies egalitarian equality. Third, one must understand that God gives promises to different brothers often. Think about the promises to Noah’s sons, Shem and Japheth (Gen. 9:26-27). Shem was promised the Messiah and the spiritual faith, while Japheth was promised both the later appropriation of that same faith and future membership in Israel. When one examines the boundaries of Christendom, one can see that the vast majority of Christendom’s people are descendants of either Shem or Japheth. The distinctions between the tribes of Israel in Genesis 50 also show this point.
The modern church essentially throws all of this out of the window with its presumption assertions of racial egalitarianism. Any opposition to the modern church’s positions on interracial marriage and propositional nations is viewed as being heretical in nature — racist, white supremacist, hateful, bigoted, Nazi, divisive, schismatic, and destructive of biblical race relations. These positions are often bolstered with scriptural texts dealing with certain Judaic ceremonial practices, or with others condemning the undue honoring of certain classes of men in the church (e.g. James 2:1-4). Racial integration and intermarriage are often held up as signs of spiritual unity, even as a positive sign of racial reconciliation by the modern-day Christian clergy. Indeed, some have gone further than the call for racial blindness and argued for the allowance of illegal immigration. This is the normative position of the Vatican.
There are several undefended premises of these arguments made by the modern Christians. The assumption that having unity in the gospel requires propositional nations of integrated races is unfounded and cannot be supported by any biblical text. Nowhere is it said that we must all become united genetically in a single race in order to demonstrate God’s order in the world. While this may appeal to certain individuals in any people or race, this will inevitably mean the end of different ethnic groups, peoples, and races. Thus, those who do not buy the libertarian ideal — in accord with their God-given natural affections — will not be attracted to this gospel. Indeed, all attempts to form multiracial societies have inevitably resulted in conflict and disorder, being unsustainable and fundamentally disordered. Ironically enough, by asserting that all men must blend into this cosmopolitan globalist Christian imperium, do we not commit the same error as the Judaizers who say that all men become culturally jewish as a part of their salvation? Now, very few wish to affirm this exact formulation, yet if we say that Christian culture is to be monolithic and reject the ethnic traditions and tribal lands, is not this conclusion inescapable?
The fact of the matter is that there can be a full-blooded Javanite Greek and a full-blooded Hebrew Israelite who can still be fellow Christians. The Bible is quite clear that our spiritual regeneration is not linked to the fact that we are male or female, Greek or Jew, slave or free, as God does not show partiality. Yet, that God shows no partiality in regeneration does not indicate that all distinctions cease to exist. It is quite obvious that some of these distinctions remain after salvation, such as gender, and the same must be the case for the others. One can have the blessings of Abraham through Christ who is Abraham’s racial heir; but that does not transform Christians into genetic Abrahamites.
A major problem in much of the modern church is an excessive focus upon the spiritual unity of the church which ignores the other distinctive ways in which God has created us, both genetically and culturally. Certainly, spiritual regeneration and a right relation with God are important. However, are not the distinctive ways in which God has made us also important? 1 Corinthians 7:17-24, which appears inside an extended discussion on marriage, is about how each man is to remain as the Lord has assigned him:
Only, as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each, in this manner let him walk. And so I direct in all the churches. Was any man called when he was already circumcised? He is not to become uncircumcised. Has anyone been called in uncircumcision? He is not to become uncircumcised. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but what matters is the keeping of the commandments of God. Each man must remain in that condition in which he was called (1 Corinthians: 17-20, NASB).
Matthew Henry’s commentary on this passage follows:
Here the apostle takes occasion to advise them to continue in the state and condition in which Christianity found them, and in which they became converts to it. And here,
I. He lays down this rule in general—as God hath distributed to every one. Note, Our states and circumstances in this world are distributions of divine Providence. This fixes the bounds of men’s habitations, and orders their steps. God setteth up and pulleth down. And again, As the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk. Whatever his circumstances or condition was when he was converted to Christianity, let him abide therein, and suit his conversation to it. The rules of Christianity reach every condition. And in every state a man may live so as to be a credit to it. Note, it is the duty of every Christian to suit his behaviour to his condition and the rules of religion, to be content with his lot, and conduct himself in his rank and place as becomes a Christian. The apostle adds that this was a general rule, to be observed at all times and in all places; So ordain I in all churches.
It can thus be concluded from this that one ought to remain in the position that he was in when he converted. If you look at the Old Testament, one can see quite clearly that tribalism and ethno-nationalism are affirmed in the way that the land was distributed (Numbers 24:1-3, 33:53-55). While men from other peoples could convert to (proto-)Christianity and become members of Israel, they were not members of the tribes and thus were not entitled to land. A woman who married outside of her tribe would not inherit land should she be the last one of her family (Numbers 36: 2-4). The men of the Old Testament took wives from among their peoples or from closely related peoples. The apocryphal book of Tobit has an example of this in chapter 4, verse 12: “Beware of all whoredom, my son, and chiefly take a wife of the seed of thy fathers, and take not a strange woman to wife, which is not of thy father’s tribe: for we are the children of the prophets, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: remember, my son, that our fathers from the beginning, even that they all married wives of their own kindred, and were blessed in their children, and their seed shall inherit the land.” Ethnic and racial ties are a key part of men which God has instilled within their hearts. These racial ties are not sinful to recognize and cherish, as the modern church would have it, but are a blessing from God.
It can be concluded, therefore, that while all Christians receive the spirit of regeneration, differences in the body are not optional or sinful, but God-created. Preservation of these differences is not sinful; rather, it is part of obeying God and honoring one’s ancestors. We desire to create the conditions that lead to the prosperity of our posterity, which is, after all, the end of all true order and law. Over the next few articles in this series I will flesh out this concept of the compatibility of ethnonationalism and christian spiritual unity.
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