Taking Responsibility for Racism
In recent Christian discourse a clear theological divide has emerged. On one side are those who assert that the social order is fundamentally structured by God or God’s law. On the other side are those who assert that humans are responsible creating social structures that express divinely revealed principles of love and justice.
The first of these assertions is older in Christian history. Until the Enlightenment, Christians believed that almost their entire social order was based on divine mandate. To deny the divine right of kings was both heresy and treason. Romans 13:1-7 seems to confirm this.
However, some 300 or more years ago a new consensus emerged in Europe that the people were the divinely appointed ruling authorities. Political systems began to emerge that recognized their right to rule themselves.
As a result Christians have slowly and often grudgingly surrendered claim after claim that some aspect of the social order is based on a divine mandate. Christians abandoned the divine right of kings, feudal land holding, slavery, parental sovereignty over children, the inferiority of women, the inferiority of non-European races, and among many, gender distinctions in church orders.
Christians who maintain that there is a divine ordering of society are down to this: the bare assertion that God dictates a binary humanity (male and female) and a single social institution (marriage between a man and a woman).
This might seem like a pretty solid position, but when a theological army has been in retreat for three centuries one wonders whether it has really fallen back as far as it can go. As Archie Goodwin reported in one of the Nero Wolf novels, “He told me to go to hell, but I got off the elevator on the ground floor.” He wisely judged that he may not have found the bottom.
But let’s say that a clever appeal to incoherent authorities, idiosyncratic literalism, compromised inerrancy, and the vagaries of church tradition has finally led traditionalists to discover the bedrock upon which society must be built. It's still just sand.
The problem with the traditional view is that it mistakes God’s central intention: that humans be the orderers of their social world.
God made them “male and female” and required sexual relations so that there would be progeny, that is true. Yet the difference between male and female is scarcely a distinctive human trait. It was found among all the animals the authors of the Bible knew. Nor, for the same reason, is the bearing of progeny through sexual relations distinctively human. Birds to it, bees do, even educated fleas do it.
What makes humans human in the Bible is that humans have the responsibility for creating everything that follows, including the critical matters of gender and marriage. It is they who must do whatever they decide to do to fulfill God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth. In the book of Genesis God really isn’t in the business of telling humans how to order their social world. Indeed, even at Sinai it is Jethro who advises Moses on how to administer his tribal confederation, not God.
And so it is not surprising that humans do all kinds of things. They create marriage (and divorce), experiment (extensively it appears) with polygamy, clans, tribalism, theocracy, city-states, charismatic war leaders, hereditary kingship, and theocracy. Enslaving people, and being enslaved, is in there as well among the social experiments.
And all along the way God both condemns the injustices humans generate and seeks to draw from flawed human social structures what good is possible. God even allows the hereditary line of the Messiah to begin with a never-intended kingship followed by a relationship conceived in lust, consummated in adultery, secured through murder, and finalized in polygamy. Are we to assume that God also approved? That this was the mandated social order?
We know God didn’t. Indeed God in God’s mercy subverted these evolving social experiments (dramatically with the Flood and less so as time passed) so that humans would have another chance to get it right. Sometimes poets are the best theologians:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfills himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
One presumes that even a traditionalist would recognize that God only tolerated hereditary kingship and slavery until, adequately subverted and condemned, we humans would finally end these pitiful efforts altogether and try something new. But maybe they wouldn't.
The desire to avoid taking responsibility for self-governance is strong in traditional Christianity. The appeal that "God made us do it" is even more prevalent than blaming the devil, especially when it comes to the self-righteous denial of human dignity based on what is supposed to be God’s law.
And this is the problem with the traditionalist stance in relationship to racism. Once you assert God, and not humans, creates the basic social order you then relieve humans from taking responsibility for the social order in which they live. And ongoing racism is another result of our failure to take responsibility for the social order we create and in which we live.
(For reference, the WCA Website has one article dealing with racism in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is found at https://firebrandmag.com/articles/the-wesleyan-witness-on-race. It treats racism entirely in terms of how individuals treat one another, which is all the Methodist tradition has had to offer until recently.)
As long as we believe that God is responsible for the social order we’ll excuse ourselves for its racist structures. We may take responsibility for our personal righteousness, or wallow in our personal sins. But we’ll write off our responsibility for the structures themselves as a product of bad interpretation of scripture or even an early response to progressive revelation. If we can’t blame God, we’ll blame our ancestors for misunderstanding God.
We don’t want to grow up and take on the freedom and responsibility that have been our birthright since God rested on the seventh day.
It is time for that to end. If we want to honor God we can do it in this way: take the responsibility God gave us for every single aspect of the order of human society up until today: from gender and marriage to legislatures and courts. It is all ours and its success and failure is all on us.
So when we appeal before the Judge we might wish to eschew the excuse that we were following orders. No orders were given. What God has revealed with absolute consistency are the principles of justice and love and a vision for what the New Adam will do on that basis when our reign is subsumed and transformed by His. For now, we need to take up our work and end the racist structures we created and we continue to sustain through through negligence, through weakness, and
through our own deliberate fault.
The first of these assertions is older in Christian history. Until the Enlightenment, Christians believed that almost their entire social order was based on divine mandate. To deny the divine right of kings was both heresy and treason. Romans 13:1-7 seems to confirm this.
However, some 300 or more years ago a new consensus emerged in Europe that the people were the divinely appointed ruling authorities. Political systems began to emerge that recognized their right to rule themselves.
As a result Christians have slowly and often grudgingly surrendered claim after claim that some aspect of the social order is based on a divine mandate. Christians abandoned the divine right of kings, feudal land holding, slavery, parental sovereignty over children, the inferiority of women, the inferiority of non-European races, and among many, gender distinctions in church orders.
Christians who maintain that there is a divine ordering of society are down to this: the bare assertion that God dictates a binary humanity (male and female) and a single social institution (marriage between a man and a woman).
This might seem like a pretty solid position, but when a theological army has been in retreat for three centuries one wonders whether it has really fallen back as far as it can go. As Archie Goodwin reported in one of the Nero Wolf novels, “He told me to go to hell, but I got off the elevator on the ground floor.” He wisely judged that he may not have found the bottom.
But let’s say that a clever appeal to incoherent authorities, idiosyncratic literalism, compromised inerrancy, and the vagaries of church tradition has finally led traditionalists to discover the bedrock upon which society must be built. It's still just sand.
The problem with the traditional view is that it mistakes God’s central intention: that humans be the orderers of their social world.
God made them “male and female” and required sexual relations so that there would be progeny, that is true. Yet the difference between male and female is scarcely a distinctive human trait. It was found among all the animals the authors of the Bible knew. Nor, for the same reason, is the bearing of progeny through sexual relations distinctively human. Birds to it, bees do, even educated fleas do it.
What makes humans human in the Bible is that humans have the responsibility for creating everything that follows, including the critical matters of gender and marriage. It is they who must do whatever they decide to do to fulfill God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth. In the book of Genesis God really isn’t in the business of telling humans how to order their social world. Indeed, even at Sinai it is Jethro who advises Moses on how to administer his tribal confederation, not God.
And so it is not surprising that humans do all kinds of things. They create marriage (and divorce), experiment (extensively it appears) with polygamy, clans, tribalism, theocracy, city-states, charismatic war leaders, hereditary kingship, and theocracy. Enslaving people, and being enslaved, is in there as well among the social experiments.
And all along the way God both condemns the injustices humans generate and seeks to draw from flawed human social structures what good is possible. God even allows the hereditary line of the Messiah to begin with a never-intended kingship followed by a relationship conceived in lust, consummated in adultery, secured through murder, and finalized in polygamy. Are we to assume that God also approved? That this was the mandated social order?
We know God didn’t. Indeed God in God’s mercy subverted these evolving social experiments (dramatically with the Flood and less so as time passed) so that humans would have another chance to get it right. Sometimes poets are the best theologians:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfills himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
One presumes that even a traditionalist would recognize that God only tolerated hereditary kingship and slavery until, adequately subverted and condemned, we humans would finally end these pitiful efforts altogether and try something new. But maybe they wouldn't.
The desire to avoid taking responsibility for self-governance is strong in traditional Christianity. The appeal that "God made us do it" is even more prevalent than blaming the devil, especially when it comes to the self-righteous denial of human dignity based on what is supposed to be God’s law.
And this is the problem with the traditionalist stance in relationship to racism. Once you assert God, and not humans, creates the basic social order you then relieve humans from taking responsibility for the social order in which they live. And ongoing racism is another result of our failure to take responsibility for the social order we create and in which we live.
(For reference, the WCA Website has one article dealing with racism in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is found at https://firebrandmag.com/articles/the-wesleyan-witness-on-race. It treats racism entirely in terms of how individuals treat one another, which is all the Methodist tradition has had to offer until recently.)
As long as we believe that God is responsible for the social order we’ll excuse ourselves for its racist structures. We may take responsibility for our personal righteousness, or wallow in our personal sins. But we’ll write off our responsibility for the structures themselves as a product of bad interpretation of scripture or even an early response to progressive revelation. If we can’t blame God, we’ll blame our ancestors for misunderstanding God.
We don’t want to grow up and take on the freedom and responsibility that have been our birthright since God rested on the seventh day.
It is time for that to end. If we want to honor God we can do it in this way: take the responsibility God gave us for every single aspect of the order of human society up until today: from gender and marriage to legislatures and courts. It is all ours and its success and failure is all on us.
So when we appeal before the Judge we might wish to eschew the excuse that we were following orders. No orders were given. What God has revealed with absolute consistency are the principles of justice and love and a vision for what the New Adam will do on that basis when our reign is subsumed and transformed by His. For now, we need to take up our work and end the racist structures we created and we continue to sustain through through negligence, through weakness, and
through our own deliberate fault.
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