I’m working through the issues I mentioned last week about race, slavery, and Paul’s gospel. I’m starting with the race/ethnicity/nationality issue, and then moving to the issue of slavery itself.
Here are some initial thoughts, trying to capitalize on the recent realization that justification has as much to do about our relationships within the family of God as it has to do with our relationship with God himself. I look forward to some more lively discussion.
For Paul, requiring Gentiles to take on another’s racial and ethnic identity in order to enjoy full participation in the people of God, for them to be regarded as equals, is nothing other than a denial of “the truth of the gospel” (Galatians 2:5, 14). The gospel says that we become part of God’s family by being united by faith and the Spirit to the crucified and risen Christ. Creating other standards of full participation, or introducing inequalities based on other measures of value, denies this gospel. Gentiles do not have to become Jews in order to become part of the people of God.
With such a horizontal argument about the implications of the gospel, Paul’s letter to Galatia eviscerates the social hierarchies that have marred Christian witness. When the gospel has been scripted into an overarching story of one race’s or one nationality’s inherent superiority, rather than standing as a larger story poised to transform those smaller narratives of inequality, it has, in fact, denied itself.
Moving from Paul to the racially-based slavery, subjugation, and segregation that mars the stories of North America and Europe, I see the argument going something like this: If the laws and regulations that God himself gave to Israel cannot become markers of inherent national superiority within the church without denying the gospel, then neither can American stories of cultural or industrial development, white stories of racial superiority, or capitalist stories of economic necessity become stories of inherent superiority within the church without denying the gospel. In short, every line of argument (whether implicit or explicit) that the church accepted as undergirding the necessity or divine sanction of slavery was a tacit denial of the gospel that Paul proclaimed.
Carrying this a bit further, Paul’s refusal to allow his churches to be swallowed up by a distinctively Jewish identity points toward an embrace of cultural and racial difference as a defining marker of the body of Christ. Not only is it a denial of the gospel to uphold one race’s claims of inherent superiority, it is a denial of the gospel to require that all Christianity be cast in the mold of white, western Christianity. This is, of course, a challenge for missionaries bringing the gospel to new cultures overseas, but presuppositions of cultural and racial superiority haunt us at home as well, often in the guise of correct theology and worship practice. Many of our churches and denominations continue to communicate that one has to become white in order to become fully part of the people of God.
But Paul’s gospel will have none of this. The church in which there is no longer a relational disparity in which Jew is greater than Greek, free is greater than slave, and male is greater than female, we cannot countenance white as greater than black (or brown or yellow or red).
