Correcting Jeffrey Kloha on Race in the Ancient World

Editorial by Linnaeus

Introduction

Dr. Jeffrey Kloha has written an article for the latest Concordia Journal (Volume 51, Number 1) entitled, “All Those Who Call Upon the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Every Place, Their Lord and Ours: The Multiethnic Church in the New Testament.” The piece is commendable in various of its points of emphasis, such as when it affirms the universality of Christ’s atoning work, undertaken for all mankind, or the sacramental unity which diverse believers in Christ enjoy with one another through mutual adoption by God. However, it is not my purpose in this editorial to tease out the praiseworthy, but to offer some criticisms of Dr. Kloha’s arguments which I believe substantially undermine what he is attempting to accomplish.

Missouri’s Multiethnic Aspirations

And what is he trying to accomplish? The work itself reads as a love letter to Concordia Seminary, St. Louis and the International Center’s growing obsession with forging the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod into a multiethnic church body. This is clear enough on its own even from the title, but its position between similar articles (authored by Leopoldo Sanchez, darling of LCMS multiethnicity, before; and Larry Vogel, long-time proponent of bolstering declining LCMS membership with imports from minority groups, especially foreigners, after) makes the point beyond any shadow of a doubt. In fact, this entire edition of Concordia Journal is dedicated to the subject of a sort of Universality of the faith that sounds more like a pretense for Globalism than a Christian doctrine. As such, it carries as a barely-disguised subtext the notion that the LCMS is insufficiently racially diverse, and this because it fails to grasp what it truly means to be part of the Universal Church.

The phrase “part of” marks a necessary digression here. As Missouri continues to make stronger and stronger demands for multiethnic results among its member congregations—wielding as it does the soft power of the scolding schoolmarm, ever disappointed with her charges’ inability to just do better—we see in her an increasingly evident pretentiousness. Missouri, it would seem, does not believe that she is part of the Church Universal; rather, she believes that she is the Church Universal.

Nothing else within the bounds of the much demanded “best construction” explains the maniacal focus on bringing all manner of people to the Lutheran way of practicing the faith, who themselves give every indication that they don’t want to be here. It is, after all, possible for a Midwestern US-dwelling German Lutheran to belong to the invisible Universal Church together with the Christian rural Chinaman. Christ knows his own, even if they are not communing at an LCMS altar. Heaven is filled with men from every tribe, tongue, and nation, even if the LCMS is not.

But the LCMS wants to be. Missouri often speaks in various ways on this theme: Heaven is filled with all the diversity that mankind has to offer, so why isn’t the LCMS? The worst construction I have heard articulated is that the LCMS is simply racist, and filled with racists. They are worse than unwelcoming to those of other races—they are downright hostile. The best construction exists on the same spectrum, but makes less assumptions about the state of the average LCMS congregant’s heart. It supposes that the members of LCMS churches are simply under-catechized on the richness of God’s love for all people, and the riches of multiethnic church life, and therefore do not put in the requisite effort for becoming multiethnic.

This is where we return to Kloha’s article. It is precisely on this point that he attempts to step into the catechetical gap and provide some Biblical wisdom for us in the LCMS, so that we may see that God’s design for including all races in His plan of salvation means that our congregations must also become multiethnic (even if that conclusion remains unstated, or coyly denied). If you’ve ever noticed how pastors will roll out a Bible study on the liturgy just before introducing changes to how your congregation conducts services, you’ve got the idea. Instruct so as to make it the peoples’ idea—this propagandist^[1] model is how the seminaries train their pastors to operate, so it is no surprise to see the same model in use on the macro scale as well.

Kloha’s Erroneous Statements on Race

Now, although Kloha’s article is somewhat wide-ranging for its scope, my criticism in this editorial will only focus on his confused presentation of the matter of race. I have chosen to do so because this is relevant to my ongoing debate with Reverend Bryan Wolfmueller on the same subject.

A good place to start is with the summary at the end of the article, where Kloha recites five items, of which claims about race account for about two-and-a-half:

• Religious practices were closely associated with ethnicity in the early Roman empire. Therefore, ethnicity provided a handy referential device to identify a new kind of community, a “people” distinct from any other people on earth.
  
• Race/ethnicity is mutable in the Roman world. Hence people could—indeed would—lose an identity and become a new people with Jesus as Lord.
  
• The new identity as people is found in Christ. This does not abolish older identities (laws, language, customs) but filters out that which did not serve God or serve neighbor. Hence because circumcision, food laws, holy days all were a hindrance to welcoming all peoples in the church they were abandoned.

Discerning readers will note immediately the contradiction in points 2 (“people could lose an [racial] identity”) and 3 (“this does not abolish older identities”), but the issue with these conclusions goes beyond that. There is a prevailing idea among many in the LCMS clergy that biological race is a brand new category courtesy of Darwin, to anachronistically justify the enslavement of Africans. Kloha asserts that “this construct of race and ethnicity as [natural, hereditary, and immutable, and therefore] indelible and unchangeable did not exist in the Roman world.” In so saying, Kloha participates in this same type of historical revisionism (whether he knows it or not) in an attempt to undergird his assertions about the concept of race in the church.

Thankfully, this provides me the opportunity to address such all-too-common claims.

In particular, I want to look at the assertion that “race/ethnicity is mutable in the Roman world.” Let’s start with a long quote from Kloha’s piece.

To understand Paul’s teaching in its historical context, it is important to understand the concepts of “race” and “people” in the Roman world and the environs of the New Testament.

Modern conceptions of race assume that ethnicity is natural, hereditary, and immutable. If you are Jewish, you will always be Jewish, if German always German. You might look more or less Jewish or American. You might evidence a few more or less cultural habits-real or caricatured. Bur in our modern construct of race, you are what your ancestors were, and you can’t change it. Our fascination with modern scientific analysis of things like DNA confirm this: Both of my sisters did the “23 and Me” tests, which informed them that our DNA says that we are central European in origin. Shock me. But what is the significance of that? That I use long, complex sentences? That I have an urgent need to be on time and efficient? That I’m inherently boring? All that may be true, but I can tell you that it has precious little, if anything, to do with who I am or how I behave. Now, admittedly, the fact that my grandparents and great-grandparents were part of the Franconian emigration and settled in the Saginaw Valley of Michigan in a town called Frankenlust-that certainly is the primary reason that I was baptized into the name of Christ as an LCMS Lutheran. Had my ancestors been from a different part of Germany I would probably be Roman Catholic or some form of Reformed. Still, none of that is inevitable, and we are finding in our post-denomination age that the Millennials and Gen Zs are not defaulting to the religions of their parents, let alone their distant ancestors. But this construct of race and ethnicity as indelible and unchangeable did not exist in the Roman world. Already in the classical period, Greeks thought that “barbarians” could become “Greek.” This is especially noteworthy, since the very concept of the barbarian emerges in the context of the Persian Wars as the overarching category to signify not-Greek. The barbarian was not seen to be divided from the Greek by means of an impermeable boundary. For example, in the early fourth century BCE, the orator Isocrates declared the prowess of Athens as follows: “[Athens] has made the name of Greeks to seem to be no more of genus but of thought, so that those who share our education, more than those who share a common nature (physis), are to be called Hellenes.”

Isocrates uses two physical terms, genos and physis, to mark the barbarians out from the Greeks, yet remarkably through education (through padeia), barbarians can become Greeks. The boundary between Greek and barbarian is therefore porous; what you were born could be changed.^[2]

This quote from Isocrates’ Panegyricus is displayed as the chief exhibit in Kloha’s argument, so it deserves careful examination.

Kloha summarizes Isocrates thusly: “[T]hrough education, barbarians can become Greeks.”

Yet this is nowhere stated by Isocrates. The word “barbarian” itself is an interpolation by Kloha. Let’s take a longer version of the quote and look for “barbarian” there.

[Athens] saw, besides, that men who have received a liberal education from the very first are not to be known by courage, or wealth, or such-like advantages, but are most clearly recognised by their speech, and that this is the surest token which is manifested of the education of each one of us, and that those who make good use of language are not only influential in their own states, but also held in honour among other people. So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas[/Greek] distinctive no longer of race but of intellect, and the title of Hellene[/Greek] a badge of education rather than of common descent.^[3]

Still nothing of barbarians, but much that we can examine nonetheless.

Isocrates was here advancing his overarching thesis within this oratory: That Athens was the best suited to unite the Hellenic/Greek city-states under a confederacy, through which they might (and later, under Alexander, would) conquer the Persians in the East. His approach was actually entirely racial, as he spent his words arguing that the Athenians had the superior pedigree for such leadership,^[4] accompanied with appeals to various superior feats to prove it.

In this quotation, Isocrates was boasting of the academic feats of Athens. Far from saying that Athens has engaged in some alchemy to transmute barbarians into Greeks, he was instead bragging that, through the ministrations of Athens, the name of Greek (Hellene) had become synonymous with philosophical learnedness.

How many of you call soda pop “Coke,” even when the product is not produced by the Coca-Cola company? For my part, I grew up asking for a “Kleenex” when I needed to blow my nose, even if the facial tissue available was not Kleenex brand.

This is a common phenomenon, where the producer of something comes to be of such notoriety that it is intimately identified with that sort of thing it produces, to the point that the latter is even called by the name of the former.

In the same way that “Coke” is synonymous with “soda pop,” so was “Greek” synonymous with a certain strain of philosophical education. Obviously, this has nothing to do with Kloha’s claim that “Already in the classical period, Greeks thought that ‘barbarians’ could become ‘Greek.’” Denise Kimber Buell, author of “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition” in the Harvard Theological Review (who Kloha cites in his end note) might think so, but alas. Perhaps if Kloha had followed up on her primary source rather than taking her word for it, he would have chosen a different argument.

But, for argument’s sake, if the quote did have to do with barbarians becoming Greeks, what kind of Greeks would they become? The figurative kind, as in the quote itself Isocrates reserves the category of those who are “genos” (racial) Greeks to those who are “physis” (by nature) Greeks. In other words, Isocrates believed that race is essentially physical. Or, in Kloha’s parlance, “natural, hereditary, and immutable.”

Quo Vadis?

The implications of Kloha’s error on the matter of race in the ancient world ultimately impact his conclusions, as well they must. And yet I cannot find fault with his closing paragraph. To be sure, the message that all races are one in Christ is a valid one. Encouragement to Christians of various races to view one another according to the peace found in the Gospel, as fellow heirs of eternal life, is salutary.

At the same time, acknowledging this does not obligate Christians to deny the natural, hereditary, and immutable existence of race, nor its continuance in the Resurrection.^[5] Paul himself acknowledged his own natural, hereditary, and immutable race when he said, “For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”^[6] Contra Kloha, these are ancient categories, well observed by the Greeks and Romans.^[7] While faith in Christ may layer in further bonds of kinship in the form of our co-adoptees from every race, it also enhances and strengthens our existing bonds with our co-ethnics,^[8] and does not abrogate them.

Nor, for that matter, does it abrogate the practical implications of race for the Kingdom of Christ’s Left Hand nations that Christians inhabit, and will inhabit until the return of our Lord. It is unfortunate that many Christians seek to go out of their way to create multiethnic congregations out of a misbegotten notion that minority representation denotes faithfulness. But worse, the same generally seek even to create multiethnic nations of the kind that history has proven amount to iron mixed with clay—weak, and trivially destroyed.

Therefore, this penchant for urgent and insistent multi-ethnicity by any means necessary on the part of church bodies like Missouri is quickly becoming—and has become—a civil matter of great concern. Even as we see the Federal Government protecting its native population by reducing funds and incentives for foreign migrants, we see the vociferous proponents of multiethnic church speaking out in anger. Make no mistake, we are headed for a collision between de facto “Christian” globalism—of the kind that Missouri is passionately flirting with—and Christian localists that demand a return to the kind of communal, civic homogeneity enjoyed by their fathers not many generations ago.

Kloha and his ilk, Missouri corporately, have very little time left to get this right. They can continue signaling their desire to align with a Babelistic trans-racial New World Order. Or, they can recognize what time it is, back off the gas, and be silent.

In any case, Kloha should definitely retract this paper.

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1. I am using the term propagandist in a descriptive sense, here, not a pejorative sense. Propaganda is simply catechesis with the goal of inculcating a change in ideology, which often manifests a second order effect of behavior change. ↑
   

2. Kloha, Jeffrey. “All Those Who Call Upon the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Every Place, Their Lord and Ours: The Multiethnic Church in the New Testament” Concordia Journal, Volume 51, Number 1, Winter 2025 ↑
   

3. Isocrates. “Pangyricus” Tr. J. A. Freese, 1947 ↑
   

4. “For it is allowed that our commonwealth [of Athens] is the most ancient and the largest and most renowned in all the world; and, good as is this foundation of our claim, for what follows we have still greater right to be honoured. For we did not win the country we dwell in by expelling others from it, or by seizing it when uninhabited, nor are we a mixed race collected together from many nations, but so noble and genuine is our descent, that we have continued for all time in possession of the land from which we sprang, being children of our native soil, and able to address our city by the same titles that we give to our nearest relations; for we alone among the Hellenes have the right to call our city at once nurse and fatherland and mother. Yet our origin is but such as should be possessed by a people who indulge in a reasonable pride, who have a just claim to the leadership of Hellas, and who bring to frequent remembrance their ancestral glories.” -Ibid ↑
   

5. Revelation 7:9 ↑

6. Romans 9:3, ESV ↑
   

7. Thuletide. “Race, Ethnicity, and ‘Racism’ in Greco-Roman Society,” December 7, 2020. Accessed March 10, 2025. ↑
   

8. “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” 1 Timothy 5:8, ESV ↑