Race Debate: Cross Examination of Linnaeus

Cross examination round of the Race Debate between Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller and Linnaeus. This page will post Linnaeus’s answers to Rev. Wolfmueller’s cross examination questions.

Debate thesis: There is only one race, the race of Adam.

Rev. Wolfmueller affirms:
Opening Statement
Rebuttal
Cross Examination of Wolfmueller
Wolfmueller’s Closing Statement

Linnaeus denies:
Opening Statement
Rebuttal
Cross Examination below
Linnaeus’ Closing Statement

---

---

Question #1

Linnaeus states, “In fact, technically and according to the broadest use of the word, there are as many races as there are fathers, for each is the origin of the race of those who come from him.” I wonder—and perhaps Linnaeus could articulate this in the next portion of the debate—when the split occurs. If the father determines the race, then Shem and Ham would, in fact, be the same race: Noahite. Only Shem’s children would be Shemites. I’m wondering if Linnaeus could help me understand my own family: if my four children are four different races, or if only my grandchildren will be different races from one another.

Answer #1

Your children are of the Bryan race. Your grandchildren are also of the Bryan race. However, only G’s children are of the G race; M’s children are not of the G race. As I noted in my opening statement, the use of the word race at this scale can become tedious, even confusing, due to the need to constantly clarify against equivocation.

At this scale we would typically prefer the term “families”. Your children are part of one another’s family. Grandchildren from G will be the same family as their siblings, but not the same family as M’s offspring. We may say that they are part of the same “extended family”, or we might move over to the term “clan” at this point. A few generations down and we would be speaking of your descendants instead as a Bryan “tribe” consisting of many clans and, under that, families.

This is all to speak nominally. Biologically, there will continue to be a widening divergence between the different children’s lines over each generation in which one or more of their descendants do not marry into the family of one of your other children, preserving (rather than diluting) their genetic inheritance from you.

---

Question #2

“If the people of Japan disappeared and you filled their islands with people of Ghana, would the Japanese be gone, or just darker skinned?” –Linnaeus

My question for Linneaus: could you flush out how this question fits with your thesis?

Answer #2

I contend, as I have argued, that men can be grouped according to their degree of shared common descent—from most recent (father/mother) to most distant (Adam/Eve). Observation, now augmented by genetic analysis, tells us that such groupings share characteristics in proportion to the recentness (as well as the overlapped-ness) of their shared ancestry. At the scale of an entire nation of near-consanguineous people, we call such a grouping a “race”.

My first question, then, was to expose whether or not you also believe in groupings at such a scale, not according to national boundaries, but according to what is intrinsic to the people.

My second question is more pointed, and has the same goal. I contend that you operate daily according to the category of race as I’ve defined it, but for ideological reasons you have to contort and deny it in order to preserve the Civil Rights neo-Confessional ordo.

---

Question #3

Linnaeus,

Could you give me your thoughts on this Luther quotation from On the Jews and Their Lies, and it’s application to the debate?

Why should so much ado be made of this? After all, if birth counts before God, I can claim to be just as noble as any Jew, yes, just as noble as Abraham himself, as David, as all the holy prophets and apostles. Nor will I owe them any thanks if they consider me just as noble as themselves before God by reason of my birth. And if God refuses to acknowledge my nobility and birth as the equal to that of Isaac, Abraham, David, and all the saints, I maintain that he is doing me an injustice and that he is not a fair judge. For I will not give it up and neither Abraham, David, prophets, apostles nor even an angel in heaven, shall deny me the right to boast that Noah, so far as physical birth or flesh and blood is concerned, is my true, natural ancestor, and that his wife (whoever she may have been) is my true, natural ancestress; for we are all descended, since the Deluge, from that one Noah. We did not descend from Cain, for his family perished forever in the flood together with many of the cousins, brothers-in-law, and friends of Noah.

(For more Luther quotations on this theme: https://wolfmueller.notion.site/lutherbloodboasting)

Answer #3

In this work, Luther contests the notion that the Jews are God’s people by virtue of their birth. Instead, Luther upholds faith in Christ as the only means by which one joins the ranks of God’s people. This renders boasts of blood before God, particularly as pertains to salvation, inert.

And yet, Luther does this while assuming the category of race—as groupings according to shared descent—which I articulated in my opening statement. In the quote provided, Luther acknowledges that his physical birth, his flesh and blood, came according to the line of Noah, and not the line of Cain. In fact, where this translation speaks of the “family” of Cain, Luther uses the German “Geschlecht.”

Langenscheidt, the premier German linguistics publisher, uses the following words to translate geschlecht:

Race, kind, genus, stock, lineage, descent, ancestry, generation, dynasty. In other words, it maps precisely onto the definition of race I have been arguing for.

According to you, there is only one Geschlecht, the Adam Geschlecht. According to Luther, there is also a Cain Geschlecht, to which he does not belong, and a Noah Geschlecht, to which he does belong.

Here again, you are forced to deny basic groupings and categories of created order to maintain your position. This doctrine you have invented or adopted has the sole aim of preventing Christians from working with concepts that are assumed within scripture and by our fathers in the faith. You should be concerned about reductionism, and look in the mirror.

---

Question #4

If a man’s mother is a descendant from Ham, and his father is a descendant of Shem, what race is he? How does this truth that every child is the result of two different hereditary lines factor into your consideration of race?

Answer #4

Your primary thesis in this debate, which is quite correct, is that both parents’ hereditary lines are from Adam. You also argue, using the phrase “Noah family reunion,” that both parents’ hereditary lines are from Noah. The fact that you are now calling it a “truth” that every child is the result of two different hereditary lines is to acquiesce to my point: that people groups have diverged from one another in the intervening generations, creating different hereditary lines. That is, you agree with what I posited in my opening statement: all men are consanguineous, but some men are more consanguineous [with one another] than others.

This factors because race is a derivative of consanguinity. It’s simply true that you are more related to those whose pedigree overlaps with yours the most completely, the most recently, and less related to those whose pedigree overlaps yours more distantly. Hence, you are more related to a brother than a first cousin, and more related to a first cousin than a second cousin, and so forth. And that’s without getting to the existence of double-cousins, as when your cousin’s father and your father are brothers, and your cousin’s mother and your mother are sisters, layering in even more consanguinity (again, overlapping pedigrees more completely, and more recently).

Turning to the scenario presented, this pedigree overlap does not happen until you get back to Noah’s generation, due to Pedigree Collapse. The child’s parents are certainly consanguineous, but distantly so. The child is mixed race.

---

Question #5

How many races are there? And what are they?

Answer #5

I have a rhetorical question in return. How many colors are there?

Seven—red, yellow, orange, green, blue, purple, and violet—is a valid answer. But it is not the only valid answer. Travel to your local hardware store and ask them how many colors of paint they carry.

The problem of where to draw the lines of delineation is called the Sorites paradox. A rejection of the existence of distinctions between points along a spectrum is called the Continuum Fallacy. I recommend looking these up.

We all understand that some categories, like color, fall within such a spectrum. It is easy to tell blue and red apart, but who can identify the precise location on the gradient where orange becomes yellow? Yet the existence of the spectrum does not disprove the category of color, nor does it render the distinction between blue and red less obvious.

In the same way, “how many races” depends upon where you choose to draw the lines of distinction—and there are many options. But place a Chinese man in a group of Western Europeans and no one would fail the “one of these things is not like the others” test.

Truly, the category of race helps us account for this phenomenon.

Indeed, I could also ask you, “how many families are there?” In your opening statement you said there is one family, the human family. Does this mean that there is no Wolfmueller family? Reality admits variance in counting according to how we map these distinctions.