Tag: linnaeus

Closing statement round of the Race Debate between Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller and Linnaeus.

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 of Linnaeus
Closing Statement Below

As we conclude this debate, I want to once again thank Rev. Wolfmueller for his affable and collegial spirit in this exchange. It has been enjoyable.

In this debate, I have argued that race denotes degrees of consanguinity, as achieved through shared lineage according to the flesh.

In cross-examination, we saw that Wolfmueller also believes in the category of lineage according to the flesh. He believes that Japanese and Ghanaians—though sharing their ultimate origins in Adam and Noah—differ in their more proximate lineage, making them different people groups.

As “people group” is a euphemism for “race,” this means that Wolfmueller believes in race. It is a settled question, even if he won’t use that term.

If, then, we agree on the biological basis of race, where is our disagreement? Is it lexical?

Certainly, in the course of this debate objections have been raised by Wolfmueller (and commentators) about the semantic application of the term. “Race” as only applicable to Adam’s level of human taxonomy is the thesis that Wolfmueller is defending, after all.

However, this makes no more semantic sense than to say that “there is only one family, the family of Adam.” The lexical range for the two terms, “family” and “race” is effectively identical. A fact which Wolfmueller himself confirmed when he concluded his opening statement by saying, “…we confess that there is one human race, one human family…”

But, simultaneously, Wolfmueller would have to agree that his children, mother and father, and sisters and brothers, are his “family” in the most immediate sense.

His aunts and uncles, first and second cousins, and their offspring, are his “family” in an extended sense.

If he is in Denmark and meets someone with his surname, and both trace their bloodlines back to the same village eight generations ago, he’d exclaim that “we must be family!” But by this he would neither mean “human family” nor “immediate family,” but rather in an intermediate sense.

Wolfmueller is even fond of the phrase “Noah family reunion,” which he uses to denote the fact that we are a “family” with all men across the globe.

So, again, does a universal “human family” mean that there is no such thing as more proximate uses of the category denoted by the term “family”? Clearly not! Then neither is “race” bound only to refer to Adam and not also to other, more proximate groupings of shared lineage according to the flesh.

Of course, as I argued in my opening statement, in English we typically reserve the word “family” for more proximate relations, whereas the word “race” typically encompasses a broader swath of consanguinity, but that is largely conventional. Perhaps we should abandon both terms and go with the German “Geschlecht” instead?

But, setting the word aside, what is Wolfmueller’s real objection to this concept? What causes him to make his central claim, that “the way the Bible teaches us to speak of humanity excludes speaking in terms of races,” when this is so clearly false?

After all, the Bible uses racial designation of groups: Israelites, Moabites, Edomites.

It applies such designations to individuals: Ruth the Moabite, Uriah the Hittite, the Ethiopian eunuch. 

It even records God’s command to wage war against entire cohorts of peoples, identified according to their races: Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites.

The reason is that Wolfmueller has fallen victim to the program described by Yuri Bezmenov:

What [Ideological Subversion] basically means is: To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that—despite the abundance of information—no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country. It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow, and it’s divided into four basic stages, the first one being demoralization. …

[The people] are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their minds. Even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. …[E]xposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him by force…he will refuse to believe it…

The Christian West’s efforts to spread the Gospel to the four corners of the world made us many enemies, who now wage war against us by way of deception. One such program of deceit is to convince the European family that our extinction via dispossession and attrition is not worth noticing, much less resisting.

After all, it would be racist to insist that your family’s inheritance be reserved to, well, your family! Being against the dispossession of your kin is sinful partiality—you don’t love your alien neighbor enough, Nazi. Your nation belongs to the people of the world, now. Anyone who cares to claim a share of it gets one. After all, when a bunch of people who are not of your nation’s pedigree start saying that they’re members of your nation, well then they are—to say otherwise would be to deal in immutable categories, and that’s just not God’s way!

Enter Wolfmueller, here to play the court theologian and baptize the ideology seeded by the enemies of his people. And not out of any guile or malicious intent on his part, but because he has been beguiled, like most living members of the European race. We have been conditioned to believe that advocacy of any racial interest is licit—as long as it’s not White. The best way to prevent White collectivization? Say that there is no such collective—race does not exist! And so we are cowed into accepting our own extinction.

May we learn instead to be men of valor again, and defend our own heritage.

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.

Rebuttal round of the Race Debate between Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller and Linnaeus.

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

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

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

Thanks again to Reverend Wolfmueller for the continuance of this debate.

Before I respond to Wolfmueller’s thesis, let me lay out the victory conditions for both sides.

I must show that within God’s creation there is a real category of consanguinity entailing different degrees of relatedness.

Wolfmueller must show that there is no such category, or that there are no such degrees.

The term “race” itself is largely incidental; the sweet-smelling rose doesn’t care what you call it.

As of the opening statements, I have fulfilled my victory condition, and Wolfmueller has not. This is the state of play.

On to the content of Wolfmueller’s thesis. I must deal here with a number of non-sequiturs and category errors that inform his incorrect views on this matter.

Universality

Wolfmueller opens by making much of the universal aspects of humanity. As he notes, I do agree with him that:

1. God made all mankind through Adam
2. All sinned in Adam
3. Christ accomplished his redeeming work on behalf of all
4. All will ultimately be raised bodily

However, universality in some things does not override particularity in others. None of the foregoing universalities change the fact that Wolfmueller and I do not share a father, or that the African and I don’t share a common ancestor more recent than, approximately, Noah. Wolfmueller believes it a danger to consider humanity according to non-universal categories, for fear of setting the universals aside. However, he himself does this every day in honoring his own father more than my father, or some abstract universal concept of fatherhood. 

The fact that he only insists on this principle when it comes to race is evidence enough that his position is an ideological commitment, not a rational one.

Boasting

Next, arguments over boasting in one’s ancestors are beyond the scope of this debate, which is strictly on the existence and nature of race, not any concerns about what we might subsequently do with that reality. This is a fallacious argumentum ad consequentiam, and I will not address Wolfmueller’s comments on it here, other than to observe that he routinely assumes the validity of race as a category of the natural world, only to argue that we must reject it because he fears what men may do with this truth. He uses the word “danger” as regards acknowledging race seven times in his statement. This, again, is the mark of a rejection of an inescapable truth on purely ideological grounds.

Immutability

Wolfmueller’s third section advances the argument that Scripture does not recognize a category for any “grouping of humanity” that is immutable. He reasons from this that we, too, should not deal in race, an immutable category, because he fears to do so is “dangerously reductionistic.” If he were consistent, he could not consider his children according to the immutable grouping category of “Bryan’s children,” but rather only as part of the universal undifferentiated mass of humanity.

Contra Wolfmueller’s protestations, some of the very examples he gives of people changing their “grouping” by fiat are themselves instances which simultaneously demonstrate Scripture’s willingness to continue to employ the immutable category of race, even after said change!

Ruth was called “the Moabite” by Boaz. The fact that he did not call her “the Israelite” on account of her change of allegiance to Israel proves that he did this according to her racial designation.
The mixed multitude was “mixed” because it contained different races, including Egyptians (as discussed in my opening statement). If Egyptians become Israelites just by beating town with them, then the multitude was not “mixed” at all!
Despite his loyalty to Israel, Uriah was still called by the epithet “the Hittite,” denoting his race.

To be certain, there is a legal and spiritual category for being joined to a group that was not formerly (or, “naturally”) your group. This is called adoption.

Hans Fiene, a European man, adopted an African girl; she legally belongs to him and is called by his name. When that girl goes to the doctor she will be asked for her family health history, but they won’t mean Hans’. If she ever needs a bone marrow or organ donor, no Fiene will be of any use. They are legally a family, but her physical racial heritage has not changed.

In the same way, we are adopted by God into a new people, but our physical race does not change. You see an analogy to this in that women are adopted by God as sons (Ephesians 1:5, Galatians 4:5-7); however, this is a legal reality, not a physical transmutation.

Again, that God takes men irrespective of race, class, or sex and joins them to Himself and one another in sacramental unity (Galatians 3:28) does not thereby abolish these categories.

Summary

Wolfmueller expresses his through-line thusly:

“The way the Bible teaches us to speak of humanity excludes speaking in terms of races.”

I disagree, and assert the following counter-thesis:

The Bible speaks about race so casually and without fanfare—because its authors assumed that their hearers were capable of grasping self-evident truths about the natural, created world—that it is too subtle for Wolfmueller to apprehend, trapped as he is in a modernistic “color-blind” zeitgeist.

I provided Scriptural examples of this in my opening statement, and added more above. I could add still more, such as the instance where Paul had to correct a Roman who had gotten his race wrong (Acts 21). No doubt all these Levantines looked the same to the poor man.

Or each and every use of “-ite,” denoting a member of a race founded by a man named in whatever precedes that suffix.

Conclusion

In light of the above, it is clear that Wolfmueller is willing to suspend the normal rules of logic and exegesis to claim that race is an invalid, anti-Gospel category. This betrays a pre-commitment, not to truth, but to the Enlightenment ideology of Equality, which is in danger of collapse.

I suggest that such loyalty is misplaced.

Rebuttal round of the Race Debate between Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller and Linnaeus.

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

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

Linnaeus denies:
Opening Statement
Rebuttal
Cross Examination of Linnaeus
Closing Statement

“Races” — A Response

First, I’d like to again thank Linnaeus for suggesting this debate, and for articulating his position regarding the different races of humanity. This is my response to his argument, which may be found here. (You can also find my original argument here and Linnaeus’ response here.)

To define race, Linnaeus invites us to consider the human family tree. “Race” refers to any given generational cross-section. If you go back to the beginning, when there is only Adam, there is only one race. One generation later we have two: Cain and Seth (not knowing if Abel had children). The next generation might bring about seven races, and then 40, and then 358, and so on and so forth, until you get to every leaf of the family tree.

Through the flood, the Lord trims all the branches but one, bringing us back to one race: Noah’s. The next generation we have three: Ham, Shem, and Japheth, and then, I suppose, the next generation introduces another multiplication of races, and so forth and so on.

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.”¹ This definition has little utility. We need bigger groups, so Linnaeus prefers the cross-sectioning of humanity somewhere between Manasseh and Adam, or, to use his language, “between tribe and species.”

I think, for the most part, my original argument stands, namely, that the Bible does not teach us to think thus of humanity. In fact, I think Linnaeus’ argument helps to illustrate my argument. The problem of thinking of people like animals is, well, that you are thinking of people like animals.

The Bible does acknowledge that there are inherited characteristics, but it refuses to use such a reductionistic term to describe people groups. The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. Fine. But we must remember that every acorn falls from two trees. One branch must link up with another to get to the next generation.

Linnaeus makes the historical argument that husband and wife would have needed to live close to one another, and that they would have been from the same general family tree. “[A] man’s access to genes has historically (before industrialized forms of travel) been restricted to the pool of people born within several miles of himself.”

Strangely, Isaac is offered as the Biblical example. Let us remember that Abraham had to send his servant into another land to find Isaac a wife from his family. If Isaac married a neighbor, he would’ve been marrying a Canaanite. Or consider Abraham. I’d like to remind the reader that Abraham, before industrialized travel, migrated all over the place, and that Sarah, his wife and a Shemite, was almost married to two different Hammites (Pharaoh in Genesis 12:10–20, and Abimelech in Genesis 20:1–18). Abraham had Ishmael from Hagar, an Egyptian (Genesis 16:1).

Linnaeus states that “The sons of Rachel and Leah would have displayed what we would consider an uncanny resemblance to Terah, because they were far more genetically ‘of him’ than modern great-great-grandchildren are of their great-great-grandfathers.” We can also remember that one of those sons married an Egyptian wife, and the two sons of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, were half Hamite. Linnaeus here admits that these crossover marriages were happening—Esau, for example, marrying two Canaanite wives, forming the new race of Edomite (which, I suppose, is half Shem and half Ham)—but Esau “did not take to wife daughters of Magog, for that clan had ventured north, and were beyond his reach.”

First, I don’t know this to be true, namely, that none of those of Terah married those of Magog. Second, the strange move that must be made from this assumed super-sedentary historical reconstruction is that this inbreeding (Linnaeus’ term) is God’s will. Linnaeus states: “[W]hat is really at issue here is the underlying biological realities that flow from how God made His creatures to differentiate in the course of our multiplication.”

Third, there is a difficult logical problem when you read biological history as an expression of God’s will: history changes. If, for example, it was God’s will to keep all the different branches of the family tree apart from one another, then it must now be God’s will that they all live together, at least in a country like the United States. How can Linnaeus not see industrialized travel as God’s will to mix us all up?

Linnaeus, helpfully, puts our attention on a verse that is very helpful to determine God’s view of all this: Deuteronomy 23:7b–8, “You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were an alien in his land. 8 The children of the third generation born to them may enter the assembly of the LORD.” Egyptians, we will remember, are of Ham.

Linnaeus notes “the Egyptians, like the Israelites, had practiced generation after generation of, and there’s no other way to say this: Inbreeding. They shared a gene pool in common with one another that was not common to other groups, hence they were recognizable as Egyptians on sight.” Really? Joseph’s brothers were not able to recognize their own brother after his years in exile.

“Despite the fact that the Israelites had lived in their land for 400 years, the two populations had not intermarried to any appreciable degree.” Really? Remember that at least 1/12 of Israel, Joseph, was married to an Egyptian.

“The Israelites were no more made Egyptians by living on Egyptian soil than Egyptians were made Israelites by living in Israel—else the above command would be incoherent.” Really? I would ask Linnaeus to read the original text. The grandchildren of the Egyptian living in Israel are granted access to the assembly. Whatever this means, it at least means that the Israelites are no longer to consider the grandchildren of Egyptians to be foreigners and strangers, but are to be welcomed into the political and spiritual life of Israel. They are to be citizens of the nation; they are no longer to be treated as Egyptian.

Linnaeus would have us think that the grandchildren of an Egyptian will always be Egyptian, but the Scriptures teach us a different way of understanding humanity: to look at the grandchildren of the Egyptian as belonging to Israel. In this way, the Bible refuses to reduce us to our gene pool, but honors each person as something more wonderful than that.

1. 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. ↩︎

Opening statement round of the Race Debate between Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller and Linnaeus.

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

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

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

Dear Reader,

At the outset, I would like to thank my opponent, Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller, for being willing to engage on this critically important topic. As we are both aware, the subject of race continues to be a flashpoint for all manner of discussion and dissension among the brethren, and this is waxing, not waning. In light of this recognition, we have agreed to bring our opposite views on this matter into collision in this written debate, in order that the truth may be made manifest, and that understanding—if not agreement—be sought, if not obtained.

The thesis of this debate is phrased as follows: There is only one race, the race of Adam. My opponent affirms this statement without qualification. My task in this debate is to show why Christians should not affirm this statement, as it is misleading and, ultimately, quite incorrect.

My thesis is simple: Race as a category is an extension of the category of family, and exists with it on a continuum with intermediates like clan and tribe. It is a derivative of the concept of consanguinity. Consanguinity denotes (1) proximate shared common descent, and (2) shared observable traits as reflective of shared genetic inheritance resulting from proximate shared common descent.

But before expanding upon these points, let me first step back in order to give the fullest view of the facts possible. Although I am taking the opposition position on our debate question, I will start off with some affirmations. This will have the effect of framing my arguments in the proper light, and demonstrating agreement with Wolfmueller in the areas where it exists, in order to throw our differences into higher relief.

Biblical Affirmations

I believe in a literal Adam and Eve, from whom all mankind (Adamkind, if you will) are descended.

Noah was a real man, whose immediate family (wife, sons, sons’ wives) were the only descendants of Adam and Eve to survive the global deluge that destroyed all land-dwelling animal life save what was present on the ark.

All men since this global flood are descended from Noah through these three sons and their wives.

Again, for emphasis: These wives were also descended from Adam and Eve; whether patrilineally through Seth or through a brother such as Cain, God only knows.

Man’s Promulgation

The children of these patriarchs increased in number, and those that had not already begun to spread abroad were ultimately dispersed from the plains of Shinar according to their new tongues. We have reason to believe that God did not put husband and wife and young children at odds with one another in the confusion of their languages, and thus that the new tongues were applied along natural family lines.

To go further: Josephus indicated that the people groups separated from one another according to patrilineal descent from Japheth, Shem, and Ham. Various of the sons and grandsons of these patriarchs set up colonies comprised of their respective clans, wherever it was that they chose as their portion to settle. From there these clans followed God’s command to be fruitful and multiply and begat successive generations, generally by taking wives from among their own clan (I will return to this). In time, such clans through multiplication became entire nations occupying the territory their forbears had chosen to inhabit.

This was not without churn, as over the ages one nation may take another nation’s habitation through conquest, erasing them from the face of the earth, or mixing with them to create a new nation, derivative of both, thus joining their inherited destinies.

In sum, it was in the foregoing fashion that God “has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings,” per Paul as recorded in Acts 17.

On this point I know Wolfmueller and I have complete and total agreement: That God took one man (Adam), and through his descendants created the differentiated people groups of the world.

And the English language provides for us another word, for which “people group” has become modernity’s euphemism: Race.

The Taxonomy of Man

Thus we return to the question, is there only one race, the race of Adam?

If “races” is truly the right term for these differentiated people groups of the world, then no, for while there is only one mankind, there are many kinds of men. Let me elucidate.

The simple fact is this: Race is a category of taxonomy, above individual, family, clan, and tribe, approximately—though not inevitably—synonymous with nation, and below species or “kind”.

Taxonomy, from the Greek taxis (order) and nomos (law), is simply the practice of grouping things according to a hierarchy of relatedness, anywhere from very closely to distantly. When it comes to living things, this can take the form of grouping creatures by morphological likeness, or by family tree. And, because morphology (i.e., form/appearance) is due to heritable traits coded for by the genes passed on in the act of reproduction, usually both at the same time.

“Race,” then, is one of several nesting terms used to taxonomically classify men according to shared inheritance, in narrowing concentric circles all the way down to the level of individual.

Lest anyone think otherwise, such taxonomical grouping is eminently Biblical, as we see in the public selection of Saul for kingship over Israel.

Then Samuel brought all the tribes of Israel near, and the tribe of Benjamin was taken by lot. He brought the tribe of Benjamin near by its clans, and the clan of the Matrites was taken by lot; and Saul the son of Kish was taken by lot. (1st Samuel 10:20-21 ESV)

We see then the narrowing concentric circles come to focus upon Saul, from his nation (Israel), to his tribe (Benjamin), to his clan (Matri), to his family (Kish), and then finally to Saul himself. If we take what the rest of Scripture has to say in addition to these two verses, Saul’s taxonomical structure could even be extended outward past nation, acknowledging that Saul was a Hebrew, a Shemite, and ultimately from Adam.

Scripture itself gives us the taxonomic model to follow.

Let’s take our Lord Jesus, according to His humanity, as another example in the Biblical taxonomic structure, from more related to less related.

Individual: Jesus
Family: Joseph
Clan: David
Tribe: Judah
Nation/Race¹: Israel
Race²: Hebrew
Race³: Shemite
Species (Kind): Adam/Mankind

As you can see from the thrice repeated use of race, this term does have a range of applications. Broader senses and narrower senses, all of which are correct, and not contradictory or mutually exclusive. 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. However, for the sake of utility, most usage has historically been preferentially applied to those degrees between tribe and species.

The old saw that “there is no White race, only Anglo/Saxon/Germanic/Celtic races” deceives by taking advantage of equivocation regarding the level of magnification employed by the term. There are of course Anglo/Saxon/Germanic/Celtic races, which are sub-races to the broader White race, just as the Israelite and Edomite races were sub-races of the Hebrew race.

It is likewise technically accurate to call mankind “the race of Adam”. Mankind, Adamkind, is the ultimate race, if you will, under which all others are subsumed. We might do well to call the race of Adam “the terminal race”, insofar as there are no others at its level, nor above it.

However, in referring to the “race of mankind” we again run into the difficulty of utility in several ways. In the first place, “mankind” communicates the truth of universal descent of man from our common ancestor perfectly well, and renders the use of “race” at this level of taxonomy superfluous and even redundant. In the second place, this use—while again technically accurate—is itself turned into a lie through the sleight-of-hand of equivocation. That is, through the demand that, because Adam is the sole universal progenitor of the human race, the category of race must have no other referents but him.

We would do just as well to say that because God is the Father of mankind, the term father must have no other, more proximate referents.

Or we can make an analogy to the taxonomical term “family”, which also displays a range of meaning: that all men are part of the family of Adam does not void the categories of immediate family or extended family.

And this is precisely the dispute which has occasioned this debate. “There is only one race, the race of Adam” is a statement which must be denied on purely lexical grounds, right from the outset. To state my thesis again: That there is only one terminal race does not mean that there is only one race.

But I would delude myself to believe that this debate can be settled merely on the basis of such logomachy, as if my opponent’s true objection was only to the combination of letters upon the labels affixed to a family tree. I believe we could still readily agree to the foregoing, and perhaps Wolfmueller will acknowledge as much in his response.

Rather than simple terminology, what is really at issue here is the underlying biological realities that flow from how God made His creatures to differentiate in the course of our multiplication. That is, most people, and I suspect Wolfmueller is here representative of most people, prefer to reject the nature and scale of heritability in order to avoid certain downstream implications (particularly in terms of how we think of people, and how we treat people).

Those downstream implications are beyond the scope of this debate, but the genetic components themselves must be addressed in order to get at the core of the disagreement between us.

The Biological Reality of Race

At the outset of this section, I must address the inevitable charge of equivocation. The critic will say that, whereas up until now I have applied “race” merely to denote familial relation—as one might use “great-grandfather” or “second cousin twice-removed”, I am now changing its point of reference to apply to cohorts with high degrees of genetic overlap. This is because the critic sees two distinct concepts and demands a strict separation between the two—one that nature itself does not observe.

To be sure, if creating children was done by some central global agency, whereby men and women submitted their gametes to be paired by lot, then we could envision a situation in which genes were distributed more-or-less randomly across the face of the earth, with no discernible patterns or groupings. But that is not at all how God has designed human reproduction. Rather, producing offspring requires sexual union—and for those not in-the-know, that union requires nothing if not, ah, close proximity.

Indeed, a man and a woman must occupy essentially the same space in order for this act to occur, which necessarily rules out the vast majority of the world as breeding partners for any given person. Because of this, a man’s access to genes has historically (before industrialized forms of travel) been restricted to the pool of people born within several miles of himself. Denizens of Europe were not traveling to Africa for wives, nor the converse.

Returning to the above retelling of the spread of mankind across the earth, it would have been the case that as linguistically unique small clans settled various areas, they would have married within their own ranks. In the first place because of their relative isolation from other early clans, and in the second place because of the language barriers that initially forced them apart from other clans. This restricted mating pool would have had the effect of standardizing the genetics of the group, where essentially every child would have been related to their great or great-great grandfather on both their father’s and their mother’s sides. This created a situation where said children received an inheritance of their patriarch’s (and his matriarch wife’s) genes from both father and mother.

For evidence of this see Isaac, who received a portion of his grandfather Terah’s genes from both Abraham and Abraham’s half-sister Sarah. This had the effect of making Isaac the genetic equivalent of a 3/4 brother to Abraham, and the same to Sarah. He then took to wife his first-cousin once removed (on both sides!) Rebekah, the great-granddaughter of Terah. Hence, Jacob and Esau were the great-grandsons of Terah on their father’s side (although they genetically received the inheritance of grandsons, as Isaac passed on the genetic inheritance equivalent to a full son of Terah), and great-great-grandsons on their mother’s side, respectively. And we may speak further of how Jacob took to wife Rachel and Leah, his first-cousins on his mother’s side, and his second-cousins once-removed on his father’s side! The sons of Rachel and Leah would have displayed what we would consider an uncanny resemblance to Terah, because they were far more genetically “of him” than modern great-great-grandchildren are of their great-great-grandfathers. Their resemblance to one another would have been uncanny as well.

As this example shows, the repeated genetic overlap in these situations was immense. During these early days, such close intermarriage served to greatly amplify the degree of relatedness of those within a given community, while simultaneously widening the genetic gap between the members of that community and non-members outside it. Certainly, sometimes intermarriage would have happened with neighboring communities, as was done by Jacob’s brother Esau when he took to wife two Canaanites and broke off to found the race of the Edomites. But Esau did not take to wife daughters of Magog, for that clan had ventured North, and were beyond his reach. Thus, without the proximity required for intermarriage, over subsequent generations the gap between the Edomites and the sons of Magog continued to grow further, and further, and further, even as the genetic overlap between any two random Edomites was growing closer due to the same layered intermarriage effect.

As you can see, the matter of a label on the family tree has tremendous implications for the genetic, biological “closeness” of the populations which resulted from these various colonies which went forth after the flood. Not to mention their relative distance with regard to other populations. It is entirely because of this phenomenon that the following command from the Lord to Israel could make any sense at all.

You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were an alien in his land. The children of the third generation born to them may enter the assembly of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 23:7b-8 NKJV)

How were the Israelites supposed to identify these Egyptians they were ordered to exclude from the assembly? Well, the Egyptians, like the Israelites, had practiced generation after generation of, and there’s no other way to say this: Inbreeding. They shared a gene pool in common with one another that was not common to other groups, hence they were recognizable as Egyptians on sight. As their DNA expressed itself in their bone structure, their fat distribution, their skin texture, etc., they simply looked like Egyptians.

And despite the fact that the Israelites had lived in their land for 400 years, the two populations had not intermarried to any appreciable degree. They were still two different peoples from two different branches of Noah’s descent, and they bore the evidence visibly. The Israelites were no more made Egyptians by living on Egyptian soil than Egyptians were made Israelites by living in Israel—else the above command would be incoherent. Rather, each designation is entirely racial.

To further show that this concept is in no wise alien to Scripture, we can look to other places in which Scripture gives examples of traits belonging within the gene pools of certain lineages.

There is the propensity for large stature found in some of the races of Canaan, which the Israelite spies discovered to their dismay.

Consider also the tribe of Benjamin, which boasted 700 elite left-handed men, as well as the left-handed judge, Ehud. The ironically named “son of my right hand” certainly carried a propensity for left-handedness as a group.

Or consider Jeremiah 13:23: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots?”, a rhetorical device which assumes the immutability of an Ethiopian’s skin color, a racial trait so universal to the people that it is their defining characteristic—all the way down to their name itself!

Even Paul, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, opined, “One of them, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’” (Titus 1:12 NKJV)

So to say, Scripture is very well-acquainted, not just with race, but with racial stereotypes as well.

Conclusion

We have now seen that race is a taxonomical designation applied at the nexus of common descent and heritability. Race, put simplest, denotes shared blood—consanguinity. We know that we are all one blood with all mankind through our shared father Adam, as well as Noah. Yet not all were fathered by Ashkenaz, Eber, or Cush, and thus we do not all share their genetic inheritance.

All, to put a positive spin on a negative phrase, are consanguineous, but some are more consanguineous than others. This fact gives rise to taxonomical grouping by race.

These are indisputable categories of the natural order, and the Word of God assumes knowledge of and agreement with this fact. Any attempt at refutation of this will necessarily employ equivocation and special pleading, most likely through (eisegetical) appeal to Galatians 3:28. However, the Gospel does not destroy lineage according to the flesh, nor natural differences between races of men—nor between man and woman, it may also be observed with thanks.