Conclusion: Against Biological Reductionism, Again
I’ll leave it to the reader to assess the helpfulness of this debate. I think, in large part, Linnaeus and I have been talking past each other. It feels like Linnaeus has been trying to squeeze a concession out of me that I’ve been willing to give our entire debate: lineage and heritage are real and true and part of God’s ordered world.
I have parents that a few other people have, and others do not. I share grandparents with some people and not with others, and so on. I don’t think I’ve every denied the reality of lineage or heritage. My argument has been that there is always more.
There is more when it comes to family, specifically because a father and mother introduce two lineages into one child. There is more implied in every word the Bible uses to describe groups of people (people, tribe, tongue, nation, etc.). There is a fundamental legal/verbal reality to our humanity, and I cannot see how the category of race is not intentionally introduced to diminish this characteristic. Perhaps not, but it still functions, always, in a reductionistic capacity, isolating lineage, heritage, genetics, etc. from the reality of the sinner created by God and redeemed by Christ.
Marriage is more than mating. Having children is more than breeding. Nations are more than herds. A man is more than his genetics.
That the Lord was pleased to bring forth the human family from Adam and Eve, and then from Noah, highlights this foundational Biblical truth. In Adam and Eve God’s image and likeness was given to man, as well as dominion over creation. Adam and Eve are given to one another, and those to became one. Through Adam and Eve the image of God was lost, and sin, death and corruption where introduced to the entire human family. The gift of life and the corruption of sin, these defining realities of each and every human life, are given to the entire family.
Here we once more point to our Lord Jesus Christ (mostly of Shem with a little Hamite mixed in) who took the place of all humanity, standing in for all the sons of Adam and Eve, enduring God’s wrath to sin for us life and salvation.
But this has been said before, I hope with sufficient clarity to make the point clear. May the reader forgive me for what was lacking.
It is true, by lineage and heritage we are all given unique and particular circumstances, nevertheless, the Scriptures give us more. By flesh we are all sons and daughters of Adam and Noah, children of wrath. By faith we are sons of Abraham. By baptism we are the children of God. Behold that love!
Thanks to Linnaeus, who not only kept this conversation going, but was also very patient with my late responses and delays.
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 Rev. Wolfmueller’s answers to Linnaeus’s cross examination questions.
Debate thesis: There is only one race, the race of Adam.
If the people of Japan disappeared and you filled their islands with people of Ghana, would the Japanese be gone, or just darker skinned?
Answer #1
Japanese certainly means more that “people living on the Island of Japan”. If, therefore, the people of Japan disappeared, then the Japanese would be gone.
Question #2
Would a man with Japanese parents still be Japanese if he lived in America, spoke only English, and practiced no Japanese culture? How so/not?
Answer #2
Sure, such a man would have a Japanese lineage and heritage, but he would much less “of Japan” or “Japanese” than, say, his parents, our his cousins living in Japan.
I appreciate Linneaus pushing me to definitions and distinctions, and I appreciate the readers patience as I wander towards them. I’m pushing back, as stated earlier, on the biological reductionism of “races”. Linneaus seems to be pushing back on the modern idea of the nation-state.
In a recent essay delivered at the Rocky Mountain District Convention, Warren Graff pointed to, perhaps, a third was of understanding ethnos via a quotation from Herodotus (~450BC):
“[We] Athenians will not betray the Greeks, since we are of the same blood and same language and in fellowship of the sanctuaries of the gods and the sacrifices, and we share customs.” (Herodotus, “The Histories,” 8.144.2. τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν ἐὸν ὁμόαιμον καὶ ὁμόγλωσσον, καὶ θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα, τῶν προδότας γενέσθαι Ἀθηναίους οὐκ ἂν εἴη καλῶς.)
Graff continues, “Our generation is, of course, post-Westphalia (1648), where definition was given to modern nation-states. When we hear nation, we necessarily think in terms of this modern nation state, where citizenship is determined by defined territories and centralized governments. But we have already noted that Herodotus, 450 years before our Lord’s Incarnation, spoke of defining one’s Greekness by sharing the same language and having fellowship of the sanctuaries of the gods and the sacrifices and customs. In other words, you are the ethnicity of Greek and of Athenian because you worship and sacrifice to the gods of Greece and Athens.” (Warren Graff, unpublished essay)
To apply this definition to our English-speaking neighbor with Japanese parents, it seem like he would be much more “of America” than “of Japan”, that is, an American.
Question #3
Let’s take the same scenario as before, but change America for Ghana and English for Dangme. Would you be able to visually tell this man apart from the native Ghanaians, and on what basis?
Answer #3
Yes. See above.
Question #4
If, as you’ve acknowledged, changing continents, languages, and cultures does not alter a man’s lineage according to the flesh, does conversion to Christ alter a man’s lineage according to the flesh?
Answer #4
No.
Lineage and heritage are true things. I think we’ve agreed on this.
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.
Ethiopian’s head and female head, with a kalos inscription. Attic janiform red-figure aryballos, ca. 520–510 BC. From Greece.
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.
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.
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:
God made all mankind through Adam
All sinned in Adam
Christ accomplished his redeeming work on behalf of all
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.
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.
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. ↩︎
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.
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. ↑
“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 ↑
Thuletide. “Race, Ethnicity, and ‘Racism’ in Greco-Roman Society,” December 7, 2020. Accessed March 10, 2025. ↑
“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 ↑
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.
First, thanks to Linneaus for suggesting this debate on Twitter.
Second, I’d like to beg for the patience of the reader. I’m not at all trained in formal debate (a fact that will be quickly observed), but I hope that this public conversation will bring clarity from God’s word on some of the recent controversies.
May God grant it for Christ’s sake.
The thesis under debate is as follows:
There is only one race, the race of Adam.
I affirm. Linnaeus will deny. This is my opening argument.
I’ll attempt to support the argument with a further thesis: The way the Bible teaches us to speak of humanity excludes speaking in terms of races.
1. “All men”
Adam and Eve, All Created
On the sixth day of creation the Lord God created Adam and Eve.
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
The details of this creation are expanded in Genesis 2:21-23.
Adam and Eve are given the mandate to be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. From this first marriage and mandate come all of humanity. Every human being is a descendant of Adam and Eve.
The Bible not only asserts the reality of a single human race, but draws out the theological implications. There are things that are true of all people and each person because of our common ancestry in Adam. Consider the following passages.
All Sinned.
“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned,” (Romans 5:12). As we sing in the hymn, “All mankind fell in Adam’s fall, one common sin infects us all.”[1] Our sinful condition is inherited, passed down from one generation to the next. The origin of this original sin is Adam.
All Are Redeemed by Christ
The universal effect of the fall is paralleled with the universal rescue accomplished by Jesus.
“Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous,” (Romans 5:18-19).
Just as Adam’s sin brought a universal corruption to humanity, the saving work of Jesus brings universal salvation. The free gift of salvation, justification, and the forgiveness of sins is accomplish for humanity, for all people and each person.[2]
All Will Be Raised
Finally, Paul calls Jesus the “Last Adam” (see 1 Corinthians 15:45) in his sermon on the resurrection, and asserts: “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive,” (1 Corinthians 15:22). Every person ever born will be raised from the dead on the last day, and gathered together before the judgment seat.
To make the point of the “all” in the resurrection, Paul parallels Christ with Adam.
Each and All
I don’t think these assertions will be debated. I think Linneaus and I will agree on all that is stated so far. Here is why it is important: the Scriptures teach us to consider and confess the universal condition of humanity, of the one human race.
We can say four things about every person we encounter:
This person is created by God.
This person is a fallen sinner.
This person is redeemed by Christ.
This person will be raised on the last day.
These truths are the most important things about all and each of us, and, astonishingly, many people don’t know this about themselves. If you are a Christian, you know more about the reality of who your unbelieving neighbor is that they know about themselves.
Here’s the point: the Bible teaches us that the most important things about humanity are universal, and we are to think, act, and pray in accord to this unity. One of the dangers of considering humanity according to various categories, and especially racial categories, is that the universal condition of humanity is set aside.
2. Noah
The human race has its single origin in Adam and Eve, and, further, in the time of Noah, humanity was once again reduced to one family. The world-wide flood destroyed every living creature that was not protected in the ark. Every human being is a descendant of Noah and his wife.[3]
While the Scripture do not make any application to our common ancestry in Noah, Luther does. In his controversial track On the Jews and their Lies, Luther is responding to arguments against the Christian confession published by some Rabbis in Wittenberg. One of the arguments presented is that the Jewish people are superior to the Gentiles because of their lineage, their blood-line through Abraham (see Luke 3:8 and John 8:33). Luther responds to this boasting:
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. (LW 47:147)
Luther continues to argue that any boasting about lineage, blood, and race should end with Psalm 51:
But let us move on. David lumps us all together nicely and convincingly when he declares in Psalm 51 [:5]: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Now go, whether you are Jew or Gentile, born of Adam or Abraham, of Enoch or David, and boast before God of your fine nobility, of your exalted lineage, your ancient ancestry! Here you learn that we all are conceived and born in sin, by father and mother, and no human being is excluded. (LW 47:148)
Luther sets the universal truths regarding humanity against any boasting of blood, lineage, or family.
3. Divisions Among Us
Now we get to the point. While the universal truths regarding the human race are clearly attested in the Scriptures and confessed by all Christians, what about the various groupings and divisions of humanity that are also discussed in the Scriptures? We are all descendants of Noah, but some of us are from Shem, or Ham, or Japheth. The Scriptures have a “Table of Nations” (Genesis 10), and God Himself divided human languages at the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11), further distinguishing some groups from others. Paul confirms this in Athens, reminding the people of their common origin he also asserts that the different nations are God’s work. “He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). John’s vision of the church in heaven rejoices in “a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb,” (Revelation 7:9). While all these different people are united in their worship of Christ, they are still recognized as distinct nations, tribes, people, and languages.
If the Bible acknowledges that people can be grouped and recognized in nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, what is the danger in grouping together people as various races? This is the critical question.
First, what do we mean by “races”? I’ll use this description from Linneaus, drawn from our email exchange, as a base.
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, where it denotes 1) proximate common descent, and 2) shared observable traits as reflective of shared allele constellations [sometimes referred to a genetic cluster], as a result of 1.
We see families. We see families grouped together as clans. We see clans grouped together as tribes, tribes grouped together as races, right? This is confirmed by observable traits and genetics. What’s the problem?
I suggest that there are two major problems: the category of “races” differs from all the other groupings of humanity used in the Bible because race is immutable (it cannot be changed) and therefore dangerously reductionistic. These differences make “races” as a category unhelpful. I’ll try to demonstrate.
Immutability
We note, first, that race is an immutable category. It is impossible to change from one race to another. This stands in stark contrast to all the categories offered in the Bible of family, tribe, people, tongue, and nation.
I might be born into one family, but taken up into another via adoption. I might be born of one tribe, but join another tribe by marriage, i.e. Moses and Zipporah (Exodus 2:21), Ruth and Boaz (Ruth 1:16-17; 4:13-22), and Rahab and Salmon (Matthew 1:5). I might be born into one people, but leave that people and join another. (“Your people shall be my people,” Ruth 1:16, and the “mixed multitude in the Exodus, Exodus 12:38.) I might be born speaking in one tongue or language, but the Lord can grant other tongues according to His purpose (via miracle, as at Pentecost, or through much learning). I might be born of one nation or ethnos, but leave that nation and join myself to another (consider Uriah the Hittite, who joined himself to Israel).
The Biblical categories all have ways of moving from one to another. “Race” does not.
Two Biblical categories need to be considered carefully: ethnos (ἔθνος)and genos (γένος).
On Ethnos
Ethnos is used 160+ times in the New Testament, and is variously translated as “people,” “Gentile,” “nation,” “pagan” (ESV), or “heathen” (KJV). It is used to describe the different people groups that fill the world (God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth,” Acts 17:26), but it is chiefly used to distinguish the Jews from everyone else (i.e. Acts 15:7, Romans 11:11, Galatians 2:12, 3:8).
How does the Scripture teach us to consider the different ethnos?
Do not think to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. (Matthew 3:9)
Now, therefore, you (Gentiles, see Ephesians 2:11) are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. (Ephesians 2:19)
For if you were cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, who are natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? (Romans 11:24)
Not only does the category of ethnos not match up with the category of races, but the Biblical teaching about the ethnos warns us of the dangers of considering ourselves or other people simply according to their lineage, etc.
On Genos
The Biblical word that comes closest to the idea of races is genos.Used 20 times in the New Testament[4], it is translated with ten different words in the KJV, “kind,” “offspring,” “kindred,” “nation,” “stock,” “born,” “country,” “diversities,” “countrymen,” and “generation.” The ESV uses nine different words, including “race” in Acts 7:19 and 1 Peter 2:9. The English words “generation” and “Genesis” derive from this word, and it indicates source of origin, but with a much broader application than the modern category of race.
Consider Acts 4:36 where Luke introduces Barnabas:
And Joses, who was also named Barnabas by the apostles (which is translated Son of Encouragement), a Levite of the country (genos,γένει)of Cyprus… (Acts 4:36).
His Jewish tribe, Levi, is mentioned, but his genos is a place, the island of Cyprus. This text, at least, indicates that genos is a much broader word that “race.”
The ESV translates genos as race in 1 Peters 2:9-10.
But you are a chosen race (genos eklekton, γένος ἐκλεκτόν),
a royal priesthood (ethnos hagion, ἔθνος ἅγιον),
a holy nation,
a people for his own possession (laos eis peripoiasin, λαὸς εἰς περιποίησιν),
that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
Peter’s beautiful point is that no matter our origin or generation, our nation and people, the Lord has claimed us as His own. We are not to think of ourselves according to the genos, ethnos, and “people” of our birth, but of the genos chosen by God, the ethnos made Holy by His sacrifice, the people He purchased and won with His own blood.
One might argue, “Sure, it is true that Christians are given this unique gift by God, but we are talking about first article truths, races in regards to our genetic kinships and lineage.” Consider again 1 Peter 2:9. According to this text, God, in conversion, gives His people a chosen genos. Ask yourself, “Does God, in conversion, put us into a new and different race?”
Reductionistic
Here we begin to see the real danger of thinking in terms of races. Categorizing an individual by the immutable characteristic of their race is dangerously reductionistic.
This is the most important point, and, I confess, I do not know how to make it well, so please bear with me.
The mutability of the Biblical categories points to a deeper reality. Every category the Bible uses for different groupings of people (family, tribe, people, nation, tongue, etc.) has a legal or verbal element to it.
Marriage, most importantly, is a legal covenant, and is the creation of the family.
Regarding children, there is the legal avenue of adoption, where a stranger comes into a family.
In tribes, the legal arrangement of marriage shapes and merges tribes.
Regarding people and nation, there is the legal matter of citizenship, which can be gained, lost, or transferred.
Language, is, definitionally, verbal, related to words.
None of these categories or descriptors is pure biology. “Race,” on the other hand, has no legal or verbal aspect to it. It is, by definition, pure genetics, biological, and materialistic.
It is not simply that these legal and verbal components of family, tribe, people, and nation, give a way of moving from one group to another (as discussed previously). There is something essential about the word in every aspect of humanity. This, I believe, is the specific danger of the category of races: there is no word, no legal or verbal element, no logos.
“Races” reduces a man to his gene pool, and in that reduction the essential place of the word is lost. This is not the way the Scriptures train us to speak, and, in fact, stands in antipathy to the way the Scriptures teach us to speak of the groups and classifications of humanity.[5]
Instead, we confess that there is one human race, one human family, from Adam and to Christ.
All Mankind Fell Through Adam’s Fall, Lazarus Spengler, 1524, (TLH 369:1). As far as I can tell, this is one of only two hymns quoted in the Book of Concord, and the only Reformation-era hymn referenced. See The Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration I.23. ↑
This saving work is apprehended by faith, and faith is worked in us by the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the Gospel. While salvation is accomplished for all, some will refuse this saving work. Universal redemption does not mean universalism, but this theological point is beyond the scope of this argument. ↑
I mention this point because, as far as I can tell, my assertion that “Everywhere we go is a Noah family reunion” is what drew me into this debate. If I remember correctly, this assertion of the Noah Family Reunion was articulated not against racism, but against a critical reading of the Bible that denied the world-wide nature of Noah’s Flood. It was part of my assertion of a young earth reading of Genesis. But it turned out to be a convenient assertion against boasting in blood. ↑
This is where the category of “races” strikes at the heart of the Gospel. Justification is the declaration of God that the sinner is righteous because of the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus. It is a gracious legal act of God. Any attempts to reduce humanity from this essentially legal understanding of humanity is a move away from the gift of justification. I hope to flesh this point out through this debate.
Nathaniel Friedmann (†1941) from Plock Russia (now Poland) was a Jewish Rabbi sent to the US as an anti-missionary who became an LCMS pastor and missionary to Jews in New York City from c.1896 until his death.
This article appears in Der Lutheraner, Vol. 66, No. 24., November 29, 1910, pp. 387-389.
Our mission to the Jews in New York has had little success in the eyes of the people. However, the number of Jews who have heard the proclamation of the Gospel has increased considerably compared to the past. The number of children taught by the missionary in the Saturday and Sunday school varies between 60 and 150, depending on the summer or winter months. Among them are those who have been attending the lessons for years and have learned the prophecies of Christ and their fulfillment excellently. The number of listeners attending our missionary’s sermons rises even in the summer months to 70 to 80, in the winter months to 100 and more, so that often many Jews have not been able to gain admission due to lack of space. The demand for New Testaments is becoming increasingly lively. This is a great thing when one considers that even a visit to our mission premises is viewed with disdain by the Jews and publicly criticized in their newspapers. On June 3rd of this year, a representative of a Jewish newspaper came to the missionary service and, after the service ended, scolded with crude words the Jews present as traitors because they went here instead of to the synagogue.
But it cannot be denied that among these many children and listeners, who are attuned to the word of the Gospel, no such successes are achieved as in the heathen and Negro mission, in which even children and weak women finally confess the Savior publicly and prefer to endure the cruelest persecutions of their fellow tribesmen and their whole family rather than deny the faith they have attained. We should not be surprised at this. “For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness.” — Romans 10:3. The gospel is an offense to the Jews. They have “a spirit of stupor, eyes that would not see and ears that would not hear, down to this very day” — Romans 11:8. Around Christmas time last year, a widely read Jewish newspaper vilified the Christian religion in the bitterest terms. It portrayed the Lord Jesus, who had first proclaimed peace, as the cruel persecutor who had finally said: “bring them here and slaughter them before me!” [Luke 19:27] It portrayed D. Martin Luther as the man who, as long as he himself was oppressed, called for the humane treatment of the Jews, but later, when he felt safe, incited the tearing down of their synagogues and the burning of their writings. In general, it described the whole of Christianity, which claims to bring light, as a darkening of the world. This was a truly Jewish view of Christmas. If the writer of such blasphemies had to live in the dark continent of Africa among the savages, he would soon learn to think otherwise.
In addition to their self-righteousness and pride in their descent from Abraham, in the nobility of their people and in their circumcision, the Jews also have what Luther calls their “donkey-like ignorance”. More than a million Jews now live in New York. Every fifth inhabitant of this cosmopolitan city is Jewish. On the great Jewish feast days, there are hardly 40 Christian children out of more than 3000 pupils in some large state schools, because the rest stay at home as Jewish children. The large number of these Jewish children, like the large number of so-called Christian children, grow up without any religious instruction. The anarchists and other subversives are recruited from among them, and the crowds of unscrupulous demagogues, fallen women, and others who harm the public good multiply. The smaller number of Jewish children, who still receive some kind of religious instruction in their Sabbath schools, hear only rabbinical fables. The five books of Moses, indeed the entire Old Testament, remain unknown to the Jews, otherwise we could get hold of them more easily. Don’t think this is an exaggeration. In the “Jüdisches Tageblatt“ [Jewish Daily], which is read by more than 50,000 Jews, there was an editorial on September 4th of this year with the headline: “Why have we abandoned the Bible?” The article, printed in the mixed Yiddish language with Hebrew letters, is extremely strange. It reads:
“The whole world reads and studies the old book. Only we reject it. The old Jewish spirit has conquered the world. The Bible has been re-crowned as the greatest creation the world possesses. The British and American Bible Societies, which are engaged in the task of distributing the Bible, have published the accounts of their activities last year. From this we see that the Bible has been sold much more than any other book in the world. These societies have sold seven million Bibles in one year. Some Jews will not realize the importance of these figures. They will say: If the British and American Bible Societies have sold seven million Bibles printed in 400 different languages, what has that got to do with us? After all, these societies are Christian, and they did it to spread Christianity and not Judaism; what is that to us? But while the hands engaged in the work of spreading the Bible may be Christian, the spirit that is being spread is Jewish. The idea of the Bible societies may be to spread the teachings of Jesus, but we know that the spirit that has conquered the world comes from the Jewish Torah (five books of Moses), from the Jewish prophets. We know that the good that Christians possess comes from our Bible. The seven million Bibles that have been sold are seven million witnesses to our greatness, to our unity, to our nobility. Thousands of years have passed since David, the son of Jesse, sang his prayers. The land over which the divine singer ruled has been destroyed. But mankind still seeks comfort and hope in his words. Isaiah lies in his grave for thousands of years, but his words are handed down from generation to generation, from epoch to epoch; they do not grow old, but live forever and retain eternal freshness.
“For thousands of years, right up to the present day, the whole world has been competing with our little Bible book and cannot defeat it. Great and mighty literatures have been created, giants of men have risen to the heavens of poetry and philosophy, but none could reach the heights of the prophets and the sublimity of the ancient Bible. You will search in vain in the great Greek, Roman and modern literature for something that could compete with the old Bible. There are not many things in world literature that have an eternal, lasting value. Currents are born and perish, various trends live out their time and disappear. The Bible, however, is the most eternal of all eternal creations; it is without beginning and without end, it is as constant as the sound of the ocean waves, as the rising and setting of the sun. The greatness of the Bible lies in its simplicity and naturalness, in its pure and profound truth, in its deep penetration of the human soul. The Bible is the same for everyone, just as the beauty of nature is the same for everyone. You don’t need to be a great natural scientist to understand the beauty of the sea, the green forest, the mighty mountain. In the same way, you don’t need to be a great scholar to understand the Bible. The knife of criticism, which cuts and turns great literary works into mere trifles, cannot harm the Bible, for it is higher than all the laws of logic and all the rules of art, higher than all the false musings of philosophy, just as nature is higher than all theory. The Bible needs no explanation. The poor Negro feels the same sweetness in the Psalm as the English lord. All find what they need there, the simple as well as the educated man, because the Bible speaks to the human heart, and because the heart is the same in all men. Man’s sufferings and joys are always the same.
“The Bible is therefore the mirror of the human soul, and that is why the Bible has triumphed even at the time when the temples of religion began to tremble. You can fight doctrines, but you cannot fight the Bible. The attempts that were made against the Bible at the time of crazy radicalism have ended in bankruptcy. The cynical and foolish wisdom of a Voltaire against the Bible has long since lost its last word. All layers of criticism will be forgotten, but the Bible will remain what it was. The world is disillusioned with unbelief and dry scientific materialism. The better classes of civilized countries are seeking refreshment for the soul, a higher sense of faith in the highest sense of the word, and are therefore returning to the Bible. The future of the Bible is great, its influence on the world has been renewed. From the ancient mountains of Judea the voice of the divine prophets can be heard among all the children of men — these are the happy and proud thoughts that occur to a Jew in view of the seven million Bibles that were sold last year.
“But there is another thought, and it is not a happy one, namely this: The whole world is returning to the Bible, all mankind is seeking instruction from our source, and we ourselves are far removed from it. Our Bible is as foreign to us as if we had no connection with it at all. How many Jews read the Bible? How many of our youth approach this book from which we draw our strength to this day? Where can we point to Jewish societies for spreading the Bible among ourselves? Where are our Jewish students who read the Bible and spread it, as one finds such among the Christian youth? Jewish young people are the greatest followers of Gorky and Mäterlinck, but there are no followers of the Bible among them. Few are the Jewish homes in which one hears the voice of the Bible in any language. It is certain that we read our Bible much less than the Christians. How can we justify this disgrace? Even those who teach their children Hebrew exchange the Bible for other textbooks, with the excuse that the Bible is not an educational book. But there is no better educational book than this eternal book. It has educated a people who have fought with a whole world and yet have remained alive. Learn the Bible with your children, however small they may be! Make this book the comrade of youth! For our whole past is built on this book, and on it rests all our hope.” So far the lament of the Jewish newspaper.
With such ignorance, it is no wonder that things happen publicly among the poor Jews here that would make a Christian’s heart break with sorrow. On the Jewish New Year, on which the annual penitential season of the Jews begins, you can see whole crowds of Jews in New York on the bridges and on the banks of the East River, who, after carefully taking out their money, turn their pockets inside out and, with murmurs of prayer, pour their sins out of their pockets into the water, misusing the prophetic passage Micah 7:19: “He will have mercy on us again, and will subdue our iniquities, and will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.” — Finally, if we consider how the great mass of nominal Christians behave so heartlessly and spitefully towards the Jews instead of winning them over with pity, and what a difficult position every proselyte has who professes to belong to the Christian Church, both among the Jews, who curse him as an apostate, and among the Christians, who do not really trust him and rarely help his earthly progress, we should not be surprised that Jewish conversions are so rare.
Nevertheless, the Lord also has his chosen ones among them, and he has opened a great door for our mission among them. In the district where our mission is located, the Jews debate in the streets about the truths they have heard; our missionary is overrun by Jews who ask him questions; he is invited into Jewish houses where he holds talks with many; many Bibles and tracts are sought after and read. Our missionary has his hands full with work and carries it out undauntedly and with great faithfulness. There are also always individual souls who receive thorough baptism instruction and are baptized after being examined by the mission commission. At the moment, another young lady is undergoing such instruction. Now it is our Lord Christ’s gracious will to gather His flock from Jews and Gentiles. He has also promised that at all times a remnant of the Jews will be saved. [Romans 9:27, 11:5] He has opened the door to the Jews for us and given us a suitable missionary for this mission. Our mission to the Jews is actually the cheapest of all the missions we carry out. Only crumbs from the collections of our congregations are needed for it to exist. Of course, if even these crumbs are refused, then our Jewish mission must eventually die of hunger. Let us also pray diligently for our Jewish mission, then the crumbs will follow of their own accord, and then God’s blessing and success will follow, which is the most important thing! P. R.
The following appears in Concordia Publishing House’s Magazin für ev.-luth. Homiletik und Pastoraltheologie [Magazine for Evangelical Lutheran Homiletics and Pastoral Theology], Volume 43 (1919) pages 91-96.
Mission Lectures.
Preliminary Remark. This year the “Magazine” will bring a series of mission lectures. These lectures will deal with missions in general and especially with the missions of our Synod. We expect the participation of one member from each of the mission authorities concerned. These lectures are intended not only for mission festivals, but also for a monthly or bimonthly mission service, which has been successfully introduced in some places, as well as for association meetings, where a lecture can be read. May these lectures serve to increase the missionary spirit in our congregations!
1.
Mission lecture on Africa.
Ethiopia [Mohrenland][1] shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. Ps. 68:31.
Moorland is the land where the Moors live. By the Moors we mean the black inhabitants of Africa, the Negroes. They will stretch out their hands to God, says David Ps. 68:31, that is, they will call upon the true God. This occurs through mission work. For “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent?” Rom. 10:14-15. Now we shall hear a lecture about the mission work in Africa.
Africa is the second largest continent. It has an area of nearly 12 million square miles. Its greatest width is about 4500 miles and its greatest length is about 5000 miles. The black population is estimated at 140 million. This numerous people is divided into three large groups: the Negroes proper (Negritians[2]), the Bantu Negroes[3], who are considered to be mongrels of Negritians and other peoples, and the Hamites. These three great groups divide again into peoples and tribes, which are almost innumerable, and have just such differences as the various peoples of the Caucasian race. They have different political, social, and commercial institutions. The languages are also different. In the whole of Africa more than 800 different languages and dialects are spoken. But despite the many differences, fundamental similarities are found. For example, among all the Negro peoples of Africa, polygamy, slavery, sorcery, and the evils associated with them are found.
Africa is usually called the dark continent. This continent was practically unknown to the Europeans. Only the northeastern part and the thin strips along the coasts were known to them. It was only in the last century that Livingstone, Stanley and other bold travelers explored the interior of the dark continent.
Africa is also dark with regards to the culture of its dark inhabitants. The blacks are culture-poor savages who live in small huts, roam almost naked over the lonely steppe or through the dense jungle and can neither read nor write.
Africa is also dark with regard to the morals of its black inhabitants. There are people who chatter about the paradisaical innocence and childlike bliss in which such uncultured, missionless peoples supposedly live. Such chatterers should simply travel to the savages in Africa and live among them for a while. There a gruesome nightmare would reveal itself to their eyes. Everywhere they would see, for example, cruelty. The Negroes are cruel by nature. Human sacrifice, murder of twins with their mother, and other inhuman abominations flourish among them. Twins and children afflicted with abnormalities are regarded as omens of misfortune. Among these are reckoned, for example, also the poor creatures in whom instead of the lower incisors the upper incisors appear first. Out of superstitious fear, these children are either killed immediately after birth, or they are abandoned in the bush and eaten there by hyenas or other animals. The Negro child never experiences motherly love as we know it. Missionary G. A. Schmidt, who works among the Negroes in the Black Belt of Alabama, recently wrote that the parents of our school children at Rosebud, Ala. were invited to visit the school on a certain day, and there, among other things, he said in his speech that the children should show their parents with words and deeds that they love and value them. On his way out of the school he heard one of the negro mothers say, “Dat chile better not come messin’ ‘round me!” That is, her child should not kiss and caress her. That is the Negro way. A Frenchman in Africa writes: “We lived among them for several years and never saw a mother embrace her child.”
The Negro is by nature careless, sluggish, and lazy. And here, too, the saying applies, “Idleness is the beginning of all vice.” Fornication, thievery, lying are thus the chief vices of the black. His passions are strong and he lacks self-control. He is a descendant of Ham. Polygamy is the rule. It is well known that the Negroes in our country are extremely thieving and lying. This is an evil inheritance from African paganism. Paganism makes people thieves and liars. Again and again one hears the complaint of the missionaries about the unspeakable dishonesty of the Africans. They do not consider lying as something dishonorable, but treasure it as a skill. The consequence of this is mutual distrust of all towards each other.
Africa is also dark with regard to the religion of the natives. Here the word of the prophet is quite true: “Behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people!” [Isaiah 60:2] The Negro is undeniably strongly disposed toward religion; but his religion is blind, crass, dark paganism. It is true that he still has an inkling and conception of a supreme being; but this is indefinite. He has no fear, love or trust in the supreme being. Instead of worship [Gottesdienst], the Africans serve spirits [Geisterdienst]. Animism is their religion. Animism means belief in spirits, worship of spirits. The Negroes believe in the survival of the soul after death. In their opinion, the spirits of the deceased are powerful, greedy, harsh and tyrannical. They demand homage and care from the living and take revenge for any neglect by bringing misfortune, illness and death. Therefore, one seeks to make them favorable through praise, invocation, and especially sacrifice. Thus, the belief in ghosts brings about fear and anxiety. The superstitious black also seeks, outside of sacrifices, other means of protection against the wrath of the spirits. He acquires these means from a shaman or witch doctor.
Besides the ideas about the soul after death, their ideas about life forces play an important role. In the opinion of the Negro, life forces reside in the blood, but also in other parts of the body, in the hair, the nails, and the saliva of people. The heathen is now anxious not only to preserve his life forces for himself, but also to increase them by stealing them from others. This is actually the basis of cannibalism, the man-eating, which is still not extinct. Especially in earlier times, one would drink the blood of slain enemies and ate their flesh. This is not done for the sake of enjoyment, but it is a matter of the life forces of the slain, which one wants to appropriate; for he who eats another’s flesh makes his life forces his own. Also with the saliva, the cut hair and nails life forces go out of the body. Therefore, the black man is extremely careful with these things–he hides the cut nails and hairs, because if someone else were to find them and appropriate them, he would take from his life forces and gain control over him.
This animism is the mother of fetishism. The word fetish comes from the Portuguese language and signifies a magical object. The fetish is used in approximately the following manner: The Negro looks for a means of defense against the misfortune which the bad ghosts or also bad people–witch masters–always want to do to him. Such means of protection are provided by the fetish priest, who is paid handsomely for it. The Negro believes that the magic doctor can banish spirits into any object–tree, stone, bone, feathers, rags–and that such magic objects or fetishes serve to make the buyer or owner invulnerable, to protect him from illness or to cure him of it. He puts his trust in these fetishes; from them he expects protection, help, and assistance against the evil spirits and evil people; they are his gods. What sinister superstition! What poor, blind heathens! They are in fear all their lives. They sink into the grave without ever having a ray of true joy and Christian hope illuminate their dark lives. Must you not sing and say:
The poor heathen have my sympathy; How deep their woe and sin! O God, behold their misery! Their soul is dead within.
They worship idols deaf and blind, They bow to wood and stone, Not knowing in their darkened mind That Thou art God alone.
Nor do they know the Lamb that bore Our burden lest we die; Their heart is wretched to the core, Beneath a curse they lie.[4]
The plight of the poor African pagans touched the hearts of Christians in Europe and America, and they sent missionaries to them. The first messengers of the Gospel arrived in 1736, but they were few in number. Around the year 1875 the real missionary period for the dark continent first began. Today, about 118 different missionary associations and church communities are carrying out the work of salvation among the blacks. Our dear synod, however, is not represented among them.
Despite the mentioned number of missionary associations and church communities with missions in Africa, the number of workers is still much, much too small. In the Belgian Congo, there are 60 zones of 10,000 square miles each without a Christian missionary. In Sudan, there are 200 zones of 10,000 square miles each that do not yet have a missionary station. In all of Africa, there are 500 zones of 10,000 square miles that are still waiting for the messengers of the gospel of Christ. One can travel 300, 500, even 1000 miles in places without meeting a Christian missionary.
The Lord has blessed and continues to bless the holy saving work of the mission in Africa. At present there are about 1,750,000 Negro Christians in Africa who have been brought to Christ their Savior by Protestant missionaries; of this number about 155,000 are Lutheran Negro Christians.
Admittedly, the life of the Negro Christians in general still leaves much to be desired. It must be remembered that their people have been imprisoned by the powers of darkness for thousands of years. And yet, even here the gospel of Christ shows its sanctifying power. Here is an example. At a mission station in Namaland[5], the Holy Communion was to be celebrated. All those who wanted to participate had to register personally with the missionary. On the day of registration, a Nama youth entered the study room and declared that he would like to come to the table of the Lord, but that he did not have the right peace of mind. Asked to explain himself, he said: “A few weeks ago, my father refused me shooting supplies while he gave them to my brother; I did not quarrel with my father, but I angrily left him. Now I would gladly go to Holy Communion, but since my father lives fourteen hours from here, I cannot ask his forgiveness beforehand.” The father was still a pagan; for this very reason the missionary decided that the youth should not go now [to communion], but only the next time, after he had been completely reconciled with his father. Without a word to the contrary, the youth left the mission house. Not twice twenty-four hours had passed–the missionary was just about to ring the bell for the beginning of the Holy Communion–when the youth, still quite out of breath, came before him with his sister and reported, “I have been to see my father, have reconciled with him, and bring with me as a witness my sister, who also wants to partake of Holy Communion.” From Friday to Sunday, the Nama youth had made a way of twice fourteen hours in the desolate country–is not this obedience to Jesus’ word and desire for His table?
And now an example that shows how Negro Christians patiently suffer and die blessedly. Martha Gotywa was the daughter of the pious helper Jakob Gotywa from Wartburg Station in Kaffir Land[6]. As she grew up, she developed with a chest ailment. She was to be confirmed. She had just attended confirmation classes for a few months when she lay down on the sick bed. Her sickbed lasted for twelve months, during which time she learned patience and faith in the midst of much pain. At first it was very difficult for her to penetrate to a joyful faith. She often told the visiting missionary Hoppe that she loved the Savior, but she was uncertain where her soul would go, whether to heaven or hell. Finally, on the morning of the day of her death, she asked along with the request to visit her to tell her pastor that the Lord had given her light. The missionary ordered his servant to bring him his horse; since the horse could not be found, he set out on foot. He found the sick woman still conscious. But she felt that her end was approaching, and after the conversation she asked the missionary to give her Holy Communion. Hoppe hurried home again to fetch the sacred implements. In the meantime the horse had been found, so that Hoppe could now quickly get back to the sick woman. In the meantime, many Christians had gathered for the holy celebration. Martha was now confirmed and received Holy Communion. The celebration had just ended, the missionary had taken leave of Martha and mounted the horse, when the little girl passed away with the words: “It is finished!” What a blessed death!
Dear friends of the mission! Let us pray diligently to the Lord of the harvest to send more messengers of peace to the dark heathen land of Africa, so that more and more poor blacks may come to know our God and Savior, stretch out their hands to him in life and in death, and be blessed here temporally and there eternally. For whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be blessed.
C. F. Drewes.
[1] The German word Mohr ‘Moor’ was used more generally in German to refer to all Africans or Negroes, unlike in English where the term refers more specifically to the Mohammedan Africans of the Mediterranean region.
Rev. Dr. Wilhelm Sihler, (1801-1885). Third Pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran, Fort Wayne, Founder of the Fort Wayne Seminary, Founding Vice-President of the Missouri Synod, and President of the Ohio and Indiana District.
This article was published by C. F. W. Walther in Der Lutheraner Volume 19.
Slavery Considered in the Light of Holy Scripture.[1][2]
(Submitted by Prof. Dr. Sihler.)
[Volume 19, St. Louis, Mon. February 1, 1863, No. 12.]
A Christian is a person whose heart and conscience are bound solely and exclusively by what God’s Word, or Holy Scripture, says. Whatever is contrary to the holy ten commandments, with which the natural or moral law written by God in the heart of all people also agrees, that is sinful, criminal and condemnable to him. And it is all the same to him, how the mass of the unbelievers regards it and perhaps lifts up to heaven what he, according to God’s word, must reject and cast down to hell.
Again, what God does not forbid in his law, but puts into the use of his Christian freedom, that is no sin to him, even if a large number of selfish, unbelieving idolaters of the human spirit, even under the pretense of love, reject and repudiate it with hatred and disgust. We now want to apply this principle, which is an undeniably correct principle for all those who want to be Christians, to slavery, and investigate from God’s Word how it applies and especially whether it is a sin to keep slaves; for it could easily be the case that some newer readers of this publication do not have a conscience sufficiently informed by God’s word; and therefore they are in danger of being misled and confused by the clamor of abolitionist fanatics, who try to spread their delusion as far as possible and to persuade others as if slavery were against Christianity or even contrary to a sound legal state of the civil community. If only this were abolished and, where possible, all slaves were immediately set free — thus they proceed in their ravings — then it could not fail that the citizens of the United States would be blissful people as heroes of humanity and benefactors of mankind, and would bring back the golden age and restore the lost paradise.
From which spirit such delusion originates, we will see later, after we have recognized the truth from God’s word. It is obvious from Holy Scripture that through the deception and seduction of the devil our first parents in paradise and all of us in them have fallen from faith and obedience to God into unbelief and disobedience to God and thus have become servants and slaves of the devil. That is why Christ calls him the strong and armed one,[3] even the prince of this world[4], i.e. of the children of unbelief; and this is the real actual bondage and slavery in which all men as sinners from their mother’s womb (Ps. 51[5]) are imprisoned, be they, according to their outward nature and worldly position, superiors or inferiors, free or slaves. We are all, in our inherited sin and its constant manifestations in real sins, from the inward conscious impulse to the grossest outbreak in deed, miserable, will-less slaves of the devil, whom this tyrant leads captive either by the bonds of mammon-service, ambition, worldly lusts, or by the subtle sins of conceitedness, self-righteousness, and sanctimoniousness; and according to his will, are on the broad path that leads to damnation.
And if the strongest had not overcome the strong, if the seed of the woman had not crushed the serpent’s head, if the Son of God had not destroyed the works of the devil by paying our debt on the cursed wood of the cross as the Son of God and Mary and suffering our punishment of death, and by virtue of his resurrection had set free the children of death and freed the slaves of the devil: we, the children of Adam, would all have remained in this miserable and terrible captivity and bondage, and would have nothing to await after temporal death, the wages of sin, but the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
It is therefore without any contradiction that we all, according to God’s Word, in Adam, as children of wrath by nature, are all also slaves of the devil, but in Christ we are all saved from the wrath of God and redeemed from the terrible spiritual bondage under the tyranny of the devil.
But if both are equally true according to the nature of sin and grace, it is a small thing that God, within this standing contrast, according to his holy punitive justice, has also from time immemorial, just as He has imposed poverty, famine, sword, and pestilence, also imposed temporal bondage and slavery on certain people, although the particular sins that caused God to impose this special punishment are not known to us everywhere. Indeed, according to God’s wonderful ways with mankind, He often lets those bear the consequences of sin whose personal sin is not punished by it. (Joh. 9:1-3[6]) For even the hardest servitude, in which a person is subjected with his body to the will of the master who owns him as property, cannot be compared to the fact that he has stolen himself from his rightful owner, God, and sold himself to sin and the devil, Rom. 7:14[7]; but then God, by virtue of the redemption in Christ, has no other purpose in these temporal punishments than to lead the bonded prisoner to repentance and to reveal to him his dear Son as his Savior, so that he may be redeemed from the power of sin and the devil through the true faith of the Gospel and become truly free and a dear child of God, even if he also has to remain in the state of servanthood, since he is not allowed to dispose of his person according to his will, and is even a saleable commodity. Again, what special advantage have the freemen, if they conduct their rule over their servants and slaves whether in a more patriarchal[8] or in a more despotic way, if they remain unbelievers and after this short temporal rule the saying of the Lord of all lords resounds against them: “Bind their hands and feet and throw them out into the outer darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”? [Matthew 22:13[9]]
After these introductory and fundamental truths, we will now proceed to the matter itself, and first deal with the cause of bodily slavery, which alone is sin. First of all we find the important passage Gen. 9:25-27[10], in which the holy patriarch Noah, after he had found out about his mockery by his son Ham, pronounced, by the stimulus of God, the following curse against Ham’s son Canaan (who had undoubtedly participated in the gross sin of his father against Noah) and his descendants: “Cursed be Canaan and a servant of all servants among his brothers. And said further, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant. God spread out Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant.”
From the first verse of this passage and from the concluding words of the two following verses, it now becomes irrefutably clear that God, after His righteous judgment through Noah’s mouth, visited the sin of Ham and Canaan on their Descendants by continuous, servile bondage or slavery under the descendants of Shem and Japheth. But that this curse did not break out of a carnal anger of Noah and did not fade away without a trace in the air, is clear from the history of the later time. For those Canaanites, who (contrary to God’s commandment, Deut. 20:17[11]) were not exterminated by Israel (Shem’s descendants) with the edge of the sword, but were spared out of selfishness, and were consigned by the victors and conquerors of the land, as we see from Jos. 16:10 and 17:13[12], to perpetual serfdom and servitude. But the Canaanites, who lived in Gibeon and were known to have deceived Israel through a fraudulent covenant, received the following harsh sentence from Joshua’s mouth, Jos. 9:23: “Therefore you shall be cursed, so that there shall not cease from among you servants who cut wood and carry water to the house of my God.”[13]
But as God remembers mercy in the midst of wrath, these Gibeonites who had been made slaves and those other Cananites had access to his word opened to them through their dwelling among Israel, so that after they had repentantly recognized their sins in the Law of Moses, they could become righteous before God through the gospel and through faith in the promised seed of Abraham, our Lord Christ, and thus truly free from the dominion of sin.
Another passage, which also proves that within the general, spiritual slavery of all natural men under the dominion of sin and the devil, bodily slavery is a temporal judgment of God against sin, similar to famine, sword, and pestilence and other plagues, is Deut. 28:68[14], which reads thus: “And the LORD shall bring you again into Egypt with ships full, by the way of which I said, thou shalt see it no more (cf. 17:16[15]). And there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondmaids, and there shall be no buyer.”
This threatening word of the Lord by Moses’ mouth is one of many others, which he directs in this chapter (verses 15-69[16]) against his own covenant people, if they would not obey his voice and would not keep his commandments and laws. And also this threat of God has been fulfilled in later times; because in the ships of the Sydonians and Tyrians after the destruction of Jerusalem Jewish slaves bought by the Babylonians were brought to Egypt for sale.
A third passage of a similar nature is found in the prophet Jeremiah, 5:19 and 17:4[17], where it reads: “As you have forsaken me and served foreign gods in your own land, so you shall serve strangers in a land that is not yours; and you (Israel) shall be cast out of your inheritance which I have given you, and will make you servants of your enemies in a land which you do not know; for you have kindled a fire of my wrath which will burn forever.”
From this it is obvious that especially because of the apostasy and idolatry, which naturally resulted in a multitude of gross transgressions of the second table, the children of Israel in the kingdom of Judah were led into captivity and slavery in Babylon before and after the destruction of Jerusalem. But since among these there were also those who sat by the waters of Babylon and wept when they remembered Zion (Ps. 137:1[18]), the gracious and merciful God comforted these shattered hearts and terrified consciences through the prophet Ezekiel with the promise of the Messiah; and as from God’s own mouth, the prophet was to say to them (33:11[19]): “As surely as I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his ways and live.”
But it was quite different and much worse for the people of Israel about 600 years later, after they had not only crucified the Lord of glory and killed the Prince of life, but also for the most part rejected the gracious gospel for about 40 years in malicious unbelief. For after the second destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., many thousands of Jews, prisoners of war, were sold into slavery at a ridiculous price and scattered among all nations without prophets, without consolation, and under the judgment of blindness and hardening,[20] as it still stands today; for only a few individuals, “the elect of grace,” have been saved through the centuries by the gospel in the Christian church.
Thus we should have seen from God’s word that slavery, i.e. the state in which a man is another’s according to body and possessions, and thus is deprived of his personal freedom with regard to the disposal of his person and the choice of his employment, is indeed a consequence of sin and a peculiar manifestation of God’s punitive justice. But there is no essential difference between it and other punishments of God, as, for example, deformity, poverty, famine, and other plagues; yes, compared, for example, with epidemics, wars, volcanic eruptions, strong earthquakes, where many people are often dragged into eternal damnation by a quick evil death, slavery appears as a milder punishment of God. And this is especially the case where the slaves are within the Christian church and under the sound of the gospel, and truly even the Negro slaves brought here are much better off than if they had fallen at home in the bloody feuds of their tribes or had been sacrificed as prisoners of war to the gods of the victors or had become more and more spiritually rotten in their own idolatry as slaves of the devil.
We now proceed to prove from God’s Word, namely the Holy Scriptures, that nowhere, neither in the Old nor in the New Testament, does it forbid or even disapprove slavery or, more precisely, the owning and keeping of slaves or bonded servants.
Thus we read that the Lord God speaks to the children of Israel through Moses (Lev. 25:44-46[21]): “If you want to have bonded servants and maids, then you shall buy them from the heathen who are around you, from the sojourners who are strangers among you and from their descendants whom they beget in your land; these you shall have for your own and you shall possess them, and your children after you for property for ever, they shall be your bonded servants.” Over these the masters were also granted a stricter regiment than over impoverished tribesmen and fellow believers who had sold themselves as servants to their debtors.
For when God says in regard to these, “But over your brethren the children of Israel none shall rule with severity,” it is evident from this that this was permitted to the lords over their bond servants to a greater extent, whether they had come into their power by purchase or captivity in war, or had been born in their houses. For most of them, namely those of Canaan’s lineage, who remained later among Israel, as e.g. the Gebeonites, were actually to be “banished,” that is, cursed with eradication and completely exterminated, as wicked idolaters and perpetrators of shameful immoral abominations (Lev. 18[22]) according to God’s strict judgment during the conquering of the land of the Lord. If, however, some of them remained among Israel, because Israel was too negligent and not zealous enough to execute God’s judgments on them, it was only in accordance with God’s justice that their lot as slaves was harsher than that of the Israelite servants; for these [latter], whom the debtor was not allowed to treat as serfs, nor to sell, were to rejoin their family and their fathers’ possessions in the seventh year, Lev. 25:39-43[23]; Ex. 21:2[24].
Furthermore, when the Lord forbids, Exodus 20:17[25], “Do not lust after your neighbor’s manservant or maidservant,” He confirms the rightful ownership of them. But God could not possibly have done this if the possession of sold, bonded servants and maids were sinful in itself. Likewise, Holy Scripture describes the ownership of servants and maids, that is, of slaves in bondage, as a blessing from the Lord. For thus Eliezer, the suitor for Isaac, speaks to Rebekah’s parents and her brother Laban, Genesis 24:35[26]: “And the Lord hath blessed my lord abundantly, and waxed great, and hath given him sheep, and oxen, and silver, and gold, and menservants, and maidservants, and camels, and asses.” And the same is reported of Jacob, (Gen. 30:43[27]) and of Job (1:3[28]).
Among other earthly goods, the godly patriarchs also possessed servants and maids as a blessing from the Lord and as part of their earthly blessings. But none of them is said to have had a bad conscience about the legitimacy of this possession and property and to have freed his servants and maids. Rather, we learn that these faithful fathers, who certainly had the Holy Spirit in them, also considered the children of these servants and maids as their rightful property; for it is expressly reported about Abraham in Genesis 14:14[29] that he had 318 servants who were born in his house. And these he armed, when he pursued with this small group in bold courage of faith Kedor Laomor, the king of Elam, and his three allied kings from the Orient, in order to rescue Lot and his children from him, which he also succeeded in doing.
But someone might raise the objection: in the household governance of the old covenant, legal discipline prevailed, and there, however, the fathers, as later their descendants, the people of Israel, found slavery as an existing thing and used it without hesitation. Also, in antiquity, as an existing institution, there had been no free day laborers and hirelings, who, after free self-determination and disposal of their person, served sometimes this, sometimes that master according to the pleasure of their will. But in the household of the new covenant, in the Christian church, things are different; there the gospel and Christian love rule; and it is strictly contrary to this that one man is the slave, the saleable bondservant of another, and that the latter has the power and strength to use the bodily strength of his slave for his own advantage for any unsinful service he desires. God is said to have created all men; before Him all are equal, also Christ redeemed all men and acquired the same freedom for all.
We intend also to answer especially this objection later. For now it suffices to prove that in the New Testament itself, Christians are by no means forbidden to keep slaves and to make use of this institution and civil order handed down from paganism and Judaism, according to Christian freedom; For since it is not sinful in and of itself and is not contrary to God’s commandment, neither Christ’s nor his apostles’ mouths censure or disapprove of it, however, the Lord punishes usury and overcharging as sins against love, which not a few abolitionist Sabbatarians practice with the greatest zeal; These holy people even help to equip and dispatch slave ships in order to smuggle slaves from the African coast to America, against the civil law of their own country, while at the same time they agitate for the quickest possible release of the existing slaves. No! Not slavery as a human institution, but only the sinful abuse, which is attached to it in many ways and of course always in conflict with love, receives due censure, especially in the New Testament.
The following are the testimonies in which the Holy Spirit not only does not disapprove of the existence of slavery (let alone urges its immediate abolition), but recognizes and accepts the slave’s calling to service as unsinful: in 1 Tim. 6:1[30], St. Paul writes to Timothy: “The servants who are under the yoke should hold their masters in high esteem, so that the name of God and the doctrine be not blasphemed.”
If slavery were against the gospel and bodily bondage against the spiritual freedom of a Christian, the apostle could not have written these words. Rather, he would have had to make it a matter of conscience for the converted slaves to break the yoke, even by violent self-help and rebellion, if secret escape were impossible. Therefore, in 1525, the Anabaptist rebel, Thomas Münzer, acted thus who incited the Thuringian serf-peasants to revolt against their bodily masters, having previously confused their minds with false unevangelical teaching. For he taught them to despise spiritual freedom, whereby Christ had freed them from the yoke of the law in order to become righteous before God by His works, as well as from all human statutes and commandments, and exchange this for bodily freedom; and so it happened that, against love, they gave place to the flesh, revolted against their bodily masters, burned their castles, plundered their possessions, and murdered the defenseless; And by this they proved that they were indeed servants of corruption and slaves of the devil, but not such people who, through true faith in Christ, were truly freed from that yoke and from the dominion of sin and the devil, and enjoyed freedom of the children of God in the midst of the servitude of the saints. Luther also writes about this in his “Refutation of the 12th Articles of the Peasants,” regarding the 3rd Article:
“There is to be no serf because Christ has redeemed us all? What is this? This would be to make Christian liberty into liberty of the flesh. Did not Abraham and other patriarchs and prophets own serfs? Read what St. Paul has to say about servants, who at that time were all in bondage. Therefore this article is directly opposed to the Gospel and it is rapacious, for everyone who is a bondman to remove himself from his master. A bondman can very well be a Christian and have Christian freedom, just as a prisoner or sick person can be a Christian, but yet is not free. This article proposes to make all men equal, and turn the spiritual kingdom of Christ into a worldly one, which is impossible. For a worldly kingdom cannot exist where there is no class distinction, where some are free, some are prisoners, some are masters, and some are vassals, etc.” (Luther’s Works by Walch, Vol. 16, pp. 85 ff.) Thus St. Paul and Thomas Münzer, together with his kindred abolitionist spirits of more recent times, of English and German tongue, have nothing to do with each other. These speak out of the enthusiastic spirit, in which the murderer and liar has played his part from the beginning, even if he disguises himself here as an angel of light. St. Paul, however, speaks from the Holy Spirit, which, as we know, is the spirit of true Christian love, peace, and wholesome order. Out of this Spirit, in 1 Tim. 6:1 he admonishes the believing slaves that they should “hold worthy of all esteem” even their unbelieving and heathen masters — for only in the following verse does he speak of their behavior toward their believing masters — and indeed for the sake of the fourth commandment and godly order, according to which it pleases the Lord to make them slaves and to make those unbelievers their bodily masters; For it was precisely in such a relationship of service that they had the best opportunity to exercise faith through love and, through their willing and joyful obedience, meekness, humility and patience, to let the glory of the gospel of Christ, which so miraculously transforms and renews the heart and will through faith, shine powerfully, as it were, as a silent sermon and a speaking testimony to their unbelieving masters. And there is no doubt that many of these masters, when they saw the godly conduct of their slaves after their conversion, while they had been lazy, thieving, unfaithful, etc. before, were won to the gospel.
Similarly, St. Peter writes about believing wives who had unbelieving husbands that they should be subject to them, so that those who did not believe in the word would be won over by the wives’ conduct without the word, when they saw their chaste conduct in fear. 1 Peter 3:1-2[31].
So St. Paul admonishes the believing slaves therefore also to hold their unbelieving masters in honor, “lest the name of God and the doctrine be blasphemed.” This would undeniably have been done by the pagan masters if their Christian slaves had acted against them according to the flesh, had demanded their bodily freedom from them and, in case of refusal, had run away or, under the pretense of Christian freedom, had withdrawn from them the obedience owed or had even revolted against them with an armed hand and open violence in order to gain their bodily freedom. Of course, the pagan masters, who were uninformed about the nature of the Gospel, would have blamed the Christian doctrine for such an impudent undertaking and sacrilegious start of their slaves, and would have blasphemed it as a source of all disorder and disobedience, even of rebellion and outrage, and would have profaned the name of Christ as the head of the rebels; for before their slaves had heard this new doctrine, their malice would never have broken out so defiantly as to demand their liberty as a right now due to them.
In a similar way — for it is the same Holy Spirit who speaks through all the apostles — St. Peter also writes, 1 Peter 2:18-21[32]: “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. For even hereunto were ye called.”
This exhortation also contains the exact opposite of what the old Anabaptists incited the serf-peasants to do and what the newer abolitionists incite the slaves to do. Yes St. Peter intensifies the already stated admonition of his fellow apostle; for he admonishes the believing slaves that they should be submissive and obedient to their heathen masters not only out of grateful love for their goodness and leniency, but that they should show the same submissiveness “with all fear” and reverence also to the “strange,” that is, the bad and perverse masters, for whom they could do nothing right and who ruled over them with severity; For this is grace and pleasing to God, and also entails the reward of grace, if they, in order not to sin through impatience and disobedience against God and against the conscience enlightened and sharpened by the gospel and faith, bear the evil, that is harsh words and blows, and suffer the injustice; for to suffer for iniquity, as rightly befalls the disobedient and insubordinate slaves, is a punishment justly inflicted and truly no glory.
If, however, they endured all sorts of things from their “strange” masters while being faithful to their service, this is grace from God, for this is what they were called to do; and Peter goes on to paint their Lord and Savior before the faithful slaves as a model of sanctification, that they not only confess him with their mouths, but also follow him in deeds and suffering. Furthermore every Christian, and therefore also every believing slave, is called not only to do good, but also to suffer evil from the one who benefits from his good deeds, namely his physical master.
Similarly, St. Paul (Titus 2:9-10[33]) admonishes the believing slaves “to be submissive to their own masters, to please them will in all things, not answering again; not to purloin, but to show all good fidelity;” and as above he had admonished them (in 1 Timothy 6:1) against dishonorable behavior toward their heathen masters, “that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed,” likewise here he exhorts them to the same Christian virtues, “that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in all things.” But in Col. 3:22-24[34] his words to the believing slaves read thus: “Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh (be they heathens or Christians); not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God. And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ. But he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he had done: and there is no respect of persons.”
Precisely these two last verses are very important in this admonition of the Apostle. For, after they had been redeemed from the slavery of sin and the devil through faith in Jesus Christ and had attained to the blessed freedom of the children of God, he is far from declaring their continuing slavery to heathen masters as something shameful and unworthy of their present spiritual nobility. Rather, he calls their present slave service, which is sanctified by faith in Jesus Christ and performed in Christian love for their masters, even if they are pagans, a service to God [Gottesdienst]. Likewise, it does not occur to St. Paul to hold out to or place in view of the believing slaves the prospect of the quickest possible liberation from bodily bondage as a necessary or urgently desirable good for those who have become spiritually free. Rather, he opens the prospect of heaven for them and testifies, as from the mouth of the Lord, that after their faithful service on earth they would receive a glorious reward and recompense in heaven, and even inherit the Kingdom of Glory. On the other hand, he also threatens them with the judgment of God if they do “wrong” against faith and conscience, including trying to attain their bodily freedom by sinful means.
In all these passages, interpreted according to the word, there is not even the slightest hint that even the slavery of Christians under pagan masters is something contrary to the gospel and spiritual freedom. Rather, St. Paul writes, 1 Cor. 7:22[35]: “He that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman.” But the apostle is just as far from making it a matter of conscience for Christian slaves to remain in the state of slavery. Indeed, he says in vv. 20-21 in general: “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou called being a servant? care not for it,” that is, do not be troubled with thoughts as if you could not be a righteous Christian, serve God, and please the Lord even as a slave. But then he adds: “But if you can become free (that is, by honest and sincere means, that someone buys you out or that your master releases you out of favor), then much rather do that,” do not let the permitted opportunity pass by unused.
But now, another point is to be considered according to God’s word, namely, what the relationship of converted slaves to their believing masters was to be and whether they could claim their bodily release from them as an act of their brotherly love. There is no trace of this in the New Testament either. Rather, St. Paul writes about the behavior of believing slaves towards their Christian masters, (1 Tim. 6:2[36]) thus: “And they that have believing masters, should not despise them with the pretense that they, [namely the servants] are the [spiritual] brothers of their masters,” so that through the same faith in Christ and the same sonship of God they are equal to them before God; “but rather do them service, (that is, perform their service all the more faithfully and willingly), because they (the servants) are faithful and beloved (by God, and by their physical Christian masters) and are partakers of the benefit (of salvation and spiritual deliverance from the dominion of sin through the gospel).”
Therefore in all these admonitions, especially those of the apostle Paul, about how the believing slaves should behave towards their pagan or Christian masters, there is not the slightest hint that their spiritual redemption by Christ from the slavery of sin and the devil brings immediate physical liberation with it. Rather, St. Paul always keeps bodily and spiritual freedom sharply apart as two completely different areas, while the enthusiasts of older and newer times confuse the two. According to his view, that is, according to the truth of God, the matter always stands thus: “He that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ’s servant.” 1 Cor. 7:22[37].
The apostle Paul confirms his teaching and admonition by his own actions. There was an unbelieving slave named Onesimus who had come to Rome after he had escaped from a believing slave owner named Philemon in Colossae, who had been converted by Paul earlier. There he was converted to faith in the Lord Christ through the preaching of St. Paul, “[who] dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came in unto him” (Acts 28:30[38]) to hear the word of God, and thus became spiritually free. What does the apostle do? If he had been a righteous Anabaptist or abolitionist preacher, he would have declared Onesimus bodily free right away, or made it a matter of conscience for Philemon to leave Onesimus bodily free; then he would have considered it contrary to the gospel, shameful and unworthy for one believer to be the slave of another; after all, they had both put on Christ and were both God’s children; and there would be “neither bond nor free.” (Gal. 3:25[39]) St. Paul did not do so, but even though the converted Onesimus, did and could do all kinds of services of love for him, and even though his master, Philemon, was freed by the apostle from the slavery of sin and the devil, and was bound to grateful love in return, he still sent Onesimus back to his master with a letter imbued with the sweetness of the evangelical spirit and Christian love. And also in this his own handwritten letter, in which he commends this “my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds, my own heart,” to Philemon’s heart for loving acceptance and forgiveness for his escape — also in this letter there is not contained the slightest hint to set this slave free bodily, who was indeed now at the same time “above a servant, a beloved brother” (namely his, Philemon’s). And surely Onesimus, as a Christian, as one anointed by the Holy Spirit and enlightened by God’s Word, would have known how to use his physical freedom for the glory of God and the benefit of mankind; and it would have been much different than if now, for example, a southern planter, seduced by abolitionist heresy in pamphlets and sentimental novels, had set free unconverted slaves, who until then could only be kept in outward obedience by coercion and fear of punishment. And is it not so that the runaway slaves to Canada, who unfortunately, contrary to the law, have been encouraged in all sorts of ways in the northern states, are by their laziness and immorality a great plague to that country?
On the other hand, in his letter Paul only expresses his joy that Onesimus (which means “useful”) now lives up to his name, because he “was useless to you (Philemon), but now he is indeed useful to you and to me.” (v. 11[40]).
[Volume 19, St. Louis, Monday, February 15, 1863, No. 13.]
The summary result of all these quotations from Holy Scripture, interpreted and applied according to the text and the faith, is therefore this: First: The gospel and the faith in Christ that it brings about, through which man, and thus also the physical slave, is made a partaker of spiritual deliverance from the slavery of sin and the devil in the forgiveness of sin and the reception of the Holy Spirit, has in and of itself nothing to do with the state of his physical slavery; for the gospel has to do only with the soul of the bodily slave, and primarily in its relationship to God, in order to redeem it from his wrath and severe judgment and to transform it into the blessed freedom of the children of God. On the other hand, it has nothing to do with the external nature and the bodily servitude of the slave to his master, in so far as it would give the slave a means of raising and asserting a legal claim to his bodily release from slavery against his master. And just as little does the gospel make it a matter of faith and love for the believing slave owner, that is, a matter of conscience, to set his slaves free in the flesh, even if they are his brothers in Christ.
Secondly: Just as it is the nature and character of the gospel through faith in Christ to sanctify, permeate, and spiritually enliven all other worldly orders and civil institutions, social relationships, customs, habits, and rights (provided they are not in themselves contrary to the commandments of God, and therefore sinful), so also is this done with slavery. And even if, due to human sin, all kinds of evil and pernicious abuse had been attached to this and that inherently unsinful institution and state or condition, such as the merchant profession (cf. Sir. 26:29, 27:1-2)[41], or unlimited monarchy (cf. 1 Sam. 8:9-17)[42], or to a particularly high degree to slavery, it is nevertheless contrary to the nature of the gospel and to the love of Christ, which is gradually improving from within, to insist in a stormy and violent manner even on the elimination of the abuses that cling to it, let alone to immediately remove the thing itself, to which the trouble adheres. For such unevangelical behavior is only the activity of arrogant legislators and workers, who everywhere in their revolutionary method of healing tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as the old and new abolitionists also do.
The gospel, however, by entering into the institution of slavery, which it found everywhere historically, works the following salutary fruit through faith in Christ and the change of mind of the slaves and slaveholders brought about by it, while leaving it in existence for the time being.
First of all, through faith, the heart, mind, spirit and will of the converted slaves are salutarily transformed respecting their physical masters. Before their conversion and spiritual deliverance from the slavery of sin and the devil, they were — by virtue of unbelief — lazy, stubborn, thieving, unfaithful, unwilling, spiteful, wrathful, groveling, false, whoring, lying, and eye-pleasing people, and where they obeyed outwardly, it was only out of fear of punishment or out of a desire for reward and praise; but inwardly there was no willing obedience and outwardly no service of true love; out of compulsion and with unwillingness they did the work commanded them and avoided the grosser outbreaks of evil. Hence Scripture so often speaks of servile fear, servile spirit and obedience in a derogatory way. And even where patriarchal house governance existed, where they had kind and gentle masters and received just treatment, they still remained, according to heart, mind, and will, unchanged and unregenerated in their inherited unbelief and disobedience, blindness and malice, aversion and spitefulness; for even the law of the holy ten commandments in correct spiritual interpretation is not able, in spite of all attached enticements and promises, as well as threats and curses, to substantially transform the heart and the will of the natural man, if he is a slave or not bodily free, and to place him in right obedience to God and man. Rather, the law, without the accompaniment of the gospel, works the exact opposite of what it demands, out of the guilt of the corrupted nature and in order to bring its extreme wickedness and corruption to light. For the more sharply the law presses upon man and demands perfect holiness of his nature and perfect obedience and love toward God in all his doings, the more vehemently it arouses man’s anger, hatred and aversion towards God and His holy will expressed in the law; and the more vehemently the desire to transgress flares up and the greater the mass of sins of commission and omission becomes. But since the law at the same time continues to pronounce the wrath of God against the children of unbelief, without giving man the desire and power to keep it, it proves itself in every man, as he is by nature (so also in every unconverted slave) to be the letter that kills, the office that preaches damnation.
But when the law thus testifies to the conscience of these bonded servants, they certainly recognize from it their sinful misery and ruin, shame and remorse, fear and terror before God’s wrath and judgment. And at the same time they realize that they have a much stricter spiritual master in the law than their physical master can ever be, for in the worst case he can punish them severely in body or have them killed. The law, however, to which their conscience assents, keeps them locked up in soul and body as evil and bankrupt debtors under its compulsion and curse, as in an unbreakable debtor’s tower and iron net, threatens them incessantly with the eternal torment and agony of hell, and lets them feel and experience the foretaste of it abundantly in the gnawing and biting of the evil conscience.
But also to them, as to all poor sinners, the law, according to God’s good gracious will, should become a disciplinarian for Christ. As soon as the gospel comes to them by some means and they do not resist the Holy Spirit, thereby kindling faith in Christ in their hearts, they receive forgiveness of sins and the Holy Spirit, are spiritually reborn and seated in the heavenly places in Christ.[43] Then they are also redeemed from the slavery of sin and the devil and made truly free through the Son, so that they are no longer slaves to sin, but live for Him who died for them and rose again. As Christ gave himself to them with his nature and work, so now, as far as the new man lives in them, they give themselves to their neighbor in love with their nature and work. Then their heart’s attitude towards their physical masters becomes essentially different from what it was before. Then their most noble thoughts and aspirations are not to become physically free as soon as possible; they close their ears to abolitionist sneaks and corner preachers and consider it theft to steal away from their master by secretly escaping.
On the contrary, they now begin to truly serve him in the fear and love of God. For by the power of faith in Christ and by the impulse of the Holy Spirit who dwells in them and enlightens and governs them through God’s Word, they apply all honest diligence and zeal to be faithful in the fulfillment of the duties of their calling and to comply with those exhortations of the apostles. Instead of the evil qualities, the habitual sins and vices with which they were afflicted before their conversion, they are now seen to have good works and virtues, wrought and sanctified by faith in Christ. As children of God, as saints and beloved, as a voluntary people in the love of Christ, they are now, predominantly, obedient, diligent, faithful, sober, chaste, disciplined, humble, meek, patient, true, sincere, and adorn the doctrine of God their Savior throughout by godly conduct and walk worthy of the Gospel.
If they have faithful, kind, and gentle masters, they recognize this as an undeserved benefit of God and make all the more effort to prove their grateful love for them through faithful service, but they are far from putting themselves on an equal footing with them in a carnal way or even claiming their bodily release as a right to which they are entitled. If, on the other hand, they have unconverted, strict, and whimsical masters, they regard this as a salvific cross, have heartfelt mercy on their devil-mastered lords and never tire of following their Lord Christ in action and suffering, taking up their cross and also showing such masters all willing obedience and good faith, bearing unjust and tyrannical treatment with patience and gentleness and praying diligently for their masters that God will grant them grace to repent.
Thus we have now demonstrated what a salutary transformation the gospel, by kindling faith in Christ in the hearts of the slaves, also brings about in their behavior toward their physical masters. But before we give the proof for how the same gospel and the same faith also bring about a salutary change in the hearts of slaveholders in their behavior toward their slaves, let us first make a helpful and appropriate observation.
We have learned above that slavery is a punishment of sin from God, although not so terrible as the evil and quick death of the guilty criminal. Nevertheless, we find already in the Old Testament, how God shows his mercy against the slaves by special decrees, and resists the mercilessness of the slave owners. Thus, God decreed (Gen. 17:12[44]) that Abraham should circumcise not only the slaves born to him at home, but also the slaves bought from all sorts of strangers.
Thereby they also entered into the covenant of grace that God established with Abraham and his seed; and although, according to their bodily descent, they were guests and strangers, they were admitted through this sacrament into the spiritual citizenship of Israel. And through this they also took part in the adoption and the glory, in the covenant and the law, in the [temple] service[45] and the promise — for this practice was to be kept among Abraham’s descendants from then on. (Rom. 9:4[46]) Likewise, God commanded Moses (Ex. 12:43-44[47]) that no stranger should eat of the Passover lamb, but whoever was a purchased servant should be circumcised first and then eat of it. Also, according to the third commandment, the slaves were to have rest from their work on the Sabbath day (Ex 20:10[48]), could participate in the services, hear the word of God, and were also to be brought to the sacrificial meals and feasts. (Deut. 12:12, 18; 16:11[49]) Furthermore, the Lord Himself protects the bonded servants bought from the Gentiles or who came under the power of Israelite masters through captivity against the tyrannical treatment of their masters. For “if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.” (Ex. 21:20[50]) Furthermore, if the masters knocked out the teeth of their servants or maidservants or spoil an eye by striking them with their fists, they should be released on account of this. (Ex 21:26-27[51]) But the most precious thing was that the slaves also should be made partakers of the New Testament promises of grace. For thus says the Lord through the prophet Joel (2:29[52]): “And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.”
Thus, in view of these bodily and especially spiritual benefits, the slaves of the Jews were much better off than if they, among the heathens of their kindred race, had perhaps been given bodily freedom, but nevertheless, as being outside the realm of the divine word, without God and without hope in this world, remained spiritually dead in transgressions and sins and were not freed from the spiritual slavery of sin and the devil. And similarly, as already mentioned, the Negroes brought over from Africa are much better off by coming into the realm of the gospel, even though so many sins against the fear of God and the love of one’s neighbor are connected with their coming over. God provided even more kindly and lovingly for the Israelite slaves, when free Hebrews (Neh. 5:5[53]) were sold by the court to a lord because of damages they could not compensate (Ex. 22:3[54]), or by debtors they could not repay (2 Kings 4:1[55], Is. 50:1[56]), or sold themselves because of impoverishment (Lev. 25:39[57]). They were not to serve as serfs [Leibeigene], nor were they to be sold like them and treated with the same severity. (vv. 40-42[58]) Rather, according to the law, they received their freedom in the Sabbath or Jubilee year after six years of service (Ex. 21:2[59], Deut. 15:12[60], Lev. 25:40[61]), and had to be provided with sheep, grain, oil, and wine by their former masters. (Deut. 15:13[62])
How little God was against the lifelong bondage of one Israelite to another, however, is clear from Ex 21:6[63] and Deut 15:17[64]. For if the servant, after his six years of service, did not want to make use of the legal freedom, but out of love for his master (also for his wife and his children, who might have been given to him by the master, and who otherwise both remained with the master upon his release (Ex. 21:4-5[65]), preferred to remain with his master as a servant for life, then this could happen; only his ear was to be pierced with an awl before the elders — a sign of servitude that was also in use among other peoples of antiquity.
If we now turn to the New Testament, we also find the appropriate evangelical admonitions for the believing masters with regard to their behavior toward their slaves. Thus we read (Col. 4:1[66]), “Masters, give unto your servants what is right and equal,” that is, fair, do not put them to excessive work, give them the necessary rest and refreshment, and provide for them according to need, as also belonging to your “household”, (1 Tim. 5:8[67]), “knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven” that is, do not forget that one day you will have to give an account to the Lord of all lords of how you have behaved toward your slaves. St. Paul admonishes the masters in a similar way, Eph. 6:9[68]: “And ye masters, do the same (what is right and just in the fear of God) unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven (and over you as his slaves); neither is there respect of persons with him.” (he rewards and punishes with righteous judgment according to his word, whether someone is master or slave).
Now as many of the physical masters who received forgiveness of sins and the Holy Spirit through faith in Christ by means of the voice of the gospel, and took these admonitions of St. Paul to heart; their hearts, minds, and wills were also salutarily transformed toward their physical slaves. If the latter were also converted to Christ out of heathendom, they recognized them as their dear brothers in Christ and did not consider themselves higher than them before the Lord (Gal. 3:28[69]). They also let Christ’s kindness and benevolence shine out in all their dealings with them, regarded them as their housemates and members of their family, cared for their needs in a fatherly way, did not impose undue work on them, granted them the necessary rest and refreshment, and took due care that they remained in the teaching and discipline of the divine word. Nevertheless, they did not cease to regard themselves as their masters, according to the salutary order of God in this world, clothed with the majesty of the Father’s name and the fourth commandment, to maintain punctual obedience and, where necessary, by the discipline of the law, to sharply punish the flesh of their Christian slaves, although in fatherly love. Nor were they bound, as God’s Word did not make them conscience-stricken, to give their slaves bodily freedom on account of being their brothers in Christ, although circumstances did arise from time to time that this happened. If their slaves were still heathen, they could of course not recognize them before God as their brothers in Christ, but they took all the more care that they, as those who had also been freed, by God’s grace and through Christian teaching, came to repentance towards God and faith in the Lord Christ, and thus were saved from the dominion of darkness and brought to the blessed freedom of the children of God.
Moreover, their behavior towards these pagan slaves was not essentially different from their behavior towards Christian slaves. Also towards them, under the governance of Christian fatherly love, the seriousness of the law and the gentleness of the gospel were wholesomely connected with each other in their discipline and regiment. And where, at the present time, there are any Christian-minded slave owners, the same thing happens essentially towards their Christian and heathen slaves; for the gospel and the faith in Christ kindled by it have everywhere in slaves and masters the same salutary effects as just described.
If, on the other hand, we consider the conduct and procedure of the older and newer abolitionists towards slaveholders and slaves, we find that it is utterly contrary to the gospel and faith in Christ and stems from a completely different spirit from the Holy Spirit and love of Christ. For it is the spirit of unbelief and enmity against Christ, the spirit of disobedience against God’s command and the spirit of insurrection and rebellion against his wholesome discipline and punishment against the children of Adam, sinners; It is the spirit of carnal reason emancipating itself from obedience to God’s word, in short, the spirit of man opposing God in arrogant self-idolatry by deception of the devil, which, where possible, overthrew the Triune God from His throne in order to sit on it and rule the world.
From this God-denying, antichristian and scripture-denying spirit have flowed for about 100 years the shameful and harmful writings of the English, French, and German deists, naturalists, rationalists, communists, and Friends of Light, in which the triune God of the Bible is dismissed as contrary to reason and instead the bastard (produced by the liar from the very beginning and the carnal reason of the apostate man) who is called “god, virtue and immortality,” is raised to the throne of the divine majesty. From this spirit came the children of the devil (the murderer from the beginning) the bloodthirsty regicides and blood-spilling monsters of the French Revolution. There, as is well known, our Lord God was deposed by popular decree on the impetus of the same, and in his place, a prostitute was worshiped as the goddess of reason by the educated madmen and uneducated rabble.[70] And what wonder if then, under the deceptive pretense of brotherhood, freedom, and equality, one party overthrew the other and delivered thousands to the guillotine and flooded France with blood. And while the guillotine continuously threw so many children of unbelief into hell every day and gave the devil a true feast, nothing but mutual suspicion, distrust, partisan hatred, rancor, malice, boasting, vengefulness, and the like prevailed between the still-living, free, and equal brothers who had been redeemed from the yoke of the allegedly unbearable royal power, so that under this regiment of freedom, brotherhood, and equality hell on earth was already to be found.[71]
The abolitionist fanatics and vocal leaders of our day and in this land come from the same spirit, who, deceived by the devil, and as deceivers of the ignorant and uncertain[72] are a devouring cancer and a malignant worm in the marrow of the people. It is true that they also adorn themselves with beautiful-sounding names, just as the devil does not like to be black, but white, even an angel of light. It is humanity and philanthropy (friendliness and love of man) that they carry before them as a figurehead. Behind it, however, they are the men of overthrow and destruction, who care little that the Constitution and the Union would perish if they could only carry through their insane enthusiasm, their singular goal; for that is their purpose, wherever possible, to emancipate all Negro slaves with one blow and to bless their own or foreign countries with these poor people, who are almost entirely uneducated for Christian, civil, and moral use of physical freedom.
In this regard, they have for years been pushing and dragging the slavery issue around in the Congress in a most excited manner, even without any motive, and have no hesitation in stirring up and embittering their Southern brethren. For this purpose they also give their speeches outside of congress in all kinds of larger and smaller gatherings, as heroes of freedom and happiness of mankind, with more or less luck and skill, in order to increase their following; and even preachers of the gospel are not ashamed, as abolitionist speechmakers, to fanaticize one part of their audience for themselves under a deceptive appeal of God’s word and against the simple understanding of Scripture and Christian doctrine, and to instill disgust and repugnance in the other, but to deceive both of them regarding the right foundation and edification in and on God’s word. To the same end, preachers and non-preachers let their pernicious foolishness go out through the press in all kinds of pamphlets, in order to spread it even further, even under Christian pretenses; and in them they have no hesitation in presenting unverified facts about the treatment of Negro slaves in the South as true and certain, and in immediately drawing conclusions about all slaveholders from individual cases of tyrannical treatment. Over this they pour the broth of their sentimental effusions of the heart in order to move other softly constituted souls to a holy indignation, if not to a crusade for the liberation of the Negroes, at least in feelings and thoughts. Indeed, their holy zeal for the emancipation of the Negro slaves goes so far that they not only, as already mentioned above, help runaway slaves across the border to Canada, with plans and action in violation of the Fugitive Slave Law, but they also dispatch spies to the South, disguised for example as peddlers, in order to, where possible, stir up trouble here and there among the blacks, to encourage them to run away, and to bring them into a hostile position against their masters by instilling their poison abolitionist potion. In summary, even if the reasons for the civil war which has now broken out and is continuing, and the manifold miseries of the country which flow from it, lie deeper, it cannot be denied that the enthusiast madness of abolitionism is one of the nearest and foremost causes of this ruin. This rage for emancipation, however, is again partly the natural consequence of the self-emancipation of arrogant carnal reason from obedience to the divine word and from true faith in Christ, and partly an inner judgment of God, who is wont to punish sin by sin.
But the outbreak of party fury into civil war and its horrors is then the external judgment of God for the same apostasy and contempt of the divine word.
It is not our intention to go into this in more detail this time. Only this much is certain, that the present abolitionism, far from helping the slaves in a salutary way, works just the opposite. In part, it drives individual slaveholders, who are more despotic than patriarchal-minded, to harsher measures, and perhaps even entire slave states to harsher laws against their slaves, and furthermore, it hinders the power of the Gospel, which, though slow and gradual, is all the more thoroughly and lastingly transforming from within.
The history of our German people, for example, shows this healing power. During the many and often very bloody wars of the individual tribes [Stämme] against each other, the victors also made their prisoners of war into slaves; and their lot was in part much harder than that of the Negroes here in the southern slave states. Then it happened by God’s gracious guidance that through the fervent zeal for love of those godly monks in English and Irish monasteries, Columbanus, Gall, Kilian, Willibrord and especially Boniface and his companions,[73] the preaching of the Gospel penetrated to our fathers in the 7th and 8th century and the Christian church also began to draw from among them.
Wherever, here and there through God’s word, individual slave masters and bonded servants became true believers in Christ and were converted, their mutual behavior naturally became different and better than before, as already explained above; the old things passed away, and through the rejuvenating and renewing power of the gospel and through faith in Christ everything became new in this respect as well. The same outward physical relationship of masters and slaves to each other, in which previously only compulsion and fear, mutual hatred and distrust prevailed, now became for both a training school of love, humility, gentleness, patience, and mutual trust in the prevailing attitude of the believing Christian-minded heart.
In the course of the centuries, however, it happened that the Christian church, even among our ancestors, grew from a mustard seed into a mighty tree, under whose branches the birds of the heavens dwelt; it happened at the same time that the Christian doctrine, the sweet and gracious gospel, proved to be a spiritual leaven; the longer that hearts were won for the faith in Christ and penetrated with it, the more there were. Slowly but surely the customs became milder and conformed to a Christian mind; even in the laws of the various countries, Christian doctrine and the educational power of the church exerted a wholesome influence, so that love and justice came more and more into their own.
This influence then also extended to slavery. Gradually, the harshest form of slavery ceased to exist, in which the slaves, who until then had been a commodity for sale, were absolutely at the mercy of the will (even the whims) of their owners, who could even impose the death penalty on them without further accountability and responsibility.
With the emergence and spread of the feudal order, since many formerly free and small landowners came under the protection of the great and powerful and entered into a certain dependent relationship with them — then in connection with that, this harsh form of serfdom ceased. The serfs now became glebae adscripti, that is, such people who, with their children and descendants, were attached to a certain property belonging to their lords. As little as they were entitled to free self-determination and disposal over their person and the choice of their work; just as little did their lords have unlimited power over them; and depending on the extent of their maintenance by their lords, the circle of their servitude and their work was also circumscribed, according to custom and law, and their persons enjoyed the legal protection of the laws against any encroachments of tyrannical lords. In this relationship, they were usually given time and opportunity to acquire property.[74]
From this transitional form and intermediate stage between complete serfdom and complete freedom, from this state of “bondage,” an even greater degree of freedom developed as “the bonded” grew in intellect, education, and civic morality. They were released from their bondage to the soil; and although they were not yet free and independent landowners on a larger scale, they became tenants of a larger landlord whom they could choose at will, and to whom, depending on the contract and agreement, as is now the case, for example, with the peasants in the Russian Baltic provinces, they must annually render a certain amount of manual labor or wages, or both, for the use of their leased land.
This wholesome educating power of the Gospel in the transformation of slavery, which works gradually, quietly, and wisely from within and yet so powerfully and lastingly, has unfortunately been most violently interrupted here in this country by the urging and raging of the fanatical abolitionists; and the most distressing and regrettable thing about this interruption is especially the fact that it has been caused to a great, if not to the greatest part, by those who, according to their actual profession, should especially be fighting it, namely by the preachers, especially those of the Methodists; for it is said that almost all of them do more harm than professional political abolitionist partisans, both in their speeches on their religious stages, where they feed their poor people with poisonous abolitionist weeds instead of God’s Word, and in their journals and pamphlets. And also by this they prove anew that they are no sons of the gospel, no true confessors of Christ and no righteous followers of the Apostles in doctrine and conduct, but legalist, hypocritical busybodies and erroneous and flattering enthusiast spirits, who, in a disgraceful and harmful way, incurably mix up spiritual and bodily freedom.
Instead of acting verbally and in writing as Christian preachers in an evangelical way against the evils and abuses of slavery, it is precisely these unfortunate and blinded people who are always urging the rapid abolition of slavery in a stormy and violent way: and it is precisely they who really have helped to bring this pernicious civil war, which they love to call a “holy” one, upon the country and to make the rupture between the North and the South, where possible, incurable. Now it could still be possible that, in spite of the raving and shouting of these senseless people, that the shouting, pleading and sighing of the true believers and children of God would obtain from their heavenly Father to heal the existing rupture once more, to give the whole people a grace period for repentance and to turn the fury of His wrath away from them, so that the quarreling factions would not yet wear each other down to complete exhaustion and crumbling. But it could also be that if the greater arrogance and reliance on flesh were with the North, the South would be able to assert its political independence and also gain external recognition. In both cases, the question would arise: What does the gospel, or more precisely, what should truly evangelical-minded people do in the first place, be they preachers or statesmen or landowners, etc., inside and outside the slave states in order to have a salutary effect on the here and there corrupted condition of slavery?
[Volume 19, St. Louis, Monday, March 1, 1863, No. 14.]
To the question that was raised in closing: What does the gospel, or more precisely, what should truly evangelical-minded people do in the first place, be they preachers or statesmen or landowners, etc., inside and outside the slave states in order to have a salutary effect on the occasionally corrupt condition of slavery? we answer as follows:
First of all, this would be the most important thing, to bring the pure Christian — that is, Lutheran — doctrine orally and in writing, which they would be able to do, more and more into the slave states and to bring slaveholders as well as slaves as far as possible into their sphere. It is true that there are Lutheran congregations in the southern states, but they are usually only called that, and are not; for they nearly all belong to the so-called Lutheran General Synod, which fundamentally denies the ninth and tenth articles of the Augsburg Confession, is reformed in its doctrine, Methodist in its practice, and unionist in its attitude.
How unclear and confused, how enthusiastic and partisan this synod is in itself, however, is irrefutably proven by the recent political discord in the country and the civil war that has broken out; for it too, like almost all other churches and their synods, is now divided, according to its political partisanship, into two hostile camps, a northern and a southern one.
How should such an impotent synod, in these stormy times, which is not held together by the unity and power of the church confession, on the basis of the divine word, which does not know how to separate and distinguish between law and gospel, or bodily and spiritual freedom — how should such a synod, as an ecclesiastical body, be in a position to have a salutary effect on the formation of healthy evangelical knowledge and attitudes, especially on the slaveholders of the South?
On the other hand, it would be highly necessary to bring the slave owners in the southern states — for in the border states, as is well known, the slaves are treated mildly on average — on the basis of evangelical knowledge and by way of inner conviction, to first abolish the grosser evils and abuses, even corruptions in the slavery system.
These include, for example, the separation of spouses or of parents and younger children by the sale of one or the other, which is said to occur from time to time in the most southern[75] states; furthermore, the perhaps excessive burden of work and the arbitrariness and harshness of the slave overseers in the infliction of corporal punishment; and therefore, the fundamental keeping down of the slaves in a state of crudeness and ignorance, in that they are regarded and treated only as living machines of service and like working domestic animals, and even the more capable are deprived of the means of attaining a certain level of knowledge and morality, which was possible even among the slaves of the pagan Romans. And, furthermore, the fact that in some states the learning of reading by slaves is forbidden by law, may also be to a large extent the fault of the revolutionary fliers and pamphlets of the abolitionists, as the dizzying and delirious spirit of these heroes of freedom and human happiness could only have had a corrupting effect on the poor slaves.
Thirdly, it would be urgently desirable that those evangelically minded men, gifted with love and wisdom, would gain a salutary influence on the legislation in individual slave states by oral and written means, insofar as these sanction those and other grosser evils by existing laws and encourage the personal harshness and severity of individual slaveholders, or at least do not oppose them.
If these truly philanthropic efforts of Christian love and wisdom were gradually heard and received in the slave states, the way would be paved at the same time to train the slaves inwardly, where possible, to the right use of bodily freedom, primarily through the teaching and discipline of the divine word and human means of education.
It would then also become clear through experience whether the children of Ham, considered as slaves, have the ability to attain civic independence and self-government as bodily freemen, or whether political dependence and servitude under the children of Japheth would be their permanent fate.
For the abortive experiments with Haiti, where the freed Negroes are revealed as lazy, ragged, loitering sluggards, do not yet furnish convincing proof of the innate incapacity of the Negro race for civic moral self-reliance and self-government.
Just as little, however, do the freed individual Negroes scattered here and there in the northern states, who present themselves as Christian-minded, intelligent, industrious people, prove the opposite. On average, the freed Negroes also seem to have a certain aversion to work in cultivating the land, since the poorer ones almost never hire themselves out as farmhands, but prefer to become barbers, cooks, and servants in inns; the well-off, however, very seldom buy land to work it themselves, but prefer to invest their money in such a way that they make as much money as possible with as little work as possible, following the example of the free white Americans.
This aversion to work in contrast to the industrious cultivation of the land, following the example of our industrious German countrymen, is, however, a bad omen and speaks more against than in favor of their future total physical emancipation; for it is difficult to deduce what the mass of the later freedmen, who, for example, would find sufficient room for profitable work as tenants in the South, should do other than cultivate land. Otherwise, they would be best used here, in my humble opinion, partly for their own advancement, partly for the support of the large plantation owners there; for experience shows that white workers are on average not able to perform the same work in the hotter regions as the muscular Negroes originating from the tropical zone, who feel all the better physically the more the burning sun drives the oily sweat on their skin. Thus they are less susceptible to climatic diseases than the whites. But to transfer them all to Liberia, or to this or that of the Central American Free States, if these would allow it, would be, especially at the present time, neither for themselves, nor for the regions and their inhabitants, to which they were sent, in any way salutary and profitable, since they are not at all trained and educated for the productive use of their physical freedom. Everything depends on whether and how such education and training is put into practice. If, to this end, where possible, the pure and truthful teaching of the divine word and suitable human means of education worked together in harmony during their present state of slavery, it would become increasingly clear during the course of this labor of love whether and to what extent the Negro race was capable of and suitable for the use of bodily freedom which would be beneficial to them and to others.
On the one hand, of course, it cannot be denied, and history has confirmed it many times, that through the gradual evangelization and Christianization of whole tribes and peoples, many gifts and powers that had hitherto been suppressed or had degenerated into sinful abuse and destructive selfishness were freed and at the same time brought into the service of love and moral, lawful order for wholesome use and common benefit. For example, this has happened in recent times in some island groups of the fifth continent, on the Sandwich, Friendship, and Society Islands, and is still happening on other islands of the South Seas, especially on New Zealand.
On the other hand, it is always questionable whether individual tribes, even though Christianity has found its way into them, are capable of the wholesome use of full bodily freedom, of civic and moral independence, and of the establishment and maintenance of a political community, especially a republican one. There are, after all, enough people in the Christian states — indeed, the greatest number of them — who, irrespective of their Christian and moral worth, in their state of dependence, even of servitude, yet for lack of higher intellectual talent, would never be able to build up a civic community on their own and to maintain it in a prosperous course, for they lack the managing ability; they are indeed the supporting feet, the running legs, the working hands of a body politic, but they need the eye that guides them, the mouth that speaks for them.
It is perhaps similar with whole tribes [Stämmen] and ethnicities [Völkerschaften] who, in spite of their conversion to Christianity, would hardly be able to escape the state of childhood and immaturity and work their way up to civil and moral independence and self-government without mixing with more talented tribes [Stämmen].
[Volume 19, St. Louis, Mon. March 15, 1863, No. 15.]
As far as the already Christianized Negroes are concerned, I have the report of a German naval officer who visited the Negro Republic of Liberia on the west coast of Africa in 1854 in a squadron. Its territory covers 450 German square miles and was then populated by 215,000 inhabitants. Of these, 200,000 are uncivilized natives who have recognized and submitted to the rule of the Republic, and 15,000 are Christian and civilized colored immigrants from the states of the Union here. As is known, the first colony of the present Republic of Liberia was founded on the coast of Upper Guinea by the North American Colonization Society in 1823. This company set itself the task of buying the freedom of as many blacks as possible and establishing an asylum for them in their homeland. Through purchases from neighboring Negro lords, it later expanded to the size indicated above, and in a period of 23 years the society sent 10,000 colored people there.
With regard to the above-mentioned reporter, it must be noted from the outset, in accordance with the truth, that he possesses a healthy, sober view and a fine power of observation and comprehension directed to the actual conditions, which does not appear to be influenced and clouded by a passionate partisan interest, either for or against slavery, to the detriment of the truth.
This eyewitness reports with regard to agriculture, to which the Republic is primarily directed, that it is practiced very casually by the free Negroes, although the excellently lush and fertile soil is unparalleled in the world and rewards even the slightest effort and work many times over, “The free colonist who emerges from the Negro race” — so it says — “only brings himself to cultivate just as much land as bare self-preservation requires. In the vicinity of Monrovia — that is the name of the capital and seat of the government in honor of the former President Monroe — one sees several thousand fields with coffee and sugar plantations, which are flourishing splendidly. However, these belong to only 5 to 6 more intelligent industrious mixlings [Mischlinge]. Further inland, one finds no trace of such plantations, although their rich yield is obvious. The ordinary black does not have the drive to do more than to gain a carefree livelihood, which comes to him with little effort in a country so favored by nature. The sluggishness which is inseparable from the character of the Negro, will therefore be the downfall of Liberia’s future.[76] The Negro wants only sufficient food and necessary clothing for himself and his family, and works merely to avoid the greatest material hardship. Farming is too arduous for him; he does not even raise cattle. Even most of the meat consumed in Liberia is imported from abroad. Only small-scale trade is still a business for him. As a craftsman, he produces such rough work that only he is satisfied by it. Any industrial object in the cities (of which there are 4) that has any claim to value comes from outside. The republic has existed with its present borders for almost 30 years, yet possesses only one road, 4 (German?) miles long, on which a wagon can travel. This road was built under the presidency of the American agent and with American money; it leads from Monrovia toward the interior. Since Liberia has become self-governing, nothing else has been done to facilitate communication.
The nearby virgin forests are the abode of countless ravenous animals that incessantly harass the colonists; these forests are also the source of the deadly miasmas (noxious vapors)[77] that kill almost half of the immigrants. It is in the interest of the state as well as of the individual to cut down the forests and to use the valuable timber as an article of commerce or even just to burn them. One would at least improve the climate, and at the same time gain millions of acres of the most beautiful virgin soil. But one is content with extracting from the forest only what is most necessary, the wood for building a house, the spot for the production of a small field, and still allows oneself to be attacked by wild animals, still breathes in death and infirmity with the poisonous vapors.”
From this description of how the freed or ransomed Negroes behave toward the cultivation of the land, it seems clear that they are just as reluctant and disgruntled by nature as they were in their former state of slavery. Just as here they are moved to work only by iron necessity and the fear of punishment, so in Liberia it is by fear of hunger and starvation, since there they have no master to provide for the satisfaction of their bodily needs. And it is difficult to foresee how they, without mixing with the white race, which, however, is utterly unthinkable, could escape from their natural life, cease to be slaves of their immediate natural needs, how they could become diligent and knowledgeable cultivators of larger stretches of land and become masters of the soil, and how they could rise in this way to a higher level of education and civilization.
How the above-mentioned intermixture has a lifting effect on the individual in the Negro race is also evident from the above description; for from it we have seen right at the beginning how the mulattoes [Mulatten], these mixlings [Mischlinge] of whites [Weißen] and Negresses [Negerinnen], possess a higher degree of understanding and prosperity. However, according to the testimony of the same reporter, the evil has been revealed in Liberia that it is these very mulattoes who form a kind of aristocratic caste and “would have long since seized all power if they were not still supervised and kept in check by the colonization society. As soon as this restraint ceases, rule must fall to them, because property and intelligence will always dominate poverty and stupidity. The Republic hereby comes to an end, while the mixlings make themselves masters of the land and turn into despots and slave owners. Actually, this is already the case, and it is the gentle, industrious Kroomen (an oppressed native Negro tribe), who look upon themselves as born beasts of burden, who willingly submit to the yoke of slavery. On the aforementioned sugar and coffee plantations, in the houses of the wealthy mixlings and Christian Negroes, the whip is already swung just as mercilessly over the Kroomen, who are used as servants, as it was formerly swung in America and the West Indies over the naked backs of their present masters. There are no worse masters than mixlings. Although born of the blood of the white and black races, they hate both irreconcilably, and they make them suffer for this hatred where they can. Moreover, the mixlings are possessed of an indomitable greed for money, and their flabby morals allow them to find every means of acquisition justified. Now they seek wealth in the cultivation of their plantations; but they will certainly prefer to engage in the more profitable slave trade as soon as the opportunity presents itself.—This cannot be said of the Christian Negroes, but they would do nothing to prevent it. The mass of Negro Christians are far too indolent and indifferent; and as long as they suffer no material hardship, it would be irrelevant to them whether Liberia were a republic, a monarchy, or a slave state, if only they themselves need not work.”
However, the Christian preachers there of all sorts and colors do not seem to contend unanimously and vigorously with the word of God and especially with the gospel against these moral corruptions that contradict the word of God. They — most of them are Methodists and Baptists — are content, after their own fashion, to give the blacks the stamp of their puritanical legal formal righteousness; for neither there nor here do they consistently recognize, by virtue of their heresies, the true nature and way of the gospel unmixed with the law and its works, which, after and with the operation of the law, as the revealer of sin and taskmaster of Christ, righteously converts, regenerates and renews the repentant sinner alone through true faith in Christ, and works the love of God and neighbor in him, and in this way also helps him to a truly moral and living activity in his civil community. In contrast, the gospel spares everything that is not intrinsically sinful but natural, as, for example, temperament, manners, habits, customs, and so on. In the manner of Christ’s love, it enters into all these natural things in order to heal them where they are diseased and where they exist among the people in a healthy way, to sanctify them and to gradually transform them into a nobler form more in keeping with the Christian sense and spirit. On the other hand, it avoids and flees coercion, the false displays of virtue, and the excessive heat of the law, which does not produce vigorous and healthy fruit, nor plants that the heavenly Father has planted and watered through the gospel.
Our author now also provides a full report of this legalist compulsion and work of the preachers there. He writes: “The blacks on the streets walk silently and with deliberate steps, the aristocrats with high white neckbands, like Puritan preachers, the lowly, though not so evenly, yet with the same solemnly composed faces. They greet each other in a formal, measured manner. If a few passers-by happen to speak together, they do so in unctuous speech and in a low voice, as if they were in a church and feared to disturb the devotion.
Whoever knows the indestructible cheerfulness of the blacks, which needs only the slightest impulse to gush forth in the most unrestrained manner, their delight in chatting and their great joy in singing — qualities which even the harshest treatment cannot suppress — must be astonished at the enormous contrast which in this respect manifests itself among the inhabitants of Monrovia.
This is the result of religious coercion exercised by the missionaries upon the inhabitants; in misconstrued zeal they have so forcibly and unnaturally changed the harmless character of the people. The clergy, both those sent by the American Missionary Societies and the native ones, exercise a great dominion over the minds of the blacks. But it seems that it is not based on love, but on fear.
If the founders of the Free State, who consisted strictly of churchmen, wanted Liberia to be regarded as a bulwark of Christianity and, to this end, sought to spread and strengthen their own principles with the help of the missionaries, there is certainly no objection to this. The small number of crimes that are punished in Liberia also proves that it has indeed succeeded in eradicating the evil passions in the minds of the blacks.” (The author means, of course, to repressing of the grosser outbreaks of the same through fear of punishment).
“But this was only done violently at the expense of the character of the Negroes, in that their childlike nature was likewise suppressed and deprived of all vigor or led to hypocrisy by means of the punishment of even the most innocent pleasures. For example, young girls are strictly forbidden to dance; only church songs are permitted. Any cheerful get-together is thus inhibited and actual sociability is lacking. In addition, friendly interaction is also disturbed by sectarianism, which is just as prevalent here as in the United States. The intolerance of the clergy has led to a situation in which the individual confessions and sects face each other harshly and in isolation, and everyone shuns contact with those who believe or think differently. That this also hinders the flourishing of the political community is obvious.”
From this description of the law-mongering and works-focused preachers there, it is clear enough that they, directly against the essence and working of the gospel, begin the process in reverse, as it were. That which is a voluntary fruit of the gospel, they try to force out by the law. Not dancing and not singing frivolous, worldly songs, for example, certainly does not make one a Christian; but he who is a believing Christian has nothing to do with dancing and such singing, because he knows and enjoys a better pleasure and a nobler joy, against which all the lusts and pleasures of this world seem to him to be gussied up corpses and apples of Sodom. In this area, too, dealing with the law can for the most part produce nothing but proud, self-righteous, works-righteous Pharisees who think they will find their righteousness before God in such outward doings, but not in Christ through faith. Another part, however, consists of secret Epicureans, who avoid what is forbidden only out of compulsion and fear of punishment, while the desire and lust for it inwardly burns all the more fiercely and occasionally gives vent to itself all the more unrestrainedly and satisfies itself all the more intemperately, the tighter and tighter the straitjacket is that is put on them.
How little hope the author has for the prosperous future of this Negro republic, in view of the ecclesiastical, political and social conditions of Liberia, is evident from his concluding words, which read thus:
“The colony, founded and cultivated under great expectations of civilization, is heading in the exact opposite direction, even if it will not arrive at this state of things for another half century. The blame for this lies in the nature of things; for the Negroes are and remain incapable of developing a civilized community of their own accord, whatever name it may have. They can be made to imitate and become accustomed to the outside world through compulsion, but as soon as this coercion disappears, they fall back into their natural barbarism without pause. The dark skin prepares the way for the whites; it will leave the stage after its work is done. As the Indians have disappeared from America, so the Negro will disappear from Africa with the incursion of the civilized peoples, even if thousands of years must pass.”
One cannot deny, of course, that this judgment of the author (who got to know the Negroes in Brazil, the East Indies and Africa) about their ability for civic-moral independence, for self-directed engagement with and independent influence on other peoples and states, i.e. for world-historical significance, has a lot going for it.
I, on the other hand, although I am more inclined to his view than not, given the way in which the Negroes have been converted to Christianity up to now, ultimately refrain from passing an unconditional judgment on the absolute inability of the Negro race to become a cultured people and to form independent states, but rather commend to God, the almighty, wise and benevolent builder and governor of all peoples, this matter as well. In my entire treatment, it has only been in my heart to prove the following points:
First, that according to God’s word, slavery is a consequence and punishment of sin, but not sinful in itself, that is, contrary to God’s commandments, even though at the same time much evil, even corruption, clings to it. Therefore, it cannot be a sin as such for any man to keep slaves.
Secondly, that everything depends on slave owners and slaves believing in Christ through the gospel and being converted to God, and thus both being freed from the slavery of sin and the devil.
Thirdly, that thereby their mutual behavior be wholesomely transformed and placed in the service of Christian love, without thereby making a bodily release of the slaves immediately necessary.
Fourth, that nevertheless, according to the evidence of history, the gospel, in the course of time, tended to alleviate and gradually abolish slavery in its harsh forms.
Fifth, that the older and newer abolitionism, as stemming from a completely different spirit, is utterly contrary to this salutary influence of the gospel and, even if it is dressed up with the figurehead of Christianity, is aggressively opposed to it and only worsens the lot of the slaves.
Sixthly, that here in this country, after the raging and storming of the emancipation mania has been eliminated and overcome (if God gives grace to that end), the gospel and the true faith in Christ thereby wrought must take up and continue its labor of love again, in order first to free unconverted slaveholders and slaves from the slavery of sin and the devil, and gradually to educate and train the latter to the Christian and moral use of bodily freedom.
Seventh, that the present method of conversion, which is customary in the country, and the associated ransom or release of the Negro slaves, will hardly enable them, by their own efforts and without mixing with the white race, to work their way out of a condition dominated only by the satisfaction of natural needs — and up into a higher condition, in which the moral and civil law, and the cultivation of natural materials and forces ordered by both, hold sway.
In conclusion, it should be expressly noted that this entire treatment, as proceeding from the word of God and supervised and guided by the same, has nothing to do with the question of slavery from the political point of view. Nor is it at all in the intention of this essay to become involved in any way in such steps and measures, which this or that slave state would like to do or take in recent times by legal means, to abolish slavery as quickly as possible in their respective areas. Whatever is wise or unwise, salutary or harmful in this procedure may be discussed and negotiated in more detail in political journals.
[1] This article was published in 1863 in four installments in Der Lutheraner, the Missouri Synod’s then flagship periodical. The source issue of each section is indicated at its head. Wilhelm Löhe also published the concluding summary statements from this essay in July 1863 in his periodical Kirchliche Mittheilungen aus und über Nord-Amerika. Another printing appeared in Baltimore in April 1863 by A. Schlitt, who appended the essay with the following remarks: Upon careful perusal of the above treatise, I found particular comfort in the soundness of the biblical proofs and other propositions cited therein; for which reason I desired to be allowed to reproduce the same by further printing. I therefore turned to the author, who also graciously granted me this wish.
[2] [Original footnote] It is therefore self-evident that the following treatment has nothing to do with the question of slavery from the political point of view, and thus does not interfere with the question of what measures a slave state might take in this present political crisis with regard to the present or later abolition of slavery from the point of view of its particular budget.
—The Author.
[3]Luke 11:21 When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace:
[5]Ps 51:5 Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.
[6]Joh. 9:1-3 And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
[7]Rom. 7:14 For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.
[8] Throughout, Sihler contrasts patriarchal (i.e. fatherly and caring, yet firm) masters with despotic or brutal ones.
[11]Deut. 20:17 but thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee:
[12]Jos. 16:10 and 17:13 And they drave not out the Canaanites that dwelt in Gezer: but the Canaanites dwell among the Ephraimites unto this day, and serve under tribute.
Yet it came to pass, when the children of Israel were waxen strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute; but did not utterly drive them out.
[20] [Original footnote] It is also part of this that the Lord has sold them under the great god Mammon and the spirit of the swindler, because they did not want to recognize Christ, the treasure of all treasures. And it is also part of God’s judgment on the apostate Christians of the present time that the pseudo-intellectual Jews belong to their choir leaders, as well as that the rich Jews are the financiers and creditors of the Christian princes.
[21]Lev. 25:44-46 Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.
[23]Lev. 25:39-43 And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bondservant: but as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubile: and then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return. For they are my servants, which I brought forth out of the land of Egypt: they shall not be sold as bondmen. Thou shalt not rule over him with rigour; but shalt fear thy God.
[24]Ex. 21:2 If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.
[27]Gen. 30:43 And the man increased exceedingly, and had much cattle, and maidservants, and menservants, and camels, and asses.
[28]Job 1:3 His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the east.
[29]Genesis 14:14 And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan.
[41]Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 26:29; 27:1-2 A merchant shall hardly keep himself from doing wrong; and an huckster shall not be freed from sin. Many have sinned for a small matter; and he that seeketh for abundance will turn his eyes away. As a nail sticketh fast between the joinings of the stones; so doth sin stick close between buying and selling.
[42]1 Sam. 8:9-17 Now therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that shall reign over them. And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king. And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.
[44]Gen. 17:12 And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed.
[46]Rom. 9:4 who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises;
[47]Ex. 12:43-44 And the Lord said unto Moses and Aaron, This is the ordinance of the passover: There shall no stranger eat thereof: but every man’s servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised him, then shall he eat thereof.
[48]Ex. 20:10 but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
[50]Ex 21:20 And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.
[51]Ex 21:26-27 And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye’s sake. 27 And if he smite out his manservant’s tooth, or his maidservant’s tooth; he shall let him go free for his tooth’s sake.
[52]Joel 2:29 and also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.
[53]Neh. 5:5 Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as their children: and, lo, we bring into bondage our sons and our daughters to be servants, and some of our daughters are brought unto bondage already: neither is it in our power to redeem them; for other men have our lands and vineyards.
[54]Ex. 22:3 If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be blood shed for him; for he should make full restitution; if he have nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.
[55]2 Kings 4:1 Now there cried a certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets unto Elisha, saying, Thy servant my husband is dead; and thou knowest that thy servant did fear the Lord: and the creditor is come to take unto him my two sons to be bondmen.
[56]Is. 50:1 Thus saith the Lord, Where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away.
[57]Lev. 25:39 And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bondservant:
[59]Ex. 21:2 If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.
[60]Deut. 15:12And if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee.
[61]Lev. 25:40but as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubile:
[62]Deut. 15:13 And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty:
[63]Ex 21:6 then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever.
[64]Deut 15:17 then thou shalt take an aul, and thrust it through his ear unto the door, and he shall be thy servant for ever. And also unto thy maidservant thou shalt do likewise.
[65]Ex. 21:4-5 If his master have given him a wife, and she have born him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself. And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free:
[66]Col. 4:1 Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.
[67]1 Tim. 5:8 But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.
[68]Eph. 6:9 And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.
[69]Gal. 3:28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
[71] [This note does not appear in the original publication in Der Lutheraner, but does appear in the edition published by A. Schlitt in Baltimore with the designation “Anm. des Verfassers” (Note of the author.)] Nevertheless, it should not be denied that under Louis XIV and XV the most shameful profligacy of the court, the unjust one-sided tax burden on the citizens and peasants, the cruelty of criminal justice and the arbitrariness of the police had increased in a terrible way and the despotism of the royal power was quite as complete as in any Asiatic world empire of the pagan past. This long and hard pressure inevitably resulted in a powerful counter-pressure, a strong reaction. But the fact that this reaction took the horrible form of unlawful and violent self-help and, according to the just judgment of God, turned into the many-headed tyranny of the partisan rage of arrogant and domineering demagogues, made the French Revolution, even according to the judgment of pagan morality, let alone before the judgment seat of the divine word, one of the most criminal and damnable deeds in world history. —The author’s note.
[72] [Original footnote] It self-evident that they are far different from their seducers. For lack of sharpness of mind and judgment, and stupefied and confused by the clamor and fallacies of their seducers, they are unable to distinguish clearly and sharply the abuses and depraved conditions of slavery from the slavery itself, but confuse the two. D. E.
[74] [Original footnote] In a similar way, for example, some serfs of the large Russian landowners are allowed to trade in the country with the permission of their lords in exchange for an annual fee, the obrok, and there are very rich merchants among them. However, legally they and their children remain attached to the landed property of their lords, whose wealth is estimated according to the number of “souls” belonging to their estates.
[75]südlichsten ‘most southern’ in original; südlichen ‘southern’ in Schlitt edition.
[76] “The cliff upon which something fails” is a German idiom. Friedrich Hölderlin writes, “Ich glaube, daß die Ungeduld, mit der man seinem Ziele zueilt, die Klippe ist, an der gerade oft die besten Menschen scheitern.” I believe that the impatience with which one rushes toward one’s goal is the cliff that often causes the best people to fail.
The following appears in Concordia Publishing House’s Magazin für ev.-luth. Homiletik und Pastoraltheologie [Magazine for Evangelical Lutheran Homiletics and Pastoral Theology], Volume 43 (1919) pages 91-96.
