Loving Them
In this episode
Scripture References
Works
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Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything else along the way. I’m your host today, Bryan Broome, and I’m joined by Greg Uttinger.
Today we’re going to be talking about the dreaded ‘them,’ the others, the inhumans, the monsters that lurk under your bed and talk to you about things like cultural anthropology and such things as that, these horrible monsters – in groups, out groups, tribalism. We’ll probably talk about a lot of these kinds of things. So Greg, why don’t you draw us into the section of scripture we’re looking at with that in mind.
With that in mind, we’re looking at 2 Kings 5. Elijah has gone on to heaven and Elisha has picked up his ministry, but we don’t begin with either of them. We begin in Syria, Aram, the nation to the north, the ‘them,’ the others, the bad guys, the invaders, pick a name.
Now Naaman, captain of the host of the king of Syria, was a great man with his master, and honourable, because by him the LORD had given deliverance unto Syria. He was also a mighty man in valour, but he was a leper. And the Syrians had gone out by companies and had brought away captive out of the land of Israel a little maid; and she waited on Naaman's wife. And she said unto her mistress, Would God my lord were with the prophet that is in Samaria! for he would recover him of his leprosy.
And one went in, and told his lord, saying, Thus and thus said the maid that is of the land of Israel. And the king of Syria said, Go to, go, and I will send a letter unto the king of Israel. And he departed, and took with him ten talents of silver, and six thousand pieces of gold, and ten changes of raiment. And he brought the letter to the king of Israel, saying, Now when this letter is come unto thee, behold, I have therewith sent Naaman my servant to thee, that thou mayest recover him of his leprosy.
And it came to pass, when the king of Israel had read the letter that he rent his clothes and said, Am I God, to kill and to make alive, that this man doth send unto me to recover a man of his leprosy? wherefore consider, I pray you, and see how he seeketh a quarrel against me.
The little girl here is one of my favorite characters in all of scripture, and unfortunately – from my point of view at least – we’re not given her name, which probably in itself is significant. This is a little girl from a village somewhere in Israel. The indication seems to be that she was not a special super-saint, holy and unusual in what she does, but what she does may seem to us very unusual.
She’s been captured. Probably her family, if not captured, has simply been killed. Her city may have been burned. She’s been plucked away from everything she knows, from her family, her city, her friends, her way of life, and the formal worship of her God, and she’s been installed in the home of this great Syrian general named Naaman and has apparently managed to learn their language well enough to communicate, although Aramaic and Hebrew were not that different.
We’re not told how old she is. She’s a maiden, so she’s probably young-ish. A maiden could reach anywhere from 5 to 15 or 16, because somewhere in there girls usually got married. She’s a young girl, a little girl and she notes that her master is a leper.
Now, that meant more in Israel than it did here. In Israel, leprosy was a symbol for sin and the curse, and if you were a leper you were excluded from the social and religious life of Israel. You lived outside the city walls. You couldn’t have contact with anybody. If anyone even came close you had to cry out, “Unclean!” You couldn’t go to temple or synagogue. You were among the living dead. The leprosy would scar your features as well. You wouldn’t look like everyone else. That didn’t all apply here, but the last part certainly did.
It was not a disease that the cool people had, the trendy people, the important people. It would have hampered Naaman in his work, and probably felt rather uncomfortable. We don’t know exactly what the nature of this disease is. It’s generally a skin disease.
The little girl notes this and is sorry for Naaman, the man who in some degree was responsible for tearing her away from everything she knows and making her a slave in his own house, but her gracious concern for him breaks out in an exclamation – “Oh that he were with the prophet that’s in Samaria, for the prophet could recover him of his leprosy!”
The first amazing thing is that she has goodwill toward this man. It would be so easy to be bitter, angry, to consider this man a monster, inhuman, an alien, one of ‘them,’ but instead she treats him as the image of God, as a man she has come to care about, and she wishes him well. She wishes he could be healed and she says so out loud, but in the process she says something else that’s also surprising.
Elisha had never healed a leper. No prophet had ever healed a leper. God had healed Miriam from her leprosy, after giving it to her, and Moses’ intervention, and although there was this extensive ceremony for cleansing of lepers who had been healed so that they could be readmitted into Israeli life, there was no record that any prophet had ever done such a thing.
There were many lepers in Israel, Jesus will say later of this event, but Elisha didn’t heal any of them, and here’s this little girl who’s been captured by this foreign general and his troops, saying “If he were there.” He’s a Gentile, an unbeliever, “But I am absolutely sure that if he were with the prophet, the prophet would do something that no prophet has ever done, and heal him,” because she majors on the compassion and love of God, in the midst of being taken away by ‘them,’ by the aliens, by the monsters, by the outsiders. We can consider later the rest of the story, but this is our focus here.
What is it about us that looks at the people across the tracks, as my parents’ generation would say, or across the border or over the seas and says ‘them, the others’? Why is this so easy to foist upon humanity? Why does humanity so easily gobble it up and look at the people outside of our immediate community as something else, something non-human, something that we just stick a label on? And having stuck that label, we don’t really have to show them the love of God or respond to them as we respond to the people we consider human.
Yeah, in a word, sin. There you go. See, Christianity has this real simple answer, but before we consider Christianity’s answer a little more, I want to point out some things from cultural anthropology.
Anthropology is supposed to be the science of humanity – anthropos (man), logos (wisdom, science) – but modern anthropology is rooted in Western rationalism and Western theories of evolution. So as anthropology sets about trying to fit various sorts of human-like things – past, present, and future – onto some kind of family tree or time scale or something, it had to decide more or less, “What is man?” It’s a good biblical question, “What is man?”
They looked at the fossil record, because that had now become a thing. They looked around the world and saw culturally inferior people. They were culturally inferior because they didn’t have flush toilets and steam power, basically. We would look back now and say, “You guys don’t have computers and spaceships,” but at the time, the technology of the day seemed to sufficiently set modern man – late 1800s and early 1900s – apart from everyone below that.
Also, just according to appearance, they looked out and saw that some people don’t look like us. Their skin is a different color. Their eyes and their noses are funny. They’re not like us, so they’re obviously a different kind of humanity, if we’re going to use that word.
The pattern – and I’m certainly no anthropologist, but I did a little reading – the traditional apparent order is the fossil other, the savage other, the black other, and the ethnographic other.
We look at the fossil record and, “Whatever those things were, they’re not like us so they weren’t human, so we can distinguish ourselves, man, true humanity, from those things.” And as the museums reconstructed humanoid things from the fossil record, they amazingly managed to predict skin color, hair length, the way they dressed, and the facial expressions that made them look stupid, because they knew that these were inferior beings. So although the fossil record can’t give you any of that, they nonetheless portrayed them like that because of the presuppositions.
They made them more ape-like, more deformed, even though there was nothing in the fossil record that actually said any of that. Certainly the fossil record does not tell you how one dresses, unless in the fossil record you also find evidence of the tools they used to make the clothes they wore, at which point we tend to ignore that and just go on with what we want to believe.
It’s also so much easier to think of human developmental history as something where you’re at the pinnacle of it.
Right. So for those living they came up with the savage other. The savage, of course, are those who are alive now or within recent history, but who do not have our technology. They don’t have anywhere near our technology. They still use stone knives and bearskins, so they’re obviously not where we are. They may look like us, and you may be able to dress them up in a business suit and for a little while they might pass as one of us, but just watch their lifestyle. They’re not us at all.
Then interestingly enough, the black other. It doesn’t matter here that these black people may live in our society, may hold a job equal to ours, may pass IQ tests and standardized testing at our level, yet obviously, being black, they’re more like gorillas then they are like us. In the 21st century we look at that with horror, and rightfully so. There was a time when this was considered cutting-edge science.
There’s a horrible line in Darwin, I think in Origin of the Species, where he bemoans the fact that in his time there was modern man and there were the very small primitive apes, but in-between there were black peoples and aborigines and gorillas, and he lumps them all together as kind of an evolutionary stairstep between the pure animal and the pure human, and he regretted that by the end of the century, he thought, that hunters would simply wipe all these out.
The gorillas and the aborigines alike would be hunted down and killed for sport or whatever, and that would leave an even bigger gap than before between man and the animals. He was sad that the aborigines would be exterminated, but survival of the fittest.
That’s like the weirdest reasoning to be sad about it. Even PETA gets sad for better reasons than that. It’s not, “Oh, we’re so sad that this animal that is a living thing that feels pain is dead and went through pain to get to death.” It’s like, “Oh, it’s really sad because now we won’t be able to tell the information that we’ve lost as a result of their extermination. It’s so sad,” not them being lost.
Yeah. “We will not be able to visually count the steps from the animals to us, because those steps will be gone and it will just be a matter of recorded science and we won’t be able to visually appreciate it.” That’s horrible. So there’s that.
And they added one more – the ethnographic other, which basically means other modern nations who may have our technology and seem to think like we do, but they’re not us. They don’t have our manners, our refinement, our way of looking at things. They’re not true Western modern people.
This racism, of course – and that’s what it was, although apparently the word ‘racism’ wasn’t coined until 1901 or something like that – it was this implicit racism that says, “We are the measure of all things. True men are like us, and everyone else, being not quite human, although we believe in humanity – we’re great humanitarians in the abstract – when it comes to individuals, if they’re not like us, you know what? They’re sacrificeable.”
In the early 1900s we had this movement that began in America, although became famous in Nazi Germany, where we looked at certain types of pseudo-humans like Hispanics and blacks and those who were mentally retarded or physically disabled and began to say, “That’s not healthy for the species.” Now, why we should care about the species is kind of an open-ended question, because if there’s a God in heaven who says, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” then why do we really care?
Tangent off tangent – in That Hideous Strength there’s a point where Lord Feverstone corners the protagonist Mark…
Yeah, and he tries to get Mark to understand where the program of the bad guys is going. Mark says, “The future of the species – that’s a pretty rock-bottom obligation,” and Feverstone says, “Why? No. Why should I care about some future eon of people I don’t know, will never know, and may not even be like me? No, it’s all about me right now and what I can get out of this. We’re in a war and I like fighting and I like winning. You do too, right? So let’s just look at it in a more realistic way.”
Such an interesting contrast between Feverstone and Weston in Out of the Silent Planet, because Weston’s entire motivation for it is, “I want humans to keep spreading across the galaxy, and I want the future generations to take control of space before space comes and wipes us out with its boot heel or something like that.” Now Feverstone is just like, “Oh no, why do I care about the future? It’s me that matters.”
Yeah, and the bridge is Perelandra, where Weston comes back and tells Ransom, “Oh, I was a little narrow-minded then. I needed to see that all of life matters,” in good Hegelian fashion. “The universe is absolute. It is spirit. Wherever it manifests itself, wherever it grows and develops…”
“Yes, but there are major trends, major currents, and to be there at the lead, that’s what matters.” And in That Hideous Strength, “No, it doesn’t.”
As Lewis carefully chronicles the decline and fall of Western rationalism, it starts with, “We can make a great beautiful world for our children and grandchildren,” to “How can I use everybody to make me happy, prosperous, and give me power?” He saw then where this was all going. We’re seeing the outworking in our generation.
But untangenting off of the tangent, in eugenics the eu- (or ev- as in evangelical) means good, and the genetic part means a good people or a good race, so eugenics is the science of how to produce a better race of humanity by scientific methods, and one of the most obvious things in any selective breeding program is to kill off the dead weight.
“Here is an animal with five legs. Let’s not let it breed with anything. Here’s a puny weak animal. It doesn’t need to be breeding with anything. Here’s something that’s nearly blind, and here’s one that’s overly fat, and here’s one that just doesn’t look pretty like we want it to. All those things need to go so that we can concentrate on breeding the best and brightest, for whatever.”
Back then there was still an emphasis upon humanity, with humanity becoming more and more restricted to white intellectual Westerners who had graduated from the right universities and who were married into the right families. But as that has developed more and more, we’ve lost even that. Of course, the Nazis looked at what we were doing.
You can think of Margaret Sanger here and Planned Parenthood and all of that, and if anyone out there still doesn’t know, most of Planned Parenthood’s ‘clinics’ were set up in Hispanic and black neighborhoods because Margaret Sanger was a racist and wanted to eliminate those ethnic groups from the gene pool. They were backward peoples who offered no hope for the future and had nothing to contribute, so they needed to be stopped from breeding.
So they’d go into these neighborhoods, make clinics readily available, and tell them, “Oh, you have far too many children. It’s such a burden. Look at this, husband. Your wife is suffering so much from having so many children, and you’re not going to be able to take care of the children. Why don’t you learn to cut it down to mere replacement value at best, or maybe none at all?” And Planned Parenthood continues to do its work.
Did Sanger profess any allegiance to some kind of mainline denomination, or a denomination in any sense, or was she purely atheistic?
I would assume the latter, but I have not read her biography. That’s a good question and maybe one we should look at before too long. It would be interesting just to talk about that whole thing sometime.
Oh, that’s right. We have all the information at our fingertips. What was I thinking?
Anyhow, the Nazis looked at that and thought that looked really grand, but when WWII started and what the Nazis were doing came out, it no longer looked quite so grand – the holocaust and all – and the eugenics movement in the United States faded, or at least went underground and changed names and such, but that’s where this kind of thing goes.
When humanity becomes more and more narrowly defined, everything beyond humanity – that’s our new definition – is sacrificeable. We can just get rid of it, because it’s in the way. Or we can use it, because maybe we need laborers for our new world order, people who are dull and dense but at least can pull levers or pull boxes or something.
Just to pop back in, the motto of the newspaper that Sanger owned and ran was a) called The Woman Rebel, and b) the motto was “No gods, no masters,” so I think that answers the question.
Yeah, that just answered the question really well – no gods, no masters. And what was the name of the paper again?
Aha. In other words, the white upper-class woman rebelling against everything that’s been forced on her, by doing serious harm to women of other sorts, who aren’t really women because they’re not really human. Labels matter. Words matter.
So that’s where anthropology has come, but the problem, as men and women from other nations and cultures have come to the West for an education, or as Western education has reached them, or whatever, they’ve moved into this business of anthropology and they began to question it, strangely enough.
“My grandfather was an aborigine in Australia. There’s something here that’s not…”
So humanistic anthropology has had to retreat and say, “Well, we’re just, ya know, describing differences,” but here’s the difference. We have no way to evaluate these differences. We may note them. We may say, “Japan differs from China in this way, and China from Argentina in this way, and Argentina from Brazil in this way, and Brazil from South Africa this way, and South Africa from Egypt in this way,” and we can go on chronicling existing societies and past societies, but what we cannot do is make any value judgements.
Originally, anthropology was all about value judgements because we took ourselves as the starting point. Now all we can do is make lists of differences, and at some point someone is going to ask the question, “Well, ya know, that’s interesting. That’s like looking at different kinds of flowers. I like roses and you like daffodils and she likes daisies, and so? What judgements can we make?”
“Are the ones who do…oh. The humans are the ones who honor their dead…well, there’s those cannibal tribes.”
Even when it comes to biology, and now the whole abortion issue kicks in, what are you going to say about the child in the womb? Is it human?
Yes, and that rapidly becomes the next question, which is of course just a shell game.
“All right, we admit that anything biologically descended from a human is human, but is this a person?”
It’s functionally the same question because a person is a human – I mean, not all persons are humans obviously. There’s three of them I can think of, but every person that you meet on the streets, or go to a distant country to shake hands with, is a human being.
Yes, so now we shift away from functional definitions to sociological definitions, which is going to give us exactly the same problem again. The child is a human being, but is it a human person? Has society granted it the rights of a human?
Yes, because it ceases to be a right and it’s now a privilege granted by the majority, but who gave the majority the right to do all that? “Well, society banded together and gave itself this…”
This is a similar argument to when people say that the Second Amendment was the government coming together to give itself the right to wield guns. What?
I just looked it up yesterday because I keep hearing the phrase “begging the question” and people use that phrase wrong all the time, but this is literally begging the question. This is the actual fallacious argument.
Let’s go back to Eden where all things begin. When the serpent came to Adam and Eve and said, “You shall be as gods,” he was offering them a chance to redefine themselves by their own choices. Wow, this is the first time I’ve ever said that. So Satan was the first existentialist, which is of course is obvious in retrospect, but I just never thought about it that way before. And in defining themselves, they sidestepped God’s definition.
God had said, “You’re my image, but you’re my creature.” They wanted to be not simply like God. They wanted to be God. They wanted to take on not so much phenomenal cosmic power, as it was the right, the ability, the authority to define right and wrong for themselves. “You shall be as God, deciding for yourselves what good and evil is.” And in defining that, they made themselves the center of the universe. Each one of them made him- or herself the center of the universe, which is a problem because when you have two all-powerful beings in the same room, somebody loses.
That’s ultimately the general problem with post-modernism, is that you have 6 or 7 billion people around the planet right now as little gods running around, and supposedly each one has the power/authority/rights to determine what reality means. Right now, the only reason that is working is because, for the most part, they’ve come to similar conclusions.
The phrase is “the Left is eating itself.” There’s also a fair amount of the Right eating itself, but I’m going to leave that alone for now. This worldview devours itself because eventually you get to the point where friendly co-belligerency is done. If you’ve won, “Oh cool, we’ve defeated the enemies that we banded with these people against.”
There’s all this, and it works on a national level or international level. It works on the personal level. “I think I am God. I may not say it that way, but I think I’m a normal average Joe, and that everybody should more or less be like me. And people who are not like me, they’re the ones who’ve got it wrong.”
It can be something like, “They speak a different language, so obviously they’re stupid,” or “Their skin color is different. Obviously, they’re not exactly human then,” and you just go down the list of all the things that make people different, even down to, “They haven’t had the kind of education I’ve had. Maybe they’ve had no education so they’re a human failure. Maybe they’re human somehow, but love them the way I love myself and people like me? Everybody who’s like me is us.” But that constantly shrinks in number, depending upon the circumstances and the conflicts involved.
“Sure, we’ll side with Western Europe against the Far East, but then when that’s dealt with, then we look at the people in Europe and say, ‘Well, they’re Europeans and they’re funny and they think funny, and we don’t need…”
Then we start tearing ourselves apart. “You’re from the south? You’re not really one of us then, are you? You’re from California? You’re not like anybody.” And we Californians – “The rest of the world doesn’t get it, but we do.”
Somebody was talking to me in the grocery store several weeks ago, an older nice guy, and I mentioned something like, “I’m not from around here. I’m not familiar with this brand. Is it good?” because I was looking at something on the shelf. He goes, “Oh yeah, it’s really good. I got a bunch of them. Where are you from?” and I go, “California,” and he immediately goes, “Ah!” and puts up his fingers like a cross.
California simply has, at the moment, the advantage of being potentially the 6th or 7th greatest nation on earth economically and in terms of hardware and such, if it were to separate from the Union. It also has Hollywood, the movie industry, and all of that.
However, if the California mentality were shrunk down to the size of, oh, I don’t know, Utah, and lost its influence on the airwaves or internet, there’s a question of how many people would actually follow us and how many people would say, “Let’s build a wall around that and lock them in.”
We come back to this definition of humanity. On the sixth day of the first week, God made man in his own image and granted him dominion over creation, the lesser creation. But he made man to love his neighbor, and first of all, of course, to love God.
Man is that being who has a conscious intelligible intelligent relationship with the living God, but who is so far beneath him on the ontological scale that there is no comparison. God is infinite and man is finite. God is Creator, man is a created being, wholly dependent upon God, and yet God condescends in his overflowing joy, love, and mercy to make covenant with man, to bring him into a relationship in which he calls man not merely his servant, but his son. That’s what makes man special.
When the Bible begins to fill out this idea of the image of God, when Adam and Eve first heard this from God, they could look back at the creation work week as God had described and say, “Well, what does it mean to be like God? Obviously, we aren’t creators.”
“Well, we kind of are. We kind of make things. And God made beautiful things and we want beauty. We want to beautify the garden. And God speaks, and we’re talking to each other. God thinks and plans, and we’ve been making plans. God is able to discern that some things are better than others, and he delights in that which is good, and we’ve been taught to do that.”
Paul eventually will put the capstone on it in Ephesians and Colossians and speak of the image of God as righteousness, true holiness, and knowledge of the truth. And of course, Genesis adds “with dominion over creation.”
These things are closely related to the Old Testament and Christological offices of prophet, king, priest. To know and to speak the truth, to act in terms of it to bring about relatively new things within the time stream, to change things, to make them better than they were, and then to rejoice with one another in that goodness, to bless and to enjoy and to fellowship. These are human things and they are all related and done before the face of the living God, who is never absent from us. This is humanity and it’s this that fell into sin.
Now, in the Fall, man did not become non-human and in that sense not less human, but humanity was corrupted. If man stopped being human, God would stop caring about him as man and would stop holding him accountable.
Yeah. And what that has left us with, because we cannot think in any other categories but biblical categories. We just twist them and break them and corrupt them. So we still have this idea of the deranged, the depraved, the deviant, but now we fix on it not in terms of some moral absolutes given by God, but in terms of how unlike us they are.
“They’re not like me. First of all, they’re not like my nation, or actually they’re not like my culture. They’re not Western civilization. Wait, they’re not American. Wait, they’re not Californian. Wait, they’re not part of my in-circle role-playing, Bible study, school we all came from group,” so we get narrower and narrower and narrower.
Yeah, but here’s the clever thing. We still have to have an idea of the devil, because that too is an inescapable category. Once we have declared most of what God would call humanity as ‘other,’ as non-human, we can put our finger on something within that and say, “And they specifically are the problem.”
Nazi Germany pointed primarily at the Jews. Some southern types have pointed primarily at the blacks. Some blacks today point to the whites.
Yeah, and Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants and vice versa. We can find one group within our range of experience and say, “They are the problem.” Dr. Rushdoony labeled this “selective depravity.” In fact, I’m going to read a quote from him here.
Depravity is limited to a class or group. Instead of seeing the problem as sin, and sin as pandemic to all men in Adam, it sees sin as limited to a segment of humanity. Instead of fighting against sin, it calls upon us to fight against a particular group of men. This means a radically different plan of salvation than that which is set forth in Scripture. Instead of Jesus Christ as the Savior of all men, of every race, color, and class, it sees one segment of humanity, the “good guys,” as the world’s hope. The problem, then, is to exorcise the “bad guys.”
This is something we are constantly seeing. Of course, Marx capitalized on this in his approach to class struggle. The oppressing class, the class that to some degree controls the capital, they are the devil. They are the bad guys, and the way of salvation is to bring them down through bloody revolution and create a new order. This keeps on going as history progresses through economic conflict.
And, of course, it’s not a spiritual salvation. It is the salvation of humankind, the workers who are these noble men who do the hard thing and are being exploited and all that. It’s societal. I’ve already said that but it’s worth repeating. There’s nothing metaphysical about it, except in the sense that he thinks there is something behind history leading it towards the conclusion of communism.
Yeah, and we’re seeing it again today in critical race theory, black lives matter, and all that, which are covers for old-fashioned Marxism. This was Marxist ideology, and before that it was Hegelian and generally socialist. Get people to fight with each other. It doesn’t matter why. Find something. People always like to fight with each other. Find the thing that works best, develop a philosophy around that, sell it, and sell it using Christian labels. “This is justice. This is freedom. This is love. People like these Christian label things, so let’s just use that.”
People like just breaking things, honestly. I think Carl Trueman said that one of the reasons the Reformation was as popular as it was – and it’s not necessarily a good motivation to get on the Reformation side of things – but was that a lot of young men basically realized, “Oo, this is our opportunity to break stuff,” so iconoclasm was a thing. Who, being a 13- or 14-year-old male child, would not relish the opportunity to take a rock and throw it through a window that has a painting of something? Apparently then more than today.
Because in their culture, outward religious differences – whether or not you even understood the difference between the Lord’s Supper and Mass – it’s enough that you’ve been told by your parents that those people who say “mass” are evil, wicked, and everything nasty should be done to them. And those people who say “communion, Lord’s Supper” or whatever, they’re the good people. It requires no understanding whatsoever.
And it also helps to explain why over the course of the centuries since then there’s the undercurrent of anything that even looks or sounds like it’s in continuity with Catholicism (with spooky fingers) is automatically wrong, automatically suspect, so we need to go away from it.
There’s a growing in strength anti-creedal movement, anti-classical theism etc etc – these things that even the most radical reformers at the time – maybe not the most radical, but the Anabaptists come to mind – but the more radical side say, “No, no, they were right about this. We’re disagreeing with them on the matter of sacramentology, ecclesiology…”
Justification by faith or by imputed righteousness or by infused righteousness.
And they still said, “They got this other thing right.” Anyway, that’s my mini-soapbox.
Being a teacher and seeing not only my own class but the younger classes, it’s amusing and yet very much concerning to see the younger kids fight over labels. If you actually understand your church’s commitment to one particular doctrine of baptism and you can yourself defend it from scripture and you want to have an argument with a kid on the other side who is in the same position with regard to his position, and you want to have a nice little debate, great! Truth matters.
But when all it’s about is, “Well, we do it this way and you do it that way, so you’re evil and stupid,” that’s not love. There’s no way that’s love, because it’s not built upon truth.
Or even the very lazy argument, which again is not in line with the truth, where you go, “Well, obviously you just haven’t reformed enough to reject this clearly Catholic teaching,” or vice versa to say, “Well, clearly you’ve just reformed right out of the gate.” This isn’t good faith argumentation.
You’re just assuming off the bat that you and your crowd are right because it’s you and your crowd. I may be wrong, but that’s not an argument. We need to go back to what the Bible actually says and read the text. What does it say? Read all of the text, and what does it all say? We’re not going to just play to your few superficial sentimental arguments that always seem to win because people don’t know anything.
Yes, all that and yet – often it is our own sinful pride that rejects the other for being the other, even into the very gates of the church. Even at the altar where we say, “You just said altar. You’re obviously Roman Catholic.”
No, I am not Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox, nor do I want to be, nor do I ever plan on being. I do actually understand the Roman doctrines of the sacraments and the Roman doctrine of justification, and I know a lot of Protestants who obviously don’t. I know a lot of Roman Catholics who don’t either, because we rest content with labels. We want just enough of a label to point out all the people who aren’t like us, so we can feel good about ourselves.
Shifting ground completely here, I am reminded, because my family comes from the south – my wife and I just saw a comedy routine on poor white trash. I don’t know who the stand-up comedian was, but he was very funny and very accurate.
One of the things about the so-called poor white trash is that they had one thing going for them – they weren’t black. They didn’t have anything else going for them, nor did they particularly pretend to. They knew they were at the bottom of the social rung, but they weren’t black. Black was something else again.
I was going through some of my father’s letters a few years back and picked up one from his sister, who was in all other respects a very godly woman, church-going, sweet, loved the Lord and all that, but apparently a black family had moved into a house nearby, and the way she described it – I won’t use the words, but you can guess – and the callousness and “Well, there goes the neighborhood” was just absolutely horrifying to me. She didn’t write it as some kind of scathing attack. It was just the way she thought and talked. It was usual because that’s the culture she’d been raised in.
That’s why when people suggest moving to the south, I’m just thinking I’m sure there are many good godly people in the south, and I’m sure the south has progressed beyond that, but it’s kind of scarred me. I grew up with this and it is not Christianity.
Yes, I can tell one color of skin from another. It’s an interesting thing – I can tell one color of skin from another, but I cannot read the DNA until now, thanks to Ancestry.com.
Yes, but nonetheless our family members one by one bought each other birthday gifts consisting of “get yourself tested here” and we found out some amazing things. My wife had been told all her life that she was mostly Italian, but that her grandfather or something was full-blood Cherokee, as everybody else’s grandfather in the United States is full-blood Cherokee. Well, her DNA comes back with no Cherokee whatsoever, no Italian, and almost entirely Scottish, Welsh, English, and Viking, that part of the world.
I had been told as a child that my birth father was Mexican-American, but what that meant was not clear. Did that mean that he was from Mexico and moved to the United States? Did it mean he was percentage-wise half Hispanic and half Anglo? I didn’t know, so I would always tell my girls, “Whenever you’re having to list your ethnicity, put Hispanic because that’s what I’ve been told.”
It turns out I am way over the mark for being Hispanic, but not generic Hispanic. My ancestors were from a small community outside Mexico City that the Aztecs never conquered, but apparently the Conquistadors intermarried with them. And basically no one in that area ever left that area until the 1920s, at which point my immediate ancestors moved to the United States, into California, then into the Oakland area, and I was born. But going back further on my mom’s side, I have lots of ancestors in Salt Lake City, Mormons. I found out eventually that my birth mother was Mormon. My birth father had been Jehovah’s Witness, but got cast out. As we look further, it also turns out that I have African blood from two or three different tribes, and a small bit of Jewish blood. So what am I? I’m a child of God.
The other is interesting scientifically, genetically, mapping history and the movements of people groups. That’s all fine and fun. My grandpa on my mom’s side always had a good response, because this was when immigration was still a very strong thing. People would say, “What nationality are you?” and Grandpa would say, “Tell them American.”
It's funny because in our school, where we have a mix of so many different Eastern European people groups, even when the families are nationalized and they’ve taken the citizenship oath and their children are nationalized, if you ask them what are they, they will say Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, Romanian – not “We’re American, but our ancestors were…” No, in their minds that grouping still holds.
So when Russia invaded Ukraine, we have Russian and Ukrainian families and kids. That was interesting for a little while. Whose side do you pick? And do you have to pick a side? Can’t you rather stand on Jesus’ side and say, “Whoever is doing evil here is wrong and they both need Jesus.”
That’s the basis for the gospel, that humanity is not shut off in selective herds, where some people need the gospel, other people maybe need something else, and some people can just burn, because they’re beneath our notice.
I’ve been reading a book on the beginning of missions after the Reformation, the renewal of missionary activity, and it is amazing to me to see how many, with good solid Calvinistic theology, had trouble getting this whole missionary thing through their heads.
It was like, “Well, they’re not really our culture. It’s going to be really hard to teach them the faith when they don’t know English. How are we supposed to communicate with them? And is it really necessary that we do? Can’t God find someone else? They’re not like us.”
It took some very strong leaders to say, “Hey, how about we go and live among them and learn their language, and then preach Christ to them in a way that they can understand, without diluting the faith but communicating it in their terms?”
It was eventually that eschatological optimism that fueled the missionary revivals of both the 1700 and 1800s, but it took a while and it was still part of this, “But they’re them, and we’re us, and how…? Why?”
This is something that Christians really need to get beyond, and in many respects we have. I’ve said before that oftentimes when the church works itself into a dead end or ignores a doctrine or a teaching or reality long enough, God will raise up a countermovement in the world which will analyze the problem pretty well, then give us the most horrible solutions possible. I think you were the one who added that one. This is a chastisement. It gets us going again.
I would love to be able to say the church is the one who led us to understand that men who seek God in all nations are acceptable to him. I’m not so sure that was it. I have an idea it was a little bit of cultural relativism that came out of the left. One of the challenges is to get over your whiteness and start looking at men as men.
The world took that in completely the wrong direction, but I think it shook us up enough that when there came a generation, probably beginning about with mine, race became a non-thing. It’s not a biblical concept remotely, and the differences in ethnicity became not simply challenges but also wonderful opportunities and a delight to see how God had prepared this people in this place to hear the gospel, if only we would go and tell them and abandon our assumptions and our privileges for a little while, which of course is what Paul did wherever he went, becoming all things to all men.
I’m not sure I have anything really to add. I think the only thing I would say in addition is the double-edge warning to – well, it’s really a single edge and it’s to have discernment. But there’s a difference between just having discernment and then being incredibly hyper-discerning against error, to the point that you can’t listen to anyone at all, because everyone has a problem about something.
When it come to the issue of race, which as you know is not really a biblical category necessarily, it’s something new. It’s something that we can acknowledge and say this is a thing that people see.
Right, and people talk about this and they use these categories, but they’re not rooted in scripture.
So racism is a sin. Obviously, you and I are on the same page about racism being a sin, but there are people who look at influential theologians in the past and give their racism – they just kind of brush it aside. At best they don’t mention it and don’t think about it.
I have two spicy examples. The first would be Martin Luther, who later in life was very, very anti-Semitic – not just anti-Judaistic but anti-Jewish. For all the great things he did, he was still a sinful man. We can obviously look at him and say, “Yeah, this is what he did,” and acknowledge it and then say, “but he was still biblically accurate on X, Y, and Z issue.”
The second one, which is also spicy, is R.L. Dabney, who wrote “A Defense of Virginia and the South” shortly after the Confederacy separated from the Union, and the absolute horridness of the way he refers to black image-bearers is awful, and the way that he continued to through the rest of life, even to the point of – I think it was the PCA at that point still – having a discussion after the war, considering the issue of bringing on black ministers.
He essentially said, “They’re all lazy. They’re all too stupid, and if we lower our standards to let these people in, there will be no ministers left in good standing who are worthy of the title Minister, so I vote against this.” It’s not good. That’s wrong. For all his other systematic correctness when it came to different doctrines, that was wrong, same as Martin Luther.
We don’t have idols or heroes in Christianity, unless you count Jesus. That’s about it.
I can think of theologians and writers, who I respect for much of what they’ve done, but the same kind of thing has come up. Sometimes it’s because they were a product of their time and using the language of their time. I’m still shocked momentarily when I’m reading something from the ‘50s or ‘60s and someone simply uses the word Negro, but it’s obviously not simply a descriptor or skin color or even of culture. It’s like, “These are a different sort of people.”
They don’t say that, but it’s almost impossible for me to read what they’ve written without hearing that. And yet that was how black people were spoken of, and now is black even acceptable? Or are we still at African-American or does that even work, because not all people with dark skin came from Africa?
There is such a thing as being too touchy, but there’s also such a thing as going back and saying these were people living in a different time under different conditions, and insofar as possible we need to discern what the intentions were. Were they really forwarding a message of hate, or were they just being careless because they were adopting the language and thought forms of the time to communicate something very different, often very hostile to those very thought forms?
Huck Finn – do you read it in class? Because it has the N word. When I was a kid, the N word was not called the N word. We actually used it. I didn’t know any black people growing up, and it was a common word. As I got older and realized it was a very offensive word, I stopped using it. I do believe you should call people what they want to be called, because it’s respectful, even if sometimes you have to go a little ways to figure out what that might be this year.
So two things – let’s not be overly picky, and consider that maybe people are uneducated or speaking out of a different time and place, and yet let’s not be afraid to call our heroes on the carpet and say, like with Dabney, “Your systematic theology is so good, but this is atrocious, and I suspect Jesus had some words with you about this as you appeared before him in glory.”
It’s like navigating all sin and righteousness issues. It’s not always easy because as saints our understanding is clouded by sin and by self. We still think of ourselves as the center of the universe, and Jesus spends all our lives working on that in us.
Only death or his return gets us past that wholly, but we can at least devote ourselves to the principle that we’re not the center of the universe. God is, and God has made many people who are very different from us in many ways, and they are human. They are the image of God and they need Jesus too, and part of our responsibility is to love them by taking Jesus to them, bringing them to him.
Exactly. So the ending message we would leave you with is to be like the little girl in 2 Kings, who saw even one who was oppressing her as one of God’s people and still said, “Man, if only he was there near the prophet so that he could be healed of this sickness.”
In the last line, the prophet did heal him. Jesus will say there were many lepers in Israel, but unto none of them was Elisha sent, but to this one Syrian, this one Gentile. The little girl was right. She was a better theologian than a lot of people today.
What an excellent note to end on. Thank you for joining me for this discussion, Greg. Do you have a recommendation?
Yeah. This is a somewhat guarded recommendation because I haven’t finished reading the book yet, which is something we tend to do a lot.
Recommendation by proxy. “You go read this and tell us what you think of it.”
When I was still in high school, I was told of a book, As the Waters Cover the Sea, by James De Jong. It’s the story of the beginning of Anglo-American missionary activity, and some of the things I mentioned actually come from the book. I’d heard of it for years and years and years. Back before the internet it was not a book you could find. Actually, the man who wrote it was a theology teacher at my college, and there were many areas of theology I very much disagreed with him on, but he’s a good historian.
I think it is probably his doctoral thesis, and it’s written like one, so this is not a book for everybody, but if you’re interested in how the idea of the Reformed church reaching out to the world, to other nations beyond Scotland, England, and America came about, and the motivating factors and the prophecies and how people interpreted prophecy differently and what those differences made as the church became more self-consciously missionary-oriented, this would be a good book for you. It's readable. It doesn’t read like a novel, certainly, but if that’s an interest of yours – As the Waters Cover the Sea by James De Jong.
Recommendation: As the Waters Cover the SeaI’m going to follow up my recommendation from last episode to say I finished the book about Peter Pan being the bad guy, and I can confirm the ending was good. It was a good story overall – very sad in a lot of ways. That’s Lost Boy by Christina Henry.
Recommendation: Lost BoyShe’s apparently also written several other books that take fairy tale stories and tell it in the non-Disney-fied version of them. I think there was one about Alice in Wonderland even. I don’t know what the premise of that one is. I just saw the cover on Good Reads when I was typing up my review.
Thank you for the recommendation and thanks for this conversation. It was good.
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