Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

ethnicity

What the Bible Teaches about Ethnic Harmony

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In this new 44-page article, I support eight propositions about ethnicity:

Naselli, Andrew David. “What the Bible Teaches about Ethnic Harmony.” Midwestern Journal of Theology 19.2 (2020): 14–57.

    1. God created every human in his image with equal worth in his sight, so ethnic partiality is sinful.
    2. Humans in the Bible’s storyline are multiethnic.
    3. God’s global plan to save sinners includes people from every ethnic group.
    4. God approves of interethnic marriage.
    5. God’s people must love their neighbors across ethnic lines.
    6. The church—both Jewish and Gentile Christians—must maintain the unity (including ethnic harmony) that Christ powerfully created.
    7. The church should welcome ethnic diversity.
    8. The church should love justice, which entails treating all ethnicities justly and encouraging its members to pursue justice in society.

Update: I helped condense the gist of this article into “Ethnic Harmony Affirmations and Denials,” a statement by the Bethlehem Baptist Church elders on February 6, 2021.

Keller and Carson: Greco-Roman Slavery ≠ Race-Based Slavery

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Many modern readers assume that slavery in the New Testament is equivalent to the race-based slavery of the African slave trade. While not defending the Greco-Roman institution of slavery, Tim Keller and Don Carson explain why it’s important not to equate it with the race-based slavery that we may be more familiar with.

Tim Keller

KellerTimothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (New York: Dutton, 2012), 213–14, 280–83.

Paul is speaking to servants and masters [in Ephesians 6:5–9], and this raises many questions in the minds of modern readers about the Bible’s depiction of the evil of slavery. While much can be said about this subject,* it is important to remember that slavery in the Greco-Roman world was not the same as the New World institution that developed in the wake of the African slave trade. Slavery in Paul’s time was not race-based and was seldom lifelong. It was more like what we would call indentured servitude. But for our purposes, think of this passage as a rhetorical amplifier and consider this: If slave owners are told they must not manage workers in pride and through fear, how much more should this be true of employers today? And if slaves are told it is possible to find satisfaction and meaning in their work, how much more should this be true of workers today? [Read more…] about Keller and Carson: Greco-Roman Slavery ≠ Race-Based Slavery

Interracial Marriage: Oppose, Tolerate, or Celebrate?

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I’ve been a member of churches that oppose interracial marriage. I have friends who have received counsel in those churches from pastors—pastors who refuse to perform an interracial wedding—to break off an interracial dating relationship primarily because of a person’s ethnicity.

I vividly recall when Bob Jones University dropped their ban against interracial dating in 2000 and apologized in 2008.

Nor do I forget the first time I taught an MDiv course at an extension site of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 2007 composed entirely of black students—all older than I. When the dean introduced me to the class, he mentioned that I earned an MA and PhD from Bob Jones University. Then he walked out of the classroom. The stares felt like glares, and I don’t blame them. I had to dig myself out of a big hole (which, by God’s grace, I think I finally escaped).

So at least for me based on my limited experience, this issue is still fresh.

In John Piper’s new book, his chapter on interracial (or better: inter-ethnic*) marriage argues “from Scripture and experience that interracial marriage is not only permitted by God but is a positive good in our day. It is not just to be tolerated, but celebrated” (p. 203):

John Piper. Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian. Wheaton: Crossway, 2011. 

*See Piper’s appendix 1 for why the term ethnicity is better than race (pp. 234–40).

The book is even more interesting to me since Piper grew up across the street from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina.

Watch him talk about it in this gripping 17-minute documentary:

Piper tells his story in chapter 1, and a big part of it is interracial marriage (pp. 35–37):

The perceived wrongness of interracial marriage had been for me one of the unshakeable reasons why segregation was right. (p. 35)

Here’s the outline of chapter 15 (“Interracial Marriage,” pp. 203–15, numbering added) with some excerpts: [Read more…] about Interracial Marriage: Oppose, Tolerate, or Celebrate?

Seven Synthesizing Conclusions about Ethnicity

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Here’s how D. A. Carson introduces J. Daniel Hays’s From Every People and Nation: A Biblical Theology of Race (ed. D. A. Carson; New Studies in Biblical Theology 14; Downers Grove: IVP, 2003) in the series preface (pp. 9–10):

This volume combines fine technical scholarship on complex matters of history and race with a prophetic call to Christians to abjure racism. On the one hand, it traces out much of what the Bible says about the diversity of races and cultures, against the background of Ancient Near Eastern social history (its treatment of the ‘curse of Ham’ is particularly penetrating and convincing); on the other, it exposes some of the glib, unbiblical, and frankly immoral stances that not only characterize a fair bit of Western scholarship, but continue to surface in our attitudes and relationships. Dr J. Daniel Hays is able simultaneously to make us long for the new heaven and the new earth, when men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation will gather around the One who sits on the throne and around the Lamb, and to cause us to blush with shame when we recognize afresh that the church of Jesus Christ is to be already an outpost of that consummated kingdom in this fallen world. This book deserves the widest circulation and the most thoughtful reading, for it corrects erroneous scholarship while calling Christians to reform sinful attitudes. If the book is sometimes intense, it is because the problems it addresses are not trivial.

Hays concludes with seven “main synthesizing conclusions” that summarize the book (pp. 201–5): [Read more…] about Seven Synthesizing Conclusions about Ethnicity