The primary problem in the world is that mankind has chosen to live according to their own definition of good and evil instead of trusting Yahweh’s.
This is called sin.
Sin has always manifested itself as peoples dominating over one another. Tribalism is inherent within the cosmic disorientation of sin.
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As we see beginning in Genesis 4, 6, 9, and 11, the sin Adam and Eve unleashed into the world when they rebelled against Yahweh and sought knowledge of good and evil for themselves manifests in humans by causing them to dominate over one another.
Cain became jealous of Abel and killed him in the field. Lamech enacts revenge by killing a man and then uses poetry to brag about it. Canaan defiles his father’s naked body through a seemingly self-gratifying sexual act and the people of Babel set out to make a name for themselves that would be above all other names.
At its core, sin causes mankind to rule and reign selfishly and not according to the image of Yahweh.
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This article is the sixth of a series of articles addressing the question, “How should Christians process Critical Race Theory?”
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From the first pages of scripture, we see that one of the main problems in the world as a result of the fall is prejudices toward each other that lead us to do harm. And this prejudice doesn’t go away.
It shows itself in the way Joseph’s brothers abused him. It shows itself in the way Hophni and Phinehas conspire to use people’s offerings for their own personal gain.
Saul becomes jealous with David and tries to kill him. David rapes Bathsheba. Ahab steals a man’s vineyard. The leaders of Israel tolerate and participate in oppression of the poor. And, eventually, full-blood Jews despise Samaritans as half-breed compromisers.
Prejudice is not limited to personal thought. As prejudices sit within people, they become embedded within that people group’s narrative of the world.
When Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, it deported all the Jews to a foreign land. This was their customary way of conquering people: scattering them throughout other foreign lands so they would lose their ethnic identity.
Eventually, as Jews returned to Samaria and began resettling, they intermarried with the foreigners who now lived there. This led other Jews who had not intermarried to view “Samaritans” as compromisers saying they had denied their faith by intermarrying with foreigners and by adopting other teachings.[1]
Jewish prejudice against Samaritans ran deep enough that they would go to great lengths to travel around Samaria instead of passing through it.
By the time Jesus showed up on the scene, this prejudice had been thoroughly baked into Jewish thought. In fact, it extended to Galileans as well, who had also been conquered by Assyria and intermarried with foreigners. Most of Jesus’ disciples came from Galilee, and on one particular trek back to Galilee from Judea, Jesus decided to go through Samaria.
While traveling through Samaria, Jesus met the woman at the well of John 4. Both the woman and His disciples seem surprised that He was talking with a Samaritan woman. As a result of His conversation with her, they spent two days in Sychar and many Samaritans of the village came to faith in Jesus as the Messiah.
Central to the Gospel is God’s work of re-unifying humanity, demolishing the tribalism of the Fall.
Even though it may be easy to miss if we do not know the cultural dynamics of His day, Jesus regularly embodied His message of Good News for all people’s by nudging His Jewish followers to rethink their view of Samaritans and Galileans. The only full-blooded Jewish disciple Jesus had was Judas Iscariot. He regularly worked to dismantle the collective prejudice of the Jewish people by surrounding Himself with and empowering those whom others despised.
In Luke 10, Jesus told the provocative parable of a man who got robbed on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho. He was left to die along the side of the road. A Levite and a priest each passed by him, but chose to ignore his dire state and quickly passed along. But then Jesus said a Samaritan came and had pity on the man beaten by robbers. Jesus told his listeners that the Samaritan bandaged his wounds and took him to an inn to be properly cared for.
What’s so provocative about this parable is that Jesus was responding to the question, “Who is my neighbor.” He had just asked His listeners to contemplate what it means to love their neighbor as theirselves. Jesus said the one who showed mercy to the robbed man proved to be the robbed man’s neighbor.
He set up the despised Samaritan as the model for His Jewish listeners to follow.
Prejudice goes back to the fall of man and this kind of manifestation of sin will continue to tempt humanity until Jesus restores all things. It should not surprise us to discover prejudice in our day and age. It shouldn’t even surprise us to discover it in our own hearts. And like many of Jesus’ listeners, the prejudice we carry often stem from prejudicial views of certain people baked into our cultural narrative of the world.
We may not have consciously decided to view certain people through a particular lens. We simply absorbed such a view by the way everyone talked about them, told jokes about them, looked when they came into the room, or reacted when we found out someone had married them.
It’s not that each of Jesus’ listeners had done something explicitly egregious toward Samaritans; it’s simply that the Jewish way of looking at the world was biased against Samaritans. This bias led to Jews regularly avoiding Samaritans, even excluding them from Yahweh’s family. After all, they had adopted false gods through marriage with foreigners.
In a very similar way, many of us in America have adopted a particular bias toward people of other ethnicities. Specifically, people of African American or Native American descent. Many have righteous sounding reasons for our bias: “they don’t have good fathers,” “they have a bad work ethic,” “they commit so much crime,” “they don’t take responsibility”—you name it.
But if we’re actually honest with ourselves and the data, we’d acknowledge that they aren’t the only ones facing a crisis of fatherhood. They’re not the only ones who have bad work ethics, commit crime, or fail to take responsibility. These reasons merely serve as covers for prejudice. Nothing more, nothing less.
But Jesus receives all peoples as His disciples. Samaritans, Galileans, Egyptians, Europeans, Africans, Asians, Native Americans—He makes ever tribe, tongue, and language a part of the new humanity being united in Him (Eph. 2:13-15).
Perhaps it could be helpful to again reiterate that this series is not an attempt to teach or promote Critical Race Theory (CRT). I am not trying to somehow make CRT fit within a scriptural paradigm.
Rather, this series is designed to help Christians process how to evaluate CRT. I am trying to help us realize there is first of all biblical precedent for addressing the issues CRT seeks to address (racial/ethnic disparities) and second of all, biblical acknowledgement of the dynamics CRT helps us realize (wrong behavior toward people of minority ethnicity based on biases we hold).
As I’ve said before, I don’t think CRT has the answer for solving racial injustice. For one thing, most CRT theorists don’t work from a framework understanding Yahweh as Creator and humanity as sinful. They do not necessarily acknowledge sin as the primary problem with the world.
Even so, rather than condemning CRT outright, we need to be careful that we clearly articulate why we have concern about CRT. Too many people who stand against CRT are simply refusing to acknowledge racial prejudices. They don’t necessarily have a distinctly better grasp of a proper worldview.
In other words, it’s not CRT that they are primarily concerned about. It’s the uncomfortable feeling they get when being confronted with the problem CRT seeks to address.
Let’s let go of CRT. We still have the sin of racial prejudice to deal with. If we can address the problem of racial prejudice without the CRT framework, let’s go for it.
We still live in a nation that has historically benefited people with white skin color and looked down upon people with colored skin. We still have a biblical precedent for understanding that these racial prejudices don’t just stop; they adapt. And we still have the Gospel calling us to be advocates for justice in our day, even as it concerns racial disparities among us.
Feel free to share your responses to this article in the comments below. Please be respectful to each other as you do. Grace and peace.
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Footnote
[1] Bill T. Arnold, Bryan E. Beyer. Encountering the Old Testament, p. 7.
