From Babel to Pentecost

Dear Gavin,

Thanks for your last letter. Clearly it is time for us to get into the ethnic issues, or at least to start on them. You will notice, right at the front end, that I much prefer to use the term ethnic as opposed to racial. These are ethnic issues, not racial issues. In the biblical worldview, there is only one race, that one race being the human race. We are, all of us, descended from Noah and his wife. We are not all descended from Ham, Shem, or Japheth, but we are all nevertheless still cousins. We are cousins because of Ham, Shem, and Japheth.

You should notice a few important things about this passage. The overarching reality is that God is the sovereign over all ethnic differentiation. He is in charge of who lives where, who goes where, and who looks like what. Whatever rivers, mountain ranges, or oceans contributed to the genetic isolation of and selection possibilities for a particular people group, such that distinct ethnic tribes consequently developed . . . well, those boundaries were established by God Himself.

The first decisive moment in this development was the time that God confused the languages of men at Babel.

When this happened, everybody obviously grouped together with the ones they could still understand. The intention of God was fulfilled, and they all scattered across the face of the earth, taking their respective new languages with them. Some of them went over the mountains, others stayed on this side of the river, and still others disappeared into the woods. They naturally would marry within their new linguistic grouping, and certain traits began to be reinforced. Soon there were physiological traits that tracked right alongside the linguistic realities. Cultures grew organically along with everything else. People didn’t separate because they were different tribes; they became different tribes because they separated. And that separation was the result of a divine intervention.

Not to be crass, but this is how dog breeders do it. Think of Irish setters as one canine tribe, and German short-haired pointers as another tribe. We are not sure about the little yippy dogs, but in the interests of inclusivity let’s include them also. All of them are dogs, but not all of them are a particular kind of dog—sheepdogs, say.

Now let’s go back to the passage in Acts. There we have distinct varieties of men (ethnoi) and we also have a basic unity (“made of one blood”). This passage clearly and unambiguously teaches the unity of all humankind, while at the same time recognizing the reason for our separation into various tribes. We are all of us sinners because of our unity in Adam (Rom. 5:12). We are all of us members of a particular ethnoi because of God’s judgment at Babel (Gen. 11:9).

This passage from Acts has often been appealed to by separatists and segregationists as justification for keeping their walls high, and the “keep out” signs posted. They argue that God clearly wants us all to steer clear of one another . . . or so the argument goes. But this take is obviously overlooking something. It is all very well to say that God appointed the Swedes to live where they do, and the Nez Perce to live where they do, and that is why everybody should just stay put—but there are other complicated areas that God’s providence rules over, like Brooklyn.

So let’s say they don’t stay put, and that certain harbor cities become cosmopolitan hot pots. Let’s also say that it goes on like that for one century after another. I mean, New York City has been a jumble of nationalities from the seventeenth century on. That being the case, and it is kind of a fait accompli, such that a native New Yorker cab driver almost has his own ethnicity, the question arises. Who apportioned the bounds of that habitation?

Someone might reply that he does not object to a merchant, say, traveling over there to buy stuff in order to bring it back over here, taking care to not bring back any cooties. The argument would then move on to say that the problem lies in things like intermarriage. This is where anti-miscegenation folks draw the line because that is where all the blurring and smudging starts to happen. But that just brings us back to the question in the previous paragraph—let’s say that the blurring does happen, and we have ourselves a new tribe of mutts. Who appointed the bounds of their habitation? God didn’t quit setting the bounds of our habitation when He finished locating the Finns and the Zulu. Acts 17 tells us that it is clearly God at work. God is at work in the mono-ethnic places like Japan, and He is at work in the SeaTac airport. And so do the downstream mutts have to fight to protect the purity of their strain?

Now there is an important point that needs to be inserted here. I am talking about what choices are lawful, and not about what choices are mandatory. It is perfectly acceptable to stay at home and marry your high school sweetheart, living and dying among your own kin. Absolutely. That’s what most of us do. Once we become interested in girls, we are usually most interested in the ones close by. In the same way, and for the same sort of reason, it is just as lawful for a GI overseas to marry a native girl and bring her home with him. Both of these are absolutely okay, and we don’t get to tell anybody what they have to do, or what their preferences need to be. We are talking about what is lawful, and consequently we leave those choices up to individuals. We are not talking about what is mandatory, where we leave the choices up to racists or other ideologues.

Just do this thought experiment. Suppose a pastor is counseling some young man your age, and let’s say that the young man is white. They are talking about his desire to marry, and the pastor asks the young man to describe what sort of girl he would like to marry. If he is getting counsel from your average evangelical pastor, he is certainly allowed to say that he would like someone who was “tall,” or “athletic,” or “blonde, I like blondes,” or “college-educated.” He can say that he would like a girl who likes to read. He can put all those things down on his list. The one thing he had better not say is “white.” If he were so stupid as to say something like that to a pastor, he would find himself under dark suspicion immediately. But that makes no ethical sense.

Everything rides on the reason. If when challenged (and he would be challenged) he says something like, “I don’t know. Just a preference. Seems like more my type,” then somebody should sound the all-clear. But if he said, with a shocked face, that “he ‘wasn’t allowed’ to marry outside his color range,” then it would be time for a Bible study. It is the difference between someone with a natural affinity for kin, and someone with a natural affinity for kinism.

Okay, so I want to do a little speculative reconstruction, but only just for a minute. This was apparently a wife from Moses’ earlier time in Egypt. Josephus tells the story of how Moses, a prince of Egypt, was besieging an Ethiopian city called Saba, and the queen of that city fell in love with him from the city walls. She offered to surrender in exchange for marriage, an offer which Moses accepted. If that tale is historical, then she apparently decided at some point to rejoin Moses out in the wilderness, thus disturbing an equilibrium that Miriam did not want to have disturbed. So Miriam objected to all of it, and God struck her with leprosy (Num. 12:10-11). She became white as snow, an event which in this circumstance did not confer on her any white privilege. But whether that story is accurate or fanciful, the biblical fact is that Moses, a descendant of Shem, was in fact married to a woman who was descended from Ham. And the one who was disciplined in that case was not Moses, but rather the person who objected to it.

It would be tedious to multiply examples, because there are many, so let me give you just one more. Rahab was a woman of great faith (Heb. 11:31), and by that faith, she spared her entire family, and came out of Jericho in order to join up with Israel (Josh. 6:23). But not only did she join up with Israel, she married into Israel. She married Salmon of the tribe of Judah (Ruth 4:20-21; 1 Chron. 2:11; Matt. 1:5)—even though she was an Amorite. He was descended from Shem, and she from Ham. Even though God appointed the boundaries of their respective habitations.

I need to bring this in for a landing, and so I will make just one more point. It is striking that early human history begins with God striking down an early humanist attempt at a global unity (Gen. 11:6). Mankind was in rebellion against heaven, and so God determined that they needed to be kept busy fighting with one another for a while. That will keep them occupied for a bit, which it most certainly did.

But when the time was fulfilled, when it came time for God to make His move, He did it by sending His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh in order that He might be sacrificed on a gibbet. This was done, but then God acted in a decisive way. In and through the resurrection, God established the pivot point of all human history. Things were going to be different now. Human history could not go on in the same way as before because a man had been killed in the middle of that history, and He had come back from the dead.

The fact of this resurrection is the message that God required His people to declare to every creature. But notice what lies in the back of this command to speak a message to every creature. The Great Commission requires an erosion of the limits of Babel. It requires missionaries from one ethnos to go live among another ethnos, learn their language and customs, and translate the Bible for them. This is simply a gargantuan task, and so God gave us some inspiration, and a jump start, in the great miracle of Pentecost. For what is Pentecost but a signal that everything is different now.

All the old affections may remain. Indeed, they must remain. Pentecost did not usher in an era of oikophobia. So all the old affections can and should remain. But in Christ, all the old hostilities and bigotries need to go.

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas