This article is Part 1 of a two-part series from CPT Fellow Phil Anderas.
Click here to read Part 2.
To answer the question – and in honor of the late great Dr. Packer – let’s start with a working definition of the gospel as: the good news that God saves sinners. The Father chose us in love and appointed us for salvation and life in Jesus Christ. The Son became flesh, redeemed us by blood, conquered Death, and brought our nature home to the Father. The Spirit gives us life, regenerating us that we may believe, renewing us in the holiness of love, instilling in us the hope of glory and keeping us by his grace until we get there.
What does this gospel have to do with race? Everything – according to St Paul. But you have to grapple with his interpretation of the OT, of the gospel, and of the church’s mission to the nations to understand why. For starters –
Some 1800 years before the birth of Christ, the Creator God called an idolater named Abram and gave to him the saving promise he’d already given to Eve and Adam millennia before (Gen 3.15). In the messianic Seed to come from his flesh, the curse that bound the human race would be broken, and the blessing of Abraham – righteousness by faith and life in the Spirit – would come to the nations as the gift of God’s grace. Promising indeed. However, the investiture of Abraham as promise-bearer and his appointment as ancestor of Messiah marked the creation of Israel as a people distinct from the nations. This is the biblical root of the famed “scandal of particularity”: there is no escaping the scriptural fact that salvation is from the Jews, that the Word became flesh as a Jew, that the gospel is – according to the apostle to the Gentiles – “for the Jew first.” The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was himself the source of the great racial divide that bifurcated the sons and daughters of Adam into two lopsided groups: Israel, and everyone else.
But now that God has kept his ancient promise to Abraham by sending, sacrificing, raising, and exalting his Son, the gift of salvation bursts out of the old-covenant wineskins and begins to fill the whole world with fruit. Sin is atoned for, Death is undone, Adam at last now reigns on high. Hence: not before but now – on the eighth day that has yet to end and in these last days that have only just begun – the gift of the Spirit is poured out upon all flesh. On Pentecost the scandal of Messiah’s fleshly particularity is counterbalanced by the equally offensive scandal of universality. Salvation is from the Jews, but for the nations. The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, the Jew first but also the Greek. The Jew who died and conquered Death is the Son of God through whom the worlds were made, and all things hold together in him, and He – Jesus Christ – is Lord of all. The Messiah of Israel suffered and rose, that repentance and forgiveness of sins might be proclaimed in his name to all nations (Luke 24.47). The King of kings sent the apostles to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Triune Name (Matt 28.19). The Savior of the world gave his sure promise, that whoever in all creation believes and is baptized will be saved (Mark 16.15-6). For the Good Shepherd died for the nation, and not for the nation only but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad (John 11.51-2).
This gospel of the kingdom must be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.
As the gospel advances in power, and as the evangelical church advances with it, it breaks down old divisions – and causes new ones. Now that Messiah has died and conquered Death and poured out the Spirit from on high, the great division between Jew and Gentile no longer matters at all. Much less do socio-economic distinctions avail any longer. Indeed, the primal differentiation of the human race as male-and-female – good as it intrinsically is as God’s gift of sexual difference, but broken by our lust and lust for power – has no bearing whatsoever on the one question of ultimate significance, viz. “What must I do to be saved?” Why, believe on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household, wife, children, slaves. For now that faith in the gospel has come, we Jews are no longer under the law of Moses as our guardian and you believers from the nations are sons and daughters of God through faith, just as we are. Which means that now – in the new age of the gospel and the Spirit – there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, not even “male and female”: for we are all one in Messiah Jesus, heirs according to promise (Acts 16.30-1, Gal 3.25-9).
What does matter now? Faith in Christ, baptism into Christ and thus into the life of the Holy Trinity, and life together as the new humanity won by the death and resurrection of the Lord and given in power by the Spirit. Or if you like: the gospel, and the church – the church that is one and catholic, united and many-splendored (cf. Eph 3.10), precisely because it lives by the truth of the one gospel of the one God, Father, Son and Spirit. Are you in Adam, or are you in Christ? A partisan of the dark lord or a freedman in service of the King of love? A slave of the pursuit of happiness, or a son set free by the Son and welcomed home to the family of God? That is all that matters now. The blood of the Lamb is thicker than the blood and soil of old Adam tribalisms. The water of baptism divorces us from racial allegiances and binds us to Christ and the Church. The table of the Lord gathers Jew and Gentile, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, Black, Dutch, Swede for the family Supper of God. I will leave my biological white brother, who has left Christ, but I will not part with my black blood brother, for we are one in Christ.
Why did Paul get so angry with Peter in Antioch? Because the gospel was at stake? Or because the catholicity of the church was at stake? Yes. To refuse to sit at table – above all the Table of the Lord, the holy koinonia of Christ and his people – with another Christian because he, as a Greek, is unclean, is to deny the gospel. Only in this case – unlike the situation in Nazi Germany, or Apartheid South Africa, or the racially divided Church in America – St. Peter and the men from James seemed to have the OT on their side. Had not God himself created the division between Jew and Greek? Had not God himself given the purity laws through his servant Moses? Far be it from me Lord, to eat anything common or unclean! Perhaps pagan converts can sit in a court of the Gentiles – perhaps blacks can sit in the balcony – but they cannot enter the inner sanctum of the authentic, apostolic, Jewish, Jerusalem Church.
To which the Lord replied, through his servant Paul: what God’s grace, Christ’s blood, and the Spirit’s gift make clean, do not call common. The Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. We all – Jew and Greek alike – are the children of the promise. Think it through Pete: you and I both know that, Jews though we are and not “Gentile sinners,” we are not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. That’s why we Jews too – you who denied the Lord, I who killed him in his saints, David who rejoiced in the forgiveness of sins, Abraham who believed the promise – we have believed in Christ crucified, in order to be justified by faith in his blood on just the same gracious terms as believers from the nations. There is no distinction. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All who are justified are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ. Which means – to compress an entire ecclesiology into a single symbolic act – that we can eat together; for we are the many who “will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 8.11). Especially, the grace that called us into the company of salvation calls us to share together in the mystery of the body and blood of the Lord. For by sharing one cup and eating one broken loaf, we show forth the unity and peace of the church as well as the grace and power of the cross.
If the gospel obliterated the God-mandated division between Jew and Gentile, how much more the petty man-made sinful racial divisions that mar the Church in America?
Yes, racial reconciliation is a gospel issue. For gospel and church must not and – by grace – cannot in fact be separated from each other. Race only ever becomes a non-gospel issue where the gospel has first degenerated into a gnostic offer of liberation for the individual soul apart from participation in Christ’s flesh by faith and communion in his body by love. But for the orthodox Faith, the socio-political problem of racial division is one of the works of the Devil that Jesus came in our flesh to destroy; and the Pentecostal solution of racial harmony through Christ’s blood and by Christ’s Spirit is essential to the gospel of grace. For the saving purpose of God is not merely to redeem individual souls but to create a new yet still thoroughly human people for himself. “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Pet 2.9-10).
Tinker with the gospel of mercy, and you destroy the church created by its power. This is the cruelty of heresy (Bp Fitz Allison), and historically we evangelicals have been keen to combat it. But divide the people of God along the lines of color, race, class or sex, and you prove you neither understand nor love the gospel and betray the complacency of your orthodoxy. This is the cruelty of schism, the tearing apart of the body of Christ in our all-too-human ways, limb from black, olive or pale-skinned limb. Paul would show us a still more excellent way. Preach the gospel of the glory of the Triune God (Eph 1.3-14: “orthodoxy”), and this gracious Lord will save sinners by his power (Eph 2.1-10: “revivalism”) and create the “one new man in place of the two” that is the holy people of God (Eph 2.11-22: “catholicity”).
One day, we will experience in our flesh what John only glimpsed in the Spirit:
After this I looked, and behold: a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne of God and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Rev 7.9-10)
What do we do in the meantime? I’ll take that up in Part 2, on love.
This resource is part of the series More than Imago Dei: Theological Explorations on Race. Click here to explore more resources from this series.
Phil Anderas is a Reformed pastor and missionary theologian with operations based in Milwaukee. He holds a PhD in Theology from Marquette. He is a member of the St. Basil Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
