Race, Ethnicity and Tribe

It is easy to read Acts 10 as a story about food laws and miss what made it so hard. The line between Jew and Gentile was not a human prejudice that Peter should have known better than to hold. It had been drawn by God. The law of Moses set Israel apart from the nations by its food, its calendar and its worship, and faithful Jews had died rather than eat what the law forbade. When Peter says, You know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with a foreigner or visit him (Acts 10:28), he is not confessing bigotry. He is describing what he had been taught was obedience. That is exactly why the passage is so powerful for this lesson. If the gospel crossed a dividing line that God himself had drawn for a season, then no line drawn by human beings, of tribe or race or caste or clan, can stand inside the church.

Peter does not reach this by reasoning. He is taught in stages, and he resists. Three times the sheet comes down, and three times he refuses. Then the Spirit tells him to go with the messengers without hesitating. In Cornelius's house he admits what God has shown him, and he begins his sermon with the words of the anchor: I now truly understand that God does not show favoritism, but welcomes those from every nation who fear Him and do what is right (Acts 10:34-35). Even then the decisive act is God's. While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard his message (10:44), and Peter can only ask, Can anyone withhold the water to baptize these people? (10:47). When the believers in Jerusalem object, their complaint is not doctrinal but social: You visited uncircumcised men and ate with them (11:3). The scandal was the shared table.

The story does not end there, and its sequel is the most important warning in the New Testament on this subject. Some years later, in Antioch, Peter was eating with Gentile believers until certain men came from James. Then he began to draw back and separate himself, for fear of those in the circumcision group (Galatians 2:12). The other Jews followed him, and even Barnabas was led astray (2:13). Paul does not treat this as a matter of manners. He says they were not walking in line with the truth of the gospel (2:14). Notice who failed. Not a pagan, not a new convert, but the apostle who had seen the sheet and preached in Cornelius's house. Knowing the right doctrine did not stop Peter from bending to the pressure of his own group. That is how ethnic division usually returns to the church: not by argument but by fear of what one's own people will say.

The early church faced the same problem from inside. The first recorded quarrel among believers was over food for widows, and it ran along a language and culture line: the Grecian Jews among them began to grumble against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food (Acts 6:1). The apostles did not deny the complaint or tell the Greek speakers to be patient. They had the church choose seven men to run the distribution, and every one of the seven listed in Acts 6:5 has a Greek name, including Nicolas from Antioch, a convert to Judaism. The group that had been overlooked was put in charge of the remedy. And when the church at Antioch is described a few chapters later, its leaders include Simeon called Niger and Lucius of Cyrene alongside Barnabas, Manaen and Saul (Acts 13:1). The first great missionary church was led by men of several peoples.

On this subject the historic churches speak with one voice, and this course will say so plainly. Favouritism on the basis of ethnicity, tribe, race, caste or clan is sin. James says it without qualification: if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors (James 2:9). His example is about wealth, the man with the gold ring given the seat of honour and the poor man told to stand (2:2-3), but the word he uses, judging by the face, covers every form of it. Racism, the belief or practice that some peoples are worth less than others, contradicts the creation of every person in God's image (Genesis 1:27) and the confession that from one man He made every nation of men (Acts 17:26). Every major Christian tradition, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, has formally condemned it.

That does not mean ethnic identity itself is a problem to be erased. Scripture never asks a believer to stop being a Jew, a Greek, a Cushite or a Scythian. At Pentecost the crowd heard the apostles speaking in their own languages (Acts 2:8-11), so the gospel came to the nations in their mother tongues rather than in one holy language. In John's vision of the end, the redeemed are from every nation and tribe and people and tongue (Revelation 7:9), and into the new city will be brought the glory and honor of the nations (Revelation 21:26). Peoples, languages and cultures are part of the richness God intends to gather in. Galatians 3:28, there is neither Jew nor Greek, does not deny that Jews and Greeks exist. It denies that the difference decides anyone's standing in Christ. The line between loving your people and favouring your people against others is the line this lesson is about.

In much of the world that line is crossed most often not by race but by tribe, clan, caste or region. Christians in many African countries know churches where a bishop is chosen because he is from the right people, where jobs and scholarships go to the pastor's relatives, where a congregation splits along ethnic lines after an election, and where members of one group are quietly told the church is not really for them. Dalit Christians in India have long testified that caste followed believers into the church, in separate seating, separate cemeteries and leadership closed to them. In Kenya, during the violence after the disputed election of December 2007, a church at Kiambaa near Eldoret where people had taken refuge was set on fire on the first day of 2008, and dozens died. The people who did such things were, in many cases, baptised.

Christians who wish to defend ethnic separation have always had texts, and an honest lesson names them. They have pointed to Genesis 11, where God scattered the peoples at Babel; to Deuteronomy 32:8, where the Most High set the boundaries of the peoples; to Acts 17:26 and its boundaries of their lands; and to the laws that kept Israel apart from the nations. In the American South, theologians such as James Henley Thornwell and Robert Lewis Dabney defended slavery from scripture. In South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church's 1974 report Human Relations and the South African Scene in the Light of Scripture argued that the diversity of peoples was God's will and that separate development honoured it. Small groups in the West, sometimes called kinists, still argue that God wills peoples to marry and worship apart. The answer of the whole church has been that these readings take verses about God's providence over the nations and turn them into a command to divide his people. Babel ends in Pentecost. Israel's separation was for a season and was ended in Christ, who has torn down the dividing wall of hostility (Ephesians 2:14). And Acts 17:26 begins with one man, not many.

The story of apartheid matters for every student, because it shows how a church that believed the Bible could give theological cover to a system of racial domination, and how the church itself, led largely by black and coloured Christians, found the words to confess the truth. As early as 1857 a synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape allowed separate services for white and black members, as a concession, it said, to the weakness of some. Over the following century the concession became a principle. Separate churches were founded for coloured, black and Indian believers, and when the National Party government built apartheid after 1948, many white Reformed theologians defended it as God's will for separate peoples.

The defence did not go unanswered. Beyers Naudé, a white minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, broke with it in the early 1960s, founded the Christian Institute in 1963, and was banned by the government in 1977. In 1982 the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, meeting in Ottawa, declared that apartheid was a sin and its moral and theological justification a heresy, and suspended the membership of the white Dutch Reformed churches. The same year the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, the church for coloured members, drafted a confession at its synod in Belhar near Cape Town, and formally adopted it in 1986. It is called the Belhar Confession.

Belhar is short and is organised around three convictions, each grounded in scripture. Unity: the church is one, and that unity must be visible, so that a church divided by race denies what it confesses. Reconciliation: the gospel reconciles people to God and to one another, so any teaching that says peoples are by nature irreconcilable and must be kept apart is false doctrine. Justice: God has revealed himself as the one who brings justice and peace, and is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged, so the church must stand with them. The letter that accompanied it is careful to say it is not aimed at any group of people but at a false teaching, and many churches outside South Africa have since adopted it, including the Reformed Church in America and the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Christian Reformed Church in North America, which since 2017 has held it as a contemporary testimony.

The white Dutch Reformed Church changed. Its 1986 statement Church and Society began to move away from the old position, and in 1990, at a gathering of churches in Rustenburg, the theologian Willie Jonker publicly confessed the guilt of his church for apartheid. Desmond Tutu, then Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, accepted the confession in the meeting. After apartheid ended, Tutu chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 1996, which heard the testimony of victims and offered amnesty to perpetrators who told the full truth about political crimes. Its work remains argued over, as section 5 will show. But the story as a whole teaches what a church can do when it has been wrong: name the false teaching, confess it as sin, and change what it practises.

In the United States, slavery and then legal segregation were defended from pulpits for generations, while the enslaved built churches of their own in which the same Bible was read as a book of exodus and deliverance. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery, wrote in the appendix to his Narrative (1845) that between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference. He was not rejecting Christ. He was refusing to let slaveholders define him. A century later the civil rights movement was led largely from black churches, by pastors such as Martin Luther King Jr., and drew its language from the prophets and the gospels. King often observed that Sunday morning at eleven o'clock was one of the most segregated hours in American life. Many churches in America still reflect that history, and Christians there continue to argue about how much of it remains in their institutions.

Rwanda is the mirror that the global church has found hardest to look into. By the early 1990s it was one of the most Christian countries in Africa, with a large majority of its people baptised. The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was older than colonial rule, but under Belgian rule it was hardened into fixed racial categories and written onto identity cards from the 1930s, and churches were deeply involved in the colonial ideas about race that shaped it. In about a hundred days from April 1994, genocidal forces and their followers killed somewhere between half a million and a million people, most of them Tutsi, along with Hutu who opposed the killing. Many were killed inside churches where they had fled for safety, at places such as Ntarama and Nyamata, which are now memorials. Some clergy took part, and the international tribunal for Rwanda convicted several of them. Other Christians, Catholic and Protestant, hid neighbours at the risk of their own lives, and some died for it.

The Ugandan Catholic priest Emmanuel Katongole, in Mirror to the Church (2009), argues that Rwanda is not an African exception but a mirror for every church, showing what happens when Christian identity sits on top of tribal or national identity instead of reshaping it. The question that has been asked again and again since 1994, in many forms, is whether the blood of tribe runs deeper in us than the water of baptism. For a pastor that is not an abstract question. It is the question of whose side you will be on when your own people turn on another people.

Notice what America, South Africa and Rwanda share. In each case the people who did wrong were mostly church members. In each case the Bible was read selectively to justify what the group already wanted. And in each case there were Christians, often from the oppressed group, who read the same Bible and refused. That pattern should make every reader humble. The question is never only whether those people in that place were wrong. It is where the same temptation is at work in my church now.

Christians agree that favouritism is sin. They disagree, honestly, on how the church should pursue unity, and these debates should be heard at full strength. The first concerns congregations organised around one people or language. Donald McGavran, the missiologist who led the Church Growth movement, observed in Understanding Church Growth (1970) that people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers. This homogeneous unit principle, as it came to be called, was not a defence of prejudice. McGavran's concern was evangelism: people hear the gospel best in their own language and culture, and requiring converts to join a foreign group first can make the gospel look like betrayal of one's people. Defenders point to Pentecost, where each heard in his own tongue, and to the fact that mother-tongue churches have spread the gospel faster than almost anything else.

Critics answered just as seriously. The Ecuadorian theologian C. René Padilla, in an essay published in 1982, argued that the New Testament churches were deliberately mixed, that Paul fought for Jew and Gentile at one table, and that a church built on sameness cannot show the reconciling power of the gospel. A consultation of the Lausanne movement in Pasadena in 1977 tried to hold the two together: the gospel can be planted within one people, but the church must never accept division as its goal, and congregations of different peoples must visibly belong to one another. Many churches now try to do both: worship in one language where that serves the people, and build leadership, fellowship and shared work across the lines.

The second debate concerns whether racism is mainly a sin of individual hearts or also something built into institutions. Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, in Divided by Faith (2000), argued from research among American evangelicals that a strongly individual way of thinking about sin made many white believers unable to see injustice built into laws, housing, schools and church structures. Others reply that the Bible locates sin in persons, that structural language can blur personal responsibility and divide Christians into groups of the guilty and the innocent by birth, and that the gospel answer is repentance, love and changed lives one by one. Both sides can cite scripture: the prophets denounce unjust decrees (Isaiah 10:1), and Ezekiel insists that each person bears his own guilt (Ezekiel 18:20). Thoughtful Christians in Africa and Asia often find both truths obvious in their own settings, where personal hatred and unjust systems of land, jobs and power feed each other.

The third debate concerns reconciliation itself. Must justice come before forgiveness, or can forgiveness come first? South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission traded amnesty for truth, and Tutu defended it in No Future Without Forgiveness (1999). Critics, including some victims' families, argued it let the guilty go free and left the economic results of apartheid untouched. Rwanda took a different road, using local community courts called gacaca, which began work in 2002 and closed in 2012 after hearing nearly two million cases, combined with church-led programmes in which perpetrators and survivors met. Scripture holds both together: Zacchaeus's repentance included repaying fourfold what he had taken (Luke 19:8), and Jesus taught that reconciliation with a brother comes before worship (Matthew 5:23-24). Christians differ on the order and the balance. They do not differ on the goal.

Open your casebook to a fresh page and head it Race, Ethnicity and Tribe. As always, write no names of people. Step one. Write a short description of the groups in your congregation or community: tribes, languages, castes, races, regions or nations, whichever apply. Step two. Without naming anyone, describe one place where favouritism or exclusion along those lines shows itself: in leadership, in who is welcomed, in marriage, in money, in who speaks at meetings, or in old wounds from violence.

Step three. Work the case with this lesson. Is what you described favouritism of the kind James calls sin? Is it a reasonable use of language or culture that serves people, of the kind McGavran defended? Or is it a mixture? Write which texts bear on it, from Acts 10, Acts 6, Galatians 2, James 2 and Ephesians 2. Step four. Write what Acts 6 suggests the remedy might look like: who would need to be given a voice or a responsibility they do not now have? Step five. Write one sentence of confession for any part you yourself have had in it, even by silence, and pray it.

Step six, for those who preach or teach. Plan a short teaching on Peter at Caesarea and Peter at Antioch side by side. The point is not that some other people are tribalists, but that even an apostle who had seen the vision drew back from the table out of fear of his own people. Ask your hearers where they are tempted to do the same. Keep the page in your casebook for the capstone.