But a one-dimensional obsession with race-as-theology is no less productive of disastrous consequences. The now-dominant unitarian theology asserts that there is only one race, the human race. The denial by “anti-racists” of the fixed, intractable, biological, character of the observable differences between various population groups provides ideological cover for the deliberate displacement of white populations in favour of non-white immigrants. But in acknowledging that racial identities can be fluid at the margins, one need not deny the enduringly distinctive biological and ethnic characteristics of various human population groups. Admittedly, when dealing with hybrid individuals, it can be difficult to identify bright-line biological boundaries, even between whites and the other major continental races. The fuzziness of racial categories, however, provides no theological warrant for the abolition of the white race. White racial identity is not merely, as anti-racists would have it, a social construct invented by European colonialists to justify the exploitation of the Other. Racial diversity should be a gift from God not just a randomly-evolved datum of modern biological science. Differences between Negroes, white Europeans, and Orientals are part of the divinely-created order of things. Race is a theological not just a biological or cultural phenomenon. Those who refuse to recognize the theological significance of race do so at their peril.
In times past, our ancestors understood that God may turn his back on any nation which turns its back on him. Such was the exemplary fate of Old Covenant Israel. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden foreshadows the final destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70, the very apocalypse promised by the Book of Revelation. Perhaps this, too, should be taken as a warning that even nominally Christian nations such as Germany and the United States can incur the wrath of God. Indeed, both the presently accelerating decay of the American Constitutional Republic and the earlier, crushing defeat of Nazi Germany attest to the continuing role of divine Providence in human history.
The idea of providential history is, after all, an inescapable corollary of the belief that in Jesus Christ the divine became human. God entered into history by becoming a man of flesh and blood. Jesus was the perfect incarnation of Spirit, water, and blood. After the Spirit left Christ as he hung on the cross, a Roman soldier pierced his side with a spear, whereupon water and blood poured out of his body (John 19:34). His suffering and death revealed that all men can become alienated from God, falling into the state of spiritual death called sin. Spiritual life depends upon the mutual indwelling of the divine and the human. It was no accident, therefore, that, after carnal Israel rejected Jesus Christ, his Spirit found another earthly abode in the hearts of the European peoples. Providence had prepared the ideal medium for the incubation of Christian nations in the pre-historic, triadic character of Indo-European religions and societies. The future heartland of Christendom was to be established not just in England, France, and Germany but in a host of city-states, principalities, kingdoms, and empires stretching from Spain to Holy Russia.
The Tripartite Structure of Indo-European Societies
From time out of mind, the many, widely-dispersed, Indo-European peoples have shared a distinctive, tripartite cosmology. Georges Dumézil revealed the remarkable congruence between the gods of ancient Rome and Scandinavia that extends to the Vedic religions of India 3,000 years ago. In each case, gods were divided into three ranks, each playing its own distinctive role in the cosmos. The gods representing the sovereign function of maintaining unity and harmony were in the first rank. The second type of god commonly found in Indo-European mythology was associated with war. Gods of the third rank performed the functions which provided the practical foundations for the other two roles. In this grouping were found the gods of fecundity and abundance. The trifunctional character of the pantheon presupposed the interdependence and unity of the three ranks of gods and goddesses. The boundaries separating the three functions were not set in concrete precisely because interaction and interpenetration of the three divine archetypes was essential to produce a harmonious equilibrium.251
The tripartite structure of Indo-European ethno-religions embodied a social ideal that was translated at one time or another, with greater or lesser fidelity, into the organization of social life. The pagan priest-kings of the Teutonic tribes represented both aspects of the premier function, magic and sovereignty; a king might also represent a mélange of elements drawn from all three functions, particularly the second since he was invariably drawn from the warrior class. Even after the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity the divine triad of the pagans retained its imaginative power to shape the organizational life of Old England by echoing the trinity of Spirit, water, and blood.
Alfred the Great gave explicit recognition to the prehistoric ideal of a trifunctional social structure. Just as a man cannot practice a craft without materials and the tools of his trade, Alfred knew that the king cannot govern without “a well-populated land; he must have men of prayer, men of war, men of labor.” Those “three pillars of the community are the ruler’s tools; as for materials, he must have enough land to provide an adequate supply of arms, food, and clothing”. Otherwise, the king “cannot keep these tools, and without these tools he cannot do any of the things he is responsible for doing.” In Alfred’s schema, the king is presented as above and apart from the trifunctional structure supporting the throne just as three legs support a stool.252
The triadic ideal of social order persisted in early modern England in the form of the Anglican ideal of a united Church and Commonwealth both of which necessarily rested upon and included the people as the indispensable element which supported the whole structure. Just as the Church represented “those who pray” and the Commonwealth “those who fight,” all “those who labor” were simultaneously members of the Church of England and of the Commonwealth creating “a figure triangular” in which “the base does not differ from the sides thereof” but in which every line is “both a base and also a side.” Richard Hooker’s “triangular” figure replicated the equilibrium between three functions that regulate the order of the cosmos.253 The trinitarian ideal of social order was embodied as well in the three estates comprising the ancient regime in France. Unfortunately, beginning with the seventeenth century Puritan Revolution, modernist egalitarianism “progressively” flattened the antique tripartite structure of both religion and society.
For whites, generally, as well as for Anglo-Saxons and Christians, the results have been catastrophic. One-dimensional man has become the template for normality in the post-Christian, transnational Empire. Spiritual barbarism is not a phenomenon peculiar to whites; nor can it be blamed on a failure of political leadership among WASP elites. Nor is the one-dimensional character of postmodern life simply an ideological disorder or theological heresy which can be cured through a return to doctrinal orthodoxy. For all those embedded in the high-intensity commodity culture of corporate capitalism, the once-powerful idea of providential history now appears mainly in the guise of a postmodern cargo cult.254 The globalized economy is now regarded with religious reverence. As a consequence, an abyss has opened up between the white race and God. The hidden God cannot be reached “by insight, by knowledge, by intelligence, by courage, by politics, [or] by tradition”. One-dimensional man has been thrown back on faith in the mysterious powers animating the transnational Empire: “Awesome, inscrutable, self-impelling, the system invite[s] adoration”. A pantheistic “wish for plenty” becomes “the wish not to have to wish wishes of one’s own at all”. Spirit, water, and blood have disappeared into a spiritual void in which the Lordship of Jesus Christ is little more than a quaint medieval superstition.255 Such a built-in disharmony between God and man positively invites a providential response. Somehow the equilibrium between heaven and earth in the new creation must be restored.
Just such a deep-seated disequilibrium is destroying the American Constitutional Republic just as it led inexorably to the downfall of the Third Reich in Germany. In both coun
tries the traditionalist, trinitarian interaction and interpenetration of Spirit, water, and blood was replaced by an unholy ideological war between racialism and a-racialism. Inevitably, every discussion of race-as-theology is short-circuited by the racialist fixation on race-as-biology or an equally one-sided, “anti-racist” insistence on the fluidity of race-as-ethnicity. A good case can be made for the proposition that neither whites nor Christians will come fully to grips with the issue of race until Christian theology is restored to its medieval glory as the queen of the sciences. Only theology aspires to discover the underlying meaning of the behaviour associated either with race-as-biology or the forms of action involved in the social construction of race-as-ethnicity.
Theology: The Queen of Racial Science?
Indeed, until very recently, theology was the queen of racial science. Colin Kidd has demonstrated “that between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries intellectuals confronted race primarily as a theological problem.” In the early modern period, Europeans came face-to-face with peoples seemingly very different from themselves. Nevertheless, the underlying “unity of the human race was fundamental to Christian theology”. Educated Christians read the Book of Genesis as if it were at once a treatise in geology and paleo-anthropology outlining the origins of the physical planet Earth and the creation of the first couple, Adam and Eve, the common ancestors of all human beings. They presented the sacred drama of Fall and redemption as if the transmission of original sin from Adam “polluted the whole human race” just as Christ’s atonement applied to the whole of mankind. Committed to defending the allegedly “historical truth” that mankind sprang from a single racial origin, “Christian commentators on race were inclined to refuse the apparent fact of distinctive races or racial types for fear of endorsing the destructive heresy of polygenesis”. Theological imperatives clearly “acted as an obstacle to the exaggeration of racial difference” in the West. The search for the underlying unities of mankind distorted Western ethnology in a monogenetic, anti-pluralist direction.256
Kidd contends that the struggle “to make sense of racial differences belonged mainly to the province of para-theology, those auxiliary regions of theology which included sacred history, sacred geography, sacred geology” and comparative religious studies seeking to reconcile paganism with the universal truth of Christianity. Ethnological questions were therefore “examined principally in the light of [their] relationship to theological orthodoxy”. The emergent disciplines of medicine and natural science “had themselves still to obtain autonomy from the realm of scriptural exegesis”. Even the “Enlightenment took place largely within churches, though until recently it was the radical extreme outside churches that attracted the most attention”. The radical Enlightenment “was intensely critical of scripture, and by extension of monogenesis, an unscientific doctrine tainted by its provenance in theological dogma”. But “the dominant strain of Enlightenment within institutions, such as churches, universities, and medical and scientific societies, attempted to reformulate an independent case for monogenesis on solid naturalistic foundations”. Generally speaking, therefore, “the Enlightenment conserved the inner core of the early modern paradigm of ethnic theology”.257
But while “Christian monogenesis remained as dominant a feature of British ethnology” in 1800 as it had in 1700, “the moderate Enlightenment quietly abandoned the details of sacred history”. Enlightened Christian scholars “were not prepared to dispense with Adam and Eve” but there was a growing “determination to establish a demarcation of race and nationhood from scriptural genealogies”. Nonetheless, in most cases, the practitioners of the new naturalistic non-scriptural scheme of anthropology “remained openly committed…to the defence of monogenesis”. The widespread “reluctance to abandon monogenesis meant that the question of mankind’s racial origins became a constituent element in the nineteenth-century crisis of faith”. Race-as-biology began gradually to subvert the intellectual hegemony of race-as-theology. Before long many Christians worried that new scientific insights into race might undermine faith in the common origins of mankind. To stave off that danger “the profile of monogenesis” was raised so high “that it seemed to be the very heart of Christian doctrine”.258 It is more than a little ironic therefore that leading figures in the modern race-as-biology movement such as J Phillipe Rushton have themselves adhered to monogenesis in the form of one or other version of the Out-of-Africa theory of human origins.259
Darwinian biology and modern geology combined to undermine literalist interpretations of the creation story in Genesis. But evolutionary theory “was itself monogenist in its account of the descent of man” presenting “a monogenist narrative which dispensed not only with divine providence and sacred history, but also with the distinction between humanity and the animal world which underpinned Christian anthropology, and ultimately soteriology”.260 Scientific scepticism, especially in Germany, gave rise to a critical view of scripture. The so-called “higher criticism” viewed “the Creation story of Genesis, with its depiction of Adam’s creation, probation, and fall, [as] truly ‘mythological,’ devoid of all scientific content”. It is perhaps doubly ironic that while race-as-biology still remains attached to the idea of an African Eve, race-as-theology was free to abandon the hoary equation of biblical Adam with mankind’s common ancestor, the first human being.
Christians are under no obligation to affirm that Adam was created ex nihilo as the first man in a physical Garden of Eden somewhere in the Near East. New perspectives in biblical and historical theology provide compelling evidence that Adam’s story is not about the biological genesis of mankind. Rather, the first three chapters of Genesis establish the cosmological setting for the covenantal relationship between God and his people, the ancient Israelites (not to be confused with those who call themselves Jews today). The tree of life was planted in the Garden of Eden where God rested after creating his cosmic temple in Genesis 1. Adam (Hebrew for “man”) stands for the first man to be graced with the imago Dei. He was brought out of the primordial darkness into the light where he was admitted to full communion with God.261 Adam enjoyed the fruits of the tree of life until he died to God after disobeying the commandment not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam is a symbol, a cosmological, not a biological, being. His story in Genesis 2–3 is a prophetic myth not a precocious paper in creation science.
Adam is best understood as a metonym for Old Israel. His fate foreshadows the destiny of the one holy nation chosen to enter into fellowship with God. Carnal, national Israel is exiled, more than once, from its land of milk and honey when it turns against the living God. Likewise, Adam is driven from the Garden temple when he puts himself in God’s place, presuming to possess knowledge of good and evil. In the first century, the Israelites who crucified Christ called themselves Jews but they were really the Synagogue of Satan (Revelation 3:9). Paul called Christ the “last Adam” because, like the first Adam, he embodied the Spirit which had given life to Israel (1 Corinthians 15:45). But the trespass of the first Adam inaugurated the reign of sin-death. Death entered the world “through the disobedience of the one man” (Romans 5:17–19). Christ, the last Adam, died so that “the many who died by the trespass of the one man” might live again. The New Exodus from the Adamic body of sin began when Christ emerged from his tomb. It ended forty years later when the Jerusalem Temple — the spiritual heart of Old Covenant Israel — was destroyed and the children of the devil driven into exile.262 The old order of things finally passed away and the Israel of God was resurrected by “the river of the water of life”. The “glory and honour of the nations” was brought into the New Jerusalem where, henceforth, the leaves of the tree of life would heal all nations (Revelation 21:26; 22:1–3).
From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible tells the story of the covenant between God and his people, first national, physical Israel and finally the Christian nations which together constitute the New Israel of God. It was by the grace of God th
at Israel in the flesh (“the seed of Abraham”) was singled out from the pre-existing, pre-Adamite peoples of the Near East. Genesis, therefore, is not a treatise in paleo-anthropology, much less astronomy or geology. Race-as-Christian theology, therefore, has no dog in the fight between monogenesis and polygenesis in the natural science of human origins. But an exclusive reliance upon the a-theistic world view inscribed into race-as-biology leaves the white race bereft of a coherent much less a Christian cosmology. Patriotic theologians can help to remedy that deficiency by reading Genesis as the opening chapter in the epic, providential history of God and his people. Perhaps by so doing they can help the white race to recover the sense of fellowship our ancestors once had with the Israel of God.
Unfortunately, most mainstream theologians refuse to restore communion between the white race and God. They prefer to remain in their cosmopolitan ivory towers, subjecting biblical texts to the narrow-minded, sceptical scrutiny of the “higher criticism”. Fundamentalist Christians are no help either. They are notoriously hostile to the methodology of the higher critics but they cling to a creation science uninterested in reading Genesis as it was understood by its original audience in ancient Israel. Race-as-theology must move beyond creation science and its knee-jerk hostility to any suggestion that the Bible is open to more than one interpretation.263 White racialists, for their part, need to grapple with the hermeneutical issues raised by modern biblical scholarship.
Dissident Dispatches Page 20