As these brothers play, they have no idea that many in the world consider them from different races. The truth is, they're not from different races. They're from the same race. If you were at our church last Sunday (and were paying attention) you already know what I'm talking about.
Even within biological families, children are not always the same "color," and it's the same within the greater human family in greater measure because of God-given and God-intended diversity. In South America and India for example, it's not uncommon for parents of middle-brown shades to have children of multiple shades, different colored hair and eyes.
Strikingly different-colored children are possible not even in the same family but in the same uterus! Below are some twins (not identical, obviously) one who takes after part-Nigerian mom, the other looks much more like the caucasian English father.
Below is another set of British twins and their mum Kerry: Layton on the left (great name by the way!) and Kaydon on the right.
One couple even had "black-white" twins twice! Didier told me in Congo there was a couple who also had 2 kids, one very dark skinned, the other very light skinned.
Are their children different "races"? Not anymore than my sons Matteus and Adam are. There is no such thing as different races, scientifically or scripturally, a fact that much of the scientific community has recognized in the last 10-20 years, but a fact not as much of the general public or Christian world has recognized.
Scientists used to believe skin color had to do with "race." They now tell us we're actually all the same color, just different amounts of it in our skin (melanin is brown and different shades are just a part of genetic combinations, we're all just different shades of brown). Many scientists also now tell us that we're actually all in the same race, and that old idea of multiple "races" of humanity was bad science.
A scientist at the Advancement of Science Convention in
Atlanta stated, “Race is a social construct derived mainly from perceptions conditioned by events of recorded history, and it has no basic biological reality ... Curiously enough, the idea comes very close to being of American manufacture.” (R.L. Hotz, "Race has no basis in biology, researchers say,"
Cincinnati Enquirer, p. A3, February 20, 1997)
Reporting on research conducted on the concept of race, ABC News stated, “More and more scientists find that the differences that set us apart are cultural, not racial. Some even say that the word race should be abandoned because it’s meaningless ... we accept the idea of race because it’s a convenient way of putting people into broad categories ... And racial prejudice remains common throughout the world.” -- "We’re all the same," ABC News, September 10, 1998, www.abcnews.com/sections/science/ DyeHard/dye72.html
In an article in the Journal of Counseling and Development [1998, Vol. 76, p. 277–285], researchers argued that the term “race” is basically so meaningless that it should be discarded. More recently, those working on mapping the human genome announced “that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome, and the researchers had unanimously declared, there is only one race—the human race.” N. Angier, "Do races differ? Not really, DNA shows," New York Times web, Aug. 22, 2000
'The truth, though, is that these so-called “racial characteristics” are only minor variations among people groups ... these so-called “racial” characteristics that people think are major differences (skin color, eye shape, etc.) “account for only 0.012 percent of human biological variation.” Dr. Harold Page Freeman, chief executive, president, and director of surgery at North General Hospital in Manhattan, reiterates, “If you ask what percentage of your genes is reflected in your external appearance, the basis by which we talk about race, the answer seems to be in the range of 0.01 percent.” In other words, the so-called “racial” differences are absolutely trivial— overall, there is more variation within any group than there is between one group and another. If a white person is looking for a tissue match for an organ transplant, for instance, the best match may come from a black person, and vice versa. ABC News claims, “What the facts show is that there are differences among us, but they stem from culture, not race.”
This past Sunday at church, the message I preached was "There's Only One Race, One Way of Grace, and One Family of Faith" based on Ephesians 2-3 and Genesis 1-11 (for the audio or text notes with documentation of this, click below link):
http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=11711030415
I discussed why we should use terminology from God's unchanging Word rather than our changing world's terminologies and theories. Below is some of the research I shared in that message with our church family about the human family, and you can find the rest on the link above:
The word "race" historically was used for humanity to emphasize the unity of mankind, however it eventually was used to refer to nations (ex: Jewish race, Irish race, English race, but not in the sense people use it today for broad categories of physical appearance). The word and concept of race appears to have "evolved" at the same time some were teaching that all things evolved, and a theory of evolution arose that there multiple races of humanity.
Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language 1828 defined race as: ‘The lineage of a family, or continued series of descendants from a parent who is called the stock. A race is the series of descendants indefinitely. Thus all mankind are called the race of Adam…’
This is why Christians into the 1800s, even in the American South who owned slaves, still rejected as a heresy human poly-genesis (the theory of multiple races of people with multiple origins). This is traced in a fascinating book put out by Cambridge Press, Colin Kidd,
The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000. He writes of the 17th to 19th centuries: ‘unity of the human race was fundamental to Christian theology. If mankind did not spring from a single racial origin then theologians were confronted with a scenario that undermined the very essence of the Christian story…Which posed the greater threat to Southern conservatives, the abolitionist denunciation of slavery or [the polygenist’s multiple races theories of man’s origins]? Perceptive Southerners recognized that polygenist racialism … was an even greater threat to their worldview that abolitionism or abolitionist readings of scripture. Ironically, some of the most noted and forthright defenders of monogenesis [one race and origin of man] in the nineteenth century were based in the South … [but he adds] some nineteenth-century ethnologists, oblivious of the ultimate consequences of this dangerous chain of argument, began to offer racial explanations for the world’s … diversity.’ Kidd’s book uses science to demolish “races” theory that he ties to rise of evolution.
The secular scholarly standard
Oxford English Dictionary (20 vol. big set, definitive history of words) defines race: ‘group of persons, animals, or plants, connected by common descent or origin …In early use always the human race, the race of men or mankind…’
A 2004 smaller update to that authoritative massive multi-volume dictionary adds: ‘In recent years, the associations of race with the ideologies and theories that grew out of the work of 19th-century anthropologists and physiologists has led to the use of the word race itself becoming problematic. Although still used in general contexts, it is now often replaced by other words which are less emotionally charged, such as people(s) or community.’
Most people are not aware that Charles Darwin’s book
The Origin of the Species was subtitled
The Preservation of Favoured Races. He was using that term “races” the way it had been used before his time of different creatures, but in his book
The Descent of Man, he re-defined and applied the idea to humans as different sub-species, creatures, or “races.” In that book he said that while some of the faculties of women are evolved or advanced, “some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.” In another place in that book he said: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.”
Those words were fulfilled in the not very distant future, a man 70 years later saw this idea as the duty of the “Aryan race,” wrongly believing he was an essentially different race than others, Hitler. A book
Evolution and Ethics, written by Arthur Keith shortly after World War II: ‘The German Fuhrer…has consistently sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution’
Ken Ham, who was in town yesterday, speaks closer to home how his own homeland, Australia, when they found black Aborigines on Tasmania, newspapers declared they found “Missing Links with Mankind” (
New York Tribune, 1924). Ham writes of these native Australian people, ‘biologists from England and Germany began to hunt them down as research specimens … Hunters were given instruction on how to skin them and prepare their skulls as specimens for museums around the world – all in the name of evolution. Some were taken live; some were killed …’
Closer to home for me as I adopted a son from Congo and my great grandpa was a missionary in Congo who risked his life to bring the gospel to that country in the early 1900s: Others came to that same country the same years, stole a Congolese man to the U.S. in 1904, making him part of a live monkey-evolution exhibit in a NY zoo!
Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas combined with bad people have bad consequences. I think it’s a bad idea to even use the term "races" when the very idea was unscientifically developed by people who believed that the white race was the original race that the other races with darker skin degenerated or devolved from. That was the view of Blumenbach, who died in 1840, the leading racial theorist of Europe who pioneered and popularized the idea of many races.
The history of the modern idea of “races” historically can be linked to Darwinism and racism, and even with Christians, much division. Steven Jay Gould, leading 20th century evolutionist from Harvard admitted: ‘Biological arguments for racism may have been common before [Darwin’s writings], but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.’ That’s not some Bible-thumping fanatic Baptist pastor (like me), that’s one of the most famous evolutionists who lived in my lifetime saying that.
But let’s get back to the Bible. The
ESV Study Bible in an article on race explains very well that there is one race, ‘descended from Adam and Eve (Gen. 1:26–28), and Eve is “the mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20), that is, of all living human beings. This means that all human beings share equally in the exalted status of being made “in the image of God” (Gen. 1:27) … Acts 17:26 [says] God “made from one man every nation of mankind …” biblical record clearly indicates there is only one fundamental race of human beings, all descended from a single set of parents.
… Recent genetic studies from the Human Genome Project give interesting confirmation … [its scientists concluded consistent with Scripture that the human genome indicates we are all ‘one race’] DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity.’ Why then do people with different racial characteristics [as the world calls them] originate from different regions of the world?
The human race, starting with Adam and Eve, has always included not only genetic variations of eye color, height, and facial appearance, but also of skin and hair color now associated with different racial groups. At some early point when people began migrating to various parts of the earth, some variations within the one human gene pool became geographically isolated from other variations [Gen. 11 gives a good explanation, the language barrier isolated them from others so that distinctive traits developed, which can be demonstrated genetically], so that people living in what is now northern Europe came to look more like each other and different from people living in what is now Africa, or Asia, or North America.’
A geneticist and scientist at Yale did a study awhile back that said it can be shown genealogically how every person living today can be traced to the same set of ancestors as few as 5-7,000 years ago (any guesses who that might be? Hint, Genesis 1-2)
That idea of multiple races with multiple origins is old bad science. In a work from Oxford with a chapter entitled “Science and the Myth of Biological Race,” it says: ‘Essentially all anthropologists have given up the attempt to identify races of human beings.’
Another writer sums up the scientific research this way: “A wide range of evidence drawn from the biological and medical sciences directly contradicts the layperson’s assumption [about] external indicators of race … Just as the study of DNA demolishes any notion of a particular black ‘African’ race, so too this field lays down a decisive challenge to the scientific legitimacy of race in general … [biologist Alain Corcos calls ‘races’] ‘figments of our imagination’ … a bogus scientific category … misleading facts of physical difference into racial ideologies, stereotypes, folklore.’
My two sons may have differing amounts of melanin in their skin, but they're from the same race and the same human family. I pray one day they'll be in the same spiritual family, by grace through faith in Christ, the One who redeems from every tribe and tongue and nation, so they can experience a unity that is even deeper than biology, a unity based on the blood of Christ our Elder Brother (Hebrews 2:11-17). Alleluia. Amen.
