Racializing Revelation's Vision of Reconciliation
Earlier this week my friend Skye Jethani tweeted the following thread. In his usual thoughtful way, Skye asks some important questions about how those of us who care about racial reconciliation use a particular passage from Revelation as our rationale.
Can I be real a second? I keep bumping into a well-intentioned reading of the Bible that’s gotten under my ethnically-ambiguous skin. It’s meant to combat the cultural divisions & racism that infects our land & the church. That should be applauded, but my concern is that Christian efforts to affirm cultural diversity may unintentionally be constructing a theology for segregation. Let me explain.
I keep hearing Rev 7:9 “I looked & behold a great multitude that on one could number from every nation, tribe, people, & language standing before the throne and before the Lamb…” This is presented as biblical affirmation of multiculturalism. God isn’t merely redeeming individuals but cultures, therefore we should not ask minorities to abandon their cultural distinctives in order to assimilate into majority culture. Amen!
But I see 2 problems. 1) If we affirm that Rev teaches the preservation & redemption of ethnic/cultural differences, it’s a short step to say that anything that changes or dilutes ethnic or cultural distinction is contrary to God’s plan of redemption. This is precisely the argument made by Christian segregationists to justify the separate-but-equal policy & anti-miscegenation laws in the US.
Years ago I taught at a church & was confronted by an older man who took issue with my message of racial inclusion. “If we’re all going to be separate around the throne in heaven” he said “why can’t we all be separate down here?” I know this is NOT what the well-intentioned teachers advocating multiculturalism are saying, but if a segregationist agrees with your reading of Rev 7 maybe maybe we need to be more careful in how we understand it.
Problem 2) How is this interpretation of Rev 7 received by those of us who do not conform to a single culture, race, or ethnicity? What are the boundaries between one culture & another? People are never just a single identity. No one fits only into one group. Cultures & the boundaries between them are not so easily defined. Therefore, to speak of the preservation, redemption, or perfection of “cultures” opens the door to enormous theological challenges not to mention the risk of alienating the growing number of people who do not define themselves by checking a single box on a census form.
As someone from a mixed-race, bi-cultural family, where will I belong around the throne? Is there some Island of Misfits for people like me? I wonder if in our desire to combat the harm done by mono-culturalism in much of the US church, we’ve allowed our zealousness for multiculturalism to override wise theology. We must be careful not to impose questions upon John’s revelation that he never intended to answer.
I think the questions Skye raises here are really important and I want to take a crack at engaging them. I’ll admit that, as with Skye, these questions are personal: neither of our sons fit into neat ethnic or racial categories.
When people - especially white Christians in my experience - talk about this passage, we often betray a static understanding of the nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues in Revelation 7. That is, when imagining the social categories of ethnicity and culture which we see affirmed in Scripture, we imagine unchanging realities.
The problem with this is that these social categories are not unchanging. I remember talking with a Korean-American pastor years ago who talked about the differences between Korean immigrant congregations in the USA and churches in Korea. He pointed out that many churches in the USA work hard to maintain the distinctions of their Korean culture and traditions but that in Korea, as time passes, those particularities develop and change. The immigrant churches attempt to capture what it meant to be Korean and Christian in a specific moment in time, while the churches back in Korea continued the natural development that is inherent to all cultures.
There’s obviously nothing earth-shattering about noticing how cultures change, so why is it that when imagining the vision of Revelation 7:9 we think about, as Skye points out, preserved boundaries? This, for me, is the important question and I’m convinced the answer has to do with how the social categories in John’s vision have become racialized in the American imagination.
Race, at its essence, is a disruption of the specificities of culture and ethnicity, categories that are intimately related to God’s good creation. As a social construct, race was and is meant to be static, to be bounded cultural sets which make clear who belongs and who doesn’t. It’s a mechanical constraint on cultural flourishing.
Two examples will show how this has worked. In the pre-Civil War south, how a person was determined to be Black changed from state to state. In some states 1/4 of a person’s ancestry determined whether they were Black. In other states it was 1/8 percent. And in still others, one drop of African blood was enough to be considered Black. Simply crossing state lines changed, legally, a person’s racial category.
Or consider whiteness. Because no immigrants arrived in the USA as white - everyone came with their national, cultural, ethnic particularities - they had to become white in their new home country. For those whose physical appearance made them eligible for whiteness, this involved shedding those particularities in order to become white and access the promises of the American dream. And once one becomes white, trading the natural developments of culture for the static boundary of race, there’s no going back.
For me, the problems Skye raises have everything to do with how many of us have deformed imaginations about our God-given social particularities. These were never meant to be walled boundaries, impenetrable boundaries protecting our Babel towers of purity. Rather, we were meant to respond together to the gifts and goodness of God’s creation which, while allowing for countless differences, could never be preserved or contained.
Rather than conforming to our racialized imaginations, the beautiful vision in Revelation 7:9 should disturb and disrupt what we have made static and exclusionary. It should point us back to God’s intentions for his people: communities caring for the creation and being shaped by it. This, I think, is not only good news for those like Skye and my sons who don’t fit within our society’s crude categories; it’s a compelling vision for all of us whose cultural identities have been constrained by a system of our own making.
This week’s endoresment for Rediscipling the White Church comes from Curtis Paul DeYoung whose many years of leadership in the areas of racial justice and reconciliation are an example for me.
David Swanson takes a deep dive into the very formation process for white Christians—discipleship. This new and altered rediscipleship, designed under the influence of mentors of color, addresses structures of white supremacy, privilege, and segregation. Simultaneously, it reforms white Christians using the central structures of church life—worship, preaching, fellowship, and the like. I know Daniel Swanson. He has been thoroughly rediscipled himself before inviting others to embrace the journey he proposes.
Thank you Dr. DeYoung!