If you've read "Brick Lane" by Monica Ali (and if you haven't, put it on the list) you will need no persuading that race is an issue in contemporary Britain. The principal character is a Bangladeshi Muslim woman who lives in the East End of London for many years, having been sent into an arranged marriage with an older man she's never met. And yet she hardly leaves Bangladesh in her mind, family or friendships, and lives for years with scarcely a word of English. It's a sharp object lesson in how deeply multiracial, multilingual and multicultural are many of Britain's cities. The Lord has brought the ends of the earth to our doorstep. Simultaneously, though, that particular Bangladeshi community is monoracial, monoglot and monocultural, at least for the women. Brick Lane, for all its curry houses, is no melting pot.
So this latest contribution to IVP's Biblical Theology series could not have come at a more critical time for us. And even within the excellence set by these outstanding studies, it must be said that this one is a stunner, quite, quite brilliant.
Why? Well, start off from the idea of a Biblical Theology of Race - would you have expected or commissioned that? Land, Temple, Sin, Salvation, yes - and possibly even riches and poverty, but race, at least beyond the confines of Jew/Gentile exegetical issues, was not a subject I expected. And how blind, or more precisely how colour blind, I was. For many black evangelicals have been saying for many years that it is a critical issue, damagingly absent from most white Systematics and preaching.
For Hays is absolutely and unanswerably right that the promise of a multi-racial crowd praising God in heaven is actively and deliberately prefigured throughout the Bible. Israel not only had contact with black men and women, but they were embedded into her national life. The land of Cush, which is his major and repeated instance, is roughly contemporary Ethiopia (don't lose heart in chapter two on the ethnic make-up of the Old Testament world- push through it), and Cushites are integrated into the Israelite army and civil service, and have specific covenant promises addressed them. Moses even marries a Cushite, twice stressed in the text, and Hays wonders if this was the reason that Miriam objected to her. For obvious to the first readers, but somehow unnoticed by us, is that Cushites were black. Moses, the Egyptian prince, had a black wife and therefore, suggests Hays, how fitting that Miriam's punishment is to be turned white as snow (Num. 12:1-10). This book is full of such exegetical moments, when you open your own Bible to see if the Bible really does say what he says. And it does. I don't know enough to judge whether they are all valid, but he's persuaded me on enough to have me accept his overarching thesis. Racism is a sin, for God created and saved a multiracial people, and church now should live out that Revelation promise as it tries to live out all the others.
Some cautions. Hays is writing out of an explicitly American context where three issues are close to the surface of church life: one is racial intermarriage, and Hays goes as far as to say not that this is neutral but that God actively encourages intermarriage. On p203f he says repeatedly that God sanctions, approves of and the church is openly to embrace such events. In the light of his assertion that in many US churches that such marriages are frowned on his force is understandable. I don't think the UK church scene is so explicitly disapproving, but I may be wrong and Hays' judgment is needed. Nevertheless, it's quite provocative to hear that interracial marriage demonstrates gospel unity.
Secondly, Hays contends that there is a visible, structural racism in American church life that must be challenged, and he hits his targets hard. It is obvious to anyone living in Britain's larger towns and cities that the same criticism can be made here, and it is as much a scandal. Hays even compares it to the Jew-Samaritan distrust that Jesus condemns. I fear he is right, but (and this is a very cautious caveat) I do not think the contours of the problem in the UK are quite the same as they are in the US. For instance, if I understand Hays correctly it would be unthinkable for Joel Edwards to be the chair of the equivalent of the Evangelical Alliance, if there is one. Mind you, the fact that we have, or need, a separate Afro-Caribbean Evangelical Alliance should be scandal enough. And in a secular contrast, Condaleeza Rice is a much more highly placed black American woman than any British equivalent. It would be extremely valuable to have someone marry Hays' exegesis with the UK scene. And it ought to be someone from the ACEA.
A third issue is the extremely vexed issue of slavery. We need to do some very careful thinking here, because Hays exposes some very unpleasant aspects of white Biblical scholarship, the mildest of which is constantly to assume that the Cushites are slaves (nowhere said in the text) right through to exposing defences of the slave trade that are in serious textbooks I have on my shelves. I was really quite shocked. Why then do we need to be careful? Partly because there is a potent public rhetoric about slavery and freedom in the States that isn't quite the same here - remember how Martin Luther King drew on the motif of "all God's children shall be free" in his "I have a dream" speech? But more urgently (to me, a white reader), liberal scholars are making the slavery issue equivalent to the (homo)sexuality issue, and we need to stop and think about what we are condemning, and why.
One final caution - Hays makes one point, the Cushite point, so frequently that this reader became slightly weary of it. And then he said this. "It is hoped that, if nothing else, this repetitive exercise will challenge the readers of this book to challenge their inherited presuppositions regarding race, and to replace those inaccurate presuppositions with careful historical research and exegesis" (p118). In other words, he's underlining this for much needed emphasis, so keep reading and don't skip.
Hays has persuaded me that Race is a significant "biblical-theological topic". Not, you understand, that it is a topic which needs a biblical and theological critique, as might any contemporary ethical issue, but that the Bible is structured, from the mono-racial garden to the multiracial garden city, via the huge significance of Genesis 10 and the Table of Nations, and the Abrahamic blessing to all the nations in the gospel, to be deliberately multi-racial and to glory in the wonderful challenge that God has set before us.
So - and this a question I was longing for Hays to address but he never does - which is more racist: a church which is so determined to reach the Bangladeshi women in the East End of London that it only functions in Bangladeshi (thus excluding all other races, and never being remotely multiracial) or the church which is determined to be multiracial in demonstrating the gospel unity which Christ has won for us, uses English as the obvious common denominator, and therefore can never reach the Bangladeshi women in Brick Lane. Answers on a postcard, please, but only when you've read this fascinating book.
Reviewed for The Biblical Theology Briefings by Chris Green, Vice Principal, Oak Hill Theological College.
