Podcast: Race, Ethnicity, and the Bible (Steven Bryan)

July 25, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Cultural Uniformity Is Not the Aim

In today's episode, Steven Bryan talks about how Christians should approach the various “collective identities” that bind—and divide—us in our world today.

Cultural Identity and the Purposes of God

Cultural Identity and the Purposes of God

Steven M. Bryan

Steven Bryan presents a biblical framework for thinking about various ideologies of cultural identity and cultivating diversity as the positive good that God intended.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:06 - Living in a Minority Culture

Matt Tully
Steve, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Steven Bryan
It’s a pleasure to be here. I just appreciate the chance to have this conversation.

Matt Tully
It’s such an important conversation, discussing the nature of our collective identities—the things about our cultures, ethnicities, and race that help to define who we are relative to other people. These are obviously big topics that are really at the forefront of a lot of our broader cultural conversations today in the US and around the world. I think this book is such a helpful starting place for good conversation as Christians. Before we get into some of the ideas that you are helping us to see from the Bible, I wonder if you could share a little bit about your own background, because I think it connects to what you’re trying to do in this book in a unique way.

Steven Bryan
We spent about twenty-four years in East Africa—in Ethiopia, actually—a very multi-ethnic society. When I first arrived, it was pretty much invisible to me. I looked around and everybody was Ethiopian, and I’m just thinking, I’m here serving Ethiopians. Over time it became clear that the differences between ethnic groups that weren’t always obvious to me were a really important part of society. A few years ago we moved back to the US and I became aware of that same kind of conversation, but it was just taking place in a somewhat different form. It was much more racialized here, whereas the conversation in Ethiopia was very much about ethnicity and cultural particularities of different ethnic groups. Here in the US it was really about racial identity. So, trying to think about the relationship between those two forms of identity—and, of course, to think about them biblically—was really important to me in order to better serve the church here in the US, but also the church around the world.

Matt Tully
I want to get into some of those terms, whether it’s ethnic identity or racial identity or a variety of other terms that we might use, but before we go there, for those of us who have grown up and maybe live today within a majority culture—their ethnicity is the dominant group or the largest group around them—give us a sense for what it was like for you and your wife and your family to live and work and worship as a Christian for over two decades in a minority culture of some sort. How would you describe what that experience was like for you?

Steven Bryan
At the beginning I think it felt like a big challenge. We were a fish out of water. We didn’t belong to that place, the place didn’t belong to us, we didn’t know the rules of the road—that was true in a figurative sense and a literal sense as well as we tried to drive around the capital city. We got off the plane and it was immediately obvious that there was difference there. It was obvious from the color of our skin, it was obvious from language, but it was obvious as well from the fact that they just thought about life differently. I think we recognized the cultural difference just immediately. In some places, those cultural differences exist with near-culture peoples. Maybe they’re not quite as obvious, but they’re still there.

Matt Tully
Do you think the experience of not being in the majority culture—or even cultures perhaps—did that help you see dynamics related to how culture works and how important it is that you don’t think you really saw before or that we might not notice as much when we’re in the majority?

Steven Bryan
I think you can grow up not really realizing that you have a culture. You really realize that you have a culture when you meet difference. That’s when you have to say, Oh! People that are part of that group, or identify with that group, don’t think about life the same way. The invisible rules that govern the way that they do life at every level are just different from the invisible rules that govern the way that I think about life and do life.

06:00 - Cultural Differences Are Part of God’s Plan

Matt Tully
You open your book with a really direct statement. You say, “Though intended by God to be a rich source of blessing, differences in collective identity have instead become one of humanity’s greatest sources of conflict, suspicion, alienation, and violence.” There’s obviously a lot to unpack in that statement; a lot that feels intuitively true. We see that dynamic all around us. To start, it’s interesting to note that that statement assumes that differences in our collective identities are not in and of themselves necessarily a bad thing, and that they were even part of God’s plan for humanity. Is that an accurate summary of an assumption behind that statement?

Steven Bryan
I think so, and I think it’s important to say that because it hasn’t always seemed to people that that’s the case. Some people think that cultural difference is something that has been introduced by the fall, that it’s the result of sin rather than part of the divine design, and so it’s something that—in the new heavens and the new earth—we will get over and we will all have the same culture. Even in the way that people have thought about Scripture, the vision and the dream of cultural uniformity has somehow been given theological credence. You can see why that’s the case because it has been the source of so much pain and struggle. Things that are most prominent in our world—like what’s unfolding in Ukraine—it really is about this question of cultural difference and domination across lines of difference.

Matt Tully
Help us understand what would be the theological or biblical case for that view—the view that ultimately, in the new heavens and the new earth, we’re headed towards a cultural uniformity that is part and parcel of what it means to be in the kingdom of God. What would be the argument for that?

Steven Bryan
Sometimes it’s kind of based out of a wrong reading the Tower of Babel incident, that this diversity of languages is a kind of divine curse, as it were.

Matt Tully
I think people listening right now might think that feels like that’s what happened. In their pride they build this huge tower, God comes down and he curses them with the confusion of their languages, and that scatters them. If that’s not the right way to read that or understand that, what would be the right approach?

Steven Bryan
If you read the early chapters of Genesis, there was this commission to fill the earth. The way that begins to play out—even in the preceding chapter (Gen. 10)—there’s this table of seventy nations. It’s a kind of preliminary picture—in a representative way, and maybe even in a symbolic way—of the earth filled. But it’s the outcome of Babel that God intends to happen. As they come together at Babel, the explicit statement of those who come together at Babel is, We will not fill the earth. We will be one people, one culture, one language. We are not going to spread out. We are not going to fill the earth. So it really is an act of rebellion against the divine purpose. If you think about this command to fill the earth not just as a command to populate the earth—I think that’s a wrong reading of that command—but as a command to fill the earth with peoples and cultures and each with their own language and ways of doing things. This is why in the genealogical material that you find in the early chapters of Genesis you get these early signs of cultural differentiation. This group began to work metal, this group began to write poetry and create musical instruments. That’s all in the genealogical material. I think that’s a kind of picture of this filling of the earth happening.

Matt Tully
That’s such an interesting way to read that story. I think you’re right that it’s maybe not the default way that we’re taught this or that we might understand it. In terms of the story of Babel, are the languages representative of the broader cultures of these different people? In confusing their languages and mixing up the languages, should we take that as God miraculously expediting the cultural differentiation that he wants to see happen among all these people?

Steven Bryan
You have this filling of the earth that takes place in the early chapters of Genesis, and the rebellion prior to the flood is instead of filling the earth with all of these culturally diverse people who are still united in the worship of God, they fill the earth with violence. They’re filling the earth with different cultures, but then they’re using those cultural differences to oppress one another, to do violence to one another. You have the flood as the divine response to that. Then, as you move toward Babel, humanity seems to say, Enough with that fill the earth nonsense! We’re going to stay one. We’re going to stay unified, and that’s going to solve all of our problems. And God’s not having that either, and so the divine judgment is, No, we will fill the earth. That’s the confusion of language. It’s a curse, but it’s also the recovery of the divine intention as well.

Matt Tully
We live in a culture today—maybe particularly in America, but I think this is also evident in other places around the world—and it seems like (there’s variation here; this is a bit of a generalization) there is often a push today towards the collective identity side. People are increasingly viewed and discussed and label according to some kind of collective identity. That’s kind of the dominant and, at least, broader push that we see. In light of that trend that we see in our society—and it’s not necessarily a Christian trend, although it appears in Christian circles as well—how would you respond to the person who says, This focus that you’re advocating for in Scripture on these cultural identities being really important and even there from the beginning, that’s an imposition on the text that is probably more influenced by just the cultural moment that we live in now than the actual witness of Scripture itself. How would you respond to that?

Steven Bryan
God’s response to it is the Abrahamic covenant. The Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 12 does not arise from a vision for cultural uniformity. It is a rejection of that vision and a declaration that that vision is idolatrous.

Matt Tully
How so?

Steven Bryan
It’s idolatrous in the sense that it is a desire for oneness, for sameness, for everyone to be the same and that will be the thing that solves all the problems of society. It’s giving ultimacy to this vision of totalizing unity. That’s not a divine vision of unity. There is a divine vision for unity, but it’s not sameness; it’s not a vision of sameness.

Matt Tully
Where do you see that in the Abrahamic covenant, that idea of unity but not uniformity?

Steven Bryan
The Abrahamic covenant is really the idea that God will make one people to be a holy people and restore the blessing that has been lost because of the fall to that people. He will make a holy people. And then he will make that people a people of peoples. It will be the people within which blessing is restored to all peoples. That divine vision of a people of peoples, then, is at the heart of the Abrahamic covenant. This is God’s solution to the fall, as it were. It’s what God announces as his divine intent to address the blessing that had been lost to humanity in the fall.

Matt Tully
You kind of hit on this a little bit, but I wonder if you could further unpack it for us. It feels like we might lose that broader vision for what God was doing through Abraham and his offspring in light of the way that we see the ethnic narrowness of God’s people in the Old Testament (the people of Israel). It feels like often the emphasis of God’s commands to them are aimed at narrowing the identity of the people of God around ethnic and cultural lines. How do you understand that dynamic? Is that what’s going on? Is that the right way to read the Old Testament? How does that relate to this broader vision that you say is there from the beginning?

Steven Bryan
At one level, as it often is in Scripture, it must take a preliminary form. The preliminary form that it takes within Israel is that you do have a unity of diversity. There are twelve tribes, and they are very different. They’re culturally different from one another, and yet they’re all part of one nation and one people. So I guess in a preliminary way we already see it taking place as the twelve sons of Jacob become a particular kind of people. It is constituted as a nation of twelve tribes. I think that’s really important to see this preliminary shape—this diversity even within this one people. There is a national particularity to this people, but that national particularity within the Abrahamic covenant has a universal end, and that universal end is for a cultural multiplicity. There’s multiplicity that God envisions to be brought into this people.

17:31 - God’s Purpose for Peoples

Matt Tully
Maybe taking a step out of the text of Scripture itself, it’s pretty common today to hear the critique that conservative evangelicals in America too often understand the gospel, the Bible, and salvation in overly individualistic terms. But you note in the book that your goal with the book is to explore what Scripture has to say about God’s purposes not only for people but also for peoples. You’ve already alluded to that distinction there, so I wonder if you could just unpack that a little bit more for us.

Steven Bryan
Going back to the Reformation, I think that evangelical theology has been especially strong in talking about that need for individual transformation—You must be born again. Jesus is very clear about that, so we can’t lose sight of that. At the same time, in the focus on individual soteriology, to think through what God is ultimately attempting to achieve and what are God’s ultimate purposes, I think we have to take into account that his purposes are for groups of people and not just for individuals. Both of those are vital and we can’t lose sight of either one of them or you lose something essential to our understanding of what God’s intentions are.

18:59 - Does the Bible Have a Concept of Race?

Matt Tully
At least in America, probably the dominant cultural conversation related to these things called “collective identities” that we’re having—and that we’ve been having for hundreds of years—relates to the issue of race in some way. Does the Bible have a concept of race like the way that we use that term today?

Steven Bryan
I think the short answer is no. Race as a category or as a construct is not something that you see in Scripture at all. They thought about collective identity in different terms. It wasn’t that they didn’t acknowledge differences in skin color, but that wasn’t the basis for thinking about cultural difference—not within Scripture. That came much later.

Matt Tully
What would be some of those cultural identity markers that we see in Scripture explicitly?

Steven Bryan
I think it is probably much closer to contemporary notions of ethnicity and of nationality. Of course, in an ancient context it means something rather different than a modern state. We tend to use the term “nation” when we’re talking about a state, which means internationally recognized borders, a system of laws. In Western tradition, individuals kind of voluntarily agree to live under that political system. A state has been, in modern terms, identified with a nation. That, of course, wasn’t part of the biblical narratives in any sense. A nation was three particular elements, it feels to me as I read those Old Testament narratives, and it was the nexus of god, king, and land. You could think of peoplehood without land, but it would be very difficult to think about a people that has no connection to a deity. When kingship, worship, and land all kind of come together, then an early conception of nationality seems to come into focus.

21:29 - An Affinity for Similarity

Matt Tully
It seems like a common thread, or maybe the core idea that stands behind any collective identity no matter how you’re drawing those groups, has to be that there is something about that group that is similar. The individuals in that group share something in common. It kind of got me wondering about how there is a certain normal and non-prejudiced way that we as humans tend to prefer things that feel similar or familiar to us. If we were raised eating a certain kind of food, there’s a good chance I’m going to like that food as an adult and maybe prefer it over something that feels different and that I’m not used to. My sense is that that dynamic applies to all kinds of things that feel familiar and comfortable to us, culturally speaking. And yet I think sometimes that the problem that we see is that the preference for things that feel normal for us can sometimes morph into something more sinister—a type of cultural or ethnic or racial superiority that leads us to look down on other people. The question for you is, especially having lived overseas for a long time, how do think about where to draw the line between a morally indifferent preference for something that feels familiar to us vs. a feeling of superiority? Is that even the right question to be asking as Christians?

Steven Bryan
I think that’s a great question. We don’t realize, as I was mentioning before, that we have this affinity for similarity until we meet the non-similar. it’s in that encounter that something crucial has to take place. A lot of people think that culture is formed at the boundaries. That is, it’s there’s the perception of difference and you’re then really even unconsciously saying, No, I’m more like this. My group does things this way and that’s how I tend to do them as well. It’s not uniformity within the group, but the culture with which you identify is serving up the options for you. It’s serving up a menu of choices from which individuals are choosing. But we recognize that we have a culture at the boundary where our culture meets some other culture. When that happens, if we are aware that we have this kind of natural affinity to likeness and similarity, then we will be very conscious of our need to stay open to the difference on the other side and to say, That’s not wrong. Living overseas, I saw this over and over again where people would come in from outside and their immediate impulse is to be critical: Why do they do it that way? It’s a very human tendency unless we check it and then say (as my wife likes to say), Unless we get curious about the differences on the other side, we will recoil against them and even react against them. Then there’s misunderstanding and the violence and aggression begins to come out of us.

25:07 - The Sinful Tendency to Normalize Our Own Experience

Matt Tully
This relates directly to a criticism that I think we often hear in America levied against “white Christianity” in America, which is what both you and I would be a part of, so to speak. It's because white Christians have enjoyed a cultural majority in the US—some would even use words like supremacy—we often view distinctly white cultural expressions of Christianity to be the baseline, and even the biblical way to be a Christian or to do church or to read the Bible. What do you make of that criticism? Do you think there’s truth in that, that many times white Christians are perhaps unaware of the cultural nature of how they view their faith in particular?

Steven Bryan
I think it’s certainly not unique to white Americans. I remember in Ethiopia that Christianity first came into the highland areas, and the highland cultures of Ethiopia are very, very different from the lowland cultures. It’s been much more difficult for the gospel and for churches to be planted in these lowland areas. Part of the reason for that is that highland Christians come announce the gospel, but with that is the expectation that the way church is going to look like in lowland areas is going to be pretty much what it looks like in the highland areas. We normativeize our own experience and make that central. If there’s a cultural preponderance or dominance of one particular group, that can be made a normative standard against which difference is measured. Those represent difference; I’m just normal. It’s that natural but certainly sinful tendency to center the experience of my group and make it normal and normative for everyone, in relation to which everyone else is different.

Matt Tully
How do we as Christians make sure we’re not normalizing certain culturally defined expressions of our faith and making them the idea of what it means to be a Christian? How do we fight against that tendency that is natural within each of us?

Steven Bryan
That’s a great question. I think part of it comes from internalizing this biblical vision for humanity—to see ourselves as people who have been welcomed as guests into Israel’s experience of peoplehood. We’ve been welcomed into Israel; that’s what the New Testament articulates as the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant. God has welcomed all peoples into this one people. We are not the dominant group. We may feel that way in our own specific cultural place and time, but theologically, that’s not the truth about us. We have been welcomed as guests, so we need to see ourselves in those terms—not as the dominant group, but as a group charged with this responsibility as we see in Romans to accept others and to accept one another across lines of cultural difference. Every banquet needs a host, and we’re not the host at stage one. As we are welcomed into that people, we are welcoming others into that people. We become a part of the whole and welcome other peoples who have come into this whole, but to really internalize that can really shape our perspective and really rid of us this sense of cultural centrality and dominance that I think every culture—no matter how big or how small—we all have this tendency to center ourselves. To de-center ourselves by thinking of ourselves in theological terms and not just in terms of demographics, I think that’s really important.

30:01 - Cultivating Cultural Multiplicity Inside of the Church

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final question that narrows in even more tightly on the church community—our own local churches—offer some advice to pastors. What does it look like for a church to embrace this theological vision of God’s people that, as you said, is from the beginning intended to be a multi-ethnic type of people? How do we actually make that a reality in our churches? How do we make that a priority in our churches without just going too far and overemphasizing the collective identities—looking just at skin color and all of the ways that we can take that too far? What does that look like?

Steven Bryan
This is going to sound a little bit old school, but in urban areas, of course, where there is cultural multiplicity there, cultivating cultural multiplicity inside of the church makes a lot of sense. That kind of cultural diversity isn’t true in all parts of the country, and certainly not in more rural areas. But one of the best things that a church in that kind of situation can do is to cultivate a robust missions program. I know that’s going to sound really old school, but until we’re beginning to think about the way in which the gospel, from the earliest stages and throughout Christian history, has transcended cultural boundaries and gone to peoples where Christ is not yet known, so that those peoples, too, can be welcomed in to the one people, that feels really, really important, fundamental, and foundational for Christian identity. Those would be a couple of things. Many areas are like this where there’s cultural multiplicity, and even if there’s not a lot of cultural diversity in your church at the present, what are some ways in which you can, within your communities and in connections between churches, be encouraging those kinds of rich intercultural expressions of Christian faith?

Matt Tully
What would you say to the pastor who lives in a moral rural place? Or, again, maybe it’s just a more culturally uniform type of context. He maybe sees in his congregation a kind of narrowness in terms of how people view their faith and view what it means to be a Christian. He wants to help them have a broader vision for what the people of God encompasses. What might he do to help encourage that, knowing that his church is just never going to be as diverse in different ways as maybe someone in a city would be?

Steven Bryan
There’s probably dozens and dozens of ways that you could do this. But who do we hold up as our examples? If you have a zealous young Christian and they want to be listening to things, where are you pointing them to? Are the people you’re pointing them to all people that share your cultural frame, or are you pointing them to models of what robust Christian maturity looks like and what a deep embrace of what Christianity sounds like? Are you pointing them to people that come from different cultural perspectives? That would certainly be one thing. How do we build these kinds of cultural connections? Oftentimes we have immigrant communities that are being settled. I grew up in southwest Kansas. It would be difficult to imagine a more culturally monolithic place at the time that I grew up, and now there are immigrant Somalis coming in, migrant workers coming in for work in agricultural industries. I think in our globalized world that experience of a culturally monochrome life is just much more rare. That’s not a bad thing. I think many people see it as a bad thing, but to cultivate within our churches a sense that this is a good thing. This linguistic diversity and this cultural diversity enriches life. In one sense, this is reflective of what the kingdom of God is like. There are oppressive forms of that multiplicity. That’s what “empire” is in Scripture, but “kingdom of God” is culturally multiple, and it’s a good thing. As that cultural diversity increasingly comes in—even to rural communities—it’s important for us to disciple our people to embrace this as a good thing. It doesn’t mean we’re all going to agree on immigration policy and what the solution is for illegal immigration. Those are political arguments that are worth having, but if they begin to impinge upon our understanding of cultural multiplicity as a value to be embraced, then I think it becomes somewhat hostile to what God’s purposes really are. A worrying trend is if you have people in your churches who are being influenced by white nationalists, or even so-called Christian nationalist voices—I think it’s really important to clearly speak out against these kinds of tendencies—the idea that cultural uniformity (cultural sameness) is really what we ought to be aiming for. That’s a Tower of Babel kind of mentality, and God made clear what he thought of it.

Matt Tully
Steve, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today about these cultural identities and, as you say in the book, their central purpose in God’s plan for the world. We appreciate it.

Steven Bryan
Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to have a conversation.

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