It seems a point that should be made against this notion that recognizing that race is real is “racist” should be made. The modern refusal to recognize race strikes the close observer as a kind of perverted spiritualism. This denunciation of “race is real” looks to be an incipient embrace of Manicheanism/Gnosticism where the material and the corporeal are denied reality. So far as I can understand it, the claim that race is not real involves the notion that since realities are at their bottom all spiritual, therefore all embracing of the reality of race is seen as some kind of serious and even heretical departure from this new modern Manichean interpretation of Christianity. This argument, then, rests on the ideal of the godlessness of all the corporeal categories of mankind that God specifically created. Indeed, given its head, the natural consequence over time of this argument that “race is not real or important” as put forward by people like Sandlin, Wilson, Strachan, James White, J. Ligon Duncan, Baucham, etc. seems inevitably to be that one day high profiled Reformed Clergy will not be able to answer the question; “What is a woman?” I mean, if “race is not real or important,” and/or if “race is only a social construct,” or if “race is only about melanin levels,” then how far is that from “gender is not real of important,” and/or “gender is only a social construct,” or “gender is only about different chromosomes.” Those who contend that race is not real can only be seen as a seeking of spirituality purely in abstraction from the corporeal. This is a reversed denial of the incarnation and the physical resurrection. Whereas the early heretics just came out and denied the corporeal in Jesus birth and resurrection, thus bollixing up the implications for the corporeal in the life of men, our latter day heretics are moving in the opposite direction effectively denying the corporeal in the life of man (“race is not real”) and over time that will work its way backwards to effectively denying gender realities and so one day eventually denying the corporeal in the birth and resurrection of Jesus. All of this is logically destructive of the Incarnation and the Resurrection of the Body.
In brief the denial of race as a biological reality is heresy of Docetism where Jesus only appeared to be a man, as seen in its early stages.
Ideas have consequences.
Christendom was already once almost seduced by semi-Manichean notions – in the Middle Ages, when the RCC elevated virginity and celibacy into higher and higher value, and made it mandatory (at least thoretically) for all its members of spiritual caste. They insisted, for example, that Mary remained “ever virgin”, against the clear Biblical evidence to the contrary, because it would have been destructive to their celibatic ideal to admit that the mother of Jesus Christ had ever lowered herself into low, filthy carnal relations.
The Reformation naturally rebelled against this monkish ascetic narrative that was like a watered-down version of Gnostic contempt for material world and carnal connections.
And speaking of “early stages”; the Bible identifies the denial of genuine, material resurrection with cancer:
https://biblehub.com/2_timothy/2-18.htm
“17 and the talk of such men will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, 18 who have deviated from the truth. They say that the resurrection has already occurred, and they undermine the faith of some.”
What these guys were going was, in all likelihood, peddling the occultist notion of “SPIRITUAL RESURRECTION.” That is – resurrection was not really about change in your material status but “rising to the higher state of consciousness.” Many cults have peddled this idea, including the American “Nation of Islam” which teaches this very idea of “spiritual resurrection” to Blacks. (The NOI is in many ways just self-deifying Gnosticism with an Afrocentric twist.)
100% agree. Well articulated.
And another absolutely notorious example of where the “pious” denial of materiality can lead: the Romish doctrine of Transubstantiation. RCs are bound by their faith to believe that bread is not really bread any more after the priestly blessing. As Protestant polemicists have noted, this is as if the people for whom Christ changed water into wine would have had to pretend they were drinking good wine, when all they could taste was water.
And therefore, “embracing of the reality of bread” was indeed a serious and officially heretical departure from the Popish faith. You were supposed to believe Rome, not your own senses.