"Spiritual Bypassing" on Racial Reconciliation

A sister in Christ approached me on social media recently concerned that I am falling prey to humanism and legalism with my “narrative” on “racial reconciliation.” She expressed multiple concerns, but the heart of them boils down to a problem I have encountered in many shapes and forms: “all you need is the Gospel!”

Various versions of this view are used to sweep aside every Christian and biblical appeal to social reform or call for change—especially sacrificial changes in behavior, but also repentance or even sometimes acknowledgment. It is already agreed up front that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the answer: it is God and only God that changes hearts, truly exposes prejudice and racism, and who truly brings repentance. Of course this is true! Far too many Christians, however, use the prima facie truth of this as a way of ending the conversation. If you bring up any further discussion of specifics in Christian ethics, patterns of behavior, social norms, etc., you will be quickly reminded that we already solved this problem with “the Gospel,” there is no need to be legalistic and start talking about laws, or worse—that dreaded critical race theory, or Social Gospel, or all those things John MacArthur or the Founders guys told me was evil Marxism and godless evil.

Or, you may hear it like I did. I posted the concluding sentences to a recent article, which included the idea that “biblical law in society and culture is going to be our claimed mission.” I was informed, “if this is your goal, then you have failed to understand that the Gospel reconciles us to God and to our fellow man with whatever skin color, and not biblical law.”

There was no reference or interaction to anything in the article, or any other article or book I have written on the subject. There is only me being held in suspicion of ignoring the Gospel and imposing works on people, and worse, a particularly twisted, racially-skewed, critical race theory-based (as they see it) works-righteousness. I am implored to preach only Christ as the foundation, “the beginning and the end,” because my own alleged narrative “collapses on itself.” I must instead, “Offer the solution.”

The truth is, I do offer Christ from foundation, beginning to end. And I do offer the solution. The problem is that it is just not the solution many conservative Christians want to hear. Many seem to prefer an easy “gospel”-only solution. It is an abstracted Christ who does not command us to pick up a cross and follow him afterward. It is an easy spiritual experience in which we preach reconciliation to others and then watch the minorities scrape and crawl to achieve it without our participation.

It’s almost like one assumes the white parties actually have no role in racial reconciliation, despite the history and despite our dominant social position. It’s as if when the subject comes up, the assumption is that those who are appealing for racial reconciliation (generally, by default, the persons of color themselves) are the ones who need to come to Christ and get reconciled to him. Once reconciled to him, they will obviously see the error of their critical race theory and cultural Marxist ways, and drop all that nonsense about reconciliation. When they finally shut up about all that, they can then be reconciled to the rest of us in our tidy white Reformed, Baptist, or Evangelical spaces.

That’s the power of the Gospel! Though your ideology be black as James Cone, it shall be washed white as wool!

I mean, I know that few people would actually go so far as to say it this way, but this is certainly how it seems to come about. I can assure you this process is how blacks get treated in these spaces routinely; it is how they routinely feel treated, and I think with good reason. Instead of pressing a “gospel” system in which they need to repent and settle down, we should rather listen to them and at least share some burden, if not take most of it.

In my case, it was suggested that since I think we should use biblical standards for social justice and social change, I was accused of ignoring the gospel and preaching works. I think everyone involved in social Reformation has encountered this.

The phenomenon overall is, of course, called “spiritual bypassing.” It is when people use spiritual-sounding catchphrases or pat answers to avoid the conversations difficult for them. (Of course, this phrase itself was coined by a Buddhist, so now I am really in hot water!)

Spiritual ByPassing on Racism Has  Deep History

This phenomenon, when applied to race, slavery, or racism, has a deep history in the United States. It was used in various ways by Bible-believing Christians to keep slavery legal, stop pulpits from preaching against these and related evils, to hold at bay white Christians who would have made changes, to keep blacks oppressed, etc., etc. I wish white Christians today could see how much their behavior parallels this, what we all now see to be evil.

In The Problem of Slavery in Christian America, I devote considerable space to how “Two Kingdoms” theology was used to suppress any official church criticism of racism or slavery for a long time. This was effectively a church sanction in favor of keeping these institutions and social conventions legal. There are countless examples of this in official church declarations, comments and writings from individual ministers, and from various individuals.

Here are just a few I have excerpted from the book. The first example is not even an evangelical, and is also not a Southerner. But note the lifestyle motivation underlying:

When Unitarian minister William Furness preached his first antislavery sermon in 1839, some wealthy members of his Philadelphia church sitting before him held investments in southern slavery, in one case between 200 and 300 slaves. After his sermon, he received ugly notes inquiring how long he intended to preach such obnoxious doctrines, and that he would be better off to “preach nothing else but Jesus Christ and him crucified.”[1]

Related to this is the proclamation of Southern Presbyterian giant James Henly Thornwell: “Our design in giving them [slaves] the Gospel is not to civilize them, not to change their social condition, not to exalt them into citizens or freemen; it is to save them.”[2]

It is hard to argue with the salvation of the soul as a priority, is it not? Hypothetically, if we could only muster the resources to address one thing, would we not all leave the rest on the shelf for this? Could we not all say we find ourselves backed into a political and social corner where the salvation of the soul is our only aim, at least out of necessity? With such “least of all evils” scenarios, conservatives could think they could easily exonerate themselves for not even trying to liberate the slaves or end Jim Crow. Anyone who objected could be derided, perhaps right out of the church, for putting material comforts ahead of the eternal spiritual value of a soul in the balance between heaven and hell!

I hope you can hear the echoes in the reasoning of modern critics of racial reconciliation: all we need is Christ! It was the very same reasonings that the church leaders contemporary with Thornwell, John Adger and John Girardeau, used. They said Thornwell was better than the abolitionists because he stuck to “the Gospel” (while allowing and openly supporting slavery) instead of denying the Gospel through “political attempts” and “liberation,” etc.:

They will also serve to evince the fact, that, while the Abolitionists were expending their zeal in unmeasured denunciation of their brethren at the South, and in polit­ical attempts to effect the liberation of the slaves, South­ern Christians were actively engaged, against such oppo­sition as an ungodly world always offers to the Gospel, in efforts to afford them judicious religious instruction, and opportunities for securing the salvation of their souls through the gracious provisions of the Gospel.

This contrast between the spiritually-minded mission of the southern church and the Abolitionists’ alleged “opposition . . . to the Gospel” renders the justification for perpetuating southern slavery a biblical defense against the onslaught of secular human­ism. Adger and Girardeau could even conclude their introduction with an admission of failure in their mission, but as the brave defenders of orthodoxy, that was a small price to pay:

The Southern Church makes no boast that she did her whole duty to the souls of the slaves. As before God, she has much to confess; but as before men, she can honestly affirm that she did not neglect the spiritual in­terests of the Negro, but sincerely endeavoured to lead him to Christ. A day of reaction may yet come, when the force of the views here submitted to the world will be acknowledged, when the justice which has hitherto been denied to the Church at the South will be ren­dered by the people of Jesus, who cannot always be blinded to scriptural truth by theories of human rights and humanitarian schemes, conceived in the womb of a rationalistic philosophy.

The southern insistence that it defended orthodoxy and faith­fully reached out to the souls of slaves, even if it neglected their earthly interests, created a powerful cloak of self-deception, though one quite transparent to the rest of the world. By this guise, south­erners could convince at least themselves that they were fine patri­archs and custodians of the poor hapless blacks allegedly thrust upon them by forces outside their control. So successful was the self-congratulation that the southern theologians, who fought emancipation in every way and at every step, who denied its possi­bility, who consistently argued that the church had no hand in the civil institution of slavery and could not work to effect emancipa­tion, who continually insulted and degraded the nature, person, and potential of the black people, and who bitterly decried eman­cipation in some cases for decades afterwards, would nevertheless credit themselves for whatever good may have come of it:

If the mass of the coloured race has, in any measure, been prepared for the responsibilities and duties of freemen so suddenly thrust upon them, the fact is due mainly to the preaching of Gospel Ministers, the in­structions of the Sabbath-school, and the training of Christian families.[3]

A quick biblical lesson on Gospel and Law

Briefly, we need to look at the theological-biblical aspect of this problem. Briefly put, conformity to God’s law is not the grounds or means of reconciliation, but it is certainly what necessarily flows from reconciliation with Christ. If we are saved by the Christ we preach, we will then move on to good works. This is the whole truth of the Gospel.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph. 2:8–10).

James goes so far as to tell us that a faith that does not have the good works following it is not the faith of salvation:

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? . . .

Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless?  Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar?  You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works; and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. And in the same way was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead (James 2:14, 20–26).

To be sure, what kind of “works” did James have in mind immediately here? They were works of overcoming class and social distinctions, prejudice, and sacrificial, material giving across those lines:

If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

Dead. Dead, I tell you. A professed faith in Christ, at the foundation and from beginning to end, that does not have social outworkings following it, is not true faith. It is dead.

There are many other Scriptures which address these concepts.

Some will suspect my teachings here to be motivated by my adherence to Theonomy, and others will accuse me of a legalism derived from a “rationalistic philosophy” (to use Adger and Girardeau’s phrase!) like “woke-ism” of Social Justice Warrior-ism; but the truth is, this is no special or new adaptation of Scripture.

Not only is this just what the Scripture says all by itself, which anyone can understand, it is also very basic, classic Reformed theology. There are three uses of the law, and one of them is the moral use: it is a guide of conduct, a pattern of sanctified behavior, for the already saved Christian.

If you are skeptical about this, you can read R. Scott Clark teaching it here, and you can hear R. C. Sproul, Sr., teach it here. Sproul even calls this use of the law its “highest function.”

For some reason, however, when it comes to specific applications, particularly social applications, of the law in this regard, Christians short-circuit, get defensive, and retreat to pious platitudes and pat answers. With such means they engage in spiritual bypassing. It is as if our Christianity is an easy Christianity that ends with a profession of faith and church attendance. Anything that calls for the slightest uncomfortable change in behavior is condemned as a legalism and bypassed. It is like we want easy justification without sanctification. But sanctification follows a pattern—the pattern of God’s law—and it necessarily means good works, which he has prepared for us to walk in.

One way I experience this bypassing often relates specifically to real sanctification.

You hear it all the time among a select group of theologians: “wokeness” or “woke” means never-ending repentance and works. It is a key reason frequently given to avoid any discussion of racial reconciliation: because if we give an inch, they will take everything. If we concede kneeling during the anthem, they will take the next thing and the next thing until they completely destroy America! I saw a quip just today in a blog from Mr. Wilson, suggesting once again that it is stupid to make concessions even about things like football team mascots because the “perpetually aggrieved” will drive it down a slippery slope. So, don’t even give anything.

(It is funny that these fellas never corral their own by citing the slippery slope versions of their own theological positions in the other direction. Fallacies are only fun when wielded against others.)

What’s the relevant theological problem here? It is the fact that racial reconciliation and “wokeness” (or awareness) is not about justification, or getting saved. It is not a hamster wheel of alleged works-righteousness. No. Properly conceived, it is simply an aspect of sanctification. Put in this light, it is so simple to understand in terms of classic theological orthodoxy.

We could even agree that there will be a lifetime of works and sacrifices still ahead of us in the area of racial reconciliation. So? This is not an indictment of the genre or the cause; it is an indictment of our failures heretofore and of our total depravity.

A lifetime of “perpetual” works ahead of us is not an argument against the potential truth or need for those works. Look at the parallel theological concept: After all, every single orthodox theologian in the world will admit that we will never be fully sanctified in this world before we die and go to be with Christ. Every one, without exception. This means that as far as sanctification is concerned, this life is one of perpetual good works, perpetual repentance, perpetual repair (including of personal relationships). Does this mean we should condemn and jettison the doctrines of sanctification and the third/moral use of the law as “endless grievances” or “endless works”? God forbid!

Well, racial reconciliation is one of those many areas of good works and sanctification out there on the table—and it will be for a while. Are there folk who abuse it and create actual objectionable legalisms out of it? Sure; just as there are preachers who make legalisms out of every other area of doctrine: worship, family, sex, and a hundred others. Do we completely ignore all of these other areas because some abuse them? No, we work all the harder to correct them and move ahead.

This is exactly what we should be doing on race, racial history, racial reconciliation, friendship, works of mercy, charity, hospitality, education, business, insurance, finance, and countless more.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that so much outstanding work is left to do in our before-prepared-for-us “good works” (Eph, 2:10), too many Christians instantly retreat into that spiritual bypass of “just preach Christ” or “you missed the Gospel” or “don’t feed the perpetual grievance machine!” But all of this is wrongheaded. We are called, implored, moved, and impelled—and we should feel these things—to reconcile with our brethren for whom Christ died—even perpetually our whole lives.

Too often, we come across the bruised and bloodied, or just naked and hungry bodies of our brothers and sisters of color lying in the road to Jericho, and we do everything we can to spiritual-bypass to the other side of the street. From the opposite curb we may call out, “Christ is our hope!” as we do what is most comfortable, safe, and inexpensive for us, and do it as quickly as possible.

When we feel the need to cross to the other side of the street, we can do so quite easily. We even have a doctrinal crosswalk: the ubiquitous argument that the Church must stay officially neutral on “political” and “social” affairs. We do not want to be like that liberal “Social Gospel,” which is no Gospel at all. The Church, in this prevalent view, only preaches salvation of souls and spiritual topics; the social and civil realms are left to God’s providence. But Jesus’ parable did not mean spiritual issues only. Had this been the case, the southern slaveholders could have stood just as guiltless before God for preaching to their slaves that if they just received Jesus in their hearts, they would be truly free—spiritually free (an argument used widely by men like Thornwell, George Whitefield, and many others). Yes, there is a sense, and a very high one, in which the parable is about salvation of the soul and spiritual things. Ultimately, Jesus is the only Good Samaritan, and we can only be the victim in the story, left for dead, helpless in our sin; Jesus comes along to pay the full price of our recovery. But if we stop here, the meaning of the parable can not only not make full sense to us, but so much of the rest of the New Testament cannot either.

We are specifically told, for instance, to make the cross of Christ an ethic by which we treat others (Rom. 15:1–3; 1 Cor. 10:24, 31–33; 2 Cor. 5:14–15; Eph. 5:2, 25; Phil. 2:1–11). This means acting like the Good Samaritan ourselves, too. If Christ is the Good Samaritan, then you can read these Scriptures, and where Christ is either stated or implied, replace his name with “the Good Samaritan,” and at some point you must realize that the Good Samaritan’s cross-racial good works must become part of the good works to which we are called as well.[4]

That is not denying the Gospel. It is realizing the full extent of the life to which the Gospel calls us, and in fact, to which our faith demands, lest our faith be judged dead.

Notes:

[1] Quoted in The Problem of Slavery in Christian America, 240

[2] Thornwell, “The Christian Doctrine of Slavery,” The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, Volume 4—Ecclesiastical, 433; quoted in Problem of Slavery, 312.

[3] Adger and Girardeau, eds., “Prefatory Note,” in The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, Volume 4—Ecclesiastical, 380; quoted in Problem of Slavery, 333–334.

[4] McDurmon, Problem of Slavery, 404.

Joel McDurmon