Rev. Dr. GP Wagenfuhr — Heritage and DNA
What does a bicycle advertisement from a UK company flooding my inbox have to do with race (and not bicycle racing)? The use of both “heritage” and “DNA” in reference to a bicycle brand reveals a fundamental thinking shift that theologians of race have pointed out. But, instead of confronting this or that thinker, let’s just pause a moment to think about these two radically different ideas of identity formation: heritage and DNA.
Heritage
Heritage is quite an important concept in the Bible. Heritage is something you inherit from your family or tribe, and it’s how the Jewish people of the Old Testament understood God to be working through them. The Promised Land was not a “gift” to the Israelites, nor was it some kind of private property they received by purchase or by merit. It was land that was entrusted to them as a heritage (נַחֲלָה) because they were in the lineage of Abraham with whom God had made a covenant. The Promised Land belonged to God, as does all land. It was entrusted to the Israelites by a covenant through Abraham as a heritage. This means that they had to look after the land, because it did not belong to them, but also to their children and their children’s children. Each generation of Israel got to use the land in ways God ordained. And from this notion, the people of God derived their identity and value as deeply attached to both the land and to the God who entrusted it to them by his covenant.
Heritage is something passed on in a family, and in the case of Scripture, that is a family created and maintained by the covenant God has made with them. This is the very language Jesus uses to discuss what his own mission entailed. Jesus speaks of people inheriting the kingdom and eternal life. Jesus is clearly harkening back to the notion of the Promised Land by his notion of the Kingdom of God, but expanding it beyond the land itself.
We’ve talked a lot about the good news of salvation, of heaven, of hell, about grace vs. merit, or faith vs. works… but we haven’t talked a lot about joining a covenanted family by which we gain the right, privilege, and responsibility of inheriting a kingdom. Eternal life is not a “gift” any more than the promised land was a “gift” in the sense of a transfer of property rights by quit-claim deed. Eternal life is entry into the life of God’s kingdom, sharing the rights and responsibilities that belong to such a place and kingdom reign. It is joining the family of a king as (eventually) adult children through adoption.
The identity conveyed through heritage only comes by means of a story. It is not a generic concept, a principle we can apply to our lives. It’s not a moral claim to do this instead of that. The commandments of God are always preceded by a reminder of the covenant relationship, “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex 20:2). Or, “My father was a wandering Aramean and he went down to Egypt…” (Deut. 26:5).
Heritage is particular. It belongs to specific people and not to others. Heritage defines the identity of a people by connecting them through each successive generation, for good or for ill. The Old Testament is a heritage text. It is particular and not general. It has no great moral treatise about what-it-means-to-be-human. It isn’t a book of general teachings to all people about how they should live rightly. It is a story about God making a covenant with a people. And that’s what makes it strange for us to read. We are constantly tempted, especially with children, to turn these heritage-identity-shaping stories into general principles for good living, which is why we skip so much of the Old Testament, it just doesn’t fit this type of reading!
The great mystery of the faith of Jesus Christ is that this heritage is being opened to Gentiles. The people who were not children of Abraham now get to join as his heirs. The heritage is re-confirmed as related to the covenant, and not to the blood of Abraham. In fact, the heritage of a people is confirmed by the kind of works that they do, according to Jesus in John 8. Those who are seeking to kill him are doing the works of their “father” the devil (John 8:44). The children of Abraham do the works that Abraham did. It is not by the “seed” (sperma) of Abraham that makes Abraham their father, but the works of Abraham—believing in the Word of God. What matters for the identity of the people of God, Jesus is saying, is not DNA (sperma) but the kind of works that the Father does. That is, behaviour shaped by inheritance.
It should not come as a surprise that in all of the biblical passages I’ve cited thus far, the people of God are those who have come out of slavery, either in Egypt or slavery to sin. The inheritance of God is for those who have been rescued from servitude, from being turned by powers human and spiritual in chattel or commodities. The people of God are rescued from DNA-meaning by being given a heritage.
DNA
DNA, in contrast to heritage, is a modern scientific concept whose meaning resides in the individual, and the individual as he or she is equal to a DNA grouping. Race, as a concept, arises only when we remove the specificity of heritage. This happens when people are displaced, taken out of their land, separated from their families, stripped of their native languages, and dispossessed. It is only by disinheritance that we come to see DNA, with its differences in physical qualities, as a marker of meaning. If we don’t want to think about this in terms of the racialization of humans, let’s think about animals for a second. There are dogs, and dogs have DNA. All dogs share a remarkable amount of DNA with wolves and foxes. They are very similar species. But that means very little to Fido and the relationship Fido has with his owners. It is only when we don’t know the stories of animals that we treat them like cattle, literally, instead of Bessie.
Now, let’s think about it in terms of the language we use for churches and other organizations. We now talk about an organization’s DNA. In individuals we talk about “wiring” as though we were individual computers with different electrical circuitry. Our words have shifted from heritage and inheritance, language of a people, to biology and electrical engineering. For churches, this means we have moved away from seeing ourselves as children of Abraham, coheirs with Christ our leader, guiding us into our inheritance in the kingdom of God for which we must be prepared as disciples. Instead, we’ve started to see the church as a construction project. When we do church planting, we have to set the DNA of the organization. When we consider ordination, we have to consider how we are each individually wired. Those aren’t bad things, of course, but they shift the main focus from stewarding an inheritance and participating in the body of Christ, and toward the personal and organizational ownership of a brand of the gospel message we have to build. Think of the reconciling power of heritage when we realize that Presbyterians and Roman Catholics are brothers and sisters in Christ, instead of focusing primarily on building institutions and organizations with the right kind of DNA.
Problems of DNA-Language
In terms of race, this shift to bodies and types of bodies has a long history beginning in colonialism when peoples were disinherited and displaced. It is only by disinheriting someone that they can become a commodity to buy, sell, and use.
And here’s where racism meets the Evangelical gospel in a disturbing way, and why the logic of the problem runs far deeper than it merely being a “sin problem.” Christianity in America has been a building religion. Philosopher Charles Taylor characterizes much of American history as the Age of Mobilization, in which churches saw their primary job in mobilizing a people to “Win the West,” “spread civilization,” or in Manifest Destiny. The strength of the American brand of Christianity was in its ability to mobilize people for a great mission of the common good. But God’s power is not revealed in our strengths. The good news of Jesus Christ has never been to build the kingdom of God by claiming it from other people, or forcing it on other people, or even forcing civilization on the creation itself. The kingdom is not a building project, but an inheritance. It is something we are drawn into as foreigners. It is a homeland we get to inhabit as outsiders welcomed in, rather than as conquerors and builders.
At the same time, American Christianity has turned each individual into a building project. Indeed, in German the very word for “culture” is Bildung, which refers to a practice of self-cultivation or self-development. And American Christianity has taken this concept of self-development to be the heart of the gospel. We might talk about it as sanctification, flourishing, “God has a wonderful plan for your life,” or even health-and-wealth. This notion of personal moral transformation directed at personal (and thereby corporate) thriving is rooted in the idea of conversion.
The Gospel is a Heritage, not a Genetic Modification for DNA Repair
Put another way, we focus the good news of Jesus Christ on what it does for me or for us, rather than focusing on the heritage in which we are graciously included. This means that instead of seeing sin as generational, a corrupt heritage (like Genesis 4 does), we see sin as personal moral failings, or even something that resides in our DNA. To solve such DNA-based sin requires a foundational displacement that we Evangelicals have called “conversion.” We must leave behind the old DNA to take up a new Christlike DNA. Of course we can point to biblical passages to support this. My point is not that this is untrue, but that it is a partial truth that has missed the more basic and guiding point that the Bible is making—God is at work forming a heritage and through that heritage reconciling all things to himself. God is not at work making people accept the correct statement of faith, then morally transforming them, with the end that all humans may flourish through the furthering of civilization. Instead, God is including us in his work of defeating sin by fathering a people who bear his character.
Put yet another way, the kingdom is all about inheritance. After all, we are all adopted into the inheritance of Christ! The kingdom is the collection of relationships between God and his people, individually bound together in Christ through whom we are adopted to share with his great inheritance of the throne of all heaven and earth (as in Matt 28:18).
This is how racialized thinking can be systemic in the church, and how we combat it. It goes to the heart of the gospel. Do we believe that the gospel is about personal conversion and moral transformation? Is it for individuals to become better versions of themselves? Is Jesus the repair-kit for broken DNA? Or is the gospel an inheritance we have received from generation after generation? Is it a great lineage in which we get to be included as foreigners and strangers? Is the gospel a call to join a people, or to fix ourselves, or our society?
I know what the Bible’s clear weight of evidence points toward. And this focus on heritage reveals how we must now be reconciled as brothers and sisters in Christ, even with very different DNA. For, if unity in Christ is unity of DNA, it follows that our churches will be racially segregated, and the DNA of others be considered lesser. But if unity is in Christ as the one who adopts us into the family of God to share in his inheritance of the kingdom and eternal life, then we realize we are all outsiders who are given a new story in Jesus.