Your Moderator’s Study Committee On Kinism and Race Realism
By Rev. Benjamin Glaser
tudy committees operate on an interesting plane in the life of the church. Often received as information by the Synod, it can seem as if they provide little more for the people of God than a bit of pious advice; however, they do serve a purpose in allowing us as a body to have a foundational resource to know how to approach thorny issues in culture.
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It is to that end that the 221st Synod of the ARP was moved to establish a study com- mittee to return back to a later synod a biblical and theological word on “kinism” and they mean here in a second. To get us started with a little background, often we are moved at our annual meeting at Bonclarken to look into matters because of something that has taken place at a church or in one of our presbyteries. When it comes to these two items the situation is no different. A teaching had come into a local body causing havoc and division, which interrupted the main mission and calling of the church, as unbiblical ideas often do.
Paul writing to his young protege Timothy warns him, “. . .that they teach no other doctrine, nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly ” (1 Tim. 1:3-4). The source of spiritual troubles is often a lack of focus on the essentials of the Christian life. To be fair, Paul was a proclaimer of the whole counsel of God. As Van Til once said, “The Bible is thought of as authoritative on everything of which it speaks. Moreover, it speaks of everything. We do not mean that it speaks of football games, of atoms, etc., directly, but we do mean that it speaks of everything either directly or by implication.” We must be wise then on how we speak and when aspects of the gospel or ideas that have nothing to do with the good news of Christ become a hobby horse of the minister the whole body suffers.
“Race realism is the recognition that mankind is divided into distinct races, that the differences between the races are large and relatively permanent, and that this racial diversity ought to be acknowledged, celebrated, and defended.” and “kinism” while lacking a concise quotation, is a modern heresy that teaches the superiority of certain races over others, that racial seg- regation and ethnic homogeneity are biblically ordained. That people should live, marry,
and worship within their own racial or ethnicities is against God’s design. These races should not only stay segregated in ecclesiastical and state relations, but phys- ically as well raising miscegenation to the level of the Fifth Commandment, that just as donkeys and horses create mules, so to they teach that binding together of black and white in marriage violates God’s command in 2 Cor. 6:14 against unequal yoking of men and women together. They believe that racial purity is a moral law which must be followed. Kinism is the sin of the Judaizers for a new generation. While the study committee’s report will give a fuller answer to why these teachings are not in keeping with God’s statutes as laid out in Holy Scripture, I want to point to one particular passage to show why their conceptions are not only false, but deadly so. Kinists and race real- ists like to cite at a passage like Genesis 1:25 as support for their conception that races should not intermarry, i.e. that kinds in this verse should be understood as what Darwinist enemies of a God-spoken creation saw as species. From before the Fall, they say, our Lord ordained differ- ent races as unique with the white race as pre-eminent, and other races less evolved and in need of protection by the white race, which is convenient. I doubt that if they were born in Kolkata of Aryan heri- tage, they would think the same. These with German atheists in the 19th Century. A proper reading of Genesis 1:25 clearly shows this heresy is a gross error. In closing, these race realist/kinist conceptions cannot hold up to the light - tion by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. One could point to passages like Ruth 4:10, Matthew 1:5, Acts 13:1, Revelation 11:15, and Galatians 3:8 that Christ does not countenance these ideas in His Kingdom.
14 The Associate Reformed Presbyterian
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