The Bible provides every white nation with a primordial myth of origin. The story of the Israel of God functioned historically as an ethno-religious mythomoteur not just for Christians but for post-AD 70 rabbinic Judaism. The Bible and the interpretive traditions it has generated over millennia are a stockpile of immensely important cultural resources. Claims to ownership over such resources have long been the stuff of ethnic competition between Christians and Jews. White racialists who claim that “Judeo-Christianity” is essentially a Jewish franchise operation make a fatal error. In effect, they concede to their most important ethnic rivals a proprietary interest in the foundation myth of European Christendom. But not even the Old Testament — much less the New — belongs to rabbinic Jews.
Indeed, the division of the Bible into Old and New Testaments is artificial and misleading. The Bible contains a coherent and continuous narrative linking Genesis to Revelation. But the story is not about the beginning and end of planet Earth. Rather modern biblical scholarship presents the Bible as a complex, many-faceted story of the Israel of God from its origins in ancient Israel “according to the flesh” to the new creation of Christ’s spiritual kingdom. A brief examination of the beginning of the Bible story can help white racialists to understand how the Bible served as a mythomoteur, first in the ethno-history of ancient Israel and in late antiquity in the ethno-genesis of European Christendom. For all its limitations, in other words, the higher criticism has made important progress in understanding the Word of God. In particular, the sub-disciplines of form criticism and historical criticism provide a useful starting-point for anyone — even the most sceptical white nationalist — struggling to decipher the providential meaning of Genesis. The first step towards a well-grounded theology of race is to recognize that critical analysis of Genesis provides fascinating insights into the cosmological context within which ancient Israelites achieved — and lost — nationhood.
The Cosmic Temple in Genesis One
Form criticism is a sub-discipline of historical criticism; both employ distinctively scholarly methodologies in reading the Bible. Such an academic approach to biblical interpretation stands in marked contrast to the “literal” approach associated with many Protestant denominations, especially in the United States. Literalists assume not just that the Word of God was written for us but also that it is addressed directly to us. Historical criticism begins from a very different premise; namely, that the Hebrew Bible is a composite text drawing on oral traditions and written materials dating from thousands of years ago and originally aimed at the Hebrew people over the long history of Old Israel. The “primary goal” of historical criticism, in the broad sense that includes form criticism, “is to ascertain the text’s primitive or original meaning in its original historical context.”264
In the case of the Old Testament, the context varies from simple nomadic societies to the complex agrarian civilizations of the ancient Near East. The text of the Hebrew Bible can be read, therefore, not just as the Word of God but also “as a document, record, or source for reconstructing” the past of ancient Israel. In fact, the Old Testament is a collection of many separate forms or genres of writing that date from different periods in the history of Israel and of the text itself. Prose forms in the Bible range from myths, folktales, and romances to legends and historical narratives. Each example of those forms arose out of specific situations in the historical experience of the Israelites; as German scholars put it, each arises out of its own Sitz im Leben or cultural and historical context. An understanding of the distinctive cultural setting of the form helps the form critic to grasp the content and intention of each genre. Form critics, therefore, may be more likely than historians to approach the Biblical text “as a writing whose original meaning is of interest in its own right.”265
Genesis 1 provides the most dramatic example of a clash between a popular/literal reading of the Bible and the interpretation of the same text in the light of form criticism. Historical criticism sets the stage for the form critic by revealing the priestly source of the text.266 The hypothesis that Genesis 1 was composed by members of the priestly caste in the Jerusalem temple is an important clue to the form or genre of that text. Identifying the priestly origins of Genesis 1 helps the form critic not just to pinpoint the broad period within which it may have been written but also evokes the distinctive Sitz im Leben of its creation story.
From this perspective, we see that Genesis 1 provided its ancient audience with a priestly, not a scientific, view of the world. According to the form critic John H Walton, the form of that text is not one appropriate to a scientific account of the natural world. Instead, Walton argues, Genesis 1 should be read as an “ancient cosmology” in which no distinction between the natural and supernatural world is possible, necessary, or desirable.267 Uninterested in clues to the original meaning of Genesis 1 unearthed by form critics, many readers simply assume that the subject of the narrative is the creation of the physical planet Earth — an assumption shared by those who believe that the planet was created in a literal six-day period as well as scientifically-minded people who treat Genesis 1 as a poetic allegory for the Big Bang theory. Walton contends that neither the priestly authors of the text nor their primary audience were interested in accounting for the material existence of “the heavens and earth” which God created in the first chapter of the Hebrew Bible. The people of “the ancient world believed that something existed not by virtue of its material properties, but by virtue of its having a function in an ordered system.”268
Before God created “the heavens and the earth” there was no ordered system; instead there was an inert, undifferentiated, non-functional void. The creation of the cosmos brought order out of chaos. Genesis 1 describes the creation of the heavens and the earth as a cosmic temple. Walton shows how God established the functions of the cosmic temple during the first three days of the story. From the fourth to the sixth day God installed the functionaries “in their appropriate positions and given their appropriate roles.” On the seventh day, God came to rest at the heart of the cosmic order.269
Walton supports his claim that Genesis 1 takes the form an ancient cosmology by locating the Hebrew creation story within the broader historical context of other Near Eastern civilizations. He demonstrates that the functional orientation of Genesis 1 was not unique to the Hebrews. Many peoples “in the ancient Near East did not think of creation in terms of making material things — instead everything is function oriented.” Other Near Eastern civilizations also conceived the cosmos as a temple and, conversely, like the Hebrews, constructed their temples on the model of a mini cosmos.270 Walton’s work is a fine example, therefore, of how form and historical criticism can provide important insights unavailable to readers who read Genesis 1 in a naïvely literalist manner.
But Walton’s historical and form criticism will not satisfy readers who believe that the Bible is meant for us, that Holy Scripture is not just an ancient text of mainly historical and comparative interest which happens to be addressed to Israelites. Few Christians expect ancient Sumerian or Egyptian creation texts to say much to or for them. Genesis 1 is received differently because the story of Old Covenant Israel belongs to the providential history of Christendom. The sacred meaning of Genesis 1 cannot be grasped through historical and form criticism alone. To believe otherwise is to mistake the trees for the forest. Unlike the original audience of Genesis 1, we can see how the Bible story ends in the Book of Revelation. Both the cosmic temple in Genesis 1 and the temple made by hand in Jerusalem belonged to the old heaven and the old earth; both were mere shadows of better things to come in the new creation promised in both law and the prophets.
Genesis and the Theology of Race
Genesis is not simply a piece of primitive folklore irrelevant to a Christian theology of race and nationhood. Whoever the author(s) of Genesis may have been and whenever it was written and redacted, it remains an inspired text for Christians. Indeed, the Bible a
s a whole is the inspired Word of God; it clearly reveals the work of divine providence in the history of a really-existing people. God made Old Covenant Israel out of the dust of the earth and breathed life into her to be a light unto the nations. In the Eden narrative, Adam is placed in the Most Holy Place of the cosmic temple created by God in Genesis 1. Similarly, Israel of the flesh carries the seed of Abraham in the promised land of Canaan until her destiny is fulfilled with the advent of Christ. (Galatians 3:16) By the time Christ came Israel had fallen into darkness. National Israel’s stubborn pride doomed her to destruction. But the promises made by God to the righteous remnant of Old Israel were fulfilled in the New Exodus from the cross to the parousia in AD 70. In the newly-established Kingdom of Christ, all nations, not just the Jews, were to be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
As the visible outcome of providential history, therefore, the actual polygenesis of Christian nations long pre-dates the social/scientific construction of the white race in the modern era. This same history also demonstrates that the Old Testament does not belong to modern rabbinic Judaism. On the contrary, the Bible remains the essential mythomoteur of every Christian nation, in the past as in the future. God willing, the white race need not remain mired in multicultural madness of this present, putatively post-Christian age of Empire.
It is important for the white race, to understand its collective identity as a trinitarian phenomenon. Race cannot be understood in one-dimensional terms as a function of biology alone. Ethnicity and theology are also essential ingredients in the social construction of race. Indeed, it may well be that theology rather than biology is the “Queen of the racial sciences”. Certainly, the history of Europe demonstrates that the white race, as we know it today, is the product of the interplay between the divine and the human. In examining the three dimensions of race-as-biology, race-as-ethnicity, and race-as-theology, we saw that the unity in diversity of Spirit, water, and blood are the constituent elements in the ethno-genesis of every Christian nation.
Three case studies in modern historical theology — involving respectively Jews, Americans, and Germans — reveal that a failure to maintain a proper balance between race-as-biology, race-as-ethnicity, and race-as-theology has catastrophic consequences for all concerned. On the surface, the take-away message is simple: God is still at work in history. At a deeper level, the salvation of the white race requires recognition of the sovereignty of God and his representatives on earth as in heaven. Divine providence is a fundamental axiom of race-as-Christian-theology. Secular and sacred histories are still intertwined in the distinctive life-cycle of every tribe, nation, and Empire.
Accordingly, the ancient Israelites and the various Indo-European peoples were created (or evolved) separately and apart from one another, each race having its own role to play in the sacred history of God’s people. This is not a new idea. In fact, such a theory appeared in 1655 when Isaac La Peyrère, described by one historian as “a Calvinist of Portuguese Jewish origin from Bordeaux,” published a book entitled Prae-Adamitae (Men Before Adam). For a professed Christian, however, La Peyrère gave polygenesis a surprisingly Jewish spin. La Peyrère’s “concern was to separate out the Jewish experience from the rest of world history”. On his reading “the Bible’s prevailing concern was with the Jewish nation, which was cast as the principal in the theatre of providential history”. Adam was not the ancestor of all men but only of the Jews. La Peyrère was convinced “that ceremonial Judaism could be traced back beyond Moses to the Garden of Eden and thus to Adam himself”. In other words, he held that the law had been given to Adam and that Adam was the biological ancestor of Abraham and Moses. Treating Genesis as a study in paleo-ethnology of the Jewish race, La Peyrère made a startling departure from the then orthodox monogenetic understanding of Pauline theology.271
According to Paul, “Until the law, sin was in the world; but sin was not imputed, when the law was not” (Romans 5:12–14). La Peyrère argued that the law cited by Paul must be understood either as the law given to Moses or as “the law given to Adam”. Accordingly, “if the law had come into force only with Moses, then there would be no fall of man with Adam”. On the other hand, if “that law were understood [as] the law given to Adam, it must be held that sin was in the world before Adam and until Adam but that sin was not imputed before Adam.” In other words, before Adam came on the scene there existed men “who had indeed sinn’d, but without imputation; because before the law sins wer [sic] not imputed”. On that reading, Genesis was “too narrow a platform upon which to construct the universal history of mankind”. La Peyrère’s thesis, therefore, relativized the authority of the Bible; but it also turned Adam’s descendants, the Jews, into “the theological fulcrum of sacred history”.272
La Peyrère relegates Gentiles to the role of onlookers. Their salvation is merely the by-product of Israel’s divine drama. Indeed, on La Peyrère’s account, the role of the Jews (“that holy and elected People…who are called the Seed of Abraham…the Posterity of Adam”) in salvation history had yet to reach its consummation. He expected the climax of sacred history to come in his near future, later in the seventeenth century. A Christian Zionist avant la lettre, La Peyrère predicted “that the Jews would be recalled and that this in-gathering would take place in France prior to their subsequent return to Palestine”. Clearly, La Peyrère did not recognize that Old Covenant Israel had been superseded once and for all when the New Covenant was consummated in AD 70. Instead he was committed to a political theology of “double messianism”. If Jesus came in the first century “in his role as Christian Messiah, his anticipated seventeenth century return was as political Jewish Messiah”.273 In this apocalyptic vision, Adam’s fateful action began salvation history while his biological descendants would bring it to an end in the seventeenth century.
La Peyrère’s one-dimensional ethnocentrism locates the mythomoteur of sacred history in the messianic Spirit of the Jewish people themselves. In effect, he denies the trinitarian nature of Christian nationhood. For him, Jewish blood is the medium through which Spirit is transmitted down the ages. La Peyrère’s ethno-history asserts that Adam and seventeenth century Jews are blood relatives. Yet when Abram received the call from Yahweh, he was not a Jew — no such people yet existed — but a Chaldean, another Semitic people. More importantly, Old Covenant Judaism ended in AD 70. The destruction of the genealogies lodged in the Jerusalem temple made it impossible to reconstitute the Levitical priesthood as was done after the return from Babylonian exile (Ezra 2:62–63). Indeed, no self-described Jew can prove biological descent from Abraham, much less Adam. Focused on the transmission of Spirit through a Jewish blood line, La Peyrère cannot see that communion with God flows through water not just blood. Accordingly, he overlooks the role that water played in bringing Adam to life. God made Adam “from the dust of the ground” and breathed life into his nostrils only after “streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground” (Genesis 2:6). La Peyrère collapses both race-as-theology and race-as-biology into race-as-Jewish-ethnicity.
Indeed, La Peyrère’s work reflects the ingrained ethnic/racial chauvinism which led Old Israel to its doom. Yes, he was right to see the Jewish people as the principal actor in the providential history of the Bible but their part in the story came to an end in AD 70. Clearly, the task of deciphering the meaning of Israel’s providential history was then handed over to the Christian peoples of the New Covenant. The fate of Old Covenant Israel is a warning to any other nation tempted to emulate her corrupt and hypocritical self-worship; Scripture, therefore, provides the church with a warrant to extend the blessing of Christian nationhood to the ends of the earth. God calls every nation, including — perhaps especially — the Jews, to be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Only when a nation enters the Kingdom of God can it incarnate Spirit, water, and blood into the tripartite order uniting those who pray, those who fight, an
d those who work.
The trinitarian interplay of the divine and the human in a Christian nation operates on many levels. Those who work sustain the fecundity or reproductive capacity of a community of blood. Within this realm, the statistical regularities of the distinctive behavioural patterns inscribed in any given gene pool find expression. Not surprisingly, those who work together as neighbours provide the natural medium for the spirit of Christian love. Those who fight, on the other hand, act to defend the honour of one’s kith and kin in competition with strangers. Those who pray customarily practice the virtue of charity. But Christian warriors, too, were once renowned for the chivalrous “sensibility of principle, that charity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity”.274 The powerful, victorious, and healthy of every estate and condition were enjoined to be merciful when dealing with the weak, the defeated, and the sick, friend or foe.
Tragically, not all Christian nations have remained faithful to the theological virtues enshrined in the New Covenant. In particular, the fate of the American Republic and Hitler’s Third Reich provide instructive examples of nominally Christian nations which failed to heed the clear warning sounded by the fate of Old Israel and suffered the consequences. National Socialism eventually subordinated both Christian theology and the richly-variegated character of German ethnicity to a merciless blood-lust, demanding Lebensraum for Aryans at the expense of other neighbouring races. In stark contrast, the original sin committed by the American Adam in his New World Garden275 was to embrace the political theology of popular sovereignty. Spirit, water, and blood were brought down to earth in a one-dimensional novus ordo seclorum. As successive stages of the American Revolution became progressively more radical, the unitarian principle of vox populi, vox Dei banished the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to the private realm of conscience.
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