Racial Gnosticism: Yes, Races Exist According to the Bible, and Why It Matters

Gnosticism is a heresy. Racial Gnosticism is no better.

“There is only one race, and that’s the race of mankind.” Or if you prefer variety in your canard collection, “There are only two races; the race of Adam and the race of Christ.”

If you prefer honest arguments, and aren’t a big fan of gnosticism, come over to an authentic and bolder Christianity, stare inconvenient truths in the face, and shout those dumb ideas down. They’re not worthy of consideration.

BANNER OF TRASH

Iain Murray kicked off the Reformation Resurgence in 1957 with the creation of Banner of Truth Trust, a publishing house ministry that put old Puritan and Non-Conformist works back in print and disseminated them tirelessly to churches and conferences on both sides of the Atlantic. It took about 50 years, but the old man’s work paid off. Those little pamphlets, brochures, and inexpensive paperback books with re-printed works from the likes of John Owen and Charles Spurgeon reignited the flame of Reformation that had all but died out, thanks to 20th Century Revivalism.

It wasn’t Driscoll or Piper or Chandler that sparked this movement in 2009 (when Time Magazine listed it as one of 99 ideas changing the world). It was Iain Murray, and it was 50 years in the making. He doesn’t get enough credit for that.

It was with Murray’s Banner of Truth in view, that I determined to do with heresies what he did with orthodoxies. If good doctrine could be forgotten, so could heresies, I surmised. And so, Pulpit & Pen and Polemics Report worked to catalogue heresies into our “Heresies List” and made a consistent, conscientious effort to label heresies with their actual, historic names.

We didn’t criticize charismaticism; we criticized Mysticism and Montanism. We didn’t criticize Oneness Pentecostalism, we criticized Modalism and Sabellianism. When terms didn’t exist, we invented them (like Rauschenbuschism, Kenyonism, and Theoerosism) for the sake of our posterity if Jesus tarries; they will know the name of what it is they’re up against, should those heresies be revived.

Think of this work as my own Banner of Trash, trying to light the fire of polemical theology and awaken irenics from its slumber. New beasts had been born, and we needed to fight them with the old weapons.

GNOSTICISM

Of all the bugbears of the New Testament writers, gnosticism is arguably the greatest polemical foe they faced except, perhaps, for the works-righteous Judaizers. It was a popular philosophical religion, dating back to the Greeks. The basic concept is that humans contained a divine spark, and had complicated reasonings and a vigorous core set of beliefs that were fundamentally opposed to the Scriptures (both Old and New Testaments).

When Christianity began to spread, Gnosticism was “Christianized” (that’s a terrible term for something that’s in no way Christian), and it was made loosely Jesusy. John took potshots at the Gnostics repeatedly in his writings, especially regarding their claims regarding the physical and spiritual world.

The Gnostics believed in a form of Dualism, the equal powers of the physical and the spiritual, and rejected the significance of the physical world. They even did this with Christ, denying that he had a physical body, a physical death, or a physical resurrection. If you want to know why John repeatedly included details of Jesus eating, this is why.

Lots of heresies coincided in this one (albeit most in their proto-form), including Mysticism, Nestorianism and Monothelitism (a form of these combined), Marcionism, Docetism, Aryanism, and Polytheism. Gnosticism was a virtual buffet of heresy.

But chiefest among these was the spiritualizing of the physical world. One can see why this is a pretty big deal, in that Jesus became incarnate, took on flesh, lived among men, died on the cross, was buried as a corpse, and rose again bodily from the dead.

RACIAL GNOSTICISM

When I use the term “Gnostic” in this article, I’m referring to this ancient aspect of the heresy. It’s the denial that race, in a particular, is indeed a physical reality. That’s why I’m using the term Racial Gnosticism.

You can see this below in a tweet from Chris Brutè Rosebrough. You’ll see the Gnosticism in it pretty clearly.

He was corrected, or at least, an attempt was made (because he wasn’t participating in the correction).

Then, Rosebough responded by copy/pasting the Greek - which is how you know he’s right - because copy/pasting the Greek is an irrefutable argument (notice my sarcasm).

I don’t mean to melee him any further than I’ve already done from X, but only provide it here as an example of Racial Gnosticism. I feel odd correcting Rosebrough on his use of Greek, as he was once my Greek tutor. But, my corrections aren’t so much on his use of Greek, but his Scripture-twisting on this point.

You see, συγγενῶν does indeed mean “race” (as it’s translated in several versions) and “kinsman according to the flesh” (as he cites the ESV here). What’s bizarre is that these are synonyms, but one of these synonyms Rosebrough apparently doesn’t like for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. Furthering the bizarreness of it, Rosebrough was responding to the question, “Was Paul a Kinist?”

Kinism, in case you didn’t know, was a belief that originated in the 1990s, extrapolating Old Testament seed laws, forbidding the mixing of different kinds of seed in the same field. Kinism doesn’t teach the inferiority or superiority of individual races, but opposes miscegenation (having a mix-race marriage and producing mixed-race children) on the grounds that it contradicts the Biblical principle in the Old Testament legal code.

So to deny that Paul was a Kinist, Rosebrough responded, “He didn’t say race. That’s a bad translation. He said kinsman.” I have to wonder if he was just having an off day that day, because he lost the argument pretty badly, and provided his own refutation.

WHAT RACE IS NOT

I don’t mean to make this fabulous Substack into a play-by-play of my tweet history, but if you’ll allow me one more indulgence to drive this point home, here’s an exchange with Joel Berry, the Managing Editor of the Babylon Bee.

As you can see, if you took the time to read it, Berry made a statement assuming that the race in racism is defined differently than how the Bible defines the term race. You know I’ve got a passion for words and their classical definitions, and detest the redefinition of words (I wrote about that in the article, Spelling Magic, Casting Words, and Making Ideas Incarnate). Words should not be redefined; instead, new words should be crafted. It’s legal and free to make words, and anyone can do it. There’s no reason to steal the words of others, and this is one way the devil does his deeds among men.

If Berry is correct, that “culture/worldview/beliefs/morality” is a better way to define the word race, then Joel Berry is absolutely a racist. That’s ironic, and perhaps the best reason we need to use words the right way and not the wrong way.

In short, my thesis is that the term race has been commandeered for evil purposes by evil men, and the devil himself has used it to wreak havoc among good men. And the first and only sub-point under the heading of “we’re using the devils’s redefinition” is that race is not part and parcel to skin-tone or melanin count. In fact, race is only ancillary to these things.

Just as “transgenderism” started to die the moment Christians finally started to add the scare quotes, I believe that the great 2025 Evangelical Schism can be healed when we start using the same lexicon. And because the Bible is inerrant, let’s start using the Bible’s definitions of race.

When I sent Joel a screenshot of this article section while it was being written, this is how he responded:

Here’s the kicker, my friends…the things that Joel says are “more important than race” (culture/worldview/beliefs/morality) is how the Bible defines it. Let’s open the Scripture and view it together.

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