Racism is a direct affront to Scripture, to the gospel, and to the Nicene Christianity that follows from them. Racism, as we are using it here, is any prejudice or antagonism against others on the basis of ethnicity or skin color. 

The third article of the Creed commits us to the four notae ecclesiae, or marks of the church: “I believe . . . in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” The third of these marks, the church’s catholicity, signifies not just an abstract and benign “universality,” but the church’s concrete wholeness, her spatial extension and temporal perdurance, and her global and eschatological dimensions as the body of Christ. 

Entailed in this affirmation is an embrace of the church’s national, ethnic, and racial diversity. One important test, then, for how committed someone is to catholicity is how much they value the beautiful multiethnic nature of the kingdom of Christ. 

MULTI-ETHNICITY IN SCRIPTURE 

From the very beginning of his covenantal dealings with man, God designed to include “all the families of the earth” in redemption (Gen. 12:3). He chose Israel with this multinational end in view. The book of Isaiah especially highlights God’s


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