Several complex moral issues surround race relations. People need a foundation to navigate the various moral issues within race relations. The person and work of Christ form an ethical foundation for race relations. This presentation will argue that the importance of the person and work of Christ in the Nicene Creed establishes a foundation for an ethical framework to engage in moral issues connected to race relations. This foundation can be seen particularly through the work of Oliver O’Donovan. Ethical frameworks need a foundation that can speak to the complexity of moral order. This foundation forms through a holistic method that accounts for an objective moral reality, subjective moral agents, and the importance of the contextual moment. Within the modern context, the notion of race comes from a shift in how the world is imagined. Racialization builds from a distorted understanding of reality. Christ’s incarnation and resurrection reshaped the Christian imagination, forming a proper understanding of moral order.
There are three major components to this argument. First, Christ’s incarnation properly frames both objective and subjective reality. Christ establishes an ethical foundation by vindicating created order through his incarnation. Second, Christ’s resurrection restores moral order and humanity’s ability to engage the moral order. The fallenness of humanity continues to distort the created order apart from the resurrection. Holistic solutions will never be provided apart from the restoration that takes place through the resurrection. Outside the resurrection, attempts to deal with moral issues will only address symptoms of deeper problems. Third, as the person and work of Christ is attested to in Scripture, it is now the task of moral agents to properly apply the truth of Scripture to their context within a morally objective world.
Thus, an ethical foundation for issues in race relations will have a view of an objective moral order centered on Christ and revealed in Scripture. These three components establish a foundation for an ethical framework for issues in race relations. Issues are not minimized to only a proper reflection of objective reality or an expression of the experience of subjective moral agents. Rather, it brings together the moral aspects of objective and subjective moral order. This framework provides a starting point for addressing issues within race relations such as Critical Race Theory, policing, etc., in a fashion that properly places them in the moral order.