The distinctions, indeed antagonisms, of the ancient world were not about race in our sense of ethnic or colour distinctions; they were about culture and tradition and religion. The only kind of discrimination which we find in the Old Testament is cultural and religious, not racial. In fact the Deuteronomic prohibition about intermarriage which we quoted a moment ago goes on to give a reason for the law: it was not a concern about race but about religion. Intermarriage is forbidden, ‘for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Furthermore, the reasons underlying the strong line taken by Nehemiah after the exile were precisely the same: that marrying ‘foreign women‘ would be likely - as with Solomon - to entice the people of Yahweh to the worship of other gods. It is not aprohibition of inter-race marriage, it is rather a strong prohibition against inter-religious marriage. - P67
In the Bible, responsibility is attributed to persons made as God‘s image, and it carries the sense of ‘response to theCreator, who holds us accountable. Our Christian understanding of human fallenness, in which sin disorders all aspects of our personalityand relationships, means that a fully restored human responsibility must be linked to our full restoration as persons, as we are gradually made more like Christ. So -as with every aspect of Christian life -there is an ambiguity in the exercise of our responsibility between the
‘now‘ of today and the ‘not yet‘ of the coming Day of the Lord.
Responsibility is therefore both an assumption and a goal. We must bealert to the debilitating effect of the sins of others and ourselves on theexercise of our responsibility, but we are not at liberty to dissolve ourmoral accountability away into any sort of determinism. Our whole life is under what Barth somewhere called the ‘global mandate of responsible freedom‘. To be responsible is to live as accountable to God and as caring for others, within the limits of the freedom which is ours in this world. - P71
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