The Black God: Science and the Ethnocentric Doctrine of God of Armstrongism

 

A Sub-Saharan African Bearing Y-chromosome Haplogroup A

The Black God

Science and the Ethnocentric Doctrine of God of Armstrongism

by Scout

 

“So Adam looked like Jesus Christ. Adam also looked like God the Father. God said, "Let US make man after OUR image." Both Jesus Christ and God the Father look alike…When Jesus was on earth 4000 years later, He looked exactly like the Father. Jesus was "the express image of His {the Father's} person" (Heb. 1:3). But Jesus also looked like the average Jew!   Since Adam looked like Christ and Christ looked like the average Jew, then Adam — the first man — must have resembled the Jew. Adam therefore was a white man as are the Jews! Jews are not Negroes, as a few colored people contend. The Jews are Whites.”    Herman L. Hoeh, The Race Question, The Plain Truth Magazine, April 1957.  

 

Herman Hoeh was wrong in believing that God looks like a White man.  If God has a body, then he looks like a Black man.   If one wishes to believe that God is corporeal and that the Imago Dei refers to nothing more than physical appearance, then one must be willing to accept its implications.  And these implications must be informed by science.  The days are fading away where one might claim to preach a Biblical message and ignore the findings of science.  For that reason, empirical evidence must be taken seriously and theologically.  The Bible is the Book of God’s word and Nature is the Book of God’s works. Both books must be read. 

Early Modern Man in Brief

There was a serious conflict between early modern man and another pre-modern hominid species.  Nobody knows much about the details of the warfare but scientists do know something of the consequences.  Early man, it is believed by many, wiped out the other pre-modern hominid species.  But the moderns also interbred with the pre-moderns because we have traces of the genetics of the pre-moderns in our genomes.  This conflict happened about 40,000 years ago.  The modern men were Black and migrated out of Africa into other locations around the globe, including Western Europe.  The people who were wiped out were Neanderthals and they were light-skinned, light haired and had light eye color.  Herman Hoeh might refer to these pre-modern people as pre-Adamic.  The out-of-Africa Black men mutated into many different hominid forms including the White Europeans and East Asians. 

The Truth is Not in the Stars but in Our Genomes

Below is a Y-chromosome phylogenetic haplogroup mapping of the human race showing how haplogroups are logically nested and interrelated. 

If you plumb the depths of this, you will notice three prominent features.  Note that the passing of time starts on the left and runs to the right. 

1.     The earliest human beings are y-chromosome haplogroup A.  This haplogroup and some subclades are shown in the shaded area at the lower left.  These people are sub-Saharan Blacks.  Y-chromosome Adam (q.v., Wikipedia) was Black.  See the photograph at the top of this essay for a photo of the physical type.  

 

2.     Most modern Blacks are y-chromosome haplogroup E – well ensconced in the human Family Tree, if you check the chart above.  So don’t let anyone tell you that Blacks are pre-Adamic. It is ironic that a few Armstrongists and Christians claim a pre-Adamic origin for Blacks.   In fact, almost all Whites and Asians have some Neanderthal (true pre-Adamites) ancestry.  African Blacks have essentially no Neanderthal ancestry because Neanderthals originated in Eurasia and did not make it to Africa.

 

3.     Lastly, a topic that I have written about elsewhere, the haplogroup mapping does not correspond in its logical structure to the traditional interpretation of the glossed “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10.  Understand that the logical structure of the haplogroup map is not something fabricated for easy reference.  It is hard-coded in our DNA.

HAL and the Black God

Herman Hoeh deduced that God is, in appearance, a White man.  His logic is given in the quotation at the top of this essay.  I will refer to that as the Herman Hoeh Algorithm, HAL for short.  HAL no doubt informs the White Supremacist thinking found among some Armstrongists.  If a person has always been a White racist then think how nicely such views are supported by Armstrongism.  No repentance required.  It would be unsurprising if Armstrongism has attracted such people over the years. 

But, alas, if the first man was Black and we apply HAL to this known scientific fact, then God is Black in appearance.  Adam looks like Jesus who looks like God.  Jesus then might have been descended from Black Jews – Jews who trace their ancestry to a migration into North Africa at the time of the Exodus.  Perhaps, that is why he came to his own and his own received him not.  Black Jews still have difficulty being accepted in modern-day Israel.  Maybe this is why Simon of Cyrene, held by some to be a Black from North Africa, was willing to help Jesus with the cross.  Conjectures could abound. 

If one believes that God has a body in his essence, then HAL and science dictate that God looks like a Black man.  God, Jesus and Adam are all Black men.  If God has a body, then his body must have racial properties.  And Herman Hoeh discovered how to deduce these racial properties from the Bible and originated HAL.  The problem is, he did not have the science to know what Adam, looked like.  So, he erroneously deduced that God was a White man. 

The God of Christianity

In orthodox Christian dogma, God has neither a body nor racial category.  Christians are not pre-occupied with what God looks like.  That fixation, it seems, is owned by mostly Restoration Movement denominations like the WCG and its myriad offshoots.   And some of the prominent denominations in this Movement have had trouble in adopting a mature and inclusive view of race.  

Jesus looks like a Jew even though in Western Christianity Jesus is groundlessly depicted as a Western European.  The Ashkenazi Jews are mixed with European ancestry and have a Europeanized appearance.  But Jesus looked like a Mizrahi Jew, the people who are descended from the Jews of Jesus’ day.  Anthropologists know what the average Jews of that time looked like.  And even Armstrongists have made the point that Jesus looked like a non-descript average Jew.  The physical anthropology is that Jesus was about 5’1”, weighed about 110 lbs., had an olive or brown complexion, aquiline nose and curly or perhaps even frizzy hair.  To a person who is of Western European ancestry and believes in British-Israelism, Jesus looked like a “Gentile”.  His chances of being admitted to Ambassador College would have been small. He is too dark and too small.  

In Christian orthodoxy, God is formless spirit and can manifest himself as he wills – a whirlwind, a rock, a pillar of fire – and he has no essential racial nature.  So, he could manifest himself as a White or Black man or an Indian Chief but that is a theophany and not what he is in his existential nature.  

He talked some racial smack at me and so I wrote back and told him that I was going to pray that God, throughout eternity, would always manifest himself to him as Moms Mabley, a famous black comedienne who would wear funny garb.  He wrote back and said he did not know who Moms was.  He hit me with some scriptures about God’s glorious appearance.  I wrote back, I think, it has been a while ago, and told him that maybe God would make an exception just for people like him. 

Summary Statement

You can see why some people have an enormous emotional investment in Herman Hoeh’s legendarium and are reluctant to leave it.   Some people need to feel that they are a part of God’s inner circle.  Nothing could be better for White people than to be a member of God’s race.  This means that for eternity they are more like God than non-White people are, not as result of spiritual formation but as a result of racial status determined at birth (“For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh”). White people would be the only people who are actually in the image of God, if image refers to the physical body. Thankfully, this view is malarkey.  God does not have a body and racial properties.  He made all races and both genders to be in his image.  And Paul describes in Ephesians 4:23-24 the only image that counts when he wrote, “…be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness (kata Theon) of God in true righteousness and holiness.”