No Flesh Shall Glory: How the Bible Destroys the Foundations of Racism

C. Herbert Oliver, a Black civil rights leader from Birmingham, Alabama, and a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, spent thirteen years rethinking the racial ideologies of his day before writing No Flesh Shall Glory in the late 1950s. In clear, biblical, and unflinching language, he dismantles the dogmas of race superiority, the doctrine of racial solidarity, and the whitewashing of history and Scripture. More than that, however, he returns to the Bible’s powerful and freeing conception of humanity. “[It is my intention] to curtail all types of racism by destroying the ground on which they stand and by pointing men to nobler ends.” His book is a gracious challenge to Christians then and now―an invitation to break free from oppressive ways of thinking and to see humanity as God sees us. This reprinting also includes Rev. Oliver’s lectures on the church, social change, identity, and protest, delivered at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1964.

C. Herbert Oliver (ThM, Westminster Theological Seminary) was a civil rights activist and pastor. Along with other local ministers in Birmingham, Alabama, he founded the Inter-Citizens Committee in 1960, and as the Committee's executive secretary, he documented over a hundred civil rights violations until 1965. He served as pastor of Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Ludlow-Smyrna and Houlton in Maine before moving to Brooklyn, New York, where he was pastor of Westminster Bethany Presbyterian Church from 1967 to 1992.