Category: Theology

Songs of Protest

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21 After threatening them again, they let them go, finding no way to punish them because of the people, for all of them praised God for what had happened. 22 For the man on whom this sign of healing had been performed was more than forty years old. (Acts 4:21-22)

Peter and John on their way to the temple encounter a lame man and, ultimately, become conduits for healing. This man whom many had passed by numerous of times, on their way to whatever pressing “Godly matters” is now in the presence of two concerned brothers. Peter and John dapped the brother up and encouraged him to “rise up and walk” in the name of that Black Messiah from Nazareth.

Because they had invoked the name of the Black Messiah, Jesus, and stood against the status quo they were unjustly arrested. Their legal protest for free health care got them placed in jail and brought before the corrupt and misinformed rulers. These corrupt rulers did everything in their power to get them to concede and change their talking points. Recognizing that these men had definitely been with the Black Messiah, the rulers made all matter of threats, but, eventually, yielded because the people’s praises were of such a rebellious vibe, it disrupted their desired intentions. These were not just praises of euphoric emotions, these songs of protest appeared to have activated strategies for change. The scripture denotes that the rulers “finding no way to punish them, because of the people, for all were praising.” The songs of protest were such a disruption of resistance that all plans were averted.

The Beautiful Ugly of Racism

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There is not a day that goes by that I do not think about racism. The inventiveness and genius of the system of racism is ever unfolding. It mutates and redevelops itself as people become more cognizant of its terror. Racism is one of the most complicated terrains I have ever had to navigate through in my life. It hurts and it frustrates in sacred places that society refuses to allow grief. Racism redefines love while reproducing hate. It dismantles any notion of reconciliation because it refuses to admit that there was a separation in the first place.

Racism has become so embedded in the fabric and essence of (a)merica that it now functions as patriotism.

Thus, objection to racist behavior makes one anti-(a)merican and a terrorist. The lived perception is that black people should consider it a privilege to be in (a)merica and willing to endure racism because of this privilege. It would make the presumption that the privilege of being in (a)merica outweighs any racism projected at black, brown and red people.

The beautiful ugly of racism is so manipulative that it fails to adjust its transformative lens, even when it encounters God. This produces a hermeneutic of oppression that discerns racism as media hype with blatant disregard for the “other.” This type of understanding of God soothes the soul of the racist rather than unhinging the lies that have prevailed in a colorblind and passive (a)merica.

A Christian that fails to interpret and oppose racism, in a society, can never be trusted to effectively transmit the Gospel to all.

Drew Hart writes in Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church views Racism,

“Dominant groups are always in danger of thinking that their perspective is synonymous with God’s perspective.”

This failure to critique and question one’s personal thinking stifles the opportunity to be sensitive to the needs of the other. In such a space, racism is acknowledged as adiaphora that is only significant to the black church as an illegitimate excuse to hate whiteness. Racism is a nonessential issue that brings division. Interestingly, in such spaces, racism appears to be the only thing that can be changed, transformed or resolved without any form of deliberation.

It is this type of privilege that embodies racism: this privilege to ignore the trauma that has become the aftermath. Racism provides the dominant culture with free passes to criticize without be criticized. It “thrives of colorblindness, while simultaneously engaging in highly racialized practices,” writes Drew Hart.

My good friend Martin Quick posed a question to me:

I know God does not get glory in racism from Christians, but…how do we respond to racism in a way in which God gets the glory?

I am not sure how to answer that question properly. The privilege that comes with racism presses the black, brown, and red people in (a)merica to be the ones that sacrifice the most. We are being asked to fix a broken system that will allow the people in power, to stay in power, but in some minimal space we obtain some level of equality. That is not justice but lunacy being ambushed by absurdity. I am left exploring that question but he answers with a quote from Dr. Dora Rudo Mbuwayesango:

Sometimes the call to and celebration of unity frightens me. I would rather have justice but maybe one leads to the other but I do not know…

We still wrestle…

Quotes and Notes from Black Theology of Liberation by James Cone (1970 edition)

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  1. There can be Christian theology which is not identified unreservedly with those who are humiliated and abused. pg17
  2. Theology ceases to be theology of the gospel when it fails to arise out of the community of the oppressed. Pg17-18
  3. Theology becomes a servant of the state, and that can only mean death for black people. Pg22
  4. Black theology is a outcry and failure of white Christian to deal appropriately with the suffering of black people. Pg23
  5. Black Theology centers around the belief that the black community is where God is at work. Pg24
  6. …in a racist society, God is never color blind.- James Cone pg25
  7. Theology by contrast cannot be separated from the community which it represents. Pg30
  8. A community that does not analyze its existence theologically is a community that does not care what it says or does. It is a community which has no identity.- 31
  9. …white theologians see no connection between whiteness and evil or blackness and God.- 31
  10. God has taken sides in the struggle…pg 36
  11. The black community must reclaim it’s history “by unraveling new meanings in old tales so that the past may emerge as an instrument of black liberation.- 39
  12. Black Theology is survival theology because it seeks to provide the theological dimensions of the struggle for black identity.-39
  13. The search for black identity is the search for God, for God’s identity is black identity,- 40
  14. Black Theology is the theological expression of a people who lack social and political power.-40
  15. Cone is very clear that the only to combat the structures of white power is to embrace pure essence of black being.- 41
  16. To be human in a condition of social oppression always involves affirming that which the oppressor regards as degrading. – 41
  17. Black Theology is a theology of survival because it seeks to interpret the theological significance of the being of a community whose existence is threatened by the power of nonbeing.- 43
  18. The eschatological promise of heaven is insufficient to account for the earthly pain of black suffering. We cannot accept a God who inflicts or tolerates black suffering for some inscrutable purpose.- 44
  19. American theology is racist; it identifies theology as a dispassionate analysis of “the tradition”, unrelated to the sufferings of the oppressed.- 46
  20. …racism is incompatible to the Gospel of Christ.- 49
  21. To be black is to be committed to destroying everything this country loves and adores.- 49
  22. Since white American theologians do not belong to the black community, they cannot relate the gospel to that community.- 53 (I may disagree with this thought in general)
  23. There can be no Black theology that does not take seriously the black experience – life of humiliation and suffering.-54
  24. What does revelation mean when one’s being is engulfed in a system of white racism cloaking itself in pious moralities?-54
  25. Black Power is the power for black folks to make decision regarding their identity.- 56
  26. The black experience is a rage that “strikes against the enemy of black humanity by throwing a Molotov cocktail into a white owned building and watching it go up in flames.”- 56
  27. Black is the experience of carving out an existence in a society that says you don’t belong.- 57
  28. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him.-59
  29. The black experience lead the black community to want to encounter with him now.- 64
  30. By taking seriously the witness of Scripture, we are prevented from making the gospel into a private moments of religious ecstasy or into the religious sanctification of the structures of society.-66
  31. It matters little to the oppressed who authored scripture; what is important is whether it can serve as a weapon against the oppressed.- 67
  32. …Literalism is being used by white scholars to encourage black people to be nonviolent, as if nonviolence is the only expression of Christian love.- Cone
  33. We cannot use Jesus behavior in the first century as a literal guide for our actions in the twentieth century.
  34. While the white church in America was rationalizing slavery through clever exegesis, the black church ministers were preaching freedom and equality.
  35. Theology cannot take some existential leap over the very issues pressing black folks in order to prop up an universalism.-76
  36. Black people have heard enough about God. What they want to know is what God is saying about the black condition.- 77
  37. It is so tempting to take the white Jesus who always speaks to black people in the terms of white interest and power.-79
  38. the Christian gospel offers men an authentic response by assuring them of God’s participation against human suffering -84
  39. The most gross sin cannot be forgive in America because it has been overlooked by America.-90
  40. Cone is very aware that God is in a personal relationship with humanity effecting the divine will of God.-90
  41. Revelation is God’s self-disclosure to humanity in a situation of liberation.-91
  42. Faith is the community’s response to God’s act of liberation.- 95
  43. We do not need to read the Bible to know that human enslavement is ungodly, and the slaves will do everything possible to break the chains.-99
  44. As the oppressed community recognized their situation in the light of God’s revelation, they know now that they should have killed him instead of “loving” him.- 101
  45. There is no revelation that does not provide man with an understanding of his own authentic self.- 103
  46. To know God is to know about ourselves…-105
  47. When oppressed people come to know who they are they will not tolerate oppression.- 105
  48. The courage to be black in the s pace of white people is what revelation means in our time- 106
  49. …the true prophet of the gospel of God must become both “anti-Christian” and “unpatriotic.”-107-108
  50. Black people are not elected to be Yahweh people of suffering.-108
  51. The black theologian must assume the dangerous responsibility of articulating the revolutionary mood of the black community.- 109
  52. The white God will point to a heavenly bliss as a means  of directing black people aay from earthly rage-110
  53. Freedom comes when we realize that it is against our interest, as a self-determining black community, to point out the god elements in an oppressive structure.-110
  54. If whites were really serious about their radicalism in regard to black revolution and it theological implications in America, they would keep silent and take instructions form black people. – 119
  55. How do we find meaning and purpose in a world in which God is absent? Are questions for an affluent society.- 120
  56. There is no place for a colorless God is a society when people suffer precisely because of their color.-120
  57. White theologians would prefer not to do theology based upon color.- 122
  58. …blackness or salvation (the two are synonymous) is the work of God not man.-125
  59. When wrath is removed from the nature of God it weakens the central biblical truth about God’s liberation of the oppressed from the oppressors.-131
  60. Black people want to know whose side God is on…-131
  61. What we need is divine love as expressed in Black Power which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors- 132
  62. If the wrath of God is his almight No against man’s Yes, then black people want to know where the No of God is today in white America.-132
  63. Love without righteousness is unacceptable to black people…-133
  64. Love means that God will accept the whites, and black will not seek reprisal.-134
  65. It takes a special kind of reasoning to conclude that God’s love means that he is no respecter of persons in a society filled with hate…-135
  66. Black Theology will accept only a love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.- 136
  67. Black Revolution trumps reformation because reformation leaves the assumption that there is still something good left in the system, it just needs to be cleaned up.- 141
  68. The hermeneutic of now is the very expressive nature of black people it captures the essence that God is entering into the struggle of black people.-142
  69. God cannot be the God of Black people and also will their suffering.-149
  70. It is not difficult for the oppressed to understand the meaning of freedom. They are forced by the very nature of their condition to interpret their existence in the world contrary to the value-structures of the oppressive society.-162
  71. …whatever we s ay about sin and man’s inability to know God because of the Fall, it must not in any way diminish the freedom of man to be in revolt against his oppressors.- 169
  72. Black Theology then emphasizes the right of black people to be black and by doing so to participate in the image of God.- 170
  73. In a world in which mean are oppressed, the image is man in rebellion against the structures of oppression.- 170
  74. Satres’s “the age of Reason” ability to capture the essence of irresponsibility is reminiscent of white privilege in America.-172
  75. Whites tell you what you have to do to be a part of the larger society and if you resist they kill you.- 174
  76. No black man will ever be good enough in the eyes of white people to merit equality.- 177
  77. There is suffering because there is no hope that  the reconciliation will be possible, and the only authentic response is to face the reality on the absurdity in rebellion.- 179
  78. Sin is alienation from the source of humanity in the world…-190
  79. Sin is not only the condition that produces lynchings, but it also makes white theologians define the theological enterprise as a “safe” venture.-193
  80. If Christ is to have any meaning for us, he must leave the security of the suburbs by joining black people in their condition.-199
  81. If Christ is white and not black, he is an oppressor, and we must kill him.- 199
  82. In baptism Jesus embraces the condition of sinners, affirming their existence as his own,- 205
  83. As long as the oppressor can be sure that the gospel does not threaten his social, economic and political security, he can enslave men in the name of Christ.- 208
  84. This means that blacks are free to do what they have to in order to affirm their humanity.-219
  85. Only oppressors can turn in upon themselves and worship their own projected image and define it as God.- 234
  86. To be oppressed is to encounter the overwhelming presence of evil without any place for escape.- 234
  87. For black people, death is not really a future reality; it is a part of their everyday existence.- 240
  88. The proper eschatological perspective must be grounded in the historical present…-241

Two Brothers Talking: A Running Dialogue on the Incarnation and Being Black, Part 4

Brian Foulks1 Comment

The essence of being incarnational, in a system that practices such heinous oppression, would appear to be asinine. The missional ethos of coming to a place that has no perimeters and no appreciation for life registers as blatant stupidity. Suffering in such as place would be and is inevitable – (a)merica is just that type of place. A place where black folks experience high levels of suffering without the benefit of promoting privilege to soften the impact of such suffering. It is within the incarnation, where we can see God’s love for a people that consistently reject God.

I return back to the thought that the incarnation is dangerous. The incarnation pushes the oppressed to love people who will not return that love back to them. It is then, that we can say that the incarnation is a sacrifice predicated upon love, still extremely dangerous but promulgating robust love. Black folks in (a)merica extend this type of love every day, in a world where systemic racism has become the norm. We are incarnated into a system that does not play by a fair set of rules, but expects us to be satisfied that we are just able to be in the game.

The incarnation for the oppressed and those in the margins of society has the potential of being imprisonment. The good news is that Jesus did not work from this perspective. He worked from the perspective that the incarnation would benefit the world regardless if the world wanted it or not. The “word becoming flesh” (John 1:14) should revolutionized how we understand love. The incarnation becomes a radical move of love with major implications that transformed the entire world. Leaving privilege to endure suffering does not constitute intelligence but it sure does highlight love in a special way.