Sunday’s Coming: Theodicy, Election, and Atonement in Black Theology Monday’s
Introduction
The black theology movement, now about 35 years old, has from the beginning
demanded the right of black Americans to speak of God through their own
experience. The movement has affirmed the story of African America as a
legitimate, indeed privileged perspective upon God’s nature and work.
My thesis here is that this story points beyond where many black and womanist
theologians have been willing to take it. It is not only a story of survival “in
the wilderness,” but of survival and liberation ** in fact, of the further
blessing (in J. Deotis Roberts and Martin Luther King, Jr.) of liberation and
reconciliation. The soteriological themes of survival, liberation, and
reconciliation require an expansion of two categories in black soteriology that
are sometimes too narrowly developed. First, the cross is not merely a moral
influence on its observers, nor merely a victory of the just over evil, but a
redemptive sacrifice on behalf of those defeated by justice’s own victory.
Second, election is not God’s division of humanity into black and white, female
and male, oppressed and oppressor, or even blessed and cursed in order to save
one and condemn the other. Rather, it is God’s choice of Israel, a people often
oppressed and occasionally oppressive, and above all of its righteous son Jesus
** not only for its benefit or his, but for the benefit of all the families of
the earth.
Let me stress that this paper does not call black and womanist theologians to
accept the corrections of “white theology” (though such a call, like its
converse, would not necessarily be illegitimate). Instead, it tries to draw out
the resources of their own traditions, and particularly the resources of the
black Church’s deeply experiential and biblical visions of theodicy and
providence. It reviews the context of the black Church’s experience of God, then
considers the constructive black and womanist soteriologies of Major Jones and
Delores Williams. By locating their claims in the wide narrative context of
black faith, it supports their affirmations, but draws out implicit
soteriologies in both projects that require stronger affirmations of both the
Anselmian theory of atonement and the Pauline doctrine of election. Such
affirmations strengthen the black Church’s resources for negotiating Christian
life after liberation.
Is God a White Racist? The Providential Center of Black Faith
To be African-American is to be a member of a cultural and linguistic nation
(ethnos) defined in part by its West African cultural heritage, by its forcible
removal from Africa, by its estrangement from the cultures of both its mainly
white context and its own past, by the ultimately unintelligible modern European
concept of “race,” and by shared experiences in slavery and segregation.
These factors shaped African American faith in countless ways. Above all (for
our purposes), black America retained the deep faith in a supreme God that it
inherited from African religion.[1] White Christians have tended to think black
America’s African religious heritage was something that stood in the way of the
gospel. In fact, it was almost the opposite. Traditional African religions
usually worshiped a powerful, providential creator God, who once lived close to
humanity, but withdrew to the sky after an ungrateful and accidental human
act.[2] Black America’s continuing belief in this transcendent Lord saw it
through its encounter with the racist gospel of white America.
However, its faith in God the creator was put under incredible stress. White
supremacist theology in the nineteenth century posited that blacks were
biologically inferior, because they were children of Noah’s son Ham (Gen.
9:25).[3] Slaves were taught from both Testaments that the God who created them
had made them to be the perpetual servants of God’s superior white children.
Quite rightly, they reacted with shock and pain, not unlike modern-day Jobs: God
is still God; but can the God we have been worshiping really be a white
racist?[4]
Thus theodicy ** the problem of evil in a world created by a good God ** became
the fundamental frame of black Christian theology.[5] We need only slightly
expand this thesis by William R. Jones to claim that evil and providence take
central places in black American theologies. This profoundly distinguishes them
from patristic, medieval, and Reformation theologies, for whom questions of evil
and providence are more marginal.
Which Chapter in Which Story?
American Africans have offered a whole spectrum of answers to Jones’ question,
from acceptance of God’s racism to radical rejection. Most found the resources
to deny that God is a white racist.[6] Some rejected theodical assumptions along
with their conclusions, and lost their faith in God. Others associated their
status as outsiders with their withdrawn, present-yet-absent God, finding in
their otherness a reflection of God’s own.[7] An “Ethiopic” school of
interpretation found in biblical Egypt, Ethiopia, and Cush the glorious past of
African civilization, and used it to conduct its own triumphalist culture-war
against the white West.[8] Still others turned the slaveholders’ theology on its
head, literally reversing it, so that the original, unfallen humanity was black
(Eden is not in Europe, after all) and that sin caused the creation of white
people. White racist theology begat a black racist theology that drew equally
heavily on genetic pseudoscience.[9]
Slaveholders had shorn slaves and their descendants of their geographic home,
their ethnic heritage, and their family relationships. In effect, they had
“de-narrated” black America. Ironically, this de-narration became the foundation
of new African-American stories:
The Muslim’s “X” symbolized the true African family name that he never could
know. For me, my “X” replaced the white slave-master name of ‘Little’ which some
blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears. … Mr.
Muhammad taught that we would keep this “X” until God Himself returned and gave
us a Holy Name from His own mouth.[10]
Yet God provided the black Church much more than the story of having lost their
story. As slaves and their descendants became Christians, they learned the
stories in Scripture, and in them many found their own story. And when God
re-narrated black Americans, God called them not the children of Noah’s cursed
son Ham, not even the culturally superior children of Ethiopia, but the children
of enslaved and liberated Israel. America was not the Promised Land after all,
as the Puritans had taught. America was Egypt. God was not the god of Pharaoh,
but the God of Moses, the God of the disinherited and denarrated. Thus black
America learned to see its destiny not in subjugation, but in exodus.[11]
Benjamin Mays’ The Negro’s God finds three African-American visions of salvation
proceeding from this common center. The first, which predominated from 1760 to
1860, envisioned God’s work as “liberative,” accomplishing the black struggle
for freedom as the God of Israel had lifted the Hebrews out of their Egyptian
slavery. The second, which predominated from 1865 to 1914, envisioned God as no
longer useful to the cause of justice and freedom for black America. Like
wandering, grumbling Hebrews, emancipated but still segregated black Americans
still knew God, but no longer as a liberator. The third, which predominated from
1914 to the time of Mays’ writing in 1937, envisioned God as promising divine
reparation for earthly suffering.[12] Here the hopes of black America shifted
from this world to the next, as the earlier optimism of the nineteenth century
came crashing down on both white and black America.
These are different answers to the question of how black America’s exodus
narrative fits into Israel’s exodus narrative. At their heart lie differing
doctrines of election, providence, and eschatology: How will black America’s
story conclude? Is the exodus a timeless principle of liberation, a manifesto
that applies to any nation experiencing oppression? Or is it a one-time event,
among whose beneficiaries one must belong in order to experience its freedom? Is
exodus past, present, or future? In what sense is it universal, and in what
sense is it particular to the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
There was no lack of storytellers. Reading the land of their ancestors as the
Land of Promise (and making the same eschatological mistake as the Puritans),
some freed slaves went back to Africa and founded Liberia. Some, including the
Nation of Islam, looked forward to being separated from white America as the
Hebrews had been separated from Egypt and Canaan. Others, among them Martin
Luther King, Jr., awaited inclusion into the greater people of God, seeing black
America in terms of “the foreigner living in the land” (Deut. 24:18-22). Still
others found in black America lost tribes of Israel, and saw their redemption as
the direct fulfillment of God’s promises to Moses.
What Shape Salvation? The Soteriologies of Major Jones and Delores Williams
Black theology burst on the theological scene in the 1960’s as an heir to this
entire tradition of black reflection on God. Its theologians reclaim and reject
various strands of their heritage, answering these questions and retelling the
old stories in widely diverse ways. They overwhelmingly revive and intensify the
liberationist strand of African-American faith that had predominated before the
Civil War. James H. Evans, Jr. summarizes black eschatology in that one word:
“liberation.”[13] Practically every writer in James H. Cone’s and Gayraud S.
Wilmore’s two-volume historical survey embraces liberation as the overriding
category of salvation. J. Deotis Roberts is an exception that proves the rule **
not because he denies liberation as a central concern of black theology, but
because he goes so far as to place reconciliation alongside it as a necessary
(and secondary) dimension.[14]
Major Jones. It is in the liberationist cluster that we may place The Color of
God: The Concept of God in Afro-American Thought, by Major Jones, the late
president of Gammon Theological Seminary. Jones’s doctrine of God is a “radical
orthodoxy” (Gayraud Wilmore) that affirms ecumenical concepts of Trinity,
Christology, soteriology, and pneumatology. It treats them not as corrective
borrowings from a foreign, white theological tradition, as Joseph Washington
might,[15] but as authentic embodiments of the fundamentally healthy black
experience of God ** an experience Jones traces to a spiritual heritage not from
America, Geneva, Wittenburg, or Rome, but from sub-saharan Africa.
For Jones, Christology is the black Church’s historical answer to its particular
problem of evil. God’s providence culminates when the black messiah enters into
solidarity with the oppressed, assuming and redeeming suffering humanity. Jesus
disproves God’s racism without compromising either God’s power or goodness.
Soteriology seems to be one of the topics in which Jones is radically orthodox.
He claims that black Christians see Christ’s passion as securing God’s love and
release for them, in a “more or less classical representation of the traditional
doctrine of the atonement” that combines the concerns of Anselm and Abelard
(83). Yet all is not as conventional as it looks, for blacks appropriate these
categories according to their relevance to black faith: “We reformulate every
Christological question across the full range of God’s own experience in Jesus
Christ as he lived among us, when we ask: ‘What does this mean for Black
people’” (84)? This means Christology is reformulated according to black
doctrines of theodicy and providence. “Black theology believes in Jesus in all
the generic senses of traditional Christology; but more importantly, Black
theologians consistently revise the meaning of Jesus as specifically pertinent
to Black people, as specifically the Christ of their liberation” (86).
The result does look somewhat Abelardian, but it is not at all Anselmian. In a
key passage, Jones repudiates a category basic to that theological tradition **
“redemptive suffering.” He calls the cross “more burdensome example” of God’s
solidarity and identification with the oppressed, “than redemptive requirement”
to satisfy God’s wrath. It is neither expiatory nor propitiatory. Any
“sacrificial” dimension is only in the sense that it is costly to Jesus himself.
It cannot be the Son’s sacrifice to the Father.
This is because “Blackness … is not what it was said to be by generations of
White theologians ** a sign of God’s wrath. Blackness is not a sign of
punishment for being Black; it is rather a profound and mysterious assignment
from God by which Black people have been called to bear witness to the message
of his judgment and his grace to all nations, and especially to White America”
(98). In effect, Jones’ liberation Christology abandons the soteriology of the
Reformed and Arminian traditions from whose categories black American theology
has usually drawn, and returns to the theme of Christus Victor that (according
to Gustav Aulen) once dominated the Christian world, continues to dominate in
Eastern Orthodoxy and Lutheranism, and increasingly dominates among theologians
of liberation.
Delores Williams. Our second soteriology, Sisters in the Wilderness by Delores
Williams of Union Theological Seminary,[16] shares Jones’ theological method,
but arrives at radically different conclusions. Like her black Church, and like
Jones, Williams engages in what she calls a hermeneutic of
“identification-discernment” in which believers read the biblical stories to
discern where they belong in its narratives, and where and how God will meet
them in their predicaments. In the Tillichian tradition of correlation, Williams
looks for where the faith of oppressed black women resonates with Scripture and
tradition. Only there are Scripture and tradition allowed authority.
How do oppressed black women experience the work of God? Not as liberation.
Women remain at the mercy of racial, class, and gender oppressors. Where the
black (male) Church has identified with Israel in exodus as paradigmatic of
their own standing in America, she on behalf of oppressed black women identifies
with Hagar and Jesus in the wilderness. It is in the wilderness that modern-day
Hagars, chased out of their social world by oppressors both male and female,
meet the Jesus of the temptation narratives. In their survival rather than their
deaths, Hagar and Jesus offer ways for God’s most invisible and marginal people
to survive. Williams’ project best fits the middle era of Mays’ analysis, in
which God was no longer viewed as a liberator.
This has tremendous consequences for Williams’ interpretation of Jesus’ life and
death. Both are significant; but only the former aids the salvation of black
women. “Jesus … does not conquer sin through death on the cross. Rather, Jesus
conquers the sin of temptation in the wilderness by resistance” (166). Only the
ministry of the living Jesus offers resources for “the oppressed of the
oppressed” to survive the “double jeopardy” (Frances Beale) of their blackness
and femininity (144). “God through Jesus Christ gave [black women] new vision to
see the resources for positive, abundant relational life. … God helps [the
invisible] make a way out of no way” (198). Williams’ soteriology of the
wilderness holds up the temptation narrative as the paradigmatic saving event in
Jesus’ career, and the ethics of the Kingdom of God as portrayed in the Synoptic
Gospels as the font of social healing. The wilderness redefines even the
resurrection. It is not a manifestation of Jesus’ victory at the cross (cf. Col.
2:14-15), but a victory of Jesus’ ministerial vision over evil’s attempts to
kill it, of which the cross was only one example, and an unnecessary one at that
(164-165).
The significance of the cross lies in its purely negative symbolism. It is “the
image of human sin in its desecrated form … an image of defilement, a gross
manifestation of collective human sin” (166). Williams thinks this must be so
because any positive saving significance of the cross validates suffering and
sacralizes violence. It supports and intensifies the suffering African-American
women have endured for centuries. A cross-centered soteriology not only leaves
them invisible, marginal, and unliberated, but withholds the resources they need
to survive at the hands of patriarchs and racists. For Williams, the category of
atonement is one long exercise in underwriting oppression (162-164). “There is
nothing divine in the blood of the cross,” she claims. “God does not intend
black women’s surrogacy experience. Neither can Christian faith affirm such an
idea. Jesus did not come to be a surrogate. … As Christians, black women cannot
forget the cross, but neither can they glorify it. To do so is to glorify
suffering and to render their exploitation sacred. To do so is to glorify the
sin of defilement” (167). On these grounds, Williams accuses both the pioneers
of black theology and traditional theologians like Martin Luther King, Jr. of
leading black women “passively to accept their own oppression and suffering **
if the women are taught that suffering is redemptive.”[17] On the same grounds,
she dismisses all of the traditional atonement theories (ransom, satisfaction,
victory, and moral influence) as resting on the category of “redemptive
suffering,” even if they develop it in different ways.
Can These Visions Be Reconciled? Black and Womanist Theology in Panoramic
Perspective
At first the claim that Jesus in the wilderness and even Jesus’ broader career
offer hope of survival to God’s most invisible and marginal people may seem
puzzling, since by themselves they seem to offer less than complete liberation
for the marginal. For example, Jesus is sent to Israel, not to “Hagarenes.” His
survival in Egypt and his triumph in the wilderness bring him back out of these
God-forsaken places and back into Israel. The ethics of the kingdom specify
perfect obedience to the Law of Moses, which theocratically marginalizes both
women and non-Israelites. Its institutional organization restores an Israel with
twelve men under an eternal King. Jesus leaves scraps for Syro-Phoenician dogs,
but nothing like the inheritance he promises his Jewish followers. How can
Williams claim that Jesus’ career offers more than scraps as resources for women
in the wilderness?
Williams can do it because oppressed black women are implicitly identifying
Jesus’ and Hagar’s narratives from a panoramic, canonical perspective that ends
in the full inclusion of both Gentiles and women under God’s eschatological
rule. They interpret the wilderness narratives in the context of the whole
story. They follow God’s sustenance of Hagar and Jesus through to their happy
conclusions: “Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand,” the angel
tells Hagar, “for I will make a great nation of him” (Gen. 21:18); “Tell his
disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee,” the angel tells
the women at the tomb. “There you will see him, just as he told you” (Mark
16:6). Both the “survival” and “liberation” strands of biblical assurance are
for Williams’ people. That is why both are deeply embodied in the black Church’s
practical faith.
Occasionally this broader perspective peeks through in Williams’ analysis. Are
soteriologies of liberation universally illegitimate, or only ineffective for
black women? It is never completely clear. At times Williams seems to reject
other visions of the atonement entirely (166-169). At other times, she seems
merely to deny that the “liberative” strand in black biblical experience applies
to black women (2-6). Then perhaps ** since many in the predominantly female
black Church do experience God as a liberator, and do not reject faith in the
cross ** it applies also to those black women whose experiences of God are
liberative. The scope of Williams’ critique is hard to identify, because the
scope of her inquiry is purposefully limited to the experience of oppressed
black women, and this experience by definition excludes experiences of
liberation. While she admits that the Bible supports a soteriology of
liberation, she finds it not ultimately important to her people. The question is
not one of right or wrong, but of allowing “poor, oppressed black women and men
to hear and see the doing of the good news in a way that is meaningful to them”
(199).
Yet what poor, oppressed blacks hear and see is already theory-laden. It is
received as located within the context of the whole economy of salvation. It
facilitates survival because it ultimately promises more. Thus what Williams
affirms ultimately depends upon what she denies.
This is equally true of Jones’ account of how black America appropriates God’s
promises of liberation. During Jesus’ career, there is every indication of his
solidarity with Israel as its divinely accepted representative, but little
indication of his solidarity with Gentile sufferers, even those whose sufferings
resemble Israel’s. The conviction that Jesus has assumed and redeemed suffering
humanity, that Jesus’ blackness resembles the blackness of the nations, comes
only as Gentiles (in fact, Gentile centurions) believe promises that have only
reluctantly been addressed to them (Acts 10). Only on the basis of their faith
can Jones ultimately claim that Jesus did not “restrict partnership (with
humanity) to an elected people, so that they only by their obedience to a
covenant might enter into his fellowship. Rather, God lowered himself and freely
accepted the worst conditions of the human race, bar none” (99).
What we see in Jones and Williams is a black Church that appreciates the moments
of Christ’s career with different degrees of intensity, yet still depends on the
whole canonical story for their significance. Here the black Church does not
depart from classical or contemporary Christian practice, as many non-black
theologians allege, but resembles its fellow Christian traditions. All of us
have long engaged in Williams’ hermeneutic of “identification-discernment,”
whether or not we have admitted it. The black tradition’s polarization over
valuing nativity, wilderness, ministry, cross, and resurrection resembles the
greater Christian tradition’s polarization over the soteriologies of
deification, moral influence, satisfaction, and victory.
Yet along with the black Church’s long tradition of soteriological favoritism
comes a related tendency towards soteriological exclusivism. And this
exclusivism (like those of other traditions) ultimately contradicts the black
vision of salvation.
The solution is not for the black Church to adopt a supposedly “catholic”
synthesis of atonement theories, exchanging its theological distinctives for a
homogenized, even majoritarian “ecumenism.” Nor is it for black America to
follow the program of democratic liberalism and integrate with its neighbors.
Like Anabaptists and other beleaguered minorities, the black Church is right to
worry that these false universalisms would be further theological invasions by
the ones who marginalized them in the first place. (Besides, black and womanist
theology’s commitments to the privileged, even critically unassailable status of
their own people’s experiences make either proposal a tough sell, especially
coming from a white, male, American, Republican theologian!)
There is a better reason for soteriological inclusiveness: The canonical setting
in which Christian traditions, including black Church traditions, implicitly
read their texts in order to support their particular visions of salvation. This
is not merely a “white” hermeneutical strategy, but is built into the practical
faith of the black Church. Williams brings the panoramic perspective of
Galatians and Ephesians to her reading of the Hagar narratives, in locating
families’ wilderness experiences in a greater narrative that looks beyond
wilderness to another time (160). Major Jones appeals to the entire scope of
God’s economy of salvation for an adequate answer to the fundamental question of
whether God is a white racist.
Monday’s Coming: Beyond Survival and Liberation
Here my own mainly white theological tradition offers an illustration. A century
ago, evangelicals considered the doctrine of penal-substitutionary atonement one
of the five “fundamentals” essential to authentic Christian faith. This
soteriology was often developed exclusivistically in evangelical theology.
Today, however, internal as well as external forces increasingly push
evangelicals into affirming soteriologies of moral influence, victory, and
deification. These usually take places alongside Calvin’s vision of atonement,
often qualify and inform it, and sometimes critique it.[18] We have learned to
see them not as alien branches that need to be resisted to preserve our
insights, or grafted in to save our faith from its own weaknesses, but (also) as
growths of our own vine that we have been too quick to prune.
Similar dynamics characterize black and womanist theology. If pursued and
followed, the internal logics and panoramic narrative contexts of these two
theological traditions provide further divine gifts of what Williams calls “new
vision to see survival and quality-of-life resources where we have seen none
before” (203). They deepen and widen the liberation that Jones’ black Messiah
brings those who suffer. They do this by pointing to a fuller appreciation of
black faith that is more than survival, and more than liberation. They keep the
black Church alive and flourishing and unceasingly restless until it receives
what was promised (Heb. 11:39). Furthermore, they ultimately undercut both
Jones’ blanket denial of the redemptive quality of suffering, and Williams’
denial of the soteriological value of the cross. Why? Because in their different
ways, both these traditions locate black men and women’s salvation with respect
to Israel.
In the gospel, the nations have histories that are both already theirs, and
fundamentally new. The primordial and patriarchal narratives announce that the
creation of the nations, including both Israel and black America’s ancestors, is
protologically significant: They are part of the plan. The prophetic and
apocalyptic narratives announce that God’s inclusion of the same nations in the
faith of Israel is eschatologically significant: It is through Jacob that all
will be blessed.
Thus, along with the first-century Jewish and Gentile Church, black Americans
experience the Hebrews’ call, enslavement, liberation, wandering, conquest,
apostasy, exile, return, and apocalyptic future as in some sense their own.[19]
They remember signs and wonders past, and learn a confident expectation of signs
and wonders to come. Rather than splintering divine liberation into an exodus
and conquest for every nation, which would simply perpetuate the cycle of
violence among nations, the gospel emancipates the black Church through the one
exodus Jesus accomplished at Jerusalem (Luke 9:31). The survival and liberation
of the African-American nation, like that of all the nations, is its unearned
but long promised share in the survival and liberation of the nation of
Israel.[20]
Black and womanist theologies justly highlight and reclaim chapters of the
Christian story that many Christians have chosen not to hear. But the scope of
Israel’s story points black theology beyond securing liberation for the
oppressed, and points womanist theology beyond gaining resources for survival in
the wilderness, because Israel’s canonical story is only begun in its opening
chapters of exodus and wandering.[21] God’s promise is that all will eventually
take part in the story’s culmination. When these storytellers choose not to hear
other chapters of what is after all still their story, or when they conduct
theological “dialogues” with only some chapters and not others, they undermine
their own places in the story.
This brings us back to theodicy and providence. Each new context for God’s
people requires different resources. In the wilderness, evil’s most pressing
problem is the threat it poses to survival itself; and God’s provision is
sustenance ** water for Hagar’s and Moses’ people, food from Ishmael’s bow and
from heaven. In slavery, the problem is whether God is fundamentally against
Hagar or the Hebrews; and providence is the promise and fulfillment of life
together in freedom for both bedouin Ishmaelites and emancipated Israelites. In
the former case, this comes in God’s gift of the social space needed to grow a
nation away from Abraham’s and Sarah’s oppression. In the latter case, it comes
through the liberating blood of paschal lambs, which point back to a lamb God
would provide to spare Jacob’s life (Gen. 22:8), and forward to a lamb slain for
the sins of the entire world.
Then, in freedom, theodicy gains new occasions, in the evil perpetuated among
God’s people. Soon after Abraham’s promise is fulfilled, Ishmael mocks Isaac,
laughing at the second-born son of laughter (Gen. 21:9, cf. Gen. 21:6). This
calls down the wrath of the protective mother through whose folly he was named
(Gen. 18:12-15).[22] Soon after the exodus, the sins of newly freed Israel
accumulate: Oppression of fellow Hebrews, oppression of new Canaanite neighbors
(not all of which is divinely sanctioned, Deut. 16:9-12), and the oppression of
God that is idolatry.
This is the Israel into which Jesus is born. Joseph A. Johnson, Jr. claims that
Jesus’ ministry liberates those on the fringe of society: the sick, the
possessed, the gentiles, and even the guilty, “the prostitutes, the thieves, the
murderers, the robbers.” Johnson passes over the most poignant group of all **
the tax collectors ** but his point remains: Jesus is the liberator of all. But
how does liberation happen after God’s people have themselves engaged in further
oppression? Johnson says that Jesus “makes himself accessible to those who need
him.”[23] But how? (And what about those not on society’s fringes?)
For Ishmael and his mother, providence comes as fellowship in Egypt (Gen.
21:21). For Israel, it comes as a Law to preserve the nation’s holiness, and a
sacrificial system that cleanses it after the Law is violated. To be a liberated
people is to be under a new, just master (cf. Rom. 6-7). After the gospel of
exodus comes the law of Sinai. The survival strategy for wilderness wanderings
includes the legal and priestly resources that continue to regulate the new life
in and out of the Promised Land. When the new master’s law is broken and the
cycle of violence is unleashed inside the camp, the law demands reconciliation.
This takes the form of sacrifice ** even the sacrifice of innocent blood in
exchange for the lives of the guilty. The tabernacle and temple are systems for
the liberation needed after liberation. They maintain God’s identification with
the oppressed after they themselves engage in oppression. They are resources of
reconciliation. They point forward to the cross, which now liberates not as
Israel’s paschal lambs liberated the innocent, but as its sin offerings
liberated the guilty.
Israel’s history in and out of its promised land proves that survival and
liberation ultimately depend on reconciliation as much as reconciliation depends
on them. How then do law, sin, and priesthood work among the liberated black
people of God? Here black theology seems to stammer. Cone and Wilmore’s
two-volume Black Theology: A Documentary History pays remarkably little
attention to life after exodus. It offers much liberation, but precious little
law.[24] In concentrating on justification, it often ignores the process of
sanctification.[25]
This theological and practical vacuum has understandable historical reasons, in
black theology’s reaction to a history of whites characterizing themselves as
“noble, manly, wise, strong, courageous” and characterizing blacks as “patient,
long-suffering, humble, self-effacing, considerate, submissive, childlike, [and]
meek.”[26] Arranged in this way, white and black “virtues” excused and even
glorified systematic oppression. In reclaiming the “white” virtues, black
theologians have seemingly abandoned the “black” ones. Yet these are no less
crucial to forgiveness and reconciliation.[27] White oppression and black
capitulation have pushed black theology into pursuing a theology of glory that
has little practical to offer when the violence is black-on-black. Here black
and womanist theology neither lead nor follow the black Church, but get in its
way.
The first Christians found many dimensions of providence in the cross, each of
which echoes an earlier chapter in the world’s history of salvation, and depends
on other dimensions for its work. One, a means of victory, takes on the imagery
of Passover (1 Cor. 5), envisioning the cross as freeing captive Israel and
recreating a people holy to God. This is the image with which black theology
consistently resonates (for instance, in the work of James H. Cone).[28]
Another, a means of healing, takes on the imagery of the serpent Moses lifts up
in the wilderness for healing (John 3:14), seeing the cross as conferring
eternal life on the world. It is an obvious point of contact between the cross
and womanist soteriology. Yet another, a means of identification, takes up the
imagery of God’s presence in the tabernacle (John 1:14-18), envisioning the
cross as the incarnate God’s universal communion with sinning and sinned-against
humanity. This is the basis of Roberts’ twofold soteriology of liberation and
reconciliation.[29] Still another, a means of satisfaction, takes up the imagery
of sin offerings and Temple, envisioning the cross as freeing sinners through
the shedding of innocent blood.[30]
Williams rejects this last vision as endorsing a surrogacy that must interpret
black women’s suffering as redemptive and sacred. Jones rejects it by
translating it in trans-national categories, as a claim that the cross frees
whites by the blood of blacks. But the Temple was not an institution for
forgiving Canaanite or Babylonian or Roman sins through Jewish blood; it was an
institution for atoning for Jewish sins through the blood of animals. It was not
a substitute for righteousness that allowed sinners to continue life as usual,
but a sign of new righteousness that made a life of sin unthinkable. We would
better translate the sacrificial cult by claiming that the sacrifices of
innocent animals maintained the holiness of black America, disinfecting it from
the depravity of white America. This culminated in one, and only one, atoning
human sacrifice, which did not merely rehearse the old sacrificial arrangements
and endorse their contradictions, but superseded the system by resolving them.
It was performed not by a high priest against the victim’s will, but of a high
priest according to his will. Its most important feature is also its closest
parallel with the old system: It was not performed on behalf of the innocent,
but of the guilty (Rom. 8:3-4). This act reconciled Israel so fully to God that
it rendered the sacrificial system not only unhelpful but misleading (Heb.
5-10), and opened a way even for the nations to enjoy God’s blessings. The
sacrifice of the cross is not a justification for lynchings, but an act of
radical inclusion that warns the world never to lynch again in light of God’s
vindication of Jesus its victim.[31]
“Friday’s here,” the black Church has long reminded itself, “but Sunday’s
coming.” The middle chapters of Israel’s saga remind us all that Monday is
coming too ** a day after liberation, when yesterday’s victims become today’s
repentant sinners.[32] It is on that day that freed slaves and mothers surviving
on the margin learn that they too are capable of injustice, and that the life of
their nation depends on both law and forgiveness. It is on that day that they
find a new taste in the blood they drink at Church ** the taste of freedom even
for oppressors.
The common lesson of these visions of atonement is not simply that the work of
Christ is multidimensional, nor simply that different people may legitimately
identify with different aspects of God’s work on their behalf.[33] It is that
the coherence and happy resolution of the narratives of God’s people depend upon
the harmonious interplay of all of these visions of salvation (along with
others), in order to bring survival and liberation and forgiveness and
reconciliation to people in different stages of need. Only a soteriology of
careful harmony can affirm what Miroslav Volf calls “solidarity in sin” without
mistaking it for “equality of sin.”[34] Jesus’ death and resurrection bring new
life for the dying, vindication for the innocent, amnesty for the guilty, and
peace for all.
This harmony of soteriologies is not a confusion of soteriologies. It is crucial
to the exodus story not to turn Passover into a sin offering. Any soteriology
that relies too exclusively on Anselmian atonement theory (as feudal, colonial,
and postcolonial European soteriologies conveniently have) risks doing just
that. It levels the world into a mass of common guilt, falsely condemns those
God has judged and acquitted, and showers a cheap grace on oppressors that
leaves them unjustified, unholy, unreconciled, and unsaved. Jones’ and Williams’
rejections of redemptive suffering have great force against such soteriologies.
Their critiques point traditional Western theologies toward more discerning
theodicies and accounts of suffering, and toward more just visions of
providence. But the converse is also true: It is equally dangerous to reduce
salvation to a paschal acquittal for the innocent. This would polarize
communities into camps of apparently absolute innocence and guilt, overlook the
sins of the supposedly innocent, nullify guilty verdicts on the basis of the
“victimhood” of perpetrators, and leave hardened oppressors no recourse but
further oppression and renewed cycles of violence.
Chosen to Suffer? The Problem of Election
The black Church faces a similar challenge on the matter of election. Confronted
with racist, Calvinist, and Arminian doctrines of election, American Africans
reinterpreted election according to their experience of their good but distant
creator. In response, the black Church typically taught variations on a theme
that identifies black America with Israel, as the elect people of God. Whether
African-Americans are elect as suffering servants whose mission is to witness to
God’s humanity,[35] or as people chosen along with Israel to share in Yahweh’s
liberation,[36] or as fellow blacks whose connection is genetic and whose task
is to achieve their own liberation,[37] they are elect with respect to Israel.
This causes friction when black doctrines collide with doctrines that depend on
other visions of election.
Jones affirms against Joseph Washington’s doctrine of black election to
suffering servanthood, a kenotic vision of atonement rooted in incarnation: “God
lowered himself and freely accepted the worst conditions of the human race, bar
none.”[38] God’s identification with humanity would be Barthian in its scope,
but for Jones’ stress on the Christological particularity of Jesus’ blackness.
Jesus’ identification with the oppressed over against their oppressors is
essential to the victory his life wins on their behalf. In such a vision of
salvation, election as nationhood and atonement as redemptive suffering are a
fatal combination. So Jones rejects the idea of election as national and
covenantal. He denies that God would “restrict partnership (with humanity) to an
elected people, so that they only by their obedience to a covenant might enter
into his fellowship.” His rejection of redemptive suffering likewise depends on
a context of national election: “We reject any identification of oppression and
suffering with redemption. … Blackness is not a sign of punishment for being
Black.”[39] We can more clearly see the logical fallacy he has uncovered by
transposing “Jewish” for “black”: “Jewishness is not a sign of punishment for
being Jewish.”
National election and redemptive suffering are equally fatal to Williams’ vision
of survival in the wilderness, but for opposite reasons. From their common
theodical starting point, “Is God a white racist?” black and womanist
theologians reason differently. The traditional male identification with elect
Israel-in-exodus ignores the traditional female identification with Hagar as
non-elect. For black women who “read the entire Hebrew testament from the point
of view of the non-Hebrew slave,” she says, “there is no clear indication that
God is against their perpetual enslavement.” When male black theologians make
the exodus narrative normative, their patriarchalism marginalizes the non-elect
people whom God sustains in the wilderness of their exclusion and
invisibility.[40] For Williams, national election combines with redemptive
suffering to glorify women’s surrogacy ** the defiling of the non-elect for the
benefit of the elect.
Against the idea of election as nationhood, Jones describes a soteriology of
participation in Christ’s blackness, and Williams describes a conviction that
God’s favor takes familial rather than narrowly racial shape (e.g., Hagar and
Ishmael helping each other survive in the wilderness). Yet these affirmations
are actually quite close to a Pauline doctrine of election ** when Romans and
Ephesians are read as answering the question of Jewish/Gentile relations rather
than offering individualized salvation-histories of justification by grace
through faith, as they usually are in the Lutheran, Reformed, and Arminian
traditions.[41]
Indeed, Jones’ and Williams’ affirmations depend on such a doctrine of election.
The meek, poor, and oppressed are happy (makarioi, Matt. 5:3-12 and Luke
6:20-23) not because they are oppressed, but by virtue of their Christlikeness.
God’s providence is for them, in a community overflowing with spiritual gifts.
They belong to a body liberated in Christ’s death and resurrection, brought
together for its own edification in the Spirit, as a new creation in the midst
of the old. Even Hagar’s story ends happily because of her relationship to
Abraham, and not merely in spite of it: “As for the son of the slave woman, I
will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring” (Gen. 21:13). This
connection is not made clear to Hagar,[42] but it is clear to the reader: All
the families of the earth, even the “non-elect,” are beneficiaries of God’s
choices. Only the God of Abraham and Jesus can be both the God of the wilderness
and the God of the exodus, both the God of the desert and the God of New
Jerusalem. Only this God can liberate those who survive, and forgive those who
oppress after their liberation.
Election, properly developed, is the qualification that can support biblical and
traditional accounts of the cross and resurrection, yet repudiate their abuse in
underwriting further injustice. While Romans punished Jesus ** in part for being
Jewish ** God did not. Rather, Jesus took on the sin of Israel as a living
sacrifice, at the Jordan and at Golgotha, and God accepted that sacrifice, and
liberated and exalted both the chosen Son (Luke 9:35) and the chosen people he
represents. While Sarah punished Hagar ** in part for being Egyptian? ** God did
not. Rather, God had mercy on her by virtue of the universal promise to Abraham.
Conclusion
In renarrating African America, God has been telling more than short stories.
God has given this suffering people parts in the story. Unless Christians can
tell where people’s sufferings fit into which parts of that whole story, the
gospel will fail to sustain, liberate, reconcile, or glorify. A doctrine of
providence centered in a panoramic vision of atonement and a truly biblical
doctrine of election properly locates the concrete sufferings of God’s oppressed
people in the one story of their salvation. It confuses neither America nor
Liberia with New Jerusalem.[43] It respects the redemptive power of suffering in
Christ (Col. 1:24, Eph.1:4, Rom. 8:28) without sacralizing the suffering God
sent Jesus to end. It enables theology to respect the problem of evil without
falling into a false dilemma that classifies all suffering as glorifying and
self-redemptive, or as defiling and oppressive. It honors the internal logics
and narrative forms of both black and womanist theology, while telling more than
these traditions currently tell by themselves. It also eases their tensions with
traditional theology, even as it refines their critiques in order to correct
others more effectively. The full story of God’s deliverance of African America
reflects a black American faith that speaks faithfully and truly from its
privileged perspective on God.
[1] Major Jones, The Color of God: The Concept of God in Afro-American Thought
(Macon, GA: Mercer, 1987), 17-20.
[2] James H. Evans, Jr., We Have Been Believers: An African-American Systematic
Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 56.
[3] Evans, 36-38.
[4] William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist? (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973),
115-117, quoted in Major Jones, 23-24.
[5] Major Jones, introduction.
[6] William R. Jones himself embraces an existentialist variety of free-will
theodicy he calls “humanocentric theism.” He claims that God’s gift of human
freedom makes humanity the co-creator of its existence, relegates God’s
involvement to persuasion rather than coercion, and leaves African-Americans in
charge of whether to resist or endure suffering. To alleviate suffering, they
“must desanctify it by taking it out of the hands of God. African-Americans must
rely only on themselves and seek their own liberation.” See Evans, 64-65,
referring to William R. Jones, 193.
[7] Evans, 57-58, calls this “the ungiven God” of African-American theology.
[8] Evans, 41-44, notes that this hermeneutic “decentered” the Bible’s own
salvation narrative (43).
[9] An example is the teaching of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. See
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press,
1966), 164-166.
[10] Malcolm X, 199.
[11] Evans, 41: “By identifying themselves with the Hebrews, African slaves
declared themselves as insiders in the scriptural drama. … While slaveholders
focused on ancient Israel as a slaveholding society, the African slaves saw
ancient Israel first as a nation descended from slaves.”
[12] Evans, 58, quoting Benjamin Mays, The Negro’s God: As Reflected in His
Literature (New York: Atheneum, 1969).
[13] Evans, 152. He develops a soteriology that is entirely liberative, calling
Jesus both “a political messiah or liberator, and spiritual mediator/healer”
(97). Jesus as healer and Jesus as liberator are essentially comparable
categories, especially in the gospels.
[14] J. Deotis Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), and “Black Theology in the Making,” in Cone
and Wilmore, 1:118-119.
[15] Joseph R. Washington, Jr., “Are American Negro Churches Christian?” in
James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Theology: A Documentary History, 2nd
ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 1:92-100.
[16] Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist
God-Talk (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993).
[17] Williams, 200. These claims leave me utterly confused about another claim
she makes of the black Church: “The black church cannot be made respectable
because it is already sacralized by the pain and resurrection of thousands upon
thousands of victims” (205). If sacralization by pain and resurrection is not
redemptive suffering (cf. 1 Peter 3:17-4:2, etc.) what is?
[18] In my opinion, they rescue it.
[19] Jones and Williams sometimes imply and others allege that African-American
Christianity is incompatible with Pauline soteriology. But the black soteriology
of incorporation into Israel matches Paul’s hermeneutical strategy for the
Corinthians. Because the nations are adopted into Israel when they are adopted
into Christ, Paul can tell the mainly Gentile, uncircumcised Corinthian
believers that “our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through
the sea” (1 Cor. 10:1). This resemblance should give black theologians pause
before they disown other Pauline tropes. See Williams, 4-5, 164; Jones, 98-99
(though without naming Paul). See also, for example, Orlando Patterson, Rituals
of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Civitas, 2000),
helpfully reviewed in “Dionysus and Jim Crow,” The New Republic 223 (8/28 and
9/4/2000), 9-10:42-49, here 46.
[20] God’s act of inclusion thus blesses all people, whether they are narrated
by powerful and sinful discourses, denarrated and atomized by modernity, or
renarrated by postmodern acts of their own fragmented and misdirected wills.
[21] Though for Williams wandering is first Hagar’s wandering, in appropriating
the Israelite and temptation narratives, her tradition identifies also with
Israel’s forty years of wilderness wanderings.
[22] Williams does not develop this pun in the narrative, instead focusing on
Sarah’s repression in terms of the threat Ishmael posed to Isaac’s inheritance
(cf. 27-28). The effect is a clean distinction between victor and victim. Yet
the text presents Ishmael’s “playing” (mtsakheq, “laughing”) as the occasion for
Hagar’s and his exile, and Paul interprets Ishmael’s action as persecution (Gal.
4:29). Here the effect is the depressing moral ambiguity of a troubled
household.
[23] Joseph A. Johnson, Jr., “Jesus, the Liberator,” in Cone and Wilmore,
1:203-213, here 212.
[24] Perhaps this comes from black theology’s birth as a reaction to the
integrationism of Martin Luther King, Jr., which is deeply interested in the
ethical shape of life after liberation.
[25] Evans characterizes Cone’s central concern as justification of the
oppressed before God and the grounding of true humanity in the freely given
acceptance of the oppressed by God ** “autonomy,” and Roberts’ as sanctification
of the oppressed in their relationships with God and the human family **
“community.” These are two functions of empowerment (112). Evans himself
proceeds to concentrate on liberation.
[26] Kyle Haselden, The Racial Problem in Christian Perspective (New York:
Herper & Row, 1959), 42-43, quoted by Joseph A. Johnson, Jr. in Cone and
Wilmore, 207.
[27] See Gregory L. Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).
[28] See for instance, “The White Church and Black Power,” in Jones and Wilmore,
1:68-69.
[29] Roberts in Cone and Wilmore, 121-122: “The Incarnation is the Atonement.”
[30] It is perhaps this sense that Cone can affirm in citing Mark 10:45’s
“ransom for many” as evidence that God’s freedom for the poor is more than the
liberation of slaves from bondage. See “Biblical Revelation and Social
Existence,” in Cone and Wilmore, 1:173.
[31] Cf. Patterson.
[32] Cf. Roberts in Cone and Wilmore, 1:119: “I do not accept Black liberation
versus White oppression as an adequate formula to cover the human condition of
estrangement. Therefore, I do not hesitate to suggest liberation between Blacks
and Blacks as well as between Blacks and Whites. It is unwise to make these
structures too ironclad, for suppose the oppressed became the liberated? What
happens to our theology then?”
[33] It is on these grounds that Wilmore is open to other visions of atonement,
affirming that there may be “several valid approaches to the One Eternal God,”
even white ones. See “Black Power, Black People, Theological Renewal,” in Jones
and Wilmore, 1:132.
[34] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of
Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 81-82.
[35] Joseph Washington, The Politics of God (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 158,
quoted in William R. Jones, “Theodicy and Methodology in Black Theology,” in
Cone and Wilmore, 1:144.
[36] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: Lippincott,
1970), 181. Cone redefines the Church as “that grouping [of all men] which
identifies with the suffering of the poor by becoming one with them” in “The
White Church and Black Power,” in Cone and Wilmore, 1:78.
[37] Albert B. Cleage, Jr., “The Black Messiah,” in Cone and Wilmore, 1:103.
[38] Jones, 99.
[39] Jones, 98-99.
[40] Williams, 145-148.
[41] I justify these claims more fully in Living and Active: Scripture in the
Economy of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), and The Reason for the
Season: Christology through the Liturgical Year (in progress).
[42] While Williams uses source criticism to keep this “Elohist” passage
artificially separate from chapter 16’s Yahwist passage (31), and even to imply
that the god of Abraham and the god of Hagar may be different gods (22-29), this
is surely not how African American women typically read Hagar’s story!
[43] Cf. Evans, 154: “In thought coming out of the African Diaspora, heaven is
often referred to as ‘home,’ and home often means ‘Africa.’ Hell meant the
plantations of the American south and the Caribbean, the physical and temporal
alienation that characterized slavery and colonization. Heaven meant the return
to a state of community, mutuality, and wholeness.”
The black theology movement, now about 35 years old, has from the beginning
demanded the right of black Americans to speak of God through their own
experience. The movement has affirmed the story of African America as a
legitimate, indeed privileged perspective upon God’s nature and work.
My thesis here is that this story points beyond where many black and womanist
theologians have been willing to take it. It is not only a story of survival “in
the wilderness,” but of survival and liberation ** in fact, of the further
blessing (in J. Deotis Roberts and Martin Luther King, Jr.) of liberation and
reconciliation. The soteriological themes of survival, liberation, and
reconciliation require an expansion of two categories in black soteriology that
are sometimes too narrowly developed. First, the cross is not merely a moral
influence on its observers, nor merely a victory of the just over evil, but a
redemptive sacrifice on behalf of those defeated by justice’s own victory.
Second, election is not God’s division of humanity into black and white, female
and male, oppressed and oppressor, or even blessed and cursed in order to save
one and condemn the other. Rather, it is God’s choice of Israel, a people often
oppressed and occasionally oppressive, and above all of its righteous son Jesus
** not only for its benefit or his, but for the benefit of all the families of
the earth.
Let me stress that this paper does not call black and womanist theologians to
accept the corrections of “white theology” (though such a call, like its
converse, would not necessarily be illegitimate). Instead, it tries to draw out
the resources of their own traditions, and particularly the resources of the
black Church’s deeply experiential and biblical visions of theodicy and
providence. It reviews the context of the black Church’s experience of God, then
considers the constructive black and womanist soteriologies of Major Jones and
Delores Williams. By locating their claims in the wide narrative context of
black faith, it supports their affirmations, but draws out implicit
soteriologies in both projects that require stronger affirmations of both the
Anselmian theory of atonement and the Pauline doctrine of election. Such
affirmations strengthen the black Church’s resources for negotiating Christian
life after liberation.
Is God a White Racist? The Providential Center of Black Faith
To be African-American is to be a member of a cultural and linguistic nation
(ethnos) defined in part by its West African cultural heritage, by its forcible
removal from Africa, by its estrangement from the cultures of both its mainly
white context and its own past, by the ultimately unintelligible modern European
concept of “race,” and by shared experiences in slavery and segregation.
These factors shaped African American faith in countless ways. Above all (for
our purposes), black America retained the deep faith in a supreme God that it
inherited from African religion.[1] White Christians have tended to think black
America’s African religious heritage was something that stood in the way of the
gospel. In fact, it was almost the opposite. Traditional African religions
usually worshiped a powerful, providential creator God, who once lived close to
humanity, but withdrew to the sky after an ungrateful and accidental human
act.[2] Black America’s continuing belief in this transcendent Lord saw it
through its encounter with the racist gospel of white America.
However, its faith in God the creator was put under incredible stress. White
supremacist theology in the nineteenth century posited that blacks were
biologically inferior, because they were children of Noah’s son Ham (Gen.
9:25).[3] Slaves were taught from both Testaments that the God who created them
had made them to be the perpetual servants of God’s superior white children.
Quite rightly, they reacted with shock and pain, not unlike modern-day Jobs: God
is still God; but can the God we have been worshiping really be a white
racist?[4]
Thus theodicy ** the problem of evil in a world created by a good God ** became
the fundamental frame of black Christian theology.[5] We need only slightly
expand this thesis by William R. Jones to claim that evil and providence take
central places in black American theologies. This profoundly distinguishes them
from patristic, medieval, and Reformation theologies, for whom questions of evil
and providence are more marginal.
Which Chapter in Which Story?
American Africans have offered a whole spectrum of answers to Jones’ question,
from acceptance of God’s racism to radical rejection. Most found the resources
to deny that God is a white racist.[6] Some rejected theodical assumptions along
with their conclusions, and lost their faith in God. Others associated their
status as outsiders with their withdrawn, present-yet-absent God, finding in
their otherness a reflection of God’s own.[7] An “Ethiopic” school of
interpretation found in biblical Egypt, Ethiopia, and Cush the glorious past of
African civilization, and used it to conduct its own triumphalist culture-war
against the white West.[8] Still others turned the slaveholders’ theology on its
head, literally reversing it, so that the original, unfallen humanity was black
(Eden is not in Europe, after all) and that sin caused the creation of white
people. White racist theology begat a black racist theology that drew equally
heavily on genetic pseudoscience.[9]
Slaveholders had shorn slaves and their descendants of their geographic home,
their ethnic heritage, and their family relationships. In effect, they had
“de-narrated” black America. Ironically, this de-narration became the foundation
of new African-American stories:
The Muslim’s “X” symbolized the true African family name that he never could
know. For me, my “X” replaced the white slave-master name of ‘Little’ which some
blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears. … Mr.
Muhammad taught that we would keep this “X” until God Himself returned and gave
us a Holy Name from His own mouth.[10]
Yet God provided the black Church much more than the story of having lost their
story. As slaves and their descendants became Christians, they learned the
stories in Scripture, and in them many found their own story. And when God
re-narrated black Americans, God called them not the children of Noah’s cursed
son Ham, not even the culturally superior children of Ethiopia, but the children
of enslaved and liberated Israel. America was not the Promised Land after all,
as the Puritans had taught. America was Egypt. God was not the god of Pharaoh,
but the God of Moses, the God of the disinherited and denarrated. Thus black
America learned to see its destiny not in subjugation, but in exodus.[11]
Benjamin Mays’ The Negro’s God finds three African-American visions of salvation
proceeding from this common center. The first, which predominated from 1760 to
1860, envisioned God’s work as “liberative,” accomplishing the black struggle
for freedom as the God of Israel had lifted the Hebrews out of their Egyptian
slavery. The second, which predominated from 1865 to 1914, envisioned God as no
longer useful to the cause of justice and freedom for black America. Like
wandering, grumbling Hebrews, emancipated but still segregated black Americans
still knew God, but no longer as a liberator. The third, which predominated from
1914 to the time of Mays’ writing in 1937, envisioned God as promising divine
reparation for earthly suffering.[12] Here the hopes of black America shifted
from this world to the next, as the earlier optimism of the nineteenth century
came crashing down on both white and black America.
These are different answers to the question of how black America’s exodus
narrative fits into Israel’s exodus narrative. At their heart lie differing
doctrines of election, providence, and eschatology: How will black America’s
story conclude? Is the exodus a timeless principle of liberation, a manifesto
that applies to any nation experiencing oppression? Or is it a one-time event,
among whose beneficiaries one must belong in order to experience its freedom? Is
exodus past, present, or future? In what sense is it universal, and in what
sense is it particular to the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
There was no lack of storytellers. Reading the land of their ancestors as the
Land of Promise (and making the same eschatological mistake as the Puritans),
some freed slaves went back to Africa and founded Liberia. Some, including the
Nation of Islam, looked forward to being separated from white America as the
Hebrews had been separated from Egypt and Canaan. Others, among them Martin
Luther King, Jr., awaited inclusion into the greater people of God, seeing black
America in terms of “the foreigner living in the land” (Deut. 24:18-22). Still
others found in black America lost tribes of Israel, and saw their redemption as
the direct fulfillment of God’s promises to Moses.
What Shape Salvation? The Soteriologies of Major Jones and Delores Williams
Black theology burst on the theological scene in the 1960’s as an heir to this
entire tradition of black reflection on God. Its theologians reclaim and reject
various strands of their heritage, answering these questions and retelling the
old stories in widely diverse ways. They overwhelmingly revive and intensify the
liberationist strand of African-American faith that had predominated before the
Civil War. James H. Evans, Jr. summarizes black eschatology in that one word:
“liberation.”[13] Practically every writer in James H. Cone’s and Gayraud S.
Wilmore’s two-volume historical survey embraces liberation as the overriding
category of salvation. J. Deotis Roberts is an exception that proves the rule **
not because he denies liberation as a central concern of black theology, but
because he goes so far as to place reconciliation alongside it as a necessary
(and secondary) dimension.[14]
Major Jones. It is in the liberationist cluster that we may place The Color of
God: The Concept of God in Afro-American Thought, by Major Jones, the late
president of Gammon Theological Seminary. Jones’s doctrine of God is a “radical
orthodoxy” (Gayraud Wilmore) that affirms ecumenical concepts of Trinity,
Christology, soteriology, and pneumatology. It treats them not as corrective
borrowings from a foreign, white theological tradition, as Joseph Washington
might,[15] but as authentic embodiments of the fundamentally healthy black
experience of God ** an experience Jones traces to a spiritual heritage not from
America, Geneva, Wittenburg, or Rome, but from sub-saharan Africa.
For Jones, Christology is the black Church’s historical answer to its particular
problem of evil. God’s providence culminates when the black messiah enters into
solidarity with the oppressed, assuming and redeeming suffering humanity. Jesus
disproves God’s racism without compromising either God’s power or goodness.
Soteriology seems to be one of the topics in which Jones is radically orthodox.
He claims that black Christians see Christ’s passion as securing God’s love and
release for them, in a “more or less classical representation of the traditional
doctrine of the atonement” that combines the concerns of Anselm and Abelard
(83). Yet all is not as conventional as it looks, for blacks appropriate these
categories according to their relevance to black faith: “We reformulate every
Christological question across the full range of God’s own experience in Jesus
Christ as he lived among us, when we ask: ‘What does this mean for Black
people’” (84)? This means Christology is reformulated according to black
doctrines of theodicy and providence. “Black theology believes in Jesus in all
the generic senses of traditional Christology; but more importantly, Black
theologians consistently revise the meaning of Jesus as specifically pertinent
to Black people, as specifically the Christ of their liberation” (86).
The result does look somewhat Abelardian, but it is not at all Anselmian. In a
key passage, Jones repudiates a category basic to that theological tradition **
“redemptive suffering.” He calls the cross “more burdensome example” of God’s
solidarity and identification with the oppressed, “than redemptive requirement”
to satisfy God’s wrath. It is neither expiatory nor propitiatory. Any
“sacrificial” dimension is only in the sense that it is costly to Jesus himself.
It cannot be the Son’s sacrifice to the Father.
This is because “Blackness … is not what it was said to be by generations of
White theologians ** a sign of God’s wrath. Blackness is not a sign of
punishment for being Black; it is rather a profound and mysterious assignment
from God by which Black people have been called to bear witness to the message
of his judgment and his grace to all nations, and especially to White America”
(98). In effect, Jones’ liberation Christology abandons the soteriology of the
Reformed and Arminian traditions from whose categories black American theology
has usually drawn, and returns to the theme of Christus Victor that (according
to Gustav Aulen) once dominated the Christian world, continues to dominate in
Eastern Orthodoxy and Lutheranism, and increasingly dominates among theologians
of liberation.
Delores Williams. Our second soteriology, Sisters in the Wilderness by Delores
Williams of Union Theological Seminary,[16] shares Jones’ theological method,
but arrives at radically different conclusions. Like her black Church, and like
Jones, Williams engages in what she calls a hermeneutic of
“identification-discernment” in which believers read the biblical stories to
discern where they belong in its narratives, and where and how God will meet
them in their predicaments. In the Tillichian tradition of correlation, Williams
looks for where the faith of oppressed black women resonates with Scripture and
tradition. Only there are Scripture and tradition allowed authority.
How do oppressed black women experience the work of God? Not as liberation.
Women remain at the mercy of racial, class, and gender oppressors. Where the
black (male) Church has identified with Israel in exodus as paradigmatic of
their own standing in America, she on behalf of oppressed black women identifies
with Hagar and Jesus in the wilderness. It is in the wilderness that modern-day
Hagars, chased out of their social world by oppressors both male and female,
meet the Jesus of the temptation narratives. In their survival rather than their
deaths, Hagar and Jesus offer ways for God’s most invisible and marginal people
to survive. Williams’ project best fits the middle era of Mays’ analysis, in
which God was no longer viewed as a liberator.
This has tremendous consequences for Williams’ interpretation of Jesus’ life and
death. Both are significant; but only the former aids the salvation of black
women. “Jesus … does not conquer sin through death on the cross. Rather, Jesus
conquers the sin of temptation in the wilderness by resistance” (166). Only the
ministry of the living Jesus offers resources for “the oppressed of the
oppressed” to survive the “double jeopardy” (Frances Beale) of their blackness
and femininity (144). “God through Jesus Christ gave [black women] new vision to
see the resources for positive, abundant relational life. … God helps [the
invisible] make a way out of no way” (198). Williams’ soteriology of the
wilderness holds up the temptation narrative as the paradigmatic saving event in
Jesus’ career, and the ethics of the Kingdom of God as portrayed in the Synoptic
Gospels as the font of social healing. The wilderness redefines even the
resurrection. It is not a manifestation of Jesus’ victory at the cross (cf. Col.
2:14-15), but a victory of Jesus’ ministerial vision over evil’s attempts to
kill it, of which the cross was only one example, and an unnecessary one at that
(164-165).
The significance of the cross lies in its purely negative symbolism. It is “the
image of human sin in its desecrated form … an image of defilement, a gross
manifestation of collective human sin” (166). Williams thinks this must be so
because any positive saving significance of the cross validates suffering and
sacralizes violence. It supports and intensifies the suffering African-American
women have endured for centuries. A cross-centered soteriology not only leaves
them invisible, marginal, and unliberated, but withholds the resources they need
to survive at the hands of patriarchs and racists. For Williams, the category of
atonement is one long exercise in underwriting oppression (162-164). “There is
nothing divine in the blood of the cross,” she claims. “God does not intend
black women’s surrogacy experience. Neither can Christian faith affirm such an
idea. Jesus did not come to be a surrogate. … As Christians, black women cannot
forget the cross, but neither can they glorify it. To do so is to glorify
suffering and to render their exploitation sacred. To do so is to glorify the
sin of defilement” (167). On these grounds, Williams accuses both the pioneers
of black theology and traditional theologians like Martin Luther King, Jr. of
leading black women “passively to accept their own oppression and suffering **
if the women are taught that suffering is redemptive.”[17] On the same grounds,
she dismisses all of the traditional atonement theories (ransom, satisfaction,
victory, and moral influence) as resting on the category of “redemptive
suffering,” even if they develop it in different ways.
Can These Visions Be Reconciled? Black and Womanist Theology in Panoramic
Perspective
At first the claim that Jesus in the wilderness and even Jesus’ broader career
offer hope of survival to God’s most invisible and marginal people may seem
puzzling, since by themselves they seem to offer less than complete liberation
for the marginal. For example, Jesus is sent to Israel, not to “Hagarenes.” His
survival in Egypt and his triumph in the wilderness bring him back out of these
God-forsaken places and back into Israel. The ethics of the kingdom specify
perfect obedience to the Law of Moses, which theocratically marginalizes both
women and non-Israelites. Its institutional organization restores an Israel with
twelve men under an eternal King. Jesus leaves scraps for Syro-Phoenician dogs,
but nothing like the inheritance he promises his Jewish followers. How can
Williams claim that Jesus’ career offers more than scraps as resources for women
in the wilderness?
Williams can do it because oppressed black women are implicitly identifying
Jesus’ and Hagar’s narratives from a panoramic, canonical perspective that ends
in the full inclusion of both Gentiles and women under God’s eschatological
rule. They interpret the wilderness narratives in the context of the whole
story. They follow God’s sustenance of Hagar and Jesus through to their happy
conclusions: “Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand,” the angel
tells Hagar, “for I will make a great nation of him” (Gen. 21:18); “Tell his
disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee,” the angel tells
the women at the tomb. “There you will see him, just as he told you” (Mark
16:6). Both the “survival” and “liberation” strands of biblical assurance are
for Williams’ people. That is why both are deeply embodied in the black Church’s
practical faith.
Occasionally this broader perspective peeks through in Williams’ analysis. Are
soteriologies of liberation universally illegitimate, or only ineffective for
black women? It is never completely clear. At times Williams seems to reject
other visions of the atonement entirely (166-169). At other times, she seems
merely to deny that the “liberative” strand in black biblical experience applies
to black women (2-6). Then perhaps ** since many in the predominantly female
black Church do experience God as a liberator, and do not reject faith in the
cross ** it applies also to those black women whose experiences of God are
liberative. The scope of Williams’ critique is hard to identify, because the
scope of her inquiry is purposefully limited to the experience of oppressed
black women, and this experience by definition excludes experiences of
liberation. While she admits that the Bible supports a soteriology of
liberation, she finds it not ultimately important to her people. The question is
not one of right or wrong, but of allowing “poor, oppressed black women and men
to hear and see the doing of the good news in a way that is meaningful to them”
(199).
Yet what poor, oppressed blacks hear and see is already theory-laden. It is
received as located within the context of the whole economy of salvation. It
facilitates survival because it ultimately promises more. Thus what Williams
affirms ultimately depends upon what she denies.
This is equally true of Jones’ account of how black America appropriates God’s
promises of liberation. During Jesus’ career, there is every indication of his
solidarity with Israel as its divinely accepted representative, but little
indication of his solidarity with Gentile sufferers, even those whose sufferings
resemble Israel’s. The conviction that Jesus has assumed and redeemed suffering
humanity, that Jesus’ blackness resembles the blackness of the nations, comes
only as Gentiles (in fact, Gentile centurions) believe promises that have only
reluctantly been addressed to them (Acts 10). Only on the basis of their faith
can Jones ultimately claim that Jesus did not “restrict partnership (with
humanity) to an elected people, so that they only by their obedience to a
covenant might enter into his fellowship. Rather, God lowered himself and freely
accepted the worst conditions of the human race, bar none” (99).
What we see in Jones and Williams is a black Church that appreciates the moments
of Christ’s career with different degrees of intensity, yet still depends on the
whole canonical story for their significance. Here the black Church does not
depart from classical or contemporary Christian practice, as many non-black
theologians allege, but resembles its fellow Christian traditions. All of us
have long engaged in Williams’ hermeneutic of “identification-discernment,”
whether or not we have admitted it. The black tradition’s polarization over
valuing nativity, wilderness, ministry, cross, and resurrection resembles the
greater Christian tradition’s polarization over the soteriologies of
deification, moral influence, satisfaction, and victory.
Yet along with the black Church’s long tradition of soteriological favoritism
comes a related tendency towards soteriological exclusivism. And this
exclusivism (like those of other traditions) ultimately contradicts the black
vision of salvation.
The solution is not for the black Church to adopt a supposedly “catholic”
synthesis of atonement theories, exchanging its theological distinctives for a
homogenized, even majoritarian “ecumenism.” Nor is it for black America to
follow the program of democratic liberalism and integrate with its neighbors.
Like Anabaptists and other beleaguered minorities, the black Church is right to
worry that these false universalisms would be further theological invasions by
the ones who marginalized them in the first place. (Besides, black and womanist
theology’s commitments to the privileged, even critically unassailable status of
their own people’s experiences make either proposal a tough sell, especially
coming from a white, male, American, Republican theologian!)
There is a better reason for soteriological inclusiveness: The canonical setting
in which Christian traditions, including black Church traditions, implicitly
read their texts in order to support their particular visions of salvation. This
is not merely a “white” hermeneutical strategy, but is built into the practical
faith of the black Church. Williams brings the panoramic perspective of
Galatians and Ephesians to her reading of the Hagar narratives, in locating
families’ wilderness experiences in a greater narrative that looks beyond
wilderness to another time (160). Major Jones appeals to the entire scope of
God’s economy of salvation for an adequate answer to the fundamental question of
whether God is a white racist.
Monday’s Coming: Beyond Survival and Liberation
Here my own mainly white theological tradition offers an illustration. A century
ago, evangelicals considered the doctrine of penal-substitutionary atonement one
of the five “fundamentals” essential to authentic Christian faith. This
soteriology was often developed exclusivistically in evangelical theology.
Today, however, internal as well as external forces increasingly push
evangelicals into affirming soteriologies of moral influence, victory, and
deification. These usually take places alongside Calvin’s vision of atonement,
often qualify and inform it, and sometimes critique it.[18] We have learned to
see them not as alien branches that need to be resisted to preserve our
insights, or grafted in to save our faith from its own weaknesses, but (also) as
growths of our own vine that we have been too quick to prune.
Similar dynamics characterize black and womanist theology. If pursued and
followed, the internal logics and panoramic narrative contexts of these two
theological traditions provide further divine gifts of what Williams calls “new
vision to see survival and quality-of-life resources where we have seen none
before” (203). They deepen and widen the liberation that Jones’ black Messiah
brings those who suffer. They do this by pointing to a fuller appreciation of
black faith that is more than survival, and more than liberation. They keep the
black Church alive and flourishing and unceasingly restless until it receives
what was promised (Heb. 11:39). Furthermore, they ultimately undercut both
Jones’ blanket denial of the redemptive quality of suffering, and Williams’
denial of the soteriological value of the cross. Why? Because in their different
ways, both these traditions locate black men and women’s salvation with respect
to Israel.
In the gospel, the nations have histories that are both already theirs, and
fundamentally new. The primordial and patriarchal narratives announce that the
creation of the nations, including both Israel and black America’s ancestors, is
protologically significant: They are part of the plan. The prophetic and
apocalyptic narratives announce that God’s inclusion of the same nations in the
faith of Israel is eschatologically significant: It is through Jacob that all
will be blessed.
Thus, along with the first-century Jewish and Gentile Church, black Americans
experience the Hebrews’ call, enslavement, liberation, wandering, conquest,
apostasy, exile, return, and apocalyptic future as in some sense their own.[19]
They remember signs and wonders past, and learn a confident expectation of signs
and wonders to come. Rather than splintering divine liberation into an exodus
and conquest for every nation, which would simply perpetuate the cycle of
violence among nations, the gospel emancipates the black Church through the one
exodus Jesus accomplished at Jerusalem (Luke 9:31). The survival and liberation
of the African-American nation, like that of all the nations, is its unearned
but long promised share in the survival and liberation of the nation of
Israel.[20]
Black and womanist theologies justly highlight and reclaim chapters of the
Christian story that many Christians have chosen not to hear. But the scope of
Israel’s story points black theology beyond securing liberation for the
oppressed, and points womanist theology beyond gaining resources for survival in
the wilderness, because Israel’s canonical story is only begun in its opening
chapters of exodus and wandering.[21] God’s promise is that all will eventually
take part in the story’s culmination. When these storytellers choose not to hear
other chapters of what is after all still their story, or when they conduct
theological “dialogues” with only some chapters and not others, they undermine
their own places in the story.
This brings us back to theodicy and providence. Each new context for God’s
people requires different resources. In the wilderness, evil’s most pressing
problem is the threat it poses to survival itself; and God’s provision is
sustenance ** water for Hagar’s and Moses’ people, food from Ishmael’s bow and
from heaven. In slavery, the problem is whether God is fundamentally against
Hagar or the Hebrews; and providence is the promise and fulfillment of life
together in freedom for both bedouin Ishmaelites and emancipated Israelites. In
the former case, this comes in God’s gift of the social space needed to grow a
nation away from Abraham’s and Sarah’s oppression. In the latter case, it comes
through the liberating blood of paschal lambs, which point back to a lamb God
would provide to spare Jacob’s life (Gen. 22:8), and forward to a lamb slain for
the sins of the entire world.
Then, in freedom, theodicy gains new occasions, in the evil perpetuated among
God’s people. Soon after Abraham’s promise is fulfilled, Ishmael mocks Isaac,
laughing at the second-born son of laughter (Gen. 21:9, cf. Gen. 21:6). This
calls down the wrath of the protective mother through whose folly he was named
(Gen. 18:12-15).[22] Soon after the exodus, the sins of newly freed Israel
accumulate: Oppression of fellow Hebrews, oppression of new Canaanite neighbors
(not all of which is divinely sanctioned, Deut. 16:9-12), and the oppression of
God that is idolatry.
This is the Israel into which Jesus is born. Joseph A. Johnson, Jr. claims that
Jesus’ ministry liberates those on the fringe of society: the sick, the
possessed, the gentiles, and even the guilty, “the prostitutes, the thieves, the
murderers, the robbers.” Johnson passes over the most poignant group of all **
the tax collectors ** but his point remains: Jesus is the liberator of all. But
how does liberation happen after God’s people have themselves engaged in further
oppression? Johnson says that Jesus “makes himself accessible to those who need
him.”[23] But how? (And what about those not on society’s fringes?)
For Ishmael and his mother, providence comes as fellowship in Egypt (Gen.
21:21). For Israel, it comes as a Law to preserve the nation’s holiness, and a
sacrificial system that cleanses it after the Law is violated. To be a liberated
people is to be under a new, just master (cf. Rom. 6-7). After the gospel of
exodus comes the law of Sinai. The survival strategy for wilderness wanderings
includes the legal and priestly resources that continue to regulate the new life
in and out of the Promised Land. When the new master’s law is broken and the
cycle of violence is unleashed inside the camp, the law demands reconciliation.
This takes the form of sacrifice ** even the sacrifice of innocent blood in
exchange for the lives of the guilty. The tabernacle and temple are systems for
the liberation needed after liberation. They maintain God’s identification with
the oppressed after they themselves engage in oppression. They are resources of
reconciliation. They point forward to the cross, which now liberates not as
Israel’s paschal lambs liberated the innocent, but as its sin offerings
liberated the guilty.
Israel’s history in and out of its promised land proves that survival and
liberation ultimately depend on reconciliation as much as reconciliation depends
on them. How then do law, sin, and priesthood work among the liberated black
people of God? Here black theology seems to stammer. Cone and Wilmore’s
two-volume Black Theology: A Documentary History pays remarkably little
attention to life after exodus. It offers much liberation, but precious little
law.[24] In concentrating on justification, it often ignores the process of
sanctification.[25]
This theological and practical vacuum has understandable historical reasons, in
black theology’s reaction to a history of whites characterizing themselves as
“noble, manly, wise, strong, courageous” and characterizing blacks as “patient,
long-suffering, humble, self-effacing, considerate, submissive, childlike, [and]
meek.”[26] Arranged in this way, white and black “virtues” excused and even
glorified systematic oppression. In reclaiming the “white” virtues, black
theologians have seemingly abandoned the “black” ones. Yet these are no less
crucial to forgiveness and reconciliation.[27] White oppression and black
capitulation have pushed black theology into pursuing a theology of glory that
has little practical to offer when the violence is black-on-black. Here black
and womanist theology neither lead nor follow the black Church, but get in its
way.
The first Christians found many dimensions of providence in the cross, each of
which echoes an earlier chapter in the world’s history of salvation, and depends
on other dimensions for its work. One, a means of victory, takes on the imagery
of Passover (1 Cor. 5), envisioning the cross as freeing captive Israel and
recreating a people holy to God. This is the image with which black theology
consistently resonates (for instance, in the work of James H. Cone).[28]
Another, a means of healing, takes on the imagery of the serpent Moses lifts up
in the wilderness for healing (John 3:14), seeing the cross as conferring
eternal life on the world. It is an obvious point of contact between the cross
and womanist soteriology. Yet another, a means of identification, takes up the
imagery of God’s presence in the tabernacle (John 1:14-18), envisioning the
cross as the incarnate God’s universal communion with sinning and sinned-against
humanity. This is the basis of Roberts’ twofold soteriology of liberation and
reconciliation.[29] Still another, a means of satisfaction, takes up the imagery
of sin offerings and Temple, envisioning the cross as freeing sinners through
the shedding of innocent blood.[30]
Williams rejects this last vision as endorsing a surrogacy that must interpret
black women’s suffering as redemptive and sacred. Jones rejects it by
translating it in trans-national categories, as a claim that the cross frees
whites by the blood of blacks. But the Temple was not an institution for
forgiving Canaanite or Babylonian or Roman sins through Jewish blood; it was an
institution for atoning for Jewish sins through the blood of animals. It was not
a substitute for righteousness that allowed sinners to continue life as usual,
but a sign of new righteousness that made a life of sin unthinkable. We would
better translate the sacrificial cult by claiming that the sacrifices of
innocent animals maintained the holiness of black America, disinfecting it from
the depravity of white America. This culminated in one, and only one, atoning
human sacrifice, which did not merely rehearse the old sacrificial arrangements
and endorse their contradictions, but superseded the system by resolving them.
It was performed not by a high priest against the victim’s will, but of a high
priest according to his will. Its most important feature is also its closest
parallel with the old system: It was not performed on behalf of the innocent,
but of the guilty (Rom. 8:3-4). This act reconciled Israel so fully to God that
it rendered the sacrificial system not only unhelpful but misleading (Heb.
5-10), and opened a way even for the nations to enjoy God’s blessings. The
sacrifice of the cross is not a justification for lynchings, but an act of
radical inclusion that warns the world never to lynch again in light of God’s
vindication of Jesus its victim.[31]
“Friday’s here,” the black Church has long reminded itself, “but Sunday’s
coming.” The middle chapters of Israel’s saga remind us all that Monday is
coming too ** a day after liberation, when yesterday’s victims become today’s
repentant sinners.[32] It is on that day that freed slaves and mothers surviving
on the margin learn that they too are capable of injustice, and that the life of
their nation depends on both law and forgiveness. It is on that day that they
find a new taste in the blood they drink at Church ** the taste of freedom even
for oppressors.
The common lesson of these visions of atonement is not simply that the work of
Christ is multidimensional, nor simply that different people may legitimately
identify with different aspects of God’s work on their behalf.[33] It is that
the coherence and happy resolution of the narratives of God’s people depend upon
the harmonious interplay of all of these visions of salvation (along with
others), in order to bring survival and liberation and forgiveness and
reconciliation to people in different stages of need. Only a soteriology of
careful harmony can affirm what Miroslav Volf calls “solidarity in sin” without
mistaking it for “equality of sin.”[34] Jesus’ death and resurrection bring new
life for the dying, vindication for the innocent, amnesty for the guilty, and
peace for all.
This harmony of soteriologies is not a confusion of soteriologies. It is crucial
to the exodus story not to turn Passover into a sin offering. Any soteriology
that relies too exclusively on Anselmian atonement theory (as feudal, colonial,
and postcolonial European soteriologies conveniently have) risks doing just
that. It levels the world into a mass of common guilt, falsely condemns those
God has judged and acquitted, and showers a cheap grace on oppressors that
leaves them unjustified, unholy, unreconciled, and unsaved. Jones’ and Williams’
rejections of redemptive suffering have great force against such soteriologies.
Their critiques point traditional Western theologies toward more discerning
theodicies and accounts of suffering, and toward more just visions of
providence. But the converse is also true: It is equally dangerous to reduce
salvation to a paschal acquittal for the innocent. This would polarize
communities into camps of apparently absolute innocence and guilt, overlook the
sins of the supposedly innocent, nullify guilty verdicts on the basis of the
“victimhood” of perpetrators, and leave hardened oppressors no recourse but
further oppression and renewed cycles of violence.
Chosen to Suffer? The Problem of Election
The black Church faces a similar challenge on the matter of election. Confronted
with racist, Calvinist, and Arminian doctrines of election, American Africans
reinterpreted election according to their experience of their good but distant
creator. In response, the black Church typically taught variations on a theme
that identifies black America with Israel, as the elect people of God. Whether
African-Americans are elect as suffering servants whose mission is to witness to
God’s humanity,[35] or as people chosen along with Israel to share in Yahweh’s
liberation,[36] or as fellow blacks whose connection is genetic and whose task
is to achieve their own liberation,[37] they are elect with respect to Israel.
This causes friction when black doctrines collide with doctrines that depend on
other visions of election.
Jones affirms against Joseph Washington’s doctrine of black election to
suffering servanthood, a kenotic vision of atonement rooted in incarnation: “God
lowered himself and freely accepted the worst conditions of the human race, bar
none.”[38] God’s identification with humanity would be Barthian in its scope,
but for Jones’ stress on the Christological particularity of Jesus’ blackness.
Jesus’ identification with the oppressed over against their oppressors is
essential to the victory his life wins on their behalf. In such a vision of
salvation, election as nationhood and atonement as redemptive suffering are a
fatal combination. So Jones rejects the idea of election as national and
covenantal. He denies that God would “restrict partnership (with humanity) to an
elected people, so that they only by their obedience to a covenant might enter
into his fellowship.” His rejection of redemptive suffering likewise depends on
a context of national election: “We reject any identification of oppression and
suffering with redemption. … Blackness is not a sign of punishment for being
Black.”[39] We can more clearly see the logical fallacy he has uncovered by
transposing “Jewish” for “black”: “Jewishness is not a sign of punishment for
being Jewish.”
National election and redemptive suffering are equally fatal to Williams’ vision
of survival in the wilderness, but for opposite reasons. From their common
theodical starting point, “Is God a white racist?” black and womanist
theologians reason differently. The traditional male identification with elect
Israel-in-exodus ignores the traditional female identification with Hagar as
non-elect. For black women who “read the entire Hebrew testament from the point
of view of the non-Hebrew slave,” she says, “there is no clear indication that
God is against their perpetual enslavement.” When male black theologians make
the exodus narrative normative, their patriarchalism marginalizes the non-elect
people whom God sustains in the wilderness of their exclusion and
invisibility.[40] For Williams, national election combines with redemptive
suffering to glorify women’s surrogacy ** the defiling of the non-elect for the
benefit of the elect.
Against the idea of election as nationhood, Jones describes a soteriology of
participation in Christ’s blackness, and Williams describes a conviction that
God’s favor takes familial rather than narrowly racial shape (e.g., Hagar and
Ishmael helping each other survive in the wilderness). Yet these affirmations
are actually quite close to a Pauline doctrine of election ** when Romans and
Ephesians are read as answering the question of Jewish/Gentile relations rather
than offering individualized salvation-histories of justification by grace
through faith, as they usually are in the Lutheran, Reformed, and Arminian
traditions.[41]
Indeed, Jones’ and Williams’ affirmations depend on such a doctrine of election.
The meek, poor, and oppressed are happy (makarioi, Matt. 5:3-12 and Luke
6:20-23) not because they are oppressed, but by virtue of their Christlikeness.
God’s providence is for them, in a community overflowing with spiritual gifts.
They belong to a body liberated in Christ’s death and resurrection, brought
together for its own edification in the Spirit, as a new creation in the midst
of the old. Even Hagar’s story ends happily because of her relationship to
Abraham, and not merely in spite of it: “As for the son of the slave woman, I
will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring” (Gen. 21:13). This
connection is not made clear to Hagar,[42] but it is clear to the reader: All
the families of the earth, even the “non-elect,” are beneficiaries of God’s
choices. Only the God of Abraham and Jesus can be both the God of the wilderness
and the God of the exodus, both the God of the desert and the God of New
Jerusalem. Only this God can liberate those who survive, and forgive those who
oppress after their liberation.
Election, properly developed, is the qualification that can support biblical and
traditional accounts of the cross and resurrection, yet repudiate their abuse in
underwriting further injustice. While Romans punished Jesus ** in part for being
Jewish ** God did not. Rather, Jesus took on the sin of Israel as a living
sacrifice, at the Jordan and at Golgotha, and God accepted that sacrifice, and
liberated and exalted both the chosen Son (Luke 9:35) and the chosen people he
represents. While Sarah punished Hagar ** in part for being Egyptian? ** God did
not. Rather, God had mercy on her by virtue of the universal promise to Abraham.
Conclusion
In renarrating African America, God has been telling more than short stories.
God has given this suffering people parts in the story. Unless Christians can
tell where people’s sufferings fit into which parts of that whole story, the
gospel will fail to sustain, liberate, reconcile, or glorify. A doctrine of
providence centered in a panoramic vision of atonement and a truly biblical
doctrine of election properly locates the concrete sufferings of God’s oppressed
people in the one story of their salvation. It confuses neither America nor
Liberia with New Jerusalem.[43] It respects the redemptive power of suffering in
Christ (Col. 1:24, Eph.1:4, Rom. 8:28) without sacralizing the suffering God
sent Jesus to end. It enables theology to respect the problem of evil without
falling into a false dilemma that classifies all suffering as glorifying and
self-redemptive, or as defiling and oppressive. It honors the internal logics
and narrative forms of both black and womanist theology, while telling more than
these traditions currently tell by themselves. It also eases their tensions with
traditional theology, even as it refines their critiques in order to correct
others more effectively. The full story of God’s deliverance of African America
reflects a black American faith that speaks faithfully and truly from its
privileged perspective on God.
[1] Major Jones, The Color of God: The Concept of God in Afro-American Thought
(Macon, GA: Mercer, 1987), 17-20.
[2] James H. Evans, Jr., We Have Been Believers: An African-American Systematic
Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 56.
[3] Evans, 36-38.
[4] William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist? (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973),
115-117, quoted in Major Jones, 23-24.
[5] Major Jones, introduction.
[6] William R. Jones himself embraces an existentialist variety of free-will
theodicy he calls “humanocentric theism.” He claims that God’s gift of human
freedom makes humanity the co-creator of its existence, relegates God’s
involvement to persuasion rather than coercion, and leaves African-Americans in
charge of whether to resist or endure suffering. To alleviate suffering, they
“must desanctify it by taking it out of the hands of God. African-Americans must
rely only on themselves and seek their own liberation.” See Evans, 64-65,
referring to William R. Jones, 193.
[7] Evans, 57-58, calls this “the ungiven God” of African-American theology.
[8] Evans, 41-44, notes that this hermeneutic “decentered” the Bible’s own
salvation narrative (43).
[9] An example is the teaching of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. See
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press,
1966), 164-166.
[10] Malcolm X, 199.
[11] Evans, 41: “By identifying themselves with the Hebrews, African slaves
declared themselves as insiders in the scriptural drama. … While slaveholders
focused on ancient Israel as a slaveholding society, the African slaves saw
ancient Israel first as a nation descended from slaves.”
[12] Evans, 58, quoting Benjamin Mays, The Negro’s God: As Reflected in His
Literature (New York: Atheneum, 1969).
[13] Evans, 152. He develops a soteriology that is entirely liberative, calling
Jesus both “a political messiah or liberator, and spiritual mediator/healer”
(97). Jesus as healer and Jesus as liberator are essentially comparable
categories, especially in the gospels.
[14] J. Deotis Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), and “Black Theology in the Making,” in Cone
and Wilmore, 1:118-119.
[15] Joseph R. Washington, Jr., “Are American Negro Churches Christian?” in
James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Theology: A Documentary History, 2nd
ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 1:92-100.
[16] Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist
God-Talk (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993).
[17] Williams, 200. These claims leave me utterly confused about another claim
she makes of the black Church: “The black church cannot be made respectable
because it is already sacralized by the pain and resurrection of thousands upon
thousands of victims” (205). If sacralization by pain and resurrection is not
redemptive suffering (cf. 1 Peter 3:17-4:2, etc.) what is?
[18] In my opinion, they rescue it.
[19] Jones and Williams sometimes imply and others allege that African-American
Christianity is incompatible with Pauline soteriology. But the black soteriology
of incorporation into Israel matches Paul’s hermeneutical strategy for the
Corinthians. Because the nations are adopted into Israel when they are adopted
into Christ, Paul can tell the mainly Gentile, uncircumcised Corinthian
believers that “our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through
the sea” (1 Cor. 10:1). This resemblance should give black theologians pause
before they disown other Pauline tropes. See Williams, 4-5, 164; Jones, 98-99
(though without naming Paul). See also, for example, Orlando Patterson, Rituals
of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Civitas, 2000),
helpfully reviewed in “Dionysus and Jim Crow,” The New Republic 223 (8/28 and
9/4/2000), 9-10:42-49, here 46.
[20] God’s act of inclusion thus blesses all people, whether they are narrated
by powerful and sinful discourses, denarrated and atomized by modernity, or
renarrated by postmodern acts of their own fragmented and misdirected wills.
[21] Though for Williams wandering is first Hagar’s wandering, in appropriating
the Israelite and temptation narratives, her tradition identifies also with
Israel’s forty years of wilderness wanderings.
[22] Williams does not develop this pun in the narrative, instead focusing on
Sarah’s repression in terms of the threat Ishmael posed to Isaac’s inheritance
(cf. 27-28). The effect is a clean distinction between victor and victim. Yet
the text presents Ishmael’s “playing” (mtsakheq, “laughing”) as the occasion for
Hagar’s and his exile, and Paul interprets Ishmael’s action as persecution (Gal.
4:29). Here the effect is the depressing moral ambiguity of a troubled
household.
[23] Joseph A. Johnson, Jr., “Jesus, the Liberator,” in Cone and Wilmore,
1:203-213, here 212.
[24] Perhaps this comes from black theology’s birth as a reaction to the
integrationism of Martin Luther King, Jr., which is deeply interested in the
ethical shape of life after liberation.
[25] Evans characterizes Cone’s central concern as justification of the
oppressed before God and the grounding of true humanity in the freely given
acceptance of the oppressed by God ** “autonomy,” and Roberts’ as sanctification
of the oppressed in their relationships with God and the human family **
“community.” These are two functions of empowerment (112). Evans himself
proceeds to concentrate on liberation.
[26] Kyle Haselden, The Racial Problem in Christian Perspective (New York:
Herper & Row, 1959), 42-43, quoted by Joseph A. Johnson, Jr. in Cone and
Wilmore, 207.
[27] See Gregory L. Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).
[28] See for instance, “The White Church and Black Power,” in Jones and Wilmore,
1:68-69.
[29] Roberts in Cone and Wilmore, 121-122: “The Incarnation is the Atonement.”
[30] It is perhaps this sense that Cone can affirm in citing Mark 10:45’s
“ransom for many” as evidence that God’s freedom for the poor is more than the
liberation of slaves from bondage. See “Biblical Revelation and Social
Existence,” in Cone and Wilmore, 1:173.
[31] Cf. Patterson.
[32] Cf. Roberts in Cone and Wilmore, 1:119: “I do not accept Black liberation
versus White oppression as an adequate formula to cover the human condition of
estrangement. Therefore, I do not hesitate to suggest liberation between Blacks
and Blacks as well as between Blacks and Whites. It is unwise to make these
structures too ironclad, for suppose the oppressed became the liberated? What
happens to our theology then?”
[33] It is on these grounds that Wilmore is open to other visions of atonement,
affirming that there may be “several valid approaches to the One Eternal God,”
even white ones. See “Black Power, Black People, Theological Renewal,” in Jones
and Wilmore, 1:132.
[34] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of
Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 81-82.
[35] Joseph Washington, The Politics of God (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 158,
quoted in William R. Jones, “Theodicy and Methodology in Black Theology,” in
Cone and Wilmore, 1:144.
[36] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: Lippincott,
1970), 181. Cone redefines the Church as “that grouping [of all men] which
identifies with the suffering of the poor by becoming one with them” in “The
White Church and Black Power,” in Cone and Wilmore, 1:78.
[37] Albert B. Cleage, Jr., “The Black Messiah,” in Cone and Wilmore, 1:103.
[38] Jones, 99.
[39] Jones, 98-99.
[40] Williams, 145-148.
[41] I justify these claims more fully in Living and Active: Scripture in the
Economy of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), and The Reason for the
Season: Christology through the Liturgical Year (in progress).
[42] While Williams uses source criticism to keep this “Elohist” passage
artificially separate from chapter 16’s Yahwist passage (31), and even to imply
that the god of Abraham and the god of Hagar may be different gods (22-29), this
is surely not how African American women typically read Hagar’s story!
[43] Cf. Evans, 154: “In thought coming out of the African Diaspora, heaven is
often referred to as ‘home,’ and home often means ‘Africa.’ Hell meant the
plantations of the American south and the Caribbean, the physical and temporal
alienation that characterized slavery and colonization. Heaven meant the return
to a state of community, mutuality, and wholeness.”
