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February 28 - March 10, 2021
God did not choose the Egyptians. He chose the enslaved and this is the story evoked as Jesus begins his ministry.
Jesus’ kingly sonship is inseparable from God’s justice because Israel’s king cares for the poor.
The slave master arrangement of biblical material bore false witness about God. This remains true of quotations of the Bible in our own day that challenge our commitment to the refugee, the poor, and the disinherited.
This shows that those whom society has declared secondary receive the place of priority in the kingdom. In a society where Black lives have historically been undervalued, we can know that we have an advocate in the person of Christ.
God displays his glory precisely in rejecting the value systems
posed by the world.
It is the rejection of the world’s evaluation that lifts the soul of the Black Christian because this country has repeatedly claimed t...
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Jesus’ ministry and the kingdom that he embodies involves nothing less than the creation of a new world in which the marginalized are healed spiritually, economically, and psychologically.
The wealthy, inasmuch as they participate in and adopt the values of a society that dehumanizes people, find themselves opposing the reign of God.
Second, it can view them as souls whose experience of the here and
now should not trouble us.25 This is false religion that has little to do with Jesus.
if some secularists can look back to the greatness of our African past as the basis for Black identity now, then Black Christians can look to early African Christianity as their own.
Free Black people were able to read in the texts of the Old and New Testaments the story of a God who loved them and called them into his family.
The Black man or woman in America who goes back to Africa looking to find their roots will be surprised to find many Black and Brown ancestors staring them in the face proclaiming Christ is risen.
God’s eschatological vision is one of reconciliation.
This discussion of the Abrahamic blessing is relevant to Black identity because it shows that God’s vision for his people was
never limited to one ethnic group, culture, or nation.
The social location of African peoples who came to the text asking whether there was a place for us in this story gave them the eyes to see Genesis’s true meaning.
Jacob sees the Brown flesh and African origin of these boys as the beginning of God’s fulfillment of his promise to make Jacob a community of different nations and ethnicities, and for that reason he claims these two boys as his own.
Egypt and Africa are not outside of God’s people; African blood flows into Israel from the beginning as a fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
When it comes to the question of Black presence in the Bible, it is not a question of finding our place in someone else’s story. The Bible is first and foremost the story of God’s desire to create a people. We are encompassed within that desire.
It means that the vision of Hebrew Scriptures is one in
which the worldwide rule of the Davidic king brings longed-for justice and righteousness to all people groups.
God’s vision for his people is not for the elimination of ethnicity to form a colorblind uniformity of sanctified blandness. Instead God sees the creation of
a community of different cultures united by faith in his Son as a manifestation of the expansive nature of his grace.
this shows clearly that Africans are drawn to Christianity in much the same way as everyone else. Christ died for our sins to reconcile us to God.
This eunuch as a “despised thing” found hope in the shamed Messiah whose resurrection lifts those with imposed indignities to places of honor.
Christ, similarly, does not convey worth on ontologically inferior blackness. Those of African descent are image bearers in the same way as anyone else.
What Christ does is liberate us
to become what we are truly meant to be, redeemed and transformed cit...
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through the cross Black Christians recover their sense of self. We take comfort in the fact that the Son suffered injustice but was nonetheless vindicated by God. This gives us hope for our own vindication.
We must not lose sight of the fact that the story of Christianity ultimately belongs to the triune God who glories in bringing the nations of the world into his family.
King’s point was never that ethnicity and culture are irrelevant, but that they should not be the cause of discrimination. King often called on African Americans to take pride in their culture and heritage:
Far from being colorblind, King called on his people to look upon themselves as Black and see in that blackness something beautiful. In doing so King echoes the vision of Revelation in which each ethnicity brings its own unique glory to God.
The colorblind interpretation of Paul cuts against the grain of his entire ministry.
Paul’s point is that
being a Jew does not make you more of an heir to the promises in Christ than being a Gentile. It is a question about standing as it relates to the inheritance, not ethnic identity full stop.24
These distinct peoples, cultures, and languages are eschatological, everlasting. At the end, we do not find the elimination of difference. Instead the very diversity of cultures is a manifestation of God’s glory.
God’s eschatological vision for the reconciliation of all things in his Son requires my blackness and my neighbor’s Latina identity to endure forever. Colorblindness is sub-biblical and falls short of the glory of God.
The vision of the kingdom is incomplete without Black and Brown persons worshiping alongside white persons as part of one kingdom under the rule of one king.
When the Black Christian enters the community of faith, she is not entering a strange land. She is finding her way home.
The equal need for grace spoke to the equal worth of Black bodies and souls, making conversion to this form of Christianity a realistic possibility.
Slave masters’ fear of the Bible must bear some indirect testimony to what the slave masters thought it said. Part of them knew that their exegetical conclusions could only be maintained if the enslaved were denied firsthand experience of the text. This is evidence to my mind that Bible reading was itself an act against despair and for hope.
This bifocal appropriation of the Christian message as a power that can bring about personal and societal change is the Black Christian tradition’s gift to the American church.
Slaveholders were not disinterested exegetes. They put their lust for power and material wealth in front of the text and read the Bible from that perspective.
They wanted to make it clear that African
peoples had been a part of God’s redemptive purposes from the beginning.
Thus, for Cone, the Old Testament reveals a God of liberation who calls his people to be faithful to him because of their liberation. The New Testament, for Cone, fulfilled the Old in that Jesus’ life and ministry embodied the call for liberation and concern for the marginalized.
The hermeneutical principle for an exegesis of the scriptures is the revelation of God in Christ as the liberator of the oppressed from social oppression and to political struggle, wherein the poor recognize that their fight against poverty and injustice is not only consistent with the gospel but is the gospel of Christ.
Womanist interpretation involves, “discover[ing] the significance and validity of the biblical text for Black women who today experience the ‘tridimensional reality’ of racism, sexism, and classism.”
