Becoming Human: The Holy Spirit and the Rhetoric of Race

by Luke A. Powery

Rather, it is the recognition that we are more than any adjective, any difference, or any category.

Precisely what does it mean to experience oneself as a human being? In the first place, it means that the individual must have a sense of kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate kinship of family or the organic kinship that binds him ethnically or “racially” or nationally. He has to feel that he belongs to his total environment. He has a sense of being an essential part of the structural relationship that exists between him and all other [people], and between him, all other [people], and the total external environment. As a human being, then, he belongs to life and the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived. In other words, he sees himself as a part of a continuing, breathing, living existence. To be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world.

As Jürgen Moltmann writes, “The criterion for life in the Holy Spirit is and remains the discipleship of Jesus.”16 Those led by the Spirit follow Jesus and not necessarily the church, because at times, to follow Jesus means one has to resist the church. In his humanness, Jesus reveals the divine way of God’s glory. As the Spirit shapes us to become more humane, she forms us to become more human, like Jesus.

The human form of Jesus challenges a ministry with humanity to be attentive to suffering bodies, particularly marginalized ones. It is vital to affirm that “the incarnation of Jesus is proof of the importance of the body as a means of grace.”

In the Spirit, ministers take the human body seriously as a vessel of grace and goodness to be embraced as vital for doing genuinely human ministry.

This is the heart of a ministry with humanity, one that seeks to humanize the dehumanized, one that is not race-based but human-centered. The focus of Christ’s ministry is on those who have been downtrodden by the politically powerful and privileged, those who have been dehumanized and ostracized because of racialization.

To have a ministry with humanity calls us to be proximate to pain, regardless of race or life situation. Pain, struggle, and woundedness cannot be avoided. It is the broader context for ministry as a whole. Even for the topic of race and racism, “as people of faith, we are all called to attend to the suffering of one another. In order to attend to this suffering, we need to first acknowledge that it exists. Racism continues to exist and refusing to name it will not make it go away.”32 Racialization will not go away in this world, yet this does not mean that we should not strive in the Spirit toward a ministry with humanity.

These suffering, battered human bodies are not merely individualized flesh but are actually “spirited bodies in relationship.”

To have all things in common is truly aspirational and pneumatological, a desire and work of the Spirit. So often it is the racialized distinction that creates walls between humanity rather than the hoped-for “joining”38 and new realities of relationships through which we “gesture communion with our very existence.”

The Spirit opens us up to one another, and ministry with humanity strives for this opening, this new humanity in Christ (Eph. 2:15) or “cosmopolitan citizenship.”

Ministry entails human vulnerability and openness to the other, even if the other may do you harm. Further, Thurman says that “the thing that human beings need in order to realize themselves, in order that that which is potential in them might be actualized, is other human beings. We must have each other. . . . We come to ourselves in the human encounter.”

Ministry in the Spirit aims for humanness and common life and is wise enough to know that those things we might use to protect ourselves from one another can become our own “executioner.”54 Thus, rather than fight with and divide each other to destroy community, the human way is to embrace the wonder of our common finitude, our mortality.

“We are joined at the site of the dirt, and the dirt is our undeniable kin. Even geographic distance and the difference of strange tongues cannot thwart this truth—we are creatures bound together.”

In the Spirit, ministry is not about race in its social or even faulty biological framework; it is about being human and becoming more fully human, even as the community writ large is made up of different socialized races.

humans are “spawned from the womb of the earth,”61 which indicates that we are all humus, meaning “from the earth.” All humans, regardless of race or ethnicity, are from the earth, are from dust, are dust.

Human life, human beings, are fragile, are dust blown around the earth’s surface. But this is the common ground, the soil of the Spirit we have been searching for—the ground of the earth. Feet on the ground. Bodies from the ground and to the ground. Dust and ashes.

This ethic of and in the humanizing Spirit can be viewed as part of the sanctification process, a sanctification conceived as “Spiritification.” This ethic is a way of life in the Spirit and means that the Spirit is always pressing us beyond any one practice toward people, human beings, loving humans, serving humans, with the recognition that we are more alike than different.

In other words, to be human is to be together in the communion of the Spirit.

“From every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev. 7:9), together. “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs” (Acts 2:9–11), together. Baptists and Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Lutherans, Methodists and Catholics and Nazarenes, Church of God (Anderson) and Church of God (Cleveland) and Church of God in Christ, holy rollers and the frozen chosen, from east and west, north and south, meeting for fellowship at the wedding supper of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, drinking wine and eating bread. God functions with conjunctions and possesses a conjunctive imagination, not a disjunctive one.

It is the intent of life, that we, that we shall all be one people. For better or for worse we are tied together in one bundle and I can never be what I must be until you are what you must be: for better or for worse this is the only option.

Johnny Ramírez-Johnson, “Intercultural Communication Skills for a Missiology of Interdependent Mutuality,” in Can “White” People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission, ed. Love L. Sechrest, Johnny Ramírez-Johnson, and Amos Yong (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2018), 260.

To be human is to be humble, even though this may not always be obvious in our daily lives.