Hi again,
I am in the midst of exams, but I thought I would share this paper with you. I have spent this semester reading about things I never knew a thing about. I had no idea how horrible the Middle Passage was. I had no idea the double amount of discrimination Afro-American women deal with every day. I had never read W.E.B.Du Bois. I had never heard of womanist theology. I had never read an account of a lynching. I have spent much of this semester very emotional and not quite sure why. I have grown a lot. If you read this, perhaps you can see some places I have been stretched...
Peace Out,
Mary
Suffering Isn’t Just for Black Folks Anymore
A Critical Essay on the Works of Albert P. Raboteau
And Matthew V. Johnson
In the 2001 Harold M. Wit Lectures given at Harvard Divinity School later published and entitled A Sorrowful Joy, Albert Raboteau gives an autobiographical overview of his Christian walk and his life as an academic. In this narrative, Raboteau challenges the Afro-American community to embrace the Orthodox Church as an extension of the Black Church Tradition rather than dismissing it as an unrelated Europeans-only idiosyncratic religious expression. He argues that the Orthodox Church better honors the Black Church Tradition than the current Black Church. The reader walks on this journey of faith with Raboteau to discover the influences upon his thinking and spiritual formation as well as examining times of personal difficulty with him and witnessing how God acted in those times of trial.
In contrast to the personal narrative of Raboteau, Matthew V. Johnson uses the occasion of the Mel Gibson film, The Passion of the Christ, to discuss the Afro-American Christian use of the passion narrative as formative for theology. Johnson then uses the Passion of Christ as a lens through which to read the Afro-American experience as a group on the periphery of American life. This paper will focus on Johnson’s final section, Crucifixion and the Tragic Vision, while drawing upon themes that run across Raboteau’s entire work including Orthodoxy’s embrace of suffering and redemption and how suffering links Christians to one another. Johnson uses the suffering in the passion narrative to explain that Black suffering is redeemed by Jesus Christ in his suffering while suffering is portrayed on a personal level in Raboteau’s autobiography. Suffering causes Raboteau to change elements of his life. While the non-Afro-American reader might be able to dismiss Johnson’s work as unimportant to his life or her Anglo-centric Christianity, Johnson’s focus on the Passion, indicates how God’s saving action on the cross captured the whole of humanity. Johnson invites the Church, and the white Church in particular, to examine and adopt three distinctives of the Black Church Tradition that honor the Gospel message.
First, Johnson explains crucifixion, not the nature of its painful effects on the human body as a device of torture, but as an instrument used by the powerful to control the people of the periphery. He writes, “Crucifixion is reserved for those on the periphery as opposed to those at the center.” Afro-Americans experienced racial crucifixion in the process of slavery including its lingering forms of subjugation. This subjugation forced Afro-Americans in slavery to question their existence and whether or not they were fully human just as these questions’ ripple effects force Afro-Americans today to question the same things. Johnson explains, “Christ’s incarnation culminating in the cross, leads to a complete identification with the slave and all of humanity at its lowest and is the most concrete expression of its tragic condition.” Black Church Theology works to make sense of the artificially created sense of “other” which black folk were forced to assume. The white power structure took God hostage and began to decide salvation and worth based on race. However, because God became “other” and subsumed humanity in total, including the lowest and least powerful of humanity, Jesus suffered and thereby redeemed all people. Therefore, a sub-group of humanity cannot control Jesus or the salvation he brings in suffering, death, and resurrection. For Johnson, this first distinctive is a message that the Black Church must deliver to the world. In fact, he believes that this message is more in line with the Gospel message found in the Bible than any current expression of Christianity.
Similarly, Raboteau uses this Gospel message of suffering but centers the gospel message in the Orthodox Church rather than the Black Church. He writes, “Christianity is a religion of suffering. The suffering of Christ and of the martyrs is at the center of the Christian tradition and suffering grounds the Christian to the suffering of the world.” Christianity, especially mainline white Protestantism cannot sanitize the gospel message, as one devoid of suffering even though that might be more comfortable. Raboteau goes on to say, “As the old slaves knew, suffering can’t be evaded, it is a mark of the authenticity of faith.” Without the context of suffering, Christianity makes sense only as a “feel good” moral code. Salvation cannot play a part without suffering. Without acknowledging suffering, humanity cannot acknowledge from what it must be saved.
Secondly, Johnson focuses on the dialectic of personal and communal experiences in the Black Church Tradition. In the Afro-American Church, conversion, for example, does not occur in an isolated individual vacuum. The individual shares in the communal spiritual belief structure and therefore joins those people in the spiritual community. The corporate belief modifies the individual belief and vice versa. Because self-worth had to be created, community grew in importance in the Afro-American psyche. Afro-Americans had to grapple with “the utter threat of non-being, which, translated into psychological terms, is the threat of the meaninglessness and worthlessness of existence.” Living in the world feeling meaningless and worthless impacted the worldview of the Afro-American slave, including the view of self. Self worth had to be created by effort, an effort on the part of both the individual and the slave community. Community continues to be important in Afro-American culture. For example, something formative happened when Raboteau read slave narratives while doing his Ph.D. work. These narratives testified to the slaves enduring suffering and even triumphing in suffering. First, he changed from reading them with an academic lens to reading them with a theological lens due to the power of the story. Next, he became linked to their suffering by experiencing it in their writing. Reflecting on that experience, he writes, “I became fascinated by the voices of former slaves…not just as historical evidence but as voices that seemed to speak directly to me.” An understanding of suffering linked Raboteau with others across time and space. In this second distinctive, the Church needs this testimony of the Black Church Tradition, of the building of self and of building community to combat a culture that continually tells the self that it is omni-important and isolated. The Church needs to be reminded that Jesus Christ links all believers together into a community of faith.
In the Black Church, something considered purely individual like a conversion experience, can only be understood within the “context of the rich communal experience.” The individual exists in time and place and as a part of a certain community. The community influences the individual by encouragement or setting the stage or simply providing the expectation of conversion occurring. Yet, this communal experience does not end when the worship experience ends. Johnson explains that this communal experience influences “the intersubjective subset of alternative meanings that formed the slave community’s alternate spiritual world—a world validated only in and through their shared experiences.” The crucifixion of personhood in slavery made the communal identity and belief structure crucial to the mental health of the slave, therefore, creating a tragic view of the gospel with the Passion of Christ as the central theme. This message is not just for the Afro-American community, but is also for the world. This shared communal structure has not dissipated over time. For Johnson, this sense of community exemplifies Christ’s message and is part of the second message from the Black Church Tradition to the world. He writes, “Christ lives in and amid the community and indeed is the community, and as such his broken body mediates grace and wholeness.” Broken individuals can come together to mediate grace and wholeness to one another. Raboteau mirrors this theme of the broken bringing healing to the broken. In describing the Souls in Motion mission where he met his second wife, Raboteau notices how a “wounded” individual ministered to another wounded soul. Furthermore, he believes that the Orthodox Church best displays care for the whole person. The Church can take a cue from this theme of wholeness and draw upon the past and current suffering inherent in the Afro-American experience rather than ignore or diminish it. Likewise, the Church can use the Afro-American Church experience with suffering and pain to minister to the all members of the Church and teach the whole Church how to make sense of suffering and come to an understanding of theodicy.
Lastly, this dialectic of the personal and the communal mirrors the dialectic importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in Black Church Theology. This ability to keep the two events together makes up the final message to the world from the Black Church. Life is tragic, ripping, and painful. By living life abundantly amidst pain, the Afro-American Church shows the path to redemption. Johnson states, “The tragic subject sees reality for what it is but in the midst of it affirms life’s value out of its depth, ever overcoming through creativity and the transfiguring powers of beauty.” Raboteau argues that the Orthodox Church embraces the suffering and redemption abandoned by the Afro-American church. The Church must examine this last distinctive and begin to grapple with past and present suffering in order to circumvent future suffering. With this, the Church must heal the brokenness especially the damage done by the role the Church played and plays in slavery and racism and division.
What do we make of suffering as the Church? How do we make sense of the presence of evil in the world and the suffering it inflicts? The Church must turn and face the suffering inflicted by individual actions and actions within the groups to which individuals belong rather than run from it or deny its existence. A person with pale skin cannot simply push off slavery and the subjugation of humanity as a problem of a bygone era or of a different people. As members of American society in 2006, people participate knowingly, as well as without realizing it, in the eddies and undercurrents of racism, bias, and classism. It is when the Church adopts Johnson’s stance and hears the message of the Black Church Tradition that the Church can gain insight into the quagmire in which it sits. First, we must throw off the bonds of individualism and examine how we can work together and support one another as a community in the Church. Secondly, the Church can no longer pretend that suffering does not exist or that it does not exist in our individual lives. The Church must, like the Orthodox Church and the Black Church Tradition, begin to speak of suffering truthfully. The Church must name the suffering occurring in families today and do something about it. The Church must notice the homeless people ten yards away from the front step of the church building. The Church must find ways to discuss suffering from the pulpit, in the aisles, and in the hallways. Suffering does not only occur in a land far, far away. Every soul has bent and broken pieces and gaping holes where God can heal, and the Church needs to be brave enough to call suffering, suffering and do something about it. Lastly, we cannot ignore the dialectic of death and resurrection. Humans like to think of Jesus on Christmas, as the sweet child in the manger. The Jesus on Resurrection Day is much more dangerous because he calls humanity to change. The Church must be brave enough to cede control to God and allow God to redeem humanity in the way only God can. When suffering happens, God calls the Church to action. When the Church acknowledges suffering, suffering can change to hope. In redemption, humanity gains responsibility. The Church cannot simply “pray about” an issue. Because each human “bears the very image of the Creator,” the church bears responsibility to care for each human whether he is getting divorced, has lost his job, is being discriminated against, or suffers from depression. The Church must begin to name the suffering and take action in the name of the one who suffered for salvation.
Questions for discussion:
1. What does Black Church Theology tell the world today? What should it be telling the Church as a whole? Is the Church willing to listen? Will your congregation listen? What will it take to make that happen?
2. Now we are to the point of the semester when you wonder, so what? After spending this semester reading some difficult material and scratching the surface of the treatment of suffering and evil in Black Church Theology, what has changed in your thinking? What will you take away from this class? How has this class affected your life and/or your ministry?
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