“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” – John 1:14 (NRSV)
The late James Cone, longtime professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York and a pioneer in Black theology, recounts in his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree the fateful day in 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia when a white mob lynched Haynes Turner, a black man, because they could not find Sidney Johnson, whom they falsely accused of murdering a white man, Hampton Smith, as Turner was known to have disliked Smith. Turner’s wife, Mary, sought justice for her husband; instead the sheriff arrested her and gave her to the mob. The mob proceeded to lynch Mary in a public spectacle that included women and children. Mary, who was eight months pregnant, was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.”[1]
This gruesome reality happened again and again for nearly 90 years after the end of the American Civil War and the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, resulting in over 4000 lynchings of black Americans – women, children, and men – as a powerful assertion of white supremacy in the aftermath of the defeat of “the Southern cause.” Many remained vehement in opposing any de jure and de facto integration of black and white persons, let alone regarding and dignifying blacks as equal human beings. The white rage evidenced by lynchings and numerous brutalities, harassments, and other extrajudicial crimes executed with impunity was met with near silence from white theologians and white religious leaders in the South and in the North, all of whom were aware of what was happening to black Americans and black communities. Black activists at the time like Ida B. Wells and W.E.B Du Bois wondered how American Christianity could be silent in the face of the ravages of lynchings, how white religious leaders could square their belief in the love of God, the grace of Jesus Christ, and salvation in Christ’s death and resurrection and yet be complicit through either apathy and indifference, or outright theological justification of a “separate but equal” rapprochement post-Civil War. Silence or explicit justification provided the cover for violence against black communities, lynching being one of many forms of atrocities against black Americans. Such spectacles were often publicized in local newspapers, done in gathered crowds of hundreds of people where families of women, children, and men would treat the hanging bodies like an entertainment prop, taking pictures next to them, and for others, having family picnics underneath the dangling bodies.
Jonathan Culler, in referring to the thought of Jacques Derrida, observed: “Meaning is context bound, and context is boundless.” Let me share briefly about my ministry context. I am a Filipino American pastor theologian serving in a largely white Presbyterian congregation in one of the most affluent suburbs in America. I am also one of a very few persons of color on our church staff, on our senior staff, and our Filipino Korean American family is one of a handful of non-white families in the congregation. Following George Floyd’s death, my eldest son (17) and I joined hundreds of peaceful protesters in downtown San Diego in front of the administrative building calling for reforms in policing. That protest, along with others in the span of two weeks, resulted in both the San Diego City Council and the San Diego Police Department in making necessary policy changes with respect to use of force, police intervention, and a closer relationship with the community. My son and I experienced being tear-gassed by law enforcement, an experienced forever seared in our memory. Over the course of the subsequent days, I reached out to our Clerk of Session, who opposed what I was doing publicly, in hopes that we together might craft a proposal for our governing council to authorize a process for our congregation to begin the long, arduous work of racial justice.
The result of those summer efforts was a specially commissioned task force (we are Presbyterians, after all! We like committees) of all three pastors and congregants who represent a cross-section of the congregation. There have been calls to not focus our work on black communities, on systemic and institutional racism against black Americans. Even within our board of elders, there was a desire to focus on injustice more broadly, and to find ways to “focus on our reconciliation in Jesus Christ” and not get “hung up in the past” because “America has made great progress” and that “we should not see one another as black or white.” One of the elders urged reading Desmond Tutu’s No Future Without Forgiveness. The argument was that rather than focusing on what divides us, we should move forward as sisters and brothers in Christ already reconciled, that we should forgive each other, and move on.
Yet, I believe a more constructive move would be to follow the path that led Tutu and our South African siblings followed during and after the apartheid regime. Such a path required the following elements:
Reckoning with the truth of white supremacy and white nationalism
Confession of sin of white supremacy and white nationalism
Repentance of the sin of white supremacy and white nationalism
Reparations for and reforms toward constructive a more just, beloved community
Mutual reconciliation
I have travelled to South Africa, and I know several church leaders there. I listened very carefully to the process that South African sisters and brothers undertook to challenge the apartheid regime in its political, cultural, and theological dimensions. It was and has been the long and arduous process of reckoning with the truth, confession of sin, repentance of sin, reparations and reforms, that has enabled a gradual mutuality of reconciliation to be a present struggle but which has visible progress in South Africa. This is all to say that Tutu was able to write what he wrote after the fact, after the necessary steps to walk the way of the cross–– liturgically speaking, to confront Good Friday, to the silence of Holy Saturday, in order to get to Easter.
James Cone’s volume reminds us all too well, as with the current work we are doing at the Village Church, as with the multiple protests on America’s streets, that we must reckon with the truth of who we are and who we have been as Americans, and American Christians. Reckoning comes with education in order to be conscientized with the hard truth of America’s past and present. Lynching of thousands of Black Americans happened, even after the end of the Civil War, even after the Emancipation Proclamation. The trans-Atlantic slave trade happened. The economic structure of America’s colonies in the 17th through 19th centuries was built on slave ownership and the plantation. Voting rights for Black women occurred decades after white women were granted the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Red-lining of geographic boundaries with respect to federal home loans before and after World War II happened, causing two generations of Black Americans to not be a part of the post-WWII economic boon. And it also happened that such red-lining was undergirded by federal legislation that prohibited federal lending to or made it difficult for black Americans to receive federal assistance. Race as a social construction was codified as such with such landmark Supreme Court cases as United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).
This is all to say, we have a long way to go. And what the biblical vision showcases for us is that human specification matters as John 1:14 demonstrates, a popular Advent/Christmas text, underlining that the triune God is in solidarity with the flesh and blood of humanity, redeems actual humanity through the actual history of the eternal Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. Chalcedonian Christology emphasizes the unity-in-distinction of the two natures of Jesus Christ subsisting in unity in the one person of the Son of God. The Belhar Confession is right in grounding its call for racial equality and racial equity in the triune God, who effects reconciliation with and within humanity, in the person of Jesus Christ. Here are the opening lines of Belhar:
We believe in the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who gathers, protects and cares for the church through Word and Spirit. This, God has done since the beginning of the world and will do to the end.
We believe in one holy, universal Christian church, the communion of saints called from the entire human family.
We believe
that Christ's work of reconciliation is made manifest in the church as the community of believers who have been reconciled with God and with one another;
that unity is, therefore, both a gift and an obligation for the church of Jesus Christ; that through the working of God's Spirit it is a binding force, yet simultaneously a reality which must be earnestly pursued and sought: one which the people of God must continually be built up to attain;
So, while I agree that we are already reconciled in Jesus Christ, I argue that it is precisely on that basis of reconciliation that we have the obligation of fellow disciples of the Lord to seek the truth, to reckon with the truth, to listen to those who have been subjugated and devalued in their humanity. We must also name and confess of how we as Christians have been complicit through silence or through outright justification of any theologies or ideologies that have obscured the fullness of the humanity we have been given by the triune God, in the grace of Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit.
The work towards racial justice is no less than an act of discipleship anchored in our worship to the God who became flesh, who dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
[1] See Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 246 in James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (New York: Orbis Books, 2011), 120.
[2] https://www.pcusa.org/site_media/media/uploads/theologyandworship/pdfs/belhar.pdf. The Belhar Confession was added to the Book of Confessions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) as the twelfth confession of faith. The 2017 Synod of the Christian Reformed Church of North America (CRCNA) adopted the Belhar Confession as a contemporary testimony of faith for the CRCNA. The 2010 General Synod of the Reformed Church in America incorporated the Belhar Confession into its Book of Church Order.
This resource is part of the series More than Imago Dei: Theological Explorations on Race. Click here to explore more resources from this series.
Neal Presa is an Associate Pastor of the Village Community Presbyterian Church (Rancho Santa Fe, CA), Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Presbyterian Foundation, Visiting Professor and Scholar of the Union Theological Seminary (Dasmariñas, Philippines), Visiting Professor of Practical Theology of the International Theological Seminary (West Covina, CA), Research Fellow for Missional and Practical Theology of the University of the Free State (Bloemfontein, South Africa), and a past Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). He is a member of the of the St. Augustine Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians. Connect via Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter @NealPresa. For his publications: www.NealPresa.com
