wholly intersections
  • My Blog
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Intro to Theology

The Color of God

4/14/2011

1 Comment

 
So, expect this song/video from Gungor (Michael) to be the next lightening rod for rants against redefining Christianity around love.  I'll not argue one way or the other.  I like the song!  Catchy.  Happy. Seems true enough to me.  My only beef is with the video depicting God's "love" turning vegetables into candy and easing a man's road rage by giving him a pogo-stick with which to hop over offending traffic. That's some SICK privileged theodicy.  But, I'm more interested in helping people explore the ongoing question of the color of God.
In 1974 (the year of my birth), William R. Jones (a Black Unitarian Universalist minister) published "Is God a White Racist?" in C. Eric Lincoln's The Black Experience in Religion. It has since become a book (which I haven't read), but his answer in 1974 was that if we stick with our traditional (even traditional Black theology) answers to the problem of evil and suffering, we have to answer, "Yes!" Suffering in the world seems disproportionately inflicted upon dark skinned people.  Our traditional theologies also suggest that the majority of these same people will go to hell, while a more sizable proportion of White people will go to heaven. The growth of the church in the global south might help remedy the latter complaint in the long run as far as traditional theologies go.  Having rejected the deist God and the God of many traditional theologies, Jones goes on to suggest a humanocentric theology that basically leads to secular humanism (God is love and manifest exclusively in humans being humane).  It is massively unclear to me how this is a better option.  I suppose people who accept this view stop blaming God for the problems of the world??  If we have a humanocentric deity, doesn't "God" ultimately just become a symbol for the people with power?  In my view then, it seems like Jones' "God" would STILL be a white racist, given his assessment of the world.

In 1925 Countee Cullen published Color.  Cullen's poetry includes a great many poignant and pained theological poems, I limit myself here to some famous lines from "Heritage" from the aforementioned collection.

Quaint, outlandish heathen gods
     Black men fashion out of rods,
     Clay, and brittle bits of stone,
     In a likeness like their own,
     My conversion came high-priced;
     I belong to Jesus Christ,
     Preacher of Humility;
     Heathen gods are naught to me.     

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
     So I make an idle boast;
     Jesus of the twice-turned cheek,
     Lamb of God, although I speak
     With my mouth thus, in my heart
     Do I play a double part.
     Ever at Thy glowing altar
     Must my heart grow sick and falter,
     Wishing He I served were black,
     Thinking then it would not lack
     Precedent of pain to guide it,
     Let who would or might deride it;
     Surely then this flesh would know
     Yours had borne a kindred woe.
     Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,
     Daring even to give You
     Dark despairing features where,
     Crowned with dark rebellious hair,
     Patience wavers just so much as
     Mortal grief compels, while touches
     Quick and hot, of anger, rise
     To smitten cheek and weary eyes.
     Lord, forgive me if my need
     Sometimes shapes a human creed.

It does seem to me that the needs of (nearly?) every person to sense that God can empathize with us drives us to imagine God in our own image. Cullen later imagined Jesus as a lynched Black man in his 1922, "Christ Recrucified."
On the other hand, echoing the dominant strains of American masculinity, the pastor of the "other" Mars Hill Church (Seattle) once famously intoned:   "In Revelation (the last book of the New Testament), Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is the guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up."  Problems with hippie-diaper-halo-Christ aside, wasn't this the basic problem of the zealots?  Never mind.
Picture
I'm sure no one will ever get this quite right.  I know I don't.  It's much easier to do some of this via negativa.  I can tell you what's WRONG about our God-images easier than I can give you one that is right.  This might be the point of that old commandment, though the incarnation (my favorite doctrine) fouled that up a bit, and now everybody is into icons (myself included).  Let's see if doing things via negativa might lead us to a positive statement.  God IS not a white man, not a boxer, not a Jewish Che Guevera, not a Christian Che Guevera (William Wallace), not a sum of the good in humanity... not "a ninja fighting off evil samurai" (thanks Talladega Nights)... Oh, I know!
God is an unprejudiced white-hipster!!  Like me!  I feel great.
Picture
1 Comment

Religion News In A Month

4/7/2011

1 Comment

 
This is an experiment.  Let me know if you like it and it works.  Here are links to the major NYTimes religion headlines for March.  The "linker" neither endorses nor opposes (as far as you know) the opinions of the writers.

Intelligent Life Elsewhere - Is this "religion" (?) 'cause its definitely "faith."

Mexican Catholics in NYC Pack the Pews
Photo essay

Serious Catholic Troubles
Abuse Scandal 1 Priest Suspensions
Abuse Scandal 2 Finances and Native Victims

The Muslim Brotherhood in the New Egypt

In-House Fighting on the Meaning of "Pro-Israel"

Book of Mormon on Broadway (?) "Which brings us, inevitably, to the issue of sacrilege."
Follow up Article

Bach Collegium Japan performs Bach's Mass in B Minor - should this be considered an interfaith event?
"Et incarnatus est" - the reviewer doesn't say what this means.

Eat, Pray, Smear - Hindus in Queens celebrate Phagwah/Holi
Photo essay of same

Fair to Muslims?  The Congressional Hearings on Radical Islam

Give Peaceful Resistance a Chance
1 Comment

Faith to Move Money: Part 2

4/1/2011

1 Comment

 
Yesterday, I briefly reviewed Jones and Woodbridge's Health, Wealth & Happiness.  Today, I will give an overview of Part 2: Corrections, and offering a few concluding thoughts; critical and affirmative.
Chapter 4: "The Biblical Teaching on Suffering" may be the most crucial chapter in the whole book because this reality is in many ways the fulcrum of the scale that tips us into either prosperity gospel, American Dream thinking or biblical consistency.  Chapter 5: "The Biblical Teachings on Wealth and Poverty" is generally very thorough.  Given the brevity, it cannot be very deep. I think their account is preferable to prosperity gospel teaching, but is unlikely to challenge the degree to which ALL American Christian thinking is accomodated to no-holds-barred capitalism.
Chapter 6: "The Biblical Teaching on Giving" is like unto the former.  It offers a concise encouragment of generous giving and an appropriate critique of the concept of "tithing."  They encourage giving to the church and other Christian organizations and direct readers to organizations that track the financial integrity of different ministries.
The Conclusion offers some helpful questions for self-diagnosis, suggestions for dialoguing with friends who are attracted to the prosperity gospel and concise replies to common defenses of the prosperity gospel.  The include a short additional reading list, among which the most important is probably the late Gordon Fee's pamphlet The Disease of Health and Wealth Gospels, because Fee was a Pentecostal New Testament scholar in the Assemblies of God tradition.

This is a very important book for its accessibility and reliability.  These authors are not writing polemic.  It is straightforward argumentation without loathing or arrogance as far as I can tell.  They counter the most dangerous aspect of the prosperity gospel which is to victimize the suffering by blaming their circumstances on a lack of faith.  For this alone, I would commend them.

In general I think it is unfair to criticize people for not writing about what I want to read about.  However, I do think that a narrow definition of prosperity gospel may mask the degree to which many more American Christians conform to it.  Van Rheenan's article "Contextualization and Syncretism" includes the following account:

Two years ago Jim planted an evangelical Bible church. The guiding question forming
his strategy was “How can we meet the needs of the people of this community and make
this church grow?” Jim developed a core team, launched with an attendance of 300 after
six months of planning, and now has an average attendance of 900 people each Sunday.
By all appearances he is very successful. However, Jim is inwardly perturbed. He
acknowledges that his church attracts people because it caters to what people want. The
church is more a vendor of goods and services than a community of the kingdom of God.

If the medium is the message, many of our churches "preach" a gospel that tells us that being a Christian and financial prosperity are joined at the hip, even if they never say that.  New Testament scholar Ben Witherington comments on his own contact with prosperity gospel in Moscow and the "American Gospel of Conspicuous Consumption." He recommends Ron Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, which is excellent but goes too far for some people.  I wonder, as does the narrator of the Lausanne video on my last post, if I find it easy to criticize the prosperity gospel preachers and their adherents because I assume that the worlds goods will always be within my grasp one way or another. 

Another point is that while several prosperity preachers have been demonstrably exposed (or outed themselves) as scam artists exploiting people, in many cases it seems to me that prosperity congregations are not just seeking their own, but are deriving some sense of pride, prosperity, and well-being from identifying with their pastors' prosperity (which they shares by investing in organizations that serve the community even as they live in opulence).  The adherents personal ambitions are secondary in their own minds as well as their pastors. However, this is a sociological rather than a theological or biblical analysis. I still recommend Jones and Woodbridge's helpful little book, which you can buy from my friends at Hearts and Minds Books.
1 Comment

    Matt Hunter, Ph.D

    Multidisciplinary religious scholar and practitioner

    Archives

    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010

    Categories

    All
    American Religion
    Barna
    Biblical Worldview
    Christianity
    C.S. Lewis
    Data
    Dissertation
    Education
    Evangelism
    Interfaith
    Nationalism
    Patriotism
    Race
    Religion
    Religion And Pop Culture
    Religion And Pop-culture
    Religious History
    Science
    Sociology
    Teaching
    Theology
    Unchristian
    Violence
    Visual Culture
    Young Adults

    RSS Feed

    View my profile on LinkedIn
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.