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The Color of God

4/14/2011

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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.
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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.
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Liberation in White and Black

10/28/2010

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In 1998, I first walked through the doors of The Church of the Advocate (Episcopal), in North Philadelphia and found myself facing a mural that illustrates Exodus 12:29, “The Lord smote the first born of Egypt…(KJV).”  At the time, I was living and working in contexts where I was frequently the only White person present and I considered myself quite comfortable.  When I saw the painting of a fierce Black man in broken shackles driving a dagger towards the throat of a ghastly White face, I felt unsafe.  I did not want to be identified with that White face by anyone who might identify with the Black liberator.  White guilt and fear die hard sometimes.  However, I and the friend who had brought me there were the only ones in the vast space and I was both too enthralled and too proud to jump back in the car and leave.  As I learned more about the way that the other thirteen murals connected biblical narrative with the story of African American history (trans-Atlantic slave trade, the suffering of plantation slavery, the abolition movement, segregation, civil rights, Black Nationalism, urban riots) I became more fascinated, but it was years before I returned and began to understand the historical and political context of the Episcopal Church or Philadelphia with regard to race and art.
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In the meantime, while taking a walk in Valley Forge Park in the Philadelphia suburbs, I happened upon Washington Memorial Chapel (also Episcopal) and entered.  It was initially just as disturbing for me, but in a different way.   The stained glass and carvings of the church told stories populated with far more uniformed White men with muskets and bayonets than biblical figures in robes.  The stories of English Protestantism, colonial North America and the Revolutionary founding of the United States (by George Washington in particular) superseded the stories I expected to find visualized in Christian churches.  This time my trans-national Christian multiculturalism and pacifism were offended by what appeared to me to be militaristic White nationalism in the place of worship. 

Shortly thereafter, the Church of the Advocate came back to mind and I realized that these places were in a sense having a sort of visual conversation, or perhaps an iconomachy (image war) about the meaning of the Christian faith, the Bible, America and freedom or liberation.
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    Matt Hunter, Ph.D

    Multidisciplinary religious scholar and practitioner

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