The Craft of Innovative Theology. Группа авторов

The Craft of Innovative Theology - Группа авторов


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1999), 94.

      30 30 To talk of Jesus as the Wisdom of God opens possibilities. Colin Gunton has a radical inclusivity when he explains that the Wisdom of God embodied in Christ embodies all the wisdom of even non-Christian cultures. So Gunton writes, “To say that the crucified Christ is the Wisdom of God is to say that he is the key to the meaning of the whole of the created order, and therefore the source of true wisdom, wherever that is to be found.” Colin Gunton, “Christ, the Wisdom of God,” in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Wisdom in the Bible, the Church and the Contemporary World, ed. Stephen Barton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 260.

      31 31 See Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003).

      32 32 In some ways this is a defense of a kenotic Christology, although I am hesitant to formulate the precise form this took. I prefer to talk about the Eternal Wisdom interpenetrating a human life. This would mean it is not a “transformational model” (of, for example, Trenton Merricks) nor is it just relational. It is a more like a “spirit-filled” Christology. Jonathan Hill’s map of the current options in the debate is very helpful, see Anna Marmodoro and Jonathan Hill, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 1.

      33 33 I am grateful to those who took the time to read an earlier draft of this article. These include Joyce Mercer, James Farwell, Barney Hawkins, Keith Ward, and Isabella Blanchard. Finally, I am grateful for the extraordinary gift of Ms. Ellen Hawkins (a person with Down’s syndrome) who has taught me so much about faith and trust.

Part II God and Church

       Pamela D. Jones

      RESEARCH LEVEL 1

      Editors’ Introduction

      Some of the best pieces of writing start from a very simple question: How can Christians committed to the Golden Rule support slavery? No one would say that they would like to be treated as a slave. In this powerful piece of historical analysis, the author starts with this question. The answer, this author explains, is that assumptions about the inferiority of African Americans created a culture where the Golden Rule is evaded. She then develops a substantial case study. The author takes the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and divides the history into three periods: the Jim Crow Era, post the 1954 Brown decision, and the 1995 Apology. She argues that African Americans are so traumatized by the racism of the denomination that the “change of heart” may not be sufficient to heal African Americans’ mistrust and skepticism toward the denomination as racist.

      I trace the road taken by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to cope publicly with the changing racial dynamics, especially in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, and then with its efforts in 1995 to formally repudiate racism and past sins of slavery and segregation. I suspected that a major theological impediment to dismantling segregated institutions in the South after the Brown decision in 1954 was whether Christian denominations were willing to accept views that African Americans were fully human and therefore were entitled to be extended Christian love, charity, and compassion in light of their suffering during Jim Crow.

      The SBC split from Northern Baptists in 1845 over its support of slavery, supported the Confederate states, and supplied biblical justifications for African American enslavement and treatment. In the twentieth century, it retained its independence as a denomination even after other former southern and northern denominational schisms over race and slavery had begun the process of healing and reuniting. Especially in the South, the SBC fervently supported Jim Crow segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, and belief in African American inferiority. Its official resolutions and agency recommendations were often paternalistic in tone and demonstrated little interest in dismantling attitudes and policies that were central to the maintenance of the racial stigma of African American inferiority.

      How ideas of Christian charity and the Golden Rule were applied to African Americans is key to understanding how the SBC helped reinforce racial stigma against African Americans. On the one hand, it is no surprise that the language of love, charity, and the Golden Rule did not resonate in the SBC because African Americans had been stigmatized as inferior to whites based on the ideology of white supremacy. On the other hand, the SBC’s language does evolve over time, with consequences for its long-held view of African Americans. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it still believed that African American upward mobility had to be shaped by association with its white superiors. More recently, the SBC has begun to speak the language of integration and diversity while making slow strides in this direction.

      As we will see, racial stigma works in two directions. It is reciprocal. In 1995, the SBC apologized for its support of slavery and segregation. But the SBC had held on to its stigmatized view of African Americans for so long that it had itself developed the stigma of being a racist institution, due to its long-held support of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and anti-miscegenation laws. Consequently, it did not achieve the increases in African American membership and integration within its own institutions that it had hoped for.

       Box 3.1

      This is the author’s signpost that gives the reader a sense of her article. She will start by looking at the manner in which white Christians interpreted key Christian themes (such as the Golden Rule) in the debates over slavery. She will go on to track the journey of a major Christian denomination (the SBC) and then look at how, despite a changing rhetoric, African Americans are still suspicious of the SBC.

      The Use of Biblical Teachings in Arguments about Slavery

      Biblical Teachings on Christian Charity and


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