“O Prejudice! thou cruel monster! wilt thou ever cease to exist?”1
At the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, African Americans experienced grave losses of the civil and political rights gained after the Civil War and the Reconstruction period. The Compromise of 1877, in which the Republican Party agreed to remove the last federal troops from the South, troops whose job was to protect the rights of the freed slaves, especially their voting rights, became a harbinger of further withdrawals of the government in regard to protecting the newly won rights of African Americans.2 As Jacquelyn Grant writes of this time, “For many Black people, emancipation meant slavery without chains.”3 By the late 1890s and first decade of the new century, blacks had virtually lost the right to vote because of numerous regulations imposed upon voting such as the poll tax, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause.4
Furthermore, several important Supreme Court decisions served to reverse and annihilate any political or social gains African Americans had made. In 1883 the Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and in 1896 its separate but equal ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson case condoned segregation legally. At the dawn of the twentieth century, then, African Americans “found themselves abandoned by former friends and allies and subject to segregation, intimidation and violence. Lynching was commonplace in the South and anti-black riots occurred in cities throughout the country.”5 Under Woodrow Wilson’s administration, segregation in the federal government started by President Taft continued and became the norm. Blacks in the government were segregated, including in areas such as offices, restrooms, and restaurants. In addition, voting rights in the South were destroyed under Wilson’s administration, and African Americans experienced total disenfranchisement.6 The Taft and Wilson administrations gave in to Southern pressure and facilitated the advancement of segregation legislation.7 The Civil War and its aftermath ruptured the South economically, politically, and socially, and African Americans became the “scapegoat” for the white community.8 Anthony Pinn observes how this reality affected Southern whites: “Even destitute white Americans could compare themselves to the ‘scapegoat’ community (even middle-class blacks) and perceive the advantages resulting from whiteness. If not politically and economically, these poor white Americans were psychologically comforted by their ‘status’ in the ‘New’ South.”9
This “new South” prohibited black participation in civic and commercial life by implementing separation in schools, parks, buses, restaurants, clubs, and taxis. Ordinances were enacted that restricted African Americans to “negro blocks” and prohibited them from walking through white neighborhoods unless they worked for one of the residents. In addition, such laws often required blacks to live in poor housing owned by white landlords who often took advantage of them without fear of reprisal.10 This new South was really the old South dressed in Jim Crow garb, in which the plantation mentality still governed racial existence and racial interactions.
Along with these realities, economic hardships added additional tensions. Due to the abandonment of Reconstruction, segregation, and the destruction of the cotton crop by the boll weevil insect, many black families migrated to the North in what is known as the Great Migration, which took place from 1914 to 1930.11 Blacks obtained employment in industrial jobs, but the number of people migrating to the North outnumbered the available jobs, and Northerners resented the presence of Southern blacks whom they believed took jobs away from them. Employer racism, housing discrimination, and the Great Depression formed a potent mixture that contributed to black exploitation and suffering.12
For those blacks who remained in the South, the sharecropping system replaced the plantation structure after the Civil War. African Americans worked under oppressive circumstances, with planters exacting astronomical interest rates on crops. The rules that bound these workers to the fields were, as Calvin White Jr. notes, another form of enslavement. To be sure, this system affected poor whites as well, but coupled with the existence of Jim Crow laws that further served to dehumanize African Americans, the sharecropping system became another way to reinforce the view of black subservience and to restrict their economic progress.13
Grant describes further the plight of African Americans postslavery, post–Civil War, and post-Reconstruction: “The end of slavery as a formal, legal institution brought neither change in the image of, nor significant change in the condition of Black people in the United States. The image that Blacks were inferior and that they were intended to service white America remained intact. Consequently, when freed blacks, sought work they were relegated in the labor market to the same service jobs and menial work which had been forced upon them during slavery.”14
Even while the injustices described by Grant existed, concerted efforts by white Americans to depict black inferiority intensified in American society through the release of a book called Clansmen by Thomas Dixon and the racist movie Birth of a Nation in 1915, based upon Dixon’s book. Dixon depicts African Americans as animals and savages and continues the lies of black inhumanity promulgated during slavery. In addition, scientists argued for black inferiority based upon “studies” that claimed to reveal such inferiority due to biological and physiological differences. Thus, some circles within the academic community sanctioned views of black intellectual and physical subservience to whites.15 The permeation of such ideas and beliefs made it easier for Southerners to engage in lynching, an ugly practice that became commonplace during this period. C. Eric Lincoln provides statistics on this horrendous practice:
In the South the total abrogation of the black man’s rights was symbolized by the common practice of the savage custom of lynching, and by the social acceptance of the practice as a desirable methodology for “keeping the [n——] in his place,” and by the indisposition of any government, local, state, or federal, to do anything effective about it. In the last sixteen years of the nineteenth century, 2,500 human beings were sacrificed to the rope and faggot. Thereafter, from 1900 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the pace of the killing was more leisurely; an annual average of seventy-eight black men and women graced the magnolias, or popped and sputtered in the bonfires before the altar of white supremacy.16
The prevalence of lynching and the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan during this period “served as a constant reminder of the expendability of black bodies and the pervasiveness of the danger living in America posed to African Americans.”17 The ubiquitous ideas of black inferiority and blacks as nonhumans along with beliefs of preserving the purity of the white race contributed to the custom of lynching and to the silence emanating from both Northerners and Southerners regarding the practice. In addition, the racist views promoted by Dixon and others influenced the depictions of black men as hypersexualized rapists of white women and black women as loose and immoral people whose aims were to seduce white men.18
In light of the racist mores and conditions of the nineteenth century, a major concern of the black church was to remove the stigma of inferiority from black consciousness. Thus, the mission of the church was to impart the concept that individual worth was not ultimately promulgated by white society, but rather, given by God. The underlying premise for this belief was that God had not created blacks as inferior beings to the rest of creation.19 As the nineteenth century closed and the twentieth began, the black church still needed to address the issue of inferiority and individual worth, but it also faced a myriad of problems, not least of which was dealing with the issues outlined above. The Great Migration meant that many Northern black churches needed to address the vast influx of African Americans from the South into their communities and congregations. As will be seen below, these issues weighed heavily upon Reverdy Ransom. Similarly, the institution and enforcement of Jim Crow laws meant that Southern black churches had to address the loss of civil rights gains and the legacy of slavery that appeared in segregationist attitudes and policies. The church was the center of African American life in public and private realms, for pastors were expected to speak to black spiritual life as well as to protest and challenge segregation. They were counted upon to use the pulpit to “better the race.”20
While many black churches and pastors during this period continued the legacies of prophetic preaching and speaking out against racism and injustice bequeathed to the black church by people such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Julia Foote, and James Pennington, some black churches “tended to turn inward and address spiritual issues.”21 It is possible that the tumultuous experiences of gaining freedom, gaining rights, and then having them taken away by Jim Crow laws contributed to this inward turn by some. However, black churches continued to thrive during this period, in spite of white supremacy, segregation, and other dehumanizing tactics, and part of this flourishing came from the pivotal place churches occupied in black life. The church was the place black people came to receive education and to learn to read. It was also the place that recognized and acknowledged their humanity and worth. Moreover, it was where blacks encountered a God who loved them and sustained them, providing them with a hope and peace that, unlike legislation, could not be revoked or vetoed. It was also the place where they could interpret Scriptures for themselves, seizing hermeneutical control of the Bible and denying white supremacist interpretations.
As will be seen, Paul continues to play a major role in black scriptural interpretation during this period. This chapter will focus on Reverdy Ransom, William Seymour, Charles Harrison Mason, Ida B. Robinson, and Martin Luther King Jr., all of whom use Paul in revolutionary ways. This chapter will also discuss Howard Thurman and Albert Cleage, two prominent African American theologians and preachers whose rejection of Paul derives from the slaveholders’ use of the apostle. Thurman and Cleage believed that Jesus and Jesus’s teachings trump Paul. All these interpreters and their use or nonuse of Paul provide important glimpses into the ongoing struggle of blacks in America’s racialized environment with its “twentieth-century incarnations.”22
Reverdy Cassius Ransom, born in Flushing, Ohio, in 1861, was a graduate of Wilberforce University and was called an “inspirer of men and movements.”23 Ransom was an African Methodist Episcopal pastor who led congregations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York. In 1912 he became the editor of the A.M.E. Review, and in 1924 he became bishop in the AME Church, although he “had no strong aspiration, or desire to become a Bishop.”24 He was a social political activist who inaugurated the idea of an Institutional Church and Social Settlement House in Chicago, which he modeled after Jane Addams’s Hull House and Richard Wright Jr.’s reformulated social gospel principles.25 He implemented the Institutional Church and Social Settlement House during his time in Chicago, but the seeds for it were planted early on in his ministry.
He describes the conditions of blacks during an early pastorate in Pittsburgh. “There were hundreds of my people there [North Pittsburgh], living in wretched tenements in the alleys, and in shanty boats along the river front.”26 He goes on to say, “My first vision of the need of social service came to me as my wife and I almost daily, went through the alleys and climbed the dark stairways of the wretched tenements, or walked out on the planks to the shanty boats where our people lived on the river. My wife gathered a considerable Sunday School from these sources. We were also able to turn many to aspire in changing their material condition as well as in things of the spirit.”27 The conditions and needs he recognized in Pittsburgh among African Americans played a role in his pastorate in Chicago, albeit in a somewhat different form. When Ransom first moved to Chicago to pastor Bethel Church, he noticed that the congregation was filled every Sunday.
I preached to standing room, morning and evening the entire time I remained at Bethel. I flattered myself that the crowds of people were drawn hither by my preaching but chief contributing cause was not my preaching but the fact that Chicago’s filling up with Negroes from the South, brought there to work chiefly at the stock-yards and other industrial establishments. The number of these people increased so rapidly that the colored clergymen of the city were bewildered. They were unprepared by training, experience and vision, to cope with the moral, social and economic conditions so suddenly thrust upon them. I soon realized that the old stereotype form of church services practiced in all Negro churches fell far short of meeting the religious, moral, and social conditions that confronted them.28
To meet the growing needs of the congregation, Ransom spearheaded the development of the Men’s Sunday Club, which was the “first organization of the kind under the patronage of a Negro church.” Although primarily for men, women could also attend its monthly meetings, and it “drew no lines in regard to religion or church affiliation. All were welcome who were willing to join us to whom our moral, social, and cultural objectives appealed. The very best men and women that Chicago had to offer in the lines of religion, social, industrial, intellectual and business lines were drawn upon from Sunday to Sunday.”29 The Men’s Sunday Club provides a glimpse into what Ransom did later as the tremendous need for churches to provide services continued. He left Bethel AME Church to create the Chicago Institutional and Social Settlement Church, which was revolutionary for its time by offering a nursery; a kindergarten; cooking and sewing classes; an employment agency; manual training classes; a boys’ and girls’ club; a gym; a Men’s Forum, which discussed educational, industrial, and philosophical topics; and a Women’s Club, in which papers written by its members were read and discussed along with news from around the world. In addition, the church supplied food, clothes, and assistance to those in need, both black and white. It also stressed and provided the opportunity for black girls to read, study, and discuss black literature. Alongside such social services, the church also offered religious activities: sermons, prayers, and praise songs.30 The Institutional Church faced great opposition, however; it faced accusations that it “was not really a church.”31 Eventually Ransom left the Institutional Church and went to pastor churches elsewhere, but the Institutional Church in Chicago stands as an important monument to his belief that black pastors and the black church ought to be about “political and social justice.”32
As subversive and revolutionary as his approach to the possibilities and programs of the black church were for his time, so also were Ransom’s utilization of Pauline texts in two addresses, “The Race Problem in a Christian State” and “The Negro, the Hope or the Despair of Christianity.” Ransom begins the former essay with a depiction of Pentecost, where people from all backgrounds and nationalities were filled with the Holy Spirit. He moves from the opening chapters of Acts to Acts 17:26, where Paul, he says, stands upon Areopagus and declares to the Athenians, “[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”33 For Ransom, this declaration by Paul coheres with the teachings of Jesus, the originator of Christianity, who started the religion in the “midst of the most bitter and intense antagonisms of race and class. Yet he ignored them all, dealing alike with Jew, Samaritan, Syro-Phoenician, Greek and Roman” (64). For Ransom, Jews become the ideal race, for “God, through the Jew, was educating the world, and laying a moral and spiritual foundation. The foundation was the establishment of the one God idea” (65). The monotheistic faith of the Jews revealed not only that there was one God but also that there was one humanity. Jesus built upon this foundation the “super-structure of the Fatherhood of God and its corollary, the brotherhood of man.” Echoing the language of Ephesians 2:14–15, Ransom writes next, “The crowning object at which Jesus Christ aimed was to break down the middle wall of partition, between man and man, and to take away all the Old Testament laws and ordinances that prevented Jew and Gentile from approaching God on an equal plane. And this he did, ‘that He might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby, so making peace’” (65). According to Ransom, the “one God idea” that was the heart of the Jewish faith in Scripture manifests itself completely in Jesus, who is able to abolish totally the divisions between Jews and gentiles; Jesus makes both groups equal before God.
For Ransom, this elimination of divisions between Jews and gentiles becomes the living paradigm for eradication of divisions between blacks and whites in America. As Paul answered the Macedonians’ cry for help in Acts 16:9–12, America needs to answer the call of living up to its self-proclaimed name of a “Christian nation” (66).34 America needs to hear the cries for help from its black citizens. To do this, America must address what Ransom calls “the Race Problem,” for if the nation is to follow Christianity properly, it cannot avoid the race issue.35 He declares, “American Christianity will un-Christ itself if it refuses to strive on, until this Race Problem is not only settled, but settled right; and until this is done, however much men may temporize and seek to compromise, and cry ‘peace! peace!’ there will be no peace until this is done” (66). Since Ransom gives this address in the early 1900s, addressing the race problem “right” entails a number of issues that relate to the topics of his day, which include providing job training and opportunities for blacks, and not just training in farming and working as domestics. They should be trained as bankers, manufacturers, and business owners. The following quote sums up Ransom’s view on the topic of equal opportunity:
This nation is not rich enough in trained minds, skilled hands and cultured brains to put a discount upon the ability and aspiration of any class of its citizens, nor will it act in the spirit of Christ [Rom. 8:9; cf. Phil. 1:19] toward the black toilers of this land, until Negroes are as freely permitted to run locomotive engines as they are elevators; to work in a national bank, as they are a coal bank; to sell dry goods over the counters of the store as they are to wash them in the laundry; to work in a cotton mill, as they are in a cotton field … this and nothing less than this, is the justice which a Christian nation should be willing to give…. It would add to the nation’s strength by making so many more millions of her citizens prosperous; by permitting them to contribute to the upbuilding of the nation along with all the lines of its defense, protection, development, and growth. (70–71)
Ransom contends that African Americans should have the same job opportunities as their white counterparts, and if they do, the nation itself would benefit from a stronger economy and a stronger workforce. Citing Romans 8:9, Ransom demonstrates how the nation is to act in the “spirit of Christ” by providing equal employment. In Romans 8:9 Paul writes that “if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” Thus, Ransom provides another basis for how America will “un-Christ itself,” for if it does not treat its black citizens fairly, then it demonstrates that it really is not a Christian nation but a nation devoid of the spirit of Christ. In his use of this Pauline text, Ransom brings together the Spirit and the economical realm, thereby declaring an intricate connection between the two.
Along with advocating for equal job opportunities, Ransom decries the disenfranchisement of blacks in which they are denied the right to vote and are told to give it up and to forget getting involved in politics. The South’s suppression of the Negro vote is an egregious offense to Ransom, and he urges the “true supporters of the Christian State” to “resist in the name of God and of human liberty” (74). Working for equality was to Ransom a divine work of God with which believers participate, because in doing so they bear witness to a God who creates all people in the divine image and desires justice for every human being.
The last two issues that Ransom addresses in this speech are the brutalization and murder of African American people and the segregation sweeping the South. Ransom discusses the “rationale” given for black murder, that it is “justified by the plea that it is necessary in order to protect the homes of white men and the chastity of their women. The highest ambition of the Negro, it is claimed, is to achieve social equality with the whites, therefore, he may be beaten, hung, shot, and burned at the stake, in the name of the preservation of social purity” (74–75).36 Ransom points out America’s hypocrisy in that it projects to the world a nation that sympathizes with the oppressed in other lands, even granting asylum to those who flee persecution in their home countries. Yet within its own borders,
a Negro may be beaten with more brutality than one would dare treat a horse or even a dog, for an alleged crime against a white person, and in many instances no crime at all. He may be tortured and put to death with all the shocking horrors of savage ferocity. These things are done within the borders of this nation and have become so common that if the public conscience is not dead, it is at least asleep for the time. The perpetrators of mob violence have ceased to mask themselves, not even shielding themselves with the veil of darkness. They stalk abroad in the open light of day, quite frequently that Day, the holy Sabbath. It is made a gala day, the railroads run excursions to the scene of burning at the stake, children, reared in our Sunday Schools and Christian homes are witnesses to these scenes, while men contend with each other for ghastly trophies of the incinerated bodies of the victims. Against all these there is no united voice of protest from the American pulpit. (75–76)
In this quote Ransom refers to the common practice of lynching African American people, which had become during this period a “festive” event on Sundays. Parishioners would gather outside and have picnics as they watched black bodies being tortured, hung, and burned. It was considered a family event, as parents and children took in these scenes on Sunday afternoons. Afterward people would vie for “souvenirs,” which consisted of something from the victim, so that they might have an item to commemorate the event.37
The lack of outcry from the pulpit against these murderous practices as well as the silence of the president, the Congress, and the press cause Ransom to ask if this Christian nation has simply acquiesced to such behavior as normal. In addition to this vicious violence experienced by African Americans, Ransom highlights the crime of segregation, which further inflicts African American bodies, minds, souls, and spirits. He describes this as another way for the “public sentiment of this nation to humiliate and to degradate the Negro” (76). Ransom characterizes the broad reach of the segregation arm, for it extends to every area and facet of societal life. “[The Negro] has been rigorously segregated by being generally refused admission to places of public resort, entertainment and amusement, and upon equal terms upon the common carriers. In the South upon the railroads he is forced to ride in a separate car, with inferior accommodations, though paying first-class fare; forced to ride there no matter what his education, wealth, character or culture. He is excluded from parks, libraries, museums, and even Young Men’s Christian Associations. If this be the spirit of Jesus [Phil. 1:19], then give us Mohammed or any other redeemer!” (76).
The reality of segregation demonstrated that the spirit of Jesus was not operating in these policies and that the Christianity of this nation was potentially “un-Christing” itself. The solution for Ransom was the one God idea with which he began his address. He writes, “As God is above man, so man is above race” (77). God’s transcendence of humanity becomes the basis for humanity’s ability to reject racism in all its forms. God creates human beings above the divisive tendencies around race and in Christ destroys the divisions that human beings erect. Ransom wants his audience to know that every human being is connected to every other human being, whether or not he or she realizes it. “The white millions of this nation can never lift themselves up in Christianity and civilization by beating back and trampling under foot the simple rights and aspirations of ten million blacks” (76). Ransom knew that true Christianity was not about the suppression and oppression of one group at the expense of another, for this was not God’s design for humanity and not what Christ’s death accomplished. Returning to Pauline language (Eph. 2:14), Ransom writes, “There is nothing to fear by forever demolishing every wall, religious, political, industrial, social, that separates man from his brotherman” (77). Ransom expands Paul’s idea of the demolition of the wall between Jews and gentiles to include every religious, political, industrial, and social division. The gospel is not about destroying divisions only between races but also any other division that arises from human identity markers, which serve to separate and disconnect people from the common bond of humanity in each other. Just as God taught the world the one God idea through the Jewish race, God will use both white and black to teach the world about the unity of humanity, for they will become “school masters of all the world, teaching by example the doctrines of the brotherhood of man” (77).
Ransom also incorporates Pauline language at important junctures in his speech “The Negro, the Hope or the Despair of Christianity.”38 Ransom begins the speech with recognition that the world itself is changing, economically, religiously, and socially. Yet he avers that although change is rampant, fundamental and basic truths remain throughout time.39 Christianity, he declares, bases its authority upon Jesus’s teachings and the writings of the New Testament, and he argues that America’s democracy itself finds its basis in the teachings of Jesus. Jesus teaches that “God is the father of all mankind; all people of every race are brothers and sisters, and are therefore equals” (2). Jesus’s teaching emphasizes love of God and love of neighbor, and so characterizes the heart of the gospel. Ransom interprets America as the new Babel, and the human race that was scattered long ago across the earth has now met again on American soil, offering all people a “common meeting place.” At this “common meeting place,” “representatives of every family of the human race here under one flag, speaking one language, dominated by a common religious faith,” ought to be able to live out the brotherhood that Jesus taught. If they cannot do so, then the “case for Christianity is hopeless” (3). For Ransom, Christianity, because of its basis in love, has the power to unite all people across ethnic, social, and economic divides. In fact, Ransom believes that such divisions disappear if and when the gospel is preached correctly and embraced completely.
Ransom moves on to discuss Epicureanism and Stoicism, which existed during the time of early Christianity, and he argues that these philosophies, although offering valuable insights into the world and the human condition, were nevertheless focused on individual existence. They “failed to give a concrete program for the realization of practical social values” (4). The Christian faith, however, offers such a program and thereby addresses the failure of these philosophies. “Under the teachings of the Christian faith all followers of Jesus are committed to a concrete program of social salvation growing out of their relationship to God through Jesus Christ. While the weapons of its warfare are not carnal [2 Cor. 10:4], the Christian faith has its arsenal filled with an inexhaustible store of moral and spiritual weapons [2 Cor. 10:4; Eph. 6:13–18]. The cross of Christ is the symbol under which it goes forth in the way of life taught by Jesus, for the reconstruction of society by moral and spiritual conquest” (4). The Christian faith, in Ransom’s view, integrally links the individual and the social. Out of one’s personal relationship to God through Christ comes the person’s new relationship to the social sphere. In other words, a person’s individual experience of salvation will have societal implications, which include the changing of power structures and systems that do not embrace Jesus’s love ethic and ethic of equality. For Ransom, salvation is not just about saving the individual but is also about liberating the social—the community, the society, the nation—for society suffers from contamination of social sin such as prejudice and oppression.
Moreover, Paul’s emphasis on the cross as the center of the gospel becomes for Ransom the basis for the reconstruction of society, that is, the concrete program of social salvation. The cross enables transformation of society, morally and spiritually. In another essay, entitled “The Coming Vision,” Ransom again emphasizes the cross as the place of unity and brotherhood, stating so eloquently:
But our highest goal is not a unified church, but a unified humanity in the bonds of brotherhood. The wise men from the East were guided by a star, but wiser men of our unfolding, coming from the four corners of the earth, are guided by a higher vision. They seek not a manger but a cross where all men stand with equal footing on common ground. It is the final stand of humanity’s last retreat. All other meeting places have failed. For all ages men have tried the decisions of the battlefield, the prerogatives of kings, the decisions of courts, the enactments of parliaments, and union of great power seeking to underwrite the peace of the world. All these have left in their trail misery and chaos, division, and strife. But at the cross one man is lifted up so high above all the causes that divide, and his arms are extended so wide that they enfold in their loving embrace every tribe, kindred, tongue, and nation, to bind them together with his wounded hands in the everlasting bonds of brotherhood and love.40
Just as the cross was central to Paul’s proclamation, so too with Ransom the cross is the heart of the gospel’s call to unity. At the cross all people stand equally before God, and this equality at the cross should transfer to human social relationships. On the cross Jesus is lifted high above all divisions, and his outstretched arms embrace every person, no matter their race or their language. To see the cross in this light is to understand God’s vision for humanity.
Such a view of the cross coheres with what one finds in his essay “The Negro, the Hope or the Despair of Christianity.” Ransom links social salvation with the Pauline language of 2 Corinthians 10:4, where the apostle contends that the weapons he utilizes are not physical weapons but weapons that God empowers, and so they are effective in carrying out God’s divine purposes for social transformation. Like the apostle, Ransom characterizes the weapons of the faith as spiritual and moral in nature. Although at this point in the speech Ransom does not delineate what these weapons entail, earlier in the address he speaks of the “Supreme Law of Love,” loving one’s neighbor as oneself and doing unto each other what each person would want done to him or her. These are likely the weapons he envisions at this moment in his lecture. Interestingly, Ransom does not understand these weapons as destructive in nature or intent but rather as contributing to the “reconstruction of society” (“The Negro,” 4). Rather than seeing warfare as something evil or inappropriate, Ransom perceives the positive outcome of this spiritual battle. Society’s reconstruction, desperately needed because of the invasive power of sin, can only come about through employment of the inexhaustible arsenal of the spiritual weapons of love, justice, and truth. Paul’s language becomes a way to express what social salvation means—the reconstruction of a society, in which racism, oppression, and injustice no longer exist and where God’s highest ideals of human sisterhood and brotherhood flourish. In addition to functioning as a clarion call for social salvation and transformation, the apostle’s words also function for Ransom as an indictment upon current American society, for the way things are is not the way things should be.
The real test of Christianity is the presence of the American Negro, declares Ransom, for it is in the treatment of African Americans that one sees how Christian this nation really is. The Negro stands as a “challenge to the earnestness of its [the nation’s] faith, the strength of its courage, and the depth and sincerity of its love” (4). Ransom merges the nation and the church, calling America a “household of faith” [Gal. 6:10; cf. Eph. 2:19] in his critique of the nation’s inability and unwillingness to repent or confess any guilt over its treatment of black Americans. In Galatians 6:10, where Paul utilizes this phrase, he admonishes the Galatians to do good to all people, but especially to those of the household of faith. By echoing this verse and invoking this phrase, Ransom draws a distinct contrast between what Paul admonishes and what white American Christians do to their fellow black Christian sisters and brothers.
Although all are one through Christ and live together in one household of faith, injustice and oppression by white Christians upon black Americans dominate. Whites are not “doing good” to their fellow believers, Ransom laments; rather, “at this very moment our Negro population stands politically, socially, and economically, ruthlessly disinherited by their white fellow Christians…. For three hundred years, our Negro population has been a stone of stumbling and rock of offense [Rom. 9:33; 1 Cor. 1:23] to American Christianity. Has the Gospel of Jesus Christ the power to transform men and bring them into brotherhood and love across the differences of color and race? America faces that test” (5). In Romans 9:33, the stumbling stone is Jesus, and in 1 Corinthians 1:23 the gospel becomes a stumbling block. Yet Ransom substitutes the American Negro for both Jesus and the gospel. By echoing Paul’s language and applying it to African Americans, Ransom underscores the grave division present in American culture over the plight of blacks. As the gospel was not understood or accepted by many Jews and Greeks in the apostle’s day, and was a stumbling block and offense to them, so too are blacks not accepted and understood in Ransom’s time. Unlike Paul’s day, however, where the gospel was relatively new on the scene, Ransom emphasizes the time dimension of the African Americans’ situation. For three centuries this Christian nation has not accepted its black citizens, but instead has treated them as less than human beings.
Therefore, the disillusionment of blacks is great, Ransom proclaims, because at one time blacks believed that Christianity, along with hard work, morality, and education, would enable them to achieve equal rights, but they have unfortunately begun to realize that Jesus “has not been able to break the American color line” (5–6).41 Although the government eliminated slavery, the nation through its laws and policies strategically stops and blocks any political, social, or economic progress African Americans make. The following quote by Ransom sums up the African Americans’ plight: “Before the doors of every church and school, before every court of justice and hall of legislation, at all the places of public necessity and amusement, public convenience and recreation, and in all the avenues of labor, business, commerce, and trade, the Negro stands rejected” (6). The amount of resistance and opposition blacks face in every arena of life leads to many feeling disappointed and skeptical about the future.
Despite the presence of great discouragement in the current state of affairs, Ransom remains hopeful regarding blacks’ future and, as a result, America’s future. Like Jesus and the gospel, the proclamation of which saves humanity, African Americans will rise as salvation and healing to the nations who are in desperate need of divine deliverance. Ransom believes that a Negro prophet will arise in the spirit of Ezekiel and prophesy to the “dry bones of our civilization until they are united, clothed with flesh that knows no distinction of race, pulsate with the warm blood of our common human brotherhood and be made alive by the spirit of God dwelling in their hearts [1 Cor. 3:16; 15:22]” (7). Along with Ezekiel, Ransom employs Paul to describe the prophetic role of African Americans and the salvific function that blacks will have in the nation. Here Ransom upholds the black prophetic tradition in which African Americans speak out against injustice and oppression and proclaim God’s purpose of sisterhood and brotherhood for humanity. Through their prophetic voice, blacks will bring to life a new people whose identity is shaped by the true gospel and formed by the Spirit. Just as Jesus, the stumbling block, becomes the chief cornerstone (1 Cor. 1:23; Eph. 2:20), here African Americans, who are a stumbling block and rock of offense, become the chief cornerstone for society’s reconstruction, the foundation for the building of the household of faith through their prophetic gift. African Americans, then, become central to Ransom’s idea of social salvation.
Reverdy Ransom’s speeches epitomize what Frederick Ware raises as an important aspect of black theology: “Black theology understands sin as something that is social and not just personal only.”42 Ransom’s pointed designation of social salvation indicates that he extends the idea of salvation beyond an individual accepting Christ as Savior. Salvation for him is holistic, transforming the individual but also reconfiguring society. “The inordinate focus on individual acts leads to an oversight of the social practices, maintained by a complex web of individual actions that are oppressive to certain groups of persons in society. African American theologians contend that the matter of sin cannot be limited to a discussion or corrective of personal conduct. Sin must be dealt with in its social manifestation. Since sin is manifested socially, it needs to be addressed in a social manner…. Salvation is personal but it is not individualistic; it is a possibility for the entire human society.”43 Ware’s comments represent the core of Ransom’s theological trajectory: salvation is comprehensive, changing individual people and simultaneously converting systems, communities, governments, and nations.
William Seymour, born to former slaves, was the pastor of the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission at 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles, California.44 The Pentecostal revival that took place in this mission spread throughout the world, and its monumental impact exists to the present day. Larry Martin characterizes the significance of Seymour for American religious history: “If Seymour was not a black man, his rise from poverty to become pastor of one of America’s greatest revivals would be remarkable. Because he was a black man in an era charged with racial hatred his accomplishments go beyond remarkable; they are truly supernatural.”45 Although Seymour had come to Los Angeles to be an associate pastor of an African American Holiness congregation, theological disagreement caused Seymour to leave the church and to begin a home Bible study. During this time, he and several of the attendees experienced the phenomenon of speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, and news of this event spread. Attendance grew, and eventually the group, led by Seymour, rented the building at 312 Azusa Street. The events taking place at the Azusa Street mission caught the attention of the media, and numerous news reports were written about the activities occurring there.46
Calvin White emphasizes the social significance of the Azusa Street event and its coverage in the media. He writes, “Working-class blacks especially enjoyed hearing the news that a black man of their class standing had gained national attention. Moreover, newspapers reported that inter-racial crowds assembled to hear Seymour, standing in direct contradiction to the Jim Crow laws that blacks despised. During a time when black men possessed little to no authority over whites and the widely held assumption of black inferiority permeated throughout society, no matter how insignificant, Seymour brought hope. As he stood before the interracial crowds and commanded their attention, Seymour channeled the dreams of equality of thousands of blacks.”47 The overturning of racial division and segregation, evidenced by Seymour’s leadership and made possible through the outpouring of the Spirit, could be seen in the worship services at the Azusa Street revival. Frank Bartleman, a participant and eyewitness of the events, writes that at Azusa Street “the ‘color line’ was washed away in the blood”48 and “no subjects or sermons were announced ahead of time, and no special speakers for such an hour. No one knew what might be coming, what God would do…. We had no ‘respect of persons.’ The rich and educated were the same as the poor and ignorant…. We only recognized God. All were equal. No flesh might glory in His presence.”49 Estrelda Alexander captures the essence of these services in the following descriptions: “Camp meeting style worship services were held daily, generally lasting for several hours and running from ten in the morning until midnight. These ecstatic services included, along with speaking in tongues, impromptu sermons, prophesying, singing in tongues, interpretation of tongues, conversions, divine healing, and exorcisms…. Another prominent feature of these meetings was their radically egalitarian nature. People of different races came together in an unprecedented manner to experience this ‘new religion.’ Blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians worshiped side by side.”50 Seymour himself describes the international and interracial dimensions of the revival: “People from all nations came and got their cup full. Some came from Africa, some came from India, China, Japan, and England.”51
Along with racial harmony, class and gender equality occurred in the services at Azusa Street. Again, Frank Bartleman: “In honor we ‘preferred one another.’ The Lord was liable to burst through any one. We prayed for this continually. Someone would finally get up anointed for the message. All seemed to recognize this and gave way. It might be a child, a woman, or a man. It might be from the back seat, or from the front. It made no difference. We rejoiced that God was working.”52 Alexander, noting the eyewitness accounts of Bartleman and others, writes, “Though most worshipers were from lower and working classes, there was no stratification by class, race, gender, or age in participation or leadership in the services. Women, as well as men, enjoyed freedom to minister within the services as they felt God leading them. Even children who felt inspired by God had a voice in the worship.”53 Early on, the services at Azusa Street exhibited a racial and gender egalitarianism that was not common in those days. To paraphrase Albert Raboteau, the outpouring of the Spirit during this revival demonstrated the Spirit’s potential of bending the seemingly inflexible positions of racial segregation and gender hierarchy.54
According to Alexander, the revival lasted eight years (1906–1914), and by the time it ended, more than twenty Pentecostal denominations and hundreds of Pentecostal congregations had come into existence.55 Twenty years after the revival, more Pentecostal denominations had been formed and thousands of Pentecostal congregations had been founded. In addition, hundreds of existing churches became Pentecostal.56 The message of Spirit baptism resounded from Azusa Street throughout the world and remains a significant part of Christianity in America and globally, as evidenced by the statistics.57
In the introduction to his book A Reader in Pentecostal Theology: Voices from the First Generation, Douglas Jacobsen asks the following two questions: “What is it that distinguishes [Pentecostals] from the wide variety of other Christian traditions that exist in the world? What sets pentecostalism apart?”58 His answers are instructive for our ensuing examinations of William Seymour, Charles Mason, and Ida B. Robinson. He writes, “Pentecostalism is Spirit-centered faith. It is the belief in the present-day power of the Holy Spirit to work miracles and supernaturally change lives…. In terms of religious practices, the Spirit-inspired ability to speak in ‘tongues’ (also known as ‘glossolalia’) is what makes pentecostalism different.” This “Spirit-centered faith” is central in the sermons and writings of Seymour, Mason, and Robinson. These Pentecostal hermeneuts emphasize Paul’s language regarding the Spirit and the Spirit’s power to speak and transform racial relations, economics, and society at large.
Jacobsen describes the importance of glossolalia for Pentecostal believers. They are “convinced that speaking in tongues is a special form of communication inspired by God, and they derive profound meaning from the experience. Even if speaking in tongues is not a language in any usual sense of the term, something significant occurs when people engage in it.” Glossolalia is also described by some Pentecostals as receiving the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” and is the sign that one has undergone this type of baptism. Integral to the baptism of the Holy Spirit is the transformation wrought by the Spirit’s presence to the believer’s character, faith, and ministry.59 Important also to Pentecostal belief and tradition is the serious role that religious experience has for doing Christian theology.60 Pentecostals’ pneumatological emphasis on “experienced presence” is a vital voice in African American religious history.61
Although the story of Acts 2 plays a prominent role in Seymour’s understanding of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, so too do the letters of Paul, particularly 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians, and Hebrews. Seymour’s sermons “Receive Ye the Holy Ghost” and “Gifts of the Spirit” utilize texts from all these letters. In “Receive Ye the Holy Ghost,” Seymour outlines his view of the different steps of the salvation experience. Citing Romans 5:1, Seymour contends that when one repents and receives forgiveness of sins, the “pardoned sinner becomes a child of God in justification.”62 This is what he calls the “first work of grace.”63 The second work of grace is sanctification, which comes about by the power of Jesus’s blood and the Holy Ghost. Citing Hebrews 10:14–15 and Hebrews 2:11, Seymour contends that the gift of sanctification prepares the believer for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Although many believers are consecrated, sanctified, and cleansed from sin, many have not had a “real personal Pentecost,” which God promises in 2 Corinthians 1:21–22: “Now he which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God, who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.”64 The present baptism of the Spirit is, according to Seymour, the third step and God’s sealing of the believer until the eschaton. Thus, the experience of the Spirit has present and future implications.
In his sermon “Gifts of the Spirit,” he employs 1 Corinthians 12:1 as the foundational text: “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you ignorant.” Seymour cites this passage at the beginning of the sermon and then proceeds to describe the Corinthian community to which Paul wrote. They did not know their “privileges in this blessed gospel” and so did not know that the gospel of Christ is the “power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth [Rom. 1:16].”65 For him the Corinthians’ ignorance corresponds to that of believers in Seymour’s own context. For Seymour, the baptism of the Spirit is important because it is the Spirit that empowers the believer to live a holy and sanctified life before God and others. Just as important as the Spirit’s power is the fruit of the Spirit, which should characterize every believer’s life. The cure for believers’ ignorance regarding all that God wills for their lives is to search and study the Scriptures and to follow the Spirit’s leading.66
Seymour also addresses those who criticize the gift of speaking in tongues and ask what good it does when you do not know what you are talking about. Seymour answers that Paul instructs us to desire spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 14) and that every gift God gives is good. Thus, the gift of speaking in tongues is not to be worshiped, but it is not to be rejected or despised either. The gift is for God’s glory and not for self-aggrandizement.67 For Seymour, as for other Pentecostals, gifts of the Spirit are a present reality, and all the gifts and miracles that took place in the New Testament are available to believers if only they would ask for them.68
Paul’s words on sanctification in 1 Thessalonians were also instrumental to Seymour’s teaching about the Holy Spirit: “For this is the will of God, even your sanctification” (4:3). In his sermon “Sanctified on the Cross,” Seymour interprets this passage to his audience along with Romans 6:6–7: “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin”: “So it is His will for every soul to be saved from all sin, actual and original…. So it takes the death of the old man in order that Christ might be sanctified in us…. God is calling His people to true holiness in these days.”69 Sanctification “makes us holy and destroys the breed of sin, the love of sin and carnality.”70 Seymour proclaims the need for sanctification because it creates purity of heart, purity of body and soul. The Spirit desires to lead believers out of sin and to help them live clean lives before the world. Once one is sanctified, one is prepared to “get into one accord for the gift or power of the Holy Ghost, and God will come in like a rushing mighty wind and fill every heart with the power of the Holy Spirit.”71 Thus, human beings become the Spirit’s “instruments,” and the display of the Spirit’s power causes people to see the reality of Jesus Christ.72 Important to Seymour’s understanding of the Spirit’s presence in the believer’s life is the following statement: “When you have the Holy Ghost, you have an empire, a power within yourself…. So when we get the power of the Holy Ghost, we will see the heavens open and the Holy Ghost power falling on earth, power over sickness, diseases and death.”73 In light of Seymour’s social location and the social location of many in his audience, one cannot help but think about the power of these words. In the midst of what may be happening throughout the country, such as segregation and lynchings, Paul’s words enable Seymour to ask the question, “Where is true power located?” It is located in the Holy Ghost. William Turner describes this sense of power: “Such empowerment from above enabled one to stand over against the world. Despite calamity, suffering, and hostile culture, there is access to power from this spiritual realm, which provides toughness, resilience, inner fortitude, and endurance to defy odds of every sort. This sense of interpenetration between the spiritual and the objective realms provided for a posture in which life, destiny, and fortunes were not dictated finally by the surrounding culture.”74 Turner’s words help to underscore the significance of the Spirit’s power for Seymour and others at Azusa Street. Seymour takes Paul’s depiction of the Spirit and the Spirit’s gifts as power to mean that, despite the awful realities of everyday life that he and his audience may face, the Spirit provides them with “a toughness,” a “resilience,” to use Turner’s words, that enables them not only to endure but to overcome. So the Spirit as a power, as an empire, as Seymour states, is an empire that is more powerful than the American empire or the nation’s laws. Seymour preaches Paul in a way that reveals the authority and power of God and God’s Spirit over against societal discrimination and realities.
God’s Spirit is depicted as an empowering entity, but this empowerment not only benefits the believer but also enables the believer to help those in need, such as those suffering illnesses and near death.75 Whereas Seymour does speak of a personal Pentecost, he says it is for the “enduement of power for service and work.”76 Baptism of the Spirit has an outward focus, empowering believers for service in the world.
Part of this outward focus includes providing financial assistance to those in need. In his sermon “Money Matters,” Seymour rejects what appears to be misunderstandings by those in the congregation about not needing to work since they have the baptism of the Spirit. These people have been listening to false teachers who tell them to “sell out,” give away all their money, and leave their families. Apparently some were in fact leaving their families to go out and preach the gospel and neglecting their jobs. Seymour rejects these false teachings, proclaiming that “We let the Spirit lead people and tell them what they ought to give…. God does not tell you to forsake your family. He says if you do not provide for your own you are worse than an infidel [1 Tim. 5:8].”77 To counter these erroneous notions, Seymour cites Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 5:8, in which the apostle advises Timothy that “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” Seymour thus rebukes those in the congregation who utilize faith as a way to deny their family responsibilities; they are to take care of their own households. If they do not take care of their families, they betray their faith; they do not exhibit it.
Furthermore, Seymour quotes Paul’s admonition in Ephesians 4:28: “Let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth,” and 1 Corinthians 16:1–2: “Now concerning the collection for the saints, … upon the first day of the week let everyone of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him.”78 Seymour focuses on the apostle’s admonition to give to those who need. To be able to help those in financial straits, believers need to work and have finances themselves. In addition, Seymour maintains that leaders should not tell people what to give because that “would not be the Spirit of the Lord.” Instead, “We let the Spirit lead people and tell them what they ought to give.”79 As the church in Corinth contributed to Paul’s collection for the Jerusalem saints, Seymour lifts them up as examples of how believers in his time need to work so that they can utilize their income in a similar manner to assist those in need. Moreover, the Spirit will lead them as to how much to give and to whom to give. Contrary to those who believed that Spirit baptism negated work, Seymour maintained, “We must know our calling. We can work when baptized with the Holy Ghost.”80 The apostle’s words in Ephesians 4:28 and 1 Corinthians 16:1–2 enable Seymour to emphasize the Spirit’s role in giving and the divine expectation that believers work and contribute to the needy. Consequently, Seymour underscores practical application of Spirit baptism.
Along with utilizing Paul to speak of the Spirit’s significance and the Spirit’s power to heal, to help the believer live a holy life, and to lead in giving, Seymour also employs Paul to address racism in his congregation. While early on the Azusa Street congregation consisted of different races worshiping together, racial tension arose later because of whites’ prejudice against blacks. Seymour describes the situation in his “Apostolic Address,” and his description exhibits his use of Paul to attempt to rectify it:
Very soon division arose through some of our brethren, and the Holy Spirit was grieved [Eph. 4:30]. We want all of our white brethren and white sisters to feel free in our churches and missions, in spite of all the trouble we have had with some of our white brethren in causing diversion, and spreading wild fire and fanaticism. Some of our colored brethren caught the disease of this spirit of division also. We find according to God’s word [that we are] to be one in the Holy Spirit, not in the flesh; but in the Holy Spirit, for we are one body. 1 Cor. 12:12–14. If some of our white brethren have prejudices and discrimination (Gal. 2:11–20), we can’t do it, because God calls us to follow the Bible…. We must love all men as Christ commands. (Heb. 12:14)81
Several interesting Pauline elements appear in Seymour’s description of the divisions taking place at Azusa Street. First of all, he echoes Ephesians 4:30, where Paul writes that believers should “grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.” Seymour views the occurrence of divisions as actions that cause the Spirit pain and grief, and the apostle’s language enables him to depict the gravity of the situation not only from a human standpoint but also from a divine perspective. God’s Spirit laments when racism takes place. Similarly, Paul’s language of unity in 1 Corinthians 12 with which he addresses the divisions in Corinth becomes the apostle’s words through Seymour to address the racial tensions at Azusa Street. Just as the Corinthians did not understand their call to unity in the Spirit, so too some of the white and black people at Azusa Street did not understand their call to be one body regardless of race.
In 1 Corinthians 12:12–14, Paul writes, “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many.” Seymour’s statements that in the Holy Spirit believers are one body echo Paul’s language in these verses and indicate that Seymour believes the baptism of the Holy Spirit is not just an individual experience but is a communal one as well, for the experience of the Spirit has social consequences. The bodily manifestations of Spirit baptism, such as glossolalia, divine healings, and ecstatic behavior, have communal body implications for the larger body of Christ as well, and one of those ramifications is racial unity. The Spirit makes racial unity possible and obliterates racial hierarchy. The social repercussions of a Spirit experience come to the fore again in the next statements Seymour makes.
When Seymour writes that “If some of our white brethren have prejudices and discrimination,” he cites Galatians 2:11–20, the episode in Antioch where Peter withdraws from the gentiles while eating. Paul writes, “But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed. For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision. And the other Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation” (2:11–13). By selecting this passage, Seymour is in effect interpreting Peter’s decision to separate from the gentiles during meals as an instance of prejudice. In doing so, Seymour aligns the actions of the whites in his congregation with that of Peter. Just as Peter’s actions were deemed by Paul as not “according to the truth of the gospel” (2:14), Seymour views whites’ racism as not in line with the gospel by which they claim to live. Interesting also is how Seymour characterizes the behavior of some of the blacks in the congregation, who follow their white peers by catching the “disease of this spirit of division.” This too corresponds with Paul’s description of what happened when Peter separated himself from the gentiles. Other Jews followed his example: “And the other Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation.” In an incisive move, Seymour compares what happened in Paul’s day to what is happening in his day. Just as some Jews followed Peter’s erroneous example by separating themselves from gentiles, some blacks were following the wrong example of their white counterparts by advocating division.
Whereas Seymour aligns the whites in his congregation with Peter, he implicitly aligns himself with Paul. As Paul took it upon himself to rebuke Peter openly and to charge him with hypocrisy, Seymour, like Paul, publicly rebukes the whites in his midst in this “Apostolic Address” and names their actions as wrong.82 He also admonishes the blacks in his congregation not to follow the behavior of the whites. He states that although they (the whites) may be prejudiced, we cannot do that because we are called to follow the biblical command to love everyone. Here blacks are called upon to act in a way that is true to biblical faith and to distinguish themselves from their white counterparts.83
The analysis of Seymour demonstrates that early on in Pentecostalism, Pentecostals were thinking seriously about their “Spirit-centered faith” and how the Spirit experience guides one’s engagement with the world.84 Jacobsen notes a common caricature of Pentecostalism, that its emphasis on experience of the Spirit negates an intellectual aspect. Jacobsen rightly critiques such a stereotype, writing that the “truth is that pentecostal Christians do think about their faith. They always have. They have engaged in theological reflection since the very beginning of the movement, and they continue to do so today. The popular stereotype is wrong.”85 Our analysis of Seymour illustrates the assertions of Jacobsen that Pentecostals have always thought about their faith, and at the center of their intellectual and theological engagement is Paul.
In this volume we have seen instances in which instead of the common framework of white ministers having Paul preach to blacks, blacks utilize Paul to preach to whites about their racism. Here, too, a black pastor, William Seymour, employs Paul to articulate the implications of Spirit baptism for everyday life and the practical theology that flows out of a Spirit experience. A Spirit-empowered life affects every aspect of that life: relationships with others, societal structures, handling of finances and family care. Indeed, to live by the Spirit means to live by a power that promotes compassion and equality and that abolishes racism and injustice. Like so many of the black hermeneuts before him, Seymour utilizes Paul to censure whites who act contrary to the liberating power of the gospel and the Spirit. The way Seymour characterizes Azusa Street also emphasizes the social focus and implications of Spirit baptism from his perspective. His words echo the universality of Paul’s words in Acts 17:26 and Galatians 3:28. The unity of believers and the abolishment of societal barriers through the outpouring of the Spirit at Azusa Street are well known, and here we see through Seymour’s sermons and writings that Paul’s words play a significant role in the characterization of this social transformation. Racial unity is evidence of the Spirit’s presence and orchestrated by the divine will.
Accordingly, Seymour takes up the apostle’s rebuke of Peter in Galatians and makes it his own reproof of the whites and blacks within his congregation that are sowing seeds of discord. Seymour puts on the Pauline mantle to proclaim the gospel’s eradicating nature of racial division.
Charles Harrison Mason was born to freed slaves in 1864 near Shelby County, Tennessee. In 1878, the family fled the area because of a yellow fever epidemic and moved to Plumersville, Arkansas. Mason became seriously ill with tuberculosis and was miraculously healed of the disease. After that experience he consecrated his life to God and at fourteen years of age was baptized, ordained, and licensed to preach in the black Baptist church by his half brother, Israel Nelson.86
In his preaching, Mason focused on holiness and sanctification, emphasizing a Spirit-led life and personal holiness, and because of this teaching he and another minister, Charles Price Jones, who taught the same beliefs, were ordered to leave the Baptist church. The two men then started the Church of God in Christ Fellowship of churches.87 Mason recounts how this name, a Pauline phrase, came to him through divine revelation. As he was walking down the street in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Lord revealed to him the name Church of God in Christ, and to confirm the name, God placed upon his heart the Scripture 1 Thessalonians 2:14, in which Paul reminds the Thessalonians of when they began to follow the faith of Christ: “For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus.”88 This Pauline phrase became the name of the new African American denomination, and in 1897 Mason and Jones registered the denomination with the state and began ordaining ministers.89 Today the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States.90 Mason’s use of Pauline language here is subversive, for Paul’s words, which had historically been used by whites to subjugate and dehumanize African Americans, are now employed by Mason to designate a black-led denomination. This move signifies blacks’ continued practice of interpreting Paul and utilizing his writings on their own terms.
Mason went to Los Angeles in 1907 to be part of the Azusa Street revival and received the baptism of the Holy Spirit.91 He describes the experience with the language of Paul and the language of Acts:
The sound of a mighty wind was in me and my soul cried, “Jesus, only, one like you.” My soul cried and soon I began to die. It seemed that I heard the groaning of Christ on the cross dying for me. All of the work was in me until I died out of the old man [Rom. 6:6; cf. Eph. 4:22; Col. 3:9]. The sound stopped for a little while. My soul cried, “Oh, God, finish your work in me” [Phil. 1:6]…. So there came a wave of glory into me, and all of my being was filled with the glory of the Lord…. When I opened my mouth to say glory, a flame touched my tongue which ran down to me. My language changed and no word could I speak in my own tongue…. And from that day until now there has been an overflowing joy of the glory of the Lord in my heart.92
Mason’s description of his baptism of the Holy Spirit as a death to his old man echoes Paul’s repeated use of old man language in his letters. In Romans 6:6 Paul writes that “our old man is crucified with him [i.e., Christ], that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.” Mason, then, views his baptism as a distinct phase in his salvific journey, in which the old man dies and a new transformation happens. Similarly, his prayer to God that God will complete the divine work recounts Paul’s promise in Philippians 1:6 that God will finish the good work begun in believers’ lives.
Mason remains at Azusa Street for five weeks under the teaching of Seymour, and when he returns home, he shares his experiences with Jones, who rejects the idea of speaking in tongues. As a result, the two men separate, with Jones organizing a separate denomination, Church of Christ (Holiness), and Mason keeping the name Church of God in Christ; all the churches in the fellowship that accepted the teaching of baptism in the Holy Spirit remained in the group.93 Mason’s experience at Azusa Street deeply affected him; he relates how when he returned to his church he prayed and asked God to give him the gift of interpretation of the tongues he spoke.
The third day after reaching Memphis I asked Him to give me the interpretation of what was spoken in tongues [1 Cor. 12:10], for I did not fully understand the operation of the Spirit. I wanted the church to understand what the Spirit was saying through me, so that they might be edified [1 Cor. 14:5]. My prayers were not in vain [1 Cor. 14:13]. The Lord stood me up and began to speak in tongues and interpret the same. He soon gave me the gift of interpretation [1 Cor. 12:10]—that is, He would interpret sounds, groans and any kind of spiritual utterance.94
Mason’s description of his deep desire to interpret his divinely inspired language reverberates with the language of 1 Corinthians and Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts, including tongues and interpretation of tongues. In 1 Corinthians 12:10 Paul writes that one of the gifts of the Spirit is the ability to speak in tongues and another is the ability to interpret those tongues. He goes on to say in 1 Corinthians 14:5 that interpretation of tongues edifies the church because the church can now understand what the person’s language means. Mason prays for interpretation so that what he says may build up the church and edify it. Moreover, Paul instructs those in the Corinthian congregation who speak in tongues to pray that they may interpret them. Mason, following the apostle’s admonition, does so and reports that God hears his prayers, for he is granted the gift to interpret his glossolalia, for he can interpret “sounds, groans, and any kind of spiritual utterance.”95
As is the case for Seymour, Paul’s letters play an important role in Mason’s understanding of the Spirit and spiritual gifts. Additionally, for Mason, the apostle’s words become the appellation of his denomination, and his teachings shape and characterize the denomination’s Pentecostal identity. Also, like Seymour, Mason led an interracial organization, as the COGIC welcomed white ministers into the denomination. White Pentecostal ministers were part of the church’s ecclesiastical powers, and, as licensed COGIC ministers under Mason, they had access to the COGIC charter so that they could perform marriage ceremonies, grant preaching licenses, carry out baptisms, and ride trains at a discount, as other COGIC ministers did. According to Ithiel Clemmons, Mason ordained more than 350 white Pentecostals.96 Mason himself states, “The Spirit through me has saved, sanctified and baptized thousands of souls of all colors and nations.”97 Clemmons observes the interracial thrust of these early COGIC congregations, writing, “where local congregations of the Church of God in Christ were founded, black and white Saints worked, worshiped, and evangelized together in an inter-racial, egalitarian fellowship modeled after the interracial fellowship of Azusa Street. This occurred throughout the South, including in Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia at a most racially tense time in the United States.”98 Yet, due to this “racially tense time,” these interracial congregations would not last. In 1914 the white members of the COGIC separated and formed a white denomination, Assemblies of God.99 But Mason continued to preach and to proclaim the gospel that “God’s church is made one, of every nation, tongue and people that are upon the face of the earth,” that “the church is the body of Christ” (Eph. 1:22), that “Christ is the head of the body, ‘the one church’” (Eph. 4:4–5), and that “God rules in one faith and in one Lord and in one baptism.”100 For Mason, the unity proclaimed in these Pauline epistles was God’s vision for the church, and no matter the earthly realities, they could not negate the truth of the gospel. To speak the language of unity in the midst of a nation filled with racial division was, in a sense, to speak another language, a type of glossolalia, speech that contradicted the prevalent separatist discourse of the time.101
The last significant subversive use of Paul by Mason occurs in his sermon “The Kaiser in the Light of the Scriptures,” given on June 23, 1918. During 1917–1918 the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated Mason because of his pacifist teaching and because the COGIC charter stated that the church did not believe in shedding blood: “We believe that the shedding of human blood or the taking of human life to be contrary to the teachings of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and as a body we are averse to war in all its forms.”102 This belief was demonstrated in Mason’s letter to President Wilson explaining why he and other members objected to participation in World War I on religious grounds.103 David Daniels notes that this pacifist campaign by Mason “was the first major political activity of Pentecostal African Americans.”104
Along with his scriptural beliefs regarding war, Mason also objected to blacks participating in the fighting because “he witnessed how Whites were vehemently opposed to African Americans wearing their military uniforms in America,” and he “questioned the legitimacy of African Americans fighting for democracy abroad when they had no democracy at home.”105 Because of these views, the Bureau alleged that Mason subverted the draft and advised black men not to fight in the war.106 On July 16, 1918, a short time after he preached this sermon, Mason and two other men, William B. Holt and Henry Kirvin, were arrested and charged with committing offenses against the government.107 One of the FBI documents regarding the matter reads as follows: “The activities of the Church of God in Christ have recently been called to our attention because of religious literature which is spreading among the Southern Negroes. Its general headquarters are in Memphis, Tennessee. The literature of this organization states that ‘the shedding of blood or the taking of human life is contrary to the teaching of the Savior, and that since 1895 its members have been forbidden to take up arms or to shed human blood in any form.’ [Bureau Deletion] The chief overseer of this organization is Elder C. H. Mason, now in custody at Jackson, Miss.”108
In the end, because of no solid evidence, the grand jury did not indict Mason, Holt, or Kirvin, and the charges were dropped.109 Mason describes his victory over the situation in Pauline terms: “The enemy (the devil) tried to hinder me and bound me over in jail for several days. I thank God for the persecution. ‘For all that will live Godly must suffer persecution’ [2 Tim. 3:12].”110 Like Paul, Mason understood that to embody the gospel and to proclaim what is right inevitably leads to suffering. In Mason’s case, to speak out against war and to fight to protect black lives meant speaking out against the nation and its laws. With his use of 2 Timothy 3:12, Mason demonstrates that he understands such activity as part of what it means to “live godly.” Godly living involves utilizing the same mouth that engages in glossolalia to protest racial injustice, oppression, and war.
Mason begins the sermon by quoting Habakkuk 2:2 and then moves to a discussion about the German kaiser. “They tell me the Kaiser went into prayer and came out and lifted up his hands and prayed; and afterwards declared war. Let us see, what did he pray and for what reason did he pray? Surely he did not pray Thy kingdom come, because the kingdom of God is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost [Rom. 14:17]. If he had been praying for peace, he would not have declared war.”111 Here Mason employs Paul to critique the German kaiser, asserting that the kingdom of God is peace and the kaiser’s declaration of war is antithetical to peace, to God’s kingdom, and to the Spirit. Mason continues to critique the kaiser by employing 1 Timothy 2:1–2, 8, in which “supplications, prayers, intercessions” are to be made for all people so that “we may lead a quiet and peaceful life” and that people should “pray everywhere lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting.” The German leader, according to Mason, does not have the spirit of prayer because he is not endeavoring to live a peaceful life but rather prays in wrath “with the purpose to work wrath,” thereby doing the opposite of what the apostle advises.112
In addition, Mason proclaims that the kaiser is not of God and does not have the Spirit of Christ (Rom. 8:9).113 Rather, the kaiser’s actions demonstrate that he is under a “devilish spirit” because he “causes women to be ravished, infants to be dashed to pieces, and prisoners of war to be tortured.”114 Depicting the kaiser as the war beast of Revelation 13 and the antichrist, Mason declares that the German ruler will have to answer to God for his actions and for the destruction of human life.115 Although Mason supports the purchase of liberty bonds to help the American government, he prays that “peace will be restored to a war-torn world.”116 What is new and subversive in Mason’s utilization of Paul in this sermon is that Paul is no longer only used to critique America, its racist policies and government action or inaction, but now blacks appropriate the apostle to critique foreign governments and their violation of scriptural admonitions. In public space Mason openly declares that Paul advocates for life and peace and his letters serve as a means to protest war. As we have seen throughout this volume, African Americans employ Paul in various ways to protest racism, injustice, oppression, and men’s refusal to ordain women. Here, Mason expands the sphere of African American Pauline protest literature to include black resistance to war, a resistance that extends from America’s participation in the war and all the way to Germany.
Mason’s use of Paul’s words to name his denomination speaks to the ability of black preachers and black interpreters to refuse to relegate Paul to white surpremacist interpretations. It could be argued that the divine revelation Mason receives for naming his church is in some sense a divine refutation of a white supremacist reading of the apostle. Mason continues the long historical trajectory of black hermeneuts appropriating Paul in a liberating manner. Like the conversion narratives and the divine encounters that appear in this volume, Mason’s account of his baptism of the Spirit and his subsequent prayer regarding the gift of interpretation are replete with Pauline echoes and citations. He adopts and adapts Pauline language, and in so doing depicts a significant link with the apostle and his own understanding of God’s present continued activity in the church. Although societal pressure prevented Mason’s “racially inclusive” vision for his denomination from coming to pass, “it was C. H. Mason … who grasped and stood with Seymour in the revival that united glossolalia with the Pauline vision of an all-inclusive egalitarian fellowship in which there is ‘… neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, … male nor female …’ (Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11).”117 Mason believes that what God began in Acts continues with the present-day church, for the present church is part of the same people of God upon which God poured the divine Spirit. Significantly, Mason also employs Paul’s words to critique the German kaiser and therefore gives the protest dimension of African American Pauline hermeneutics an international lens.
Ida B. Robinson founded the largest African American Pentecostal denomination established by a woman, and she also has the honor of starting the largest denomination led by an African American woman. Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, Inc., from its inception in 1924, has been a church body that has upheld and fostered women leadership and equality in ministry, and until recently has had women bishops leading the organization.118 Robinson was born in 1891 in Hazelhurst, Georgia, and moved to Florida with her family while she was still a child, and she associated early on with the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee). In 1917, during the Great Migration, she and her husband moved to Philadelphia, and she became a part of the Mount Olive Holy Church, where Elder Henry Fisher ordained her to the ministry. When the pastor of the church passed away, Robinson became the pastor. The church was one of the originating congregations of the Northern District of the United Holy Church of America.119 Robinson was a powerful pastor renowned for her speaking, singing, and preaching abilities, and as an evangelist she traveled around the country proclaiming the gospel. Male leaders of the United Holy Church recognized her gifts and often called upon her to assist them in church services.120
Due to her powerful ministry, other women within the denomination began to seek ordination and leadership roles. In response, the male leadership decided in 1924 to no longer “ ‘publicly’ ordain women to the ministry.” Robinson reacted to this decision by fasting and praying for ten days in order to seek God’s guidance as to what to do, after which she contended that God had told her to leave the United Holy Church and to start a new denomination, which she immediately did, calling it the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America. In her protest of the United Holy Church’s decision regarding women ordination, she argued, “If Mary the mother of Jesus could carry the word of God in her womb, why can’t women carry the word of God in their mouth?”121 Another version of her departure from the United Holy Church appears in Rosalie S. Owens’s recent biography, in which Robinson’s decision to leave after her ten-day fast was not precipitated by the decision of the United Holy Church but came about because “God told her to do so,” commissioning her to start a new work.122 At any rate, Robinson’s new ministry focused on elevation of women preachers and leaders, and like Zilpha Elaw, Jarena Lee, and Julia Foote before her, she affirmed God’s call upon women to preach and maintained that this call cannot and should not be proscribed by men.
Led by Robinson, who became the denomination’s first bishop, the Mount Sinai denomination grew, reaching as far as Cuba and Guyana. Robinson ordained women across America, and although male ministers and officers were present in the organization, the leadership of the church consisted mainly of women.123 Estrelda Alexander insightfully observes the impact of Robinson’s decision: “Even though her own future in the United Holy Church would probably have been secure, Robinson’s intention in starting her movement was specifically to establish an organization in which every woman minister would have full freedom to participate in every level of ministry, and in which women would have full clergy rights—including the right to ordination as bishop. Accordingly, every action she took as head of the newly formed denomination reflected this commitment and intention.”124 Robinson’s unswerving belief that God called women just as God called men compelled her to create spaces for women so that they could fulfill their divine mandates without human-made restrictions.
Like the other hermeneuts examined in this chapter, Robinson believed the church should minister to the whole person. Therefore, she started a soup kitchen, began a school for elementary through high school students, and purchased a farm. And, like Charles Harrison Mason, she had pacifist leanings.125 Because of this stance and because her congregations were racially mixed, Robinson came under FBI surveillance during World War II. Alexander notes that she used her radio broadcast to speak out against the war, and since her secretary was a German woman whose husband was Italian, Robinson and her congregation became “suspected of sympathizing with the enemy.”126 One of her FBI files states that she was “placed on a list of agitators in Philadelphia for statements she made.”127 Later, however, the FBI dropped her name from their list.128
As indicated, Robinson was a trailblazer in a number of ways. Her intrepid spirit is also manifest in the way she utilizes Paul in her sermons to emphasize holiness and separation from the world and to speak out against the horrendous practice of lynching in this country. In her sermon “Economic Persecution,” Robinson describes the plight of the early church: “In the early days of Christianity, under the old order of things, everyone who openly called on the name of the Lord Jesus was persecuted indescribably. Many of them died calling on the name of the Lord to the very end.”129 She speaks about the martyrs of the early church and how the gospel, in spite of persecution, continued to spread. In response to the Christians’ prayers regarding the severe persecution they were experiencing, God touched the heart of Constantine, who became a converted “witness of Jesus Christ, and a powerful friend of the church.”130 As a result of his conversion to Christianity, persecution of believers ceased and the gospel continued to expand.
After providing this historical backdrop, Robinson proceeds to compare blacks’ situation in the South with that of the early Christian believers. “At present the same conditions [prevail] in substance. Our people in certain southern states, are killed, their bodies dismembered and thrown to vultures. This, of course, is a common occurrence, and unfortunately, [occurs] where ‘Christianity’ is more prevalent than any other part of our Union. For in this section of the country laws are made to uphold ‘Christianity’ in their states, and to prevent any teachings in their institutions of learning that tend to distort, minimize or otherwise change the principle of the doctrine of Christianity as taught in the Bible.”131 Robinson denounces Christianity as practiced in the South, arguing that the South’s Christian religiosity condones and permits blacks to be murdered, thereby indicating that its Christianity is no Christianity at all. Southerners actually “ignore the words of the sacred ‘Book’ they pretend to love so dearly.” Since they ignore those words, Robinson declares that she will, in stark contrast, appeal to the Bible’s “wisdom and justice.” She then quotes Ephesians 4:5–6, where Paul emphasizes Christian unity. Robinson writes, “There is but ‘One Lord one faith and one baptism’ [Eph. 4:5] so that, if God is the Father of all [Eph. 4:6], the relationship that [exists] between Gentile and Jew, as well as Ethiopians, is [inseparable] and unquestionably established. So let us saints, pray that the Constantine of our day (if there be one) sends a letter to the modern pagans in the [polluted] southland in the form of ‘Anti-lynch’ legislation that is now pending in Congress.”132 Robinson draws upon the apostle’s language of unity and God’s fatherhood of all people to point out that the lynchings occurring in the South directly oppose God’s vision of a united humanity.
Robinson’s use of Paul at this point is a perfect example of what Peter Paris calls the ability of black Americans to extricate “the gospel from its racist entanglements. In the Bible, blacks found a perspective on humanity that was wholly different from that which they experienced in the teachings and practices of white Americans. The universal parenthood of God implied a universal kinship of humankind. This is the basic proposition of the hermeneutic designated as the black Christian tradition.”133 For Robinson, Paul’s words affirm that God established a bond between gentiles, Jews, and Ethiopians, a divinely created human bond between the races that confirms the humanity of all people, including black people. Thus, the fact that people do not speak out against the lynchings of African Americans is antithetical to God’s divine decree.
Robinson likens blacks with early Christians and Southern whites with pagans in the time of the early church. As pagans back then persecuted believers, so too are some white Christians persecuting African Americans. Courageously, Robinson avers that although white believers in the South maintain that they are Christians enacting laws to “uphold Christianity,” they are in fact “modern pagans” who defy the gospel they proclaim to love. Robinson urges those in her congregation to pray like the early believers did, so that, like in the time of old, God may raise up a modern-day Constantine who, like the Constantine in the past, will put an end to the killing of innocent people. In addition, Robinson employs Paul’s reference to Satan in 2 Corinthians 4:4, in which Paul calls Satan the “god of this world,” to indicate the satanic element of the spiritual dimension behind the false Christianity prevalent in the South.134 This reality comes to the fore through the actions of those who claim to be righteous but whose behavior reveals that they are really “enemies of Jesus Christ.”135 As someone who led a denomination that had churches and congregations in the South, which she often visited, it is no doubt that the practice of lynching was a disturbing reality for her.
Robinson draws upon Paul’s writings to assert blacks’ humanity and the value of black lives in a time when lynching had become the norm. God as the Father of all affirms that black people are made in the image of God, and so they deserve to live and not die. Bettye Collier-Thomas says Robinson “has not received adequate recognition and is still virtually unknown to scholars and the general public” but that “her legacy survives through the denomination she founded and the church she established in Philadelphia.”136 As has been demonstrated throughout this volume, many white interpreters utilized Paul’s words to dehumanize blacks, yet an important part of Robinson’s legacy is her use of Paul to argue for black personhood and the value of black lives. She follows in the footsteps of so many courageous black women preachers before her, some of whom are discussed in this volume, such as Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Julia Foote, who dared to preach and refused to be silenced by male leadership. Although she follows in their footsteps, she does what they could not do in their own time and place historically, which is to begin a denomination run by women. Along with championing women’s rights to preach, she champions the right of black people to live and employs Paul in the articulation of that right.
Howard Thurman has been called one of the most important theologians of the twentieth century.137 He attended Morehouse College and Rochester Theological Seminary (now Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School) and graduated from both as valedictorian of his class. Later he became professor of religion and director of religious life at Morehouse and Spelman, and after that, he pastored the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, a multiracial congregation. After almost ten years there (1944–1953), he became the first African American dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University and professor of spiritual disciplines and resources (1953–1965).138 After retiring from this position, he continued his work for racial justice and interracial community through his charitable and education foundation, the Howard Thurman Educational Trust, which he led until his passing in 1981.139 Albert Raboteau remarks that Thurman “was a mesmerizing preacher whose voice and presence articulated with power his vision of interracial religious community”140 and that he believed that “true social change needed to be grounded in spiritual experience.”141 His work on racial reconciliation, his efforts for justice for the oppressed, and his spiritual insight into Christian Scripture forged interpretive pathways for many subsequent explicators of these sacred texts.
As indicated in the opening chapter of this volume, Thurman’s story regarding his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, and her aversion to many of the Pauline texts because of her experience of these Scriptures in slavery, has become quite well known. In some circles, her story has become the Ur-text to advocate African American rejection of Paul. However, Ambrose’s powerful story is only a part of the narrative regarding African Americans’ relationship with Paul. Most African Americans, by and large, despite how Paul was used against them, adopted and adapted him to their own lives and contexts, and in many instances they heard his voice as one that denounced the oppression he was used to legitimize.
Not only has Ambrose’s experience with Paul become an avenue for some to dismiss Paul’s relevance for African Americans, but her experience also profoundly shaped Howard Thurman’s view of Paul. After relating his grandmother’s words to him, he writes of how her account deeply affected him: “Since that fateful day on the front porch in Florida I have been working on the problem her words presented.”142 In Jesus and the Disinherited, we find the most comprehensive articulation of Thurman’s view of Jesus and Paul. Thurman begins the book by raising the question of what Jesus’s teaching and life mean for those who have “their backs against the wall” (11), which are the majority of the people in the world, because most of the human population consists of “the poor, the disinherited, and the dispossessed. What does our religion say to them?” (13). This critical question leads Thurman to assess the current state of Christianity as woefully inadequate in relation to its founding, since it originated in suffering and persecuted communities but now is in the hands of the wealthy and the powerful and so becomes another instrument with which to oppress the weak and the dispossessed.
According to Thurman, several reasons exist for this co-optation of the Christian religion. First, the “missionary impulse” that is so much a part of Christian thought is problematic, because although it encourages people to share with others, this impulse can facilitate pride and arrogance. Christians are encouraged to see their role in helping the poor and the needy, but this same role may cause them to view themselves as superior to those they help, which fosters within them a sense of self-righteousness and racial superiority. Thurman understands that such views have caused many Christians to divorce mission from humanity. “For decades we have studied the various peoples of the world and those who live as our neighbors as objects of missionary endeavor and enterprise without being at all willing to treat them either as brothers or as human beings” (13). Echoing the sentiments of black hermeneuts before him, such as Harriet Jacobs, Thurman laments American Christianity’s emphasis on mission to other countries while at the same time refusing to see the African Americans in their own country and the people to whom they minister in other countries as human beings.
The second reason for the co-optation of the Christian religion by the powerful, according to Thurman, is the disconnection in Christian thought and teaching between Jesus and his Jewish heritage. Jesus’s Jewish heritage is central to understanding Jesus’s identity, for when one examines his history, one sees that Jesus was a poor Jew and a member of a minority group dominated by Roman imperial rule. His economic position in society means that he can identify with the “mass of men on the earth,” since the “masses of the people are poor” (17). Understanding Jesus’s background is important because if one’s faith derives from a people who suffered, who were poor and under oppression by the Romans, then one does not want to inflict suffering upon others or justify it. Moreover, how could one argue that their religion is to dominate the world if their own faith came about in the midst of domination where oppression remained rampant?
Thurman views Jesus’s situation as similar to the Negro’s plight in America. Both Jesus and blacks are minorities, experiencing oppression by the dominant and the powerful. In proclaiming this parallel, Thurman argues that Jesus provided a technique of survival for the oppressed in his own day and so also offered a technique of survival for blacks and all who experience oppression in the modern world.
The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them. (29)
That Christianity later became the religion the dominant used as an instrument of oppression means that many people find little or no relevance in the church’s teaching regarding Jesus and Scripture for their everyday lives. They see Christianity as a largely otherworldly religion fixated on heaven and not eradicating the injustices of the present. Indeed, Thurman observes that for many Christianity seems to be a “betrayal of the Negro into the hands of his enemies by focusing his attention upon heaven, forgiveness, love, and the like” (29). Thurman admits that although these elements are part of Jesus’s teaching, one must look at the entire context of Jesus’s life before injudiciously espousing such attributes. He maintains that if one focuses on retrieving the “religion of Jesus,” then it is possible even in the midst of the church’s “betrayal of his faith” to recover a Christianity that speaks to those whose backs are against the wall. Thurman asserts that if we can understand the religion of Jesus, we can embrace Christianity even though it has been used to victimize and oppress.
The third reason for the co-optation of Christianity by the powerful rests upon Paul, who has been given undue weight in the course of Christian history and thought. Although Paul, like Jesus, was a Jew and a minority, in contradistinction to Jesus, he was a Roman citizen, which afforded him a great amount of privilege, privilege not shared by Jesus. As a result, Thurman describes Paul as “a minority but with majority privileges” (32). Since Paul enjoyed such privileges of Roman citizenship, he could appeal to Caesar when in trouble (Acts 25:11), write that slaves should obey their masters (Eph. 6:5; Col. 3:22), and write that all government is ordained by God (Rom. 13:1). His privileged position deeply affected how he viewed the world and how he wrote about it in his letters. Thurman acknowledges that there are places within the Pauline correspondence in which the apostle proclaims that the gospel transcends race, class, and other conditions, but the fact that there is another side to Paul that has been used throughout history to subjugate and afflict others cannot be ignored. For Thurman, then, Paul’s citizenship creates a chasm between the world of Jesus and the world of Paul. He eloquently writes, “Now Jesus was not a Roman citizen. He was not protected by the normal guarantees of citizenship—that quiet sense of security which comes from knowing that you belong and the general climate of confidence which it inspires. If a Roman soldier pushed Jesus into a ditch, he could not appeal to Caesar; he would be just another Jew in the ditch…. Unless one actually lives day by day without a sense of security, he cannot understand what worlds separated Jesus from Paul at this point” (33–34).
The danger and the lack of protection that derive from noncitizenship, which describes Jesus’s life and blacks’ lives, are what make Jesus’s life and faith relevant for African Americans and Paul irrelevant to a great extent and in some ways harmful. Thurman asserts that
The striking similarity between the social position of Jesus in Palestine and that of the vast majority of American Negroes is obvious to anyone who tarries long over the facts…. It is the similarity of a social climate at the point of a denial of full citizenship which creates the problem for creative survival. For the most part, Negroes assume that there are no basic citizenship rights, no fundamental protection, guaranteed to them by the state, because their status as citizens has never been clearly defined. There has been for them little protection from the dominant controllers of society and even less protection from the unrestrained elements within their group. (34)
When one recalls that Thurman writes at a time when lynchings, police brutality, lack of voting rights, and segregation reign supreme, one sees clearly the analogues he makes at this point in his argument. Unlike Paul, who had a sense of belonging and a sense of status, Jesus and the Negro have no status, no protection from violence from the state or elsewhere, and no recognition of their worth to the body politic.143
Unlike other interpreters examined above, Thurman explicitly and purposefully juxtaposes Paul with Jesus and determines that Jesus trumps Paul because Jesus’s life was not one of privilege. For Thurman, Paul’s words are in many ways relativized by his privileged status and can only be of limited relevance for the everyday lives of the oppressed and disinherited. Paul’s Roman citizenship hampers his vision and causes him to espouse views that throughout history have been harmful to the weak and the dispossessed.144 Jesus’s Sitz im leben (situation in life), however, is more similar to the Negro’s plight than to the apostle’s. His life, teaching, and faith intersect with the African American liminal space of citizenship and the accompanying suffering and injustices that inhabit that space.
Albert Cleage was born in 1911 in Indianapolis but grew up in Detroit. He enrolled at Wayne State University, majoring in psychology, and in 1936 became a social worker. He then went on to study with Charles Johnson, a premiere sociologist at Fisk University. In 1938 he decided to pursue ministry and earned his MDiv degree at Oberlin. In his studies, he rejected the social gospel because of its nonrealistic stance and leaned more toward Reinhold Niebuhr, whose realism he found to be a more adequate depiction of society.145
After ordination in the Congregational Church in 1943, Cleage became an interim pastor at a newly established integrated church, San Francisco Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, among whose founding members was Howard Thurman. Cleage was copastor of the church until Thurman arrived and took on the position. The church had one black pastor, Cleage, and one white pastor, Albert Fisk, a white Presbyterian, to model integration and interracial leadership. But Cleage protested that his copastor, while well intentioned, preached an optimistic social gospel that “avoided crises such as the Japanese interment and the treatment of black soldiers.”146 For Cleage, Fisk’s refusal to engage such pressing faith matters indicated “white Christianity’s utter inability to address systemic moral evil” and that “black and white theological interests were fundamentally oppositional.”147 In 1953, he started his own church that was devoted to providing programs for the poor, advocating for better education for blacks, and promoting black empowerment. As D. Kimathi Nelson notes, “the first tenet of his newly founded church was that, ‘No area of Black life was too controversial for our church to be involved,’”148 and that “his integrity as a champion of black people was beyond reproach. When people had problems that reflected racism or injustice, they knew to call Reverend Cleage.”149
Cleage was an outspoken advocate of the civil rights movement but disagreed with Martin Luther King Jr.’s methods. His approach aligned more with Malcolm X’s sense of direct action. Cleage rejected the idea that American society could be just toward blacks; history and the present circumstances taught him otherwise.150 The nation’s constant declaration of black inferiority through its policies and laws indicated to him that the full integration advocated by the civil rights movement could not be realized.151 Cleage was deeply concerned that black people internalized this idea of black inferiority, causing a black person to “hate everything about his community, everything about his culture, everything about his imitation institutions which he has patterned after white institutions, believing that all of these things are inferior because he is inferior.”152 Cleage believed that one of the significant roles of the black church was to combat and destroy the myth of black inferiority.
To fulfill this mission of destroying the notion of black inferiority, he launched the Black Christian Nationalist movement and the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church.153 And in 1967, on Easter Sunday, Cleage revealed an eighteen-foot painting of a black Madonna and renamed Central Congregational the Shrine of the Black Madonna. For Cleage, this unveiling symbolized black freedom from a distorted Christianity that taught that black was evil and unworthy of divine salvation.154 He writes of the meaning of this black Madonna:
It wasn’t so long ago that such a conception [black Madonna] would have been impossible for us. Our self-image was so distorted that we didn’t believe that even the Almighty God could use us for his purpose because we were so low and despised. Now we have come to the place where we not only can conceive of the possibility, but we are convinced, upon the basis of our knowledge and historic study of all the facts that Jesus was born to a black Mary, that Jesus, the Messiah was a black man who came to save a Black nation…. Our unveiling of the Black Madonna is a statement of faith…. It is an unfolding conception, tremendous in its meanings, as we begin to think through this knowledge which has been kept from us for so long, and which we are only now beginning to understand. To reclaim our own history, our own faith, our own religion, our own Black Messiah, and to begin to conceive again of the resurrection of a black nation is a wonderful thing.155
According to Cleage, Jesus was a black revolutionary Messiah who came to resurrect the black nation of Israel; historically, the nation of Israel during Jesus’s time was black, since all the people in that part of the world during this period were black (99). Jesus proclaimed a message of liberation and revolution to his people, who were oppressed by white Rome. Integral to the resurrection message for African Americans in the present day is a refutation of a distorted Christianity based on white supremacy, which portrays Jesus and God as white. African Americans, therefore, must recover the true message and identity of Jesus. To facilitate this process, one must reject Paul and his teachings, since he is the reason for the loss and perversion of Jesus’s original message. On this point Cleage’s view is worth quoting at length:
During this early period when people were trying to determine the meaning of the life and death of Jesus, the Apostle Paul came on the scene with an entirely new interpretation. He had never seen Jesus in the flesh, but his interpretation dominated the early Church and greatly influenced the Gospels when they were written. So in the Book of Galatians and in the Acts of the Apostles, you have a whole lot of arguing going on between the Disciples and the Apostle Paul…. Why were the followers of Jesus critical of the Apostle Paul? Because the Apostle Paul was leaning over backward to convert the Gentiles. “Apostle to the gentiles” meant Apostle to the white people. Paul was taking the religion of a Black Nation to white people who had no background in religion. But to make it acceptable to them he had to change it. (88–89)
Since Jesus was black, he preached to a black Jewish nation. However, Paul takes Jesus’s message and changes it in order to make it suitable for gentiles, who, in Cleage’s formulation, consist of white people. Thus, because of Paul, “the historic Jesus is completely lost. Paul’s distortion of Jesus could even be taken into Europe where there were nothing but heathens, pagans and barbarians who lived in caves and ate raw meat. They accepted violence as a way of life. These were the white barbaric European Gentiles who now dominate the world. The Apostle Paul kept trying to change the religion of Jesus to meet their needs and so he lost the concept of the Black Nation which gave the teachings of Jesus meaning” (89–90).
For Cleage, the Gospels provide glimpses of Jesus’s revolutionary character as indicated by the charges brought against him, such as stirring up trouble and forbidding people to give tribute to Caesar. Such accusations were “political charges” that reveal Jesus was a revolutionary leader engaging in nation building and guiding his people into conflict with their oppressors (91). Paul, on the other hand, takes the nation-oriented message of Jesus, which urges the Jewish people to resist their oppressors, and turns it into an individual-oriented proclamation, which emphasizes individual faith in Christ and individual salvation (92–93). And so, the “Resurrection of the Nation” to which Jesus’s own resurrection points is lost due to the apostle Paul. Yet, it can be recovered, according to Cleage, if one goes to the Bible, searches for the religion of Jesus, and separates the black Messiah’s religion from that of Paul (98).
Cleage’s interpretation of Paul resonates with that of Howard Thurman in that both view Paul as largely dispensable to the articulation of black Christian faith. In other words, unlike the majority of interpreters discussed in this monograph, both explicitly reject Paul. In addition, both set Jesus and Paul in opposition to each other, giving Jesus and Jesus’s message precedence over the apostle. Cleage, however, is arguably more radical in this sense than Thurman. Whereas Thurman acknowledged some of the egalitarian elements of Pauline Scripture, Cleage does not. In fact, Cleage “deletes the writings of St. Paul from the canon.”156 As William Turner observes, both Thurman and Cleage “credit Paul with planting the seeds of slaveholding Christianity.”157 These two Pauline interpreters, although not representing the dominant perspective of the apostle Paul present in African American writings, nevertheless exemplify the complicated relationship of African Americans with the apostle and his letters. In their dismissal of Paul, they seek to demonstrate Scripture’s relevancy to black lives and the everyday conditions faced by black people, such as police brutality, poverty, racism, and injustice. Whereas other black interpreters utilized Paul to combat these issues, for them, Paul was part of the problem and a central source of black oppression. Their rejection of Paul, then, is also an African American Pauline hermeneutic because it is another attempt by blacks to interpret Paul on their own terms, and in their cases to reject him, just as blacks historically experienced rejection because of him. Significantly, as had many of the black hermeneuts before them, their hermeneutic approaches to Paul sought to analyze the apostle’s historical context (i.e., Thurman’s analysis of Paul’s Roman citizenship), to analyze the larger biblical history (i.e., Thurman’s and Cleage’s recognition of Jewish oppression by Rome), and to place these contexts in conversation with the African American plight. The complexity of the relationship of African Americans with Paul reflects Paul’s own complex history.
Martin Luther King Jr. has been deemed a prophet,158 “God’s trombone,”159 “a drum major for justice,”160 and a “theologian of resistance”161—all deserved appellations that attempt to capture the profound impact he has made as the quintessential leader of the civil rights movement. Born in January 1929, King grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, in a household where his mother, Alberta King, was a teacher and his father, Martin Luther King Sr., was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. He graduated from high school at the age of fifteen and in 1948 received his bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College. After graduating from Crozer Theological Seminary, King went on to receive his PhD from Boston University in 1955.162
In 1954, a year before receiving his doctorate, King became the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where he helped lead a bus boycott in protest of the racial injustice against African Americans in which blacks were relegated to the back of the bus due to Jim Crow laws. The boycott, which began when Rosa Parks courageously refused to give up her seat on a bus, lasted over a year. During this protest, people bombed King’s home and threatened his life, and he and other protestors endured physical brutality and intimidation by police and other government officials. The endurance of King and other African Americans during this boycott resulted in a victory for racial equality.163
The Montgomery boycott thrust King into the national spotlight and solidified his leadership in the civil rights movement. King’s life as a Baptist preacher’s kid, his training in seminary, and his doctoral studies enabled him to fuse his love for God, for the church, and for God’s people with a gospel that spoke to individual and social concerns, particularly the racial prejudice and discrimination that permeated the Jim Crow South. King merged this liberative gospel with the nonviolence ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and became a champion for political, economic, and social equality. The following quote captures his view of the connection between being a minister and being an advocate for justice:
Before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I don’t plan to run for any political office. I don’t plan to do anything but remain a preacher. And what I’m doing in this struggle, along with many others, grows out of my feeling that the preacher must be concerned about the whole man. Not merely his soul, but his body.164
King understands a preacher’s role to involve caring for people’s souls as well their everyday issues. Being concerned about the whole man involves fighting oppression and advocating for equality. King does not compartmentalize social justice, ministry, and preaching. For him, each of these areas is deeply connected, and in fact, civil rights work derives from understanding what true ministry entails. To achieve excellence in the Christian ministry means to be concerned for the whole person. In this regard, King follows in the footsteps of others like Reverdy Ransom, who understood the preacher’s job as to combine the spiritual and the physical and to see that these two realms are ultimately related.165
In 1957 King became the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group that formed to help lead the revived civil rights movement, and in 1963 he led another huge protest against racial injustice in Alabama, which led to his writing the now classic work “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” which will be discussed below. The protests, which occurred via sit-ins and marches, captured the nation’s attention, especially the violent responses from the police department, which used hoses and dogs against the protestors. As was the case with the Montgomery boycott, these protests resulted in a victory as well.
In August of that same year, King led the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which over a quarter million attended, where he gave his renowned “I Have a Dream” speech. And in 1965, he was instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which occurred after he, John Lewis, and Hosea Williams led several marches with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) demanding an end to discrimination in voter registration. The marchers experienced violence and abuse from police officers, who beat them with clubs and terrorized them with tear gas. National television coverage of these events outraged the nation, and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in response to these events.166
King employs Paul and his letters extensively in his essays and speeches. We will discuss only four of his works, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” “The Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” “Transformed Non-Conformist,” and “Shattered Dreams.” In each King employs Paul in subversive ways, developing an African American Pauline hermeneutic that counters the bigotry prevalent in American society.
In King’s essay “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” he takes on the persona of the apostle to pen a letter to Christian believers in the United States. The assumptions undergirding this essay are that Paul would have something to say to America and that Paul is respected by the intended audiences. As discussed throughout this monograph, both white Christians and black Christians have used Paul and cited Paul for their respective causes. Here in this letter purported to be from the apostle himself, the historical veneration of Paul by white Americans and black Americans comes together in a heightened way. It is important to note that King does not write Jesus’s letter to America but instead chooses to recognize the sacred place the apostle holds in both black and white Christian traditions. Thus, in this essay, the three hundred plus years in American history of using Paul to argue against injustice and oppression regarding race issues come to a head. It is because Paul has been and is still so venerated by both blacks and whites that King can pen a letter in his name and assume that his audiences would be willing to hear it.
The letter opens with a typical Pauline epistolary greeting: “Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to you who are in America, grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”167 As the historical Paul longed to see the Roman and Philippian believers, so too he has longed to see believers in America because he has heard so much about America’s scientific and technological achievements. “Paul”168 extols these advancements, noting America’s superiority in these areas compared to other nations: “Through your scientific genius you have dwarfed distance and placed time in chains. You have made it possible to eat breakfast in Paris, France, and lunch in New York City” (127). At the same time, however, he chastises America because its moral progress and spiritual progress have not developed in the same way that its technological accomplishments have. “Paul” censures Americans: “Through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood, but you have failed to employ your moral and spiritual genius to make of it a brotherhood” (128). This ability to make distant places easily accessible coupled with a failure to improve morally and spiritually in loving each other leads to a devastation of the most painful kind, the destruction of the heart.
“Paul” reminds his audience that the ethical principles of Christianity are important to follow, and one cannot just be a Christian in name only but a Christian lifestyle must accompany that name. Just as he represented these ethical principles in his day, even though they were not popular, so, too, must American believers. They cannot allow themselves to follow societal “mores” that contradict scriptural admonitions. He cites Romans 12:1–2, declaring, “American Christians, I must say to you what I wrote to the Roman Christians years ago ‘Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind’” (128). “Paul” admonishes his hearers to “Be who you say you are”; your actions must cohere with your Christian profession. King through Paul’s voice contends that white Christians cannot be conformed to the world around them, which promotes and accepts segregation as the norm, but they must have a higher loyalty to God than to their Southern heritage. Paul’s language enables King to challenge white Christians to allow God to renew their minds toward justice and equality.
Through the Romans 12 passage “Paul” espouses an apocalyptic notion of dual citizenship. Because God has broken into the present through the Christ event, this divine in-breaking creates for believers a dual citizenship in which they live in both time and eternity, in both the new age and the old age simultaneously (128). Although believers have an earthly citizenship and a heavenly citizenship, the heavenly citizenship should affect how they live out their earthly citizenship. “You must never allow the transitory, evanescent demands of manmade institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God. In a time when men are surrendering the high values of the faith you must cling to them, and despite the pressure of an alien generation preserve them for children yet unborn. You must be willing to challenge unjust mores, to champion unpopular causes, and to buck the status quo” (128–29). When believers allow their heavenly citizenship to take precedence over their earthly citizenship, they will not conform to racist ideologies, white supremacy, segregation, or any forms of injustice. This notion of dual citizenship brings together spiritual and earthly realities and demonstrates how each reality is intricately linked with the other. Spiritual transformation leads to earthly transformation, as demonstrated in one’s behavior, beliefs, and social practices. Like the many black interpreters before him, such as David Walker and Reverdy Ransom, King proclaims an inextricable connection between the spiritual and the earthly; that is, salvation for him is comprehensive, transforming the individual but also reconfiguring society.
“Paul” also critiques the exploitative tendencies of capitalism, citing the unfairness of his time, that “one-tenth of 1 per cent of the population controls more than 40 per cent of the wealth.” “America,” he decries, “how often have you taken the necessities from the masses and given luxuries to the classes. If you are to be a truly Christian nation, you must solve this problem,” and not by turning to communism, which is “based on ethical relativism, a metaphysical materialism, a crippling totalitarianism, and a withdrawal of basic freedom that no Christian can accept” (129). Instead, the country can utilize its democratic ideals to make sure that all have enough and that there is a better distribution of wealth.
Utilizing his body of Christ imagery (1 Cor. 12), “Paul” criticizes denominational divisions and divisions between races, where white churches and black churches worship separately. The imagery of the body functions as a way to emphasize God’s plan of unity (129–30). Adopting a Pauline tone of indignation, King exclaims, “Another thing that disturbs me about the American church is that you have a white church and a Negro church. How can segregation exist in the body of Christ? … How appalling this is!” Applying Paul’s voice as found in Galatians 3:28 and Acts 17:26, King goes on to write,
I understand that there are Christians among you who try to find biblical bases to justify segregation and argue that the Negro is inferior by nature. Oh, my friends, this is blasphemy and against everything that the Christian religion stands for. I must repeat what I have said to many Christians before, that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” [Gal. 3:28]. Moreover, I must reiterate the words I uttered on Mars Hill: “God that made the world and all things therein … hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” [Acts 17:26]. So, Americans, I must urge you to be rid of every aspect of segregation. Segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we have in Christ. (130)
King’s appeal to Galatians 3:28 stresses further that in Christ all divisions are eradicated despite what some may say. Like his predecessors before him, King also holds up Acts 17:26 as a passage that excoriates racial division and white supremacy by demonstrating the unity God intends for all humanity. Segregation, then, opposes the unity believers have in Christ, and so to oppose desegregation is to oppose God’s eternal will (131).169
“Paul” then calls upon the churches of America to resist segregation through social action, and he speaks directly to the victims of this horror by encouraging them to fight and protest injustice. Their overlap of citizenship (both earthly and heavenly) and the overlap of ages (new age and old age) in which they live mean that they wrestle against evil powers exhibited in the intransigence of racism and white supremacy. Therefore, they must fight with “Christian weapons” (2 Cor. 10:3–6) and “Christian methods” to defeat such entities (131). For King, these Christian weapons include nonviolent protest and the enduring power of love (132).
“Paul” knows, however, that when one stands up against evil, suffering and persecution inevitably result:
Do not worry about persecution, American Christians; you must accept this when you stand up for a great principle. I speak with some authority, for my life was a continual round of persecutions. After my conversion I was rejected by the disciples at Jerusalem. Later I was tried for heresy at Jerusalem. I was jailed at Philippi, beaten at Thessalonica, mobbed at Ephesus, and depressed at Athens. I came away from each of these experiences more persuaded than ever that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come … shall … separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” [Rom. 8:38–39]. The end of life is not to be happy nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may. I have nothing but praise for those of you who have already stood unflinchingly before threats and intimidation, inconvenience and unpopularity, arrest and physical violence, to declare the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. (132)
In this essay King merges his voice and Paul’s voice, but in this selection we see an extension of this merging. The sufferings that Paul undergoes for the gospel in his day become intertwined with the sufferings that King experiences in the civil rights struggle, and by extension the apostle’s afflictions become interweaved with the hardships of all who suffer in the civil rights movement for the causes of justice and equality, ideals that are also, as King demonstrates in the essay, part of the gospel message. King succeeds in linking Paul to himself, but also to everyone, black and white, who endure enormous persecution because they protest segregation policies and laws. Paul’s life becomes an example of what it means to suffer for righteousness and for those who struggle for justice; he becomes a fellow companion in the suffering. In addition, his words offer comfort and hope that no matter what happens in the fires of persecution, nothing can separate a person from God’s love.
King closes the letter with a paraphrase of Paul’s love chapter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13), a paraphrase shaped by what he sees as the issues endemic to the American church. The following excerpt from part of this final section of the correspondence illustrates the brilliant eloquence of the writer:
[American Christians,] you may have the gift of scientific prediction and understand the behavior of molecules, you may break into the storehouse of nature and bring forth many new insights, you may ascend to the heights of academic achievement, so that you have all knowledge, and you may boast of your great institutions of learning and the boundless extent of your degrees; but, devoid of love, all of these mean absolutely nothing. But even more, Americans, you may give your goods to feed the poor, you may bestow great gifts to charity, and you may tower high in philanthropy, but if you have not love, your charity means nothing [1 Cor. 13]. (133)
As the Corinthians chose to overlook the value of love and focus on other gifts, such as prophecy and speaking in tongues, Paul reminds them that these gifts, while important, do not replace the gift of love. In fact, love should operate in tandem with these gifts because in the end love is the greatest gift of all (1 Cor. 13:13). Likewise, King here admonishes the American believers that their focus on such things as technology, science, philanthropy, and education does not negate the need for love either, because “love is the most durable power in the world” (133). King here discerns the reasoning behind the apostle’s focus on love in the letter to the Corinthians and to the Americans, for Paul’s focus on love is theological, christological, soteriological, and ecclesiological in that it is God-centered and cross-centered at the same time, an important nexus that shapes the community of faith. Since love is the essence of who God is, love then should characterize believers’ own lives and practices. “Calvary,” King writes, “is a telescope through which we look into the long vista of eternity and see the love of God breaking into time.” God’s love that breaks into time creates an overlapping of ages for believers who live in both the old and new age simultaneously, and yet through the power of divine love can bear witness to this divine in-breaking of God. Once he finishes his paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13, “Paul” reiterates the words he spoke to the Corinthians at the end of another letter to them, in 2 Corinthians 13:11, and urges American believers to “Be of good comfort; be of one mind; and live in peace” (134). As the apostle closes his letter with exhortations of peace and unity, so too, King ends his correspondence with the same appeals.
King’s essay “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” is, as Milton Sernett describes, “a classic in protest literature.”170 Arrested on Good Friday 1963 for his participation in a protest march, King remained in jail for eight days. While there he decides to respond to eight white religious leaders who have written a letter in opposition to the civil rights movement, asking its leaders and supporters to cease and desist. King responds to each of their accusations against the movement, and in doing so employs Pauline language and Scripture to repudiate their contentions and to present an alternative vision to the segregationist present.
King’s writing of the letter itself presents similarities to Paul’s prison epistles, such as Philippians, which the apostle wrote from jail after being incarcerated for the sake of the gospel. Like Paul, who suffered for proclaiming the truth of the gospel, King also undergoes imprisonment for his proclamation of the gospel. As Paul used the occasion of his imprisonment to address believers, so too does King utilize his incarceration to address the white clergymen and all believers, both black and white. Just as Paul’s imprisonment epistles were aimed at believing communities to instruct, encourage, and exhort them to some type of godly action and deeper commitment to the faith, so too is King’s letter written to communities of faith, particularly the white communities, to instruct them regarding the biblical and theological bases of the civil rights movement as well as to encourage those black sisters and brothers already in the struggle.
The eight white religious leaders objected to the presence of the civil rights activists in Birmingham because they were “outside agitators” who had no right interfering in the local issues of the city. After rehearsing for his audience his organizational ties to the city, that is, the presence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King justifies his being there from a biblical point of view. As the Old Testament prophets were often led by God to go out of their native cities to proclaim the divine word of the Lord, so he and other civil rights leaders are led to Birmingham. King then expands from Old Testament paradigms to the New Testament figure of Paul: “Just as the eighth century prophets left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Graeco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.”171 The phrase “Thus saith the Lord” indicates a prophetic mantle, a prophetic voice, and a prophetic charge by God, all of which King uses to describe his own calling. Along with a prophetic mandate, King casts himself as a modern-day Paul who carries the gospel around the world. As Paul took the gospel throughout the Roman Empire, so King must also carry the gospel of freedom throughout the United States.
King’s reference to the “Macedonian call for aid” recalls the story in Acts 16:9–12 in which Paul receives a summons for help in a dream:
And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us. And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavoured to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them. Therefore loosing from Troas, we came with a straight course to Samothracia, and the next day to Neapolis; And from thence to Philippi, which is the chief city of that part of Macedonia, and a colony: and we were in that city abiding certain days. (Acts 16:9–12)
As the apostle Paul heard the Macedonian call for aid and responded, King, a modern-day Paul, hears and heeds the call of the Birmingham residents who summoned him and asked for his help.172 Birmingham is a present-day Macedonia that needs apostolic and prophetic assistance. King frames the letter and the situation in Birmingham with Scripture: prophetic, apostolic, and Pauline. Moreover, King answers his detractors who decry his presence in their city by stating that all of humanity is interrelated and that just because he lives in Atlanta does not mean he should not be concerned about what is happening in Birmingham. After all, he writes, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country” (290).
King cites the reasons why he and other civil rights advocates are in Birmingham as well as why demonstrations are needed: Birmingham has the most unsolved cases of Negro home and church bombings; it is one of the most segregated cities in the United States; its brutality regarding black lives is well known; and it refuses to negotiate in “good faith” with black leaders. For example, city business owners had agreed to remove racial signs in the stores in exchange for the cessation of demonstrations. Yet the signs remained, and those that were temporarily removed reappeared (290–91). As a result of the city’s consistent refusal to honor its promises, King echoes Romans 12:1 in depicting the African American community’s response: “We had no alternative except that of preparing for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies [Rom. 12:1] as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community…. We started having workshops on nonviolence, and repeatedly asked ourselves the questions: ‘Are you able to accept blows without retaliating? Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?’” (291). Here King’s echo of Romans 12:1, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service,” takes on concrete, tangible form in which black bodies literally suffer physical violence and trauma in their struggle for justice. King sees the suffering that he and those working with him endure as a bodily sacrifice that will bring awareness to the national community regarding the gross injustices taking place in Birmingham. The result of this sacrificial suffering is that peoples’ consciences will be affected, and they will hopefully advocate for justice around the country. These demonstrators sacrifice their bodies on behalf of the larger black population, so that all may experience freedom from discrimination and racism.
King’s use of Paul to frame this direct action of nonviolence indicates that he views nonviolence as suffering on behalf of fellow black sisters and brothers, which also means that this suffering is simultaneously an offering of their bodies to God, for God is the author of the “gospel of freedom,” and it is on behalf of this “gospel of freedom” that he and others endure affliction. Paul’s words of “living sacrifice” take on added meaning in light of King’s context, in which demonstrators were often beaten, attacked, and killed by vicious mobs. King’s use of Paul also serves as another riposte to the white clergymen who do not want him in Birmingham. The work he engages in is holy, acceptable to God, and is the reasonable service God expects from those called by the Divine. God is a God of justice, and so one must live a life that promotes and advocates justice, which is what he and the other civil rights workers are doing.
The white clergymen accuse King and his coworkers of breaking laws and not waiting for a more opportune time to protest. King responds to the first accusation by citing Saint Augustine, who states that “an unjust law is no law at all” (293). He also cites Saint Thomas Aquinas, who believes that an unjust law does not originate in eternal or natural law. King eloquently writes, “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority…. So segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful” (293). Like the African American petition writers and Lemuel Haynes before him who dared to call slavery and the slave trade sin, King declares that segregation, slavery’s descendant, is sin and morally reprehensible.
King responds to the white clergy’s demand that blacks should wait with a litany of reasons why they can no longer wait: the prevalence of lynchings and drownings of black people; the astronomical poverty rates among blacks; the nonexistence of voting rights for African Americans; the daily reminders of racial injustice such as being called “[n——],” “boy”; signs that say “white” and “colored”; the nonexistence of school buses for black children; the practice of giving textbooks to black schools with pages missing; and the inability to stay in hotels or take black children to amusement parks because they refuse to serve blacks. King concludes that the time for waiting is over, for “we have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights” (292).
In addition, King rejects the idea advocated by some whites that all things will be made well for blacks in America if they just wait and allow time to run its course. One advocate of this view wrote this to King: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry…. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth” (296). King calls this idea of time a myth and echoes Pauline language to refute it:
All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively…. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God [2 Cor. 6:1], and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. (296)
The neutrality of time means that people utilize the time they have been given for good or evil. Even for their silence will good people need to repent. King asserts that human progress takes work, and it takes working with God, a divine-human partnership, if you will, in which both God and human beings work together to bring about God’s will on earth. Time itself does not take care of injustice, but people must use time to act in concert with God to do so.
In this letter King also depicts himself as caught between two groups of Negroes, those who have grown complacent in large part because of systemic oppression that has generated a loss of self-respect and those who have become violent, like the black nationalist groups who have lost faith in America and in Christianity. King sees himself standing between these two factions, writing that “we need not follow the ‘do-nothingism’ of the complacent or the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. There is the more excellent way of love [1 Cor. 13:1] and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle” (297). King utilizes Paul to point to a third way, the more excellent way of love from the apostle’s “love” chapter. Significantly, King expands Paul’s view of the more excellent way to include nonviolent protest, signifying that the Pauline conception of love encompasses action and resistance, which in this case means embracing the philosophy of nonviolence.
King also utilizes Paul to answer the charge that he is an extremist, a charge that at first King finds ludicrous, considering his nonviolent stance. Then, upon second thought, he realizes that the label extremist puts him in good company.
I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized. But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love—“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice—“Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ—: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” [Gal. 6:17]…. So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? (297–98)
In this excerpt King sets forth a scriptural lineage of those who follow God’s ways in a radical manner to such an extent that they proclaim God’s will in a world filled with violence and hate. Jesus’s words address a people oppressed by the Romans and represent extreme love of the enemy; Amos’s words speak to a time of great injustice in Israel and call upon God’s justice to come forth; and Paul’s bearing of Jesus’s marks upon his body demonstrates the radicality of the gospel, for he suffers for its proclamation, carrying in his body the marks he receives from all the hardships he endures for preaching Christ crucified. King sets himself in the company of these extremist followers of the Divine, and his reference to Paul’s marks recalls his earlier depiction in the essay of himself and others as people who present their bodies as living sacrifices, suffering blows for the cause of justice and not retaliating in their nonviolent struggle. It follows that those who engage in this nonviolent practice will, like the apostle, also bear in their own bodies the marks of Jesus, the incarnation of extreme love. Here, then, one finds a link between Jesus’s body, King’s body, the bodies of those in the civil rights movement, and Paul’s body—all suffer for the sake of gospel extremism.
The theme of the body reappears in King’s lament regarding the leadership of the white church. Although he had hoped that white clergy would support the cause of desegregation and rally behind the nonviolent protests, he found that for the most part they were staunch opponents of the movement and encouraged their congregations to oppose it as well. With great disappointment King writes, “In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say: ‘Those are social issues with which the gospel has no real concern,’ and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular” (299).
In this passage, King underscores the distinction often made by white interpreters of Scripture that spiritual salvation has no earthly implications, for salvation only matters for the soul and results in no elements of social transformation. Such a distinction goes as far back as slavery, when laws were passed to make sure that slaves who underwent baptism understood that their baptism did not become a basis for their freedom. Their salvation and baptism affected only their soul and spirit, but not the transference of their physical body from slavery to freedom. Such perspectives of slave owners persisted in the civil rights era, with whites maintaining the same distinction. For them, the gospel had nothing to do with transformation of society or elimination of segregation; its chief concern related to the soul. King’s phrase the “strange distinction between body and soul” highlights the absence of such a division in black interpretation of Scripture where God’s invasion through the Christ event transforms body and soul and erases the demarcation between secular and sacred.
King goes on to lift up Paul’s body-of-Christ imagery to depict the church and to emphasize the egregious nature of the behavior of white clergy: “Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ [1 Cor. 12:12–27]. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and fear of being nonconformists” (299–300). He views the entire church as the body of Christ, which is why he admits that he weeps over the church, for this body of Christ includes blacks and whites together as sisters and brothers in the faith. The scarring of the body takes place because of the white church’s refusal to see its black sisters and brothers as humans worthy of justice and equality and its refusal to stop racial injustice. For King, when whites refuse to help African Americans in their struggle for freedom, they demonstrate that they do not see their connection with their sisters and brothers of color and that what happens to blacks affects them as well, for they are part of the body. Thus, the whole body experiences blemishes and scars—not just black churches, but the entire body of Christ. King, then, lifts up Paul’s words: “And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it” (1 Cor. 12:26). As part of Christ’s body, when African Americans suffer, the white members of Christ’s body suffer also.
King’s essay “Transformed Nonconformist” begins with a citation of Romans 12:2, which shapes the structure of the entire treatise: “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” King commences the exposition by recognizing that Paul’s advice is hard to follow in the modern world, given the emphasis placed on conformity and following the status quo. Despite the pressures to conform, however, King maintains that Christians have been given a mandate from the apostle to be nonconformists. Believers are “called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, not social respectability. We are commanded to live differently and according to a higher loyalty.”173 This mandate to live by a different set of ideals originates from the believer’s dual existence, in which she lives in both time and eternity simultaneously. Although believers live in the present time, they are to remember the apostle’s words to the Philippians that “we are a colony of heaven,” which means that heavenly citizenship shapes one’s earthly existence and commitments (9).
Regrettably, King argues, the church, albeit called to nonconformity, often capitulates to the majority opinion, especially in issues of race and class.
The erstwhile sanction by the church of slavery, racial segregation, war, and economic exploitation is testimony to the fact that the church has hearkened more to the authority of the world than to the authority of God. Called to be the moral guardian of the community, the church at times has preserved that which is immoral and unethical. Called to combat social evils, it has remained silent behind stained-glass windows. Called to lead men on the highway of brotherhood and to summon them to rise above the narrow confines of race and class, it has enunciated and practiced racial exclusiveness. (11)
This capitulation to racial exclusiveness and class division arises from a preoccupation with money and prestige by the church’s leadership, who are more concerned about the size of their parsonage and not offending their members than they are about preaching sermons that align with the true tenets of the gospel (12). Quoting Emerson, who wrote in his essay “Self-Reliance” that “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” King asserts that Paul likewise reminds us that “whoso would be a Christian must also be a nonconformist. Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave” (12). Yet believers are not called to be mental and spiritual slaves to the larger society but are called to “imbue an unchristian world with the ideals of a higher and more noble order” (9). As people who have tasted eternity, Christians are called to impart that eternal reality into the present social order, which does not yet exemplify the kingdom of God.
At the same time that King recognizes the importance of nonconformity, he also realizes that nonconformity by itself does not automatically engender transformation, for people could choose to be nonconformists for various reasons, such as exhibitionism and self-interest. Paul, he contends, offers a way to engage in “constructive nonconformity” in the latter part of Romans 12:2: “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (13). This transformation of the inner self, which encompasses a new mental trajectory, is central to the nonconformity sensibility. King writes, “By opening our lives to God in Christ we become new creatures [2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15]. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists…. Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit” (13). King links Paul’s new-creature language with Jesus’s language of new birth found in John 3, and by connecting these two themes he underscores the need for divine transformation in order to engage in social justice work. The evils of this world are so powerful that people who dare to fight against them cannot do so in their own strength, lest they become cold, hardhearted, and self-righteous, “speaking irresponsible words which estrange without reconciling” and making “hasty judgments which are blind to the necessity of social process.” An inner spiritual transformation enables believers to avoid the aforementioned pitfalls of exhibitionism, self-interest, self-righteousness, and coldheartedness.
King ends the essay with an acknowledgment that transformed non-conformity is costly and often leads to suffering, which is inevitably part of the Christian life.
But we are gravely mistaken to think that Christianity protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence. Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us [Gal. 6:17] and redeems us to that more excellent way [1 Cor. 12:31] which comes only through suffering. In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth. (14–15)
In this statement King draws upon two Pauline citations he uses in the “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” The Galatians passage, which refers to marks upon the body, becomes a vivid description of the suffering civil rights workers undergo, since they are trained to receive blows upon their bodies without retaliating. Here again, King affirms that those who fight for justice and equality, and embrace a transformed nonconformist lifestyle, will also live a life characterized by physical trauma and violence. In addition, although in its original context Paul speaks of a more excellent way of love in his discussion of spiritual gifts, King makes the interpretative move of putting the reference in the context of suffering, which demonstrates that he views the way of love as filled with suffering, since love often means acting against the majority and not conforming to the prevalent misguided discourse and standards of society. When one acts for the sake of love, justice, and truth, all ideals that run counter to the world and its ways, this more excellent way of love often results in suffering at the hands of a world that refuses to embrace nonconformity.
The final King essay under examination in this volume is entitled “Shattered Dreams” and begins with the Pauline citation from Romans 15:24: “Whensover I take my journey into Spain, I will come to you.”174 King employs this passage from Paul to discuss the topic of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Evocatively he writes,
In Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians we find a potent illustration of this vexing problem of disappointed hopes…. One of his ardent hopes was to travel to Spain where, at the edge of the then known world, he might further proclaim the Christian gospel. On his return he wished to have personal fellowship with that valiant group of Roman Christians…. What a glowing hope stirred within Paul’s heart! But he never got to Rome according to the pattern of his hopes. Because of his daring faith in Jesus Christ, he was indeed taken there but as a prisoner and was held captive in a little prison cell. Nor did he ever walk the dusty roads of Spain, nor look upon its curvacious slopes, nor watch its busy coastal life. He was put to death, we presume, as a martyr for Christ in Rome. Paul’s life is a tragic story of a shattered dream. (78–79)
As indicated by this excerpt, Paul’s life becomes an exemplar for King of what it means to have a deep desire or wish and to not have it fulfilled. In fact, this reality touches all human beings, prompting King to ask, “Who has not set out toward some distant Spain, some momentous goal, or some glorious realization, only to learn at last that he must settle for much less?” (79). After citing several historical and biblical examples of people who did not live to see their dreams fulfilled, King links this reality with African American experiences in this country before returning to Paul: “Many Negro slaves in America, having longed passionately for freedom, died before emancipation…. And the Apostle Paul repeatedly and fervently prayed that the ‘thorn’ might be removed from his flesh [2 Cor. 12:7], but the pain and annoyance continued to the end of his days. Shattered dreams are a hallmark of our mortal life” (79). King realistically depicts a life of faith as one in which a person does not always receive what she prays for and does not always experience a pain-free life. He links the reality that many blacks died in slavery, although desiring freedom, with Paul’s unanswered prayer for deliverance from the thorn in the flesh. Although occurring in different times in human history, both cases nevertheless show a continuity of mortal experience in which human existence is often fraught with disappointment and unrealized hopes and dreams.
In light of this inevitable fact, how does one live in such a world? King outlines three common responses: (1) people become bitter, mean, and resentful; (2) people become introverts and withdraw into themselves; or (3) people adopt fatalism and believe external forces control all things, and so they believe there is no need to try to change their circumstances. While rejecting all these options, King singles out fatalism, saying it rests upon an inappropriate conception of God.
For everything, whether good or evil, is considered to represent the will of God. A healthy religion rises above the idea that God wills evil. Although God permits evil in order to preserve the freedom of man, he does not cause evil. That which is willed is intended, and the thought that God intends for a child to be born blind or for a man to suffer the ravages of insanity is sheer heresy that pictures God as a devil rather than as a loving Father. The embracing of fatalism is as tragic and dangerous a way to meet the problem of unfulfilled dreams as are bitterness and withdrawal. (81–82)
King’s answer to the reality that people may experience unfulfilled dreams is to confront the shattered dream and not to pretend that the disappointment does not exist. He promotes a living in tension, as it were, accepting “finite disappointment even as we adhere to infinite hope.” One of the questions King suggests that a person asks is, “How may I transform this liability into an asset?” He links this question with the apostle Paul’s experience of not reaching Spain and uses the verse in Romans to formulate an additional question: “How may I, confined in some narrow Roman cell and unable to reach life’s Spain, transmute this dungeon of shame into a haven of redemptive suffering?” King contends that one must not settle for being held captive in the Roman prison but should seek to utilize the prison captivity as a way to serve God’s purpose.
King holds up African American experience as an example of living in this tensive hope. Recalling the options people often choose when facing disappointment, King encourages his audience to cling to hope. This section is worth quoting at length:
We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but still we are confined in an oppressive prison of segregation and discrimination. Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our personalities. Must we, by concluding that segregation is within the will of God, resign ourselves to oppression? Of course not, for this blasphemously attributes to God that which is of the devil. To co-operate passively with an unjust system makes the oppressed as evil as the oppressor. Our most fruitful course is to stand firm with courageous determination, move forward nonviolently amid obstacles and setbacks, accept disappointments, and cling to hope…. While still in the prison of segregation, we must ask, “How may we turn this liability into an asset?” By recognizing the necessity of suffering in a righteous cause, we may possibly achieve our humanity’s full stature. To guard ourselves from bitterness, we need the vision to see in this generation’s ordeals the opportunity to transfigure both ourselves and American society. Our present suffering and our nonviolent struggle to be free may well offer to Western civilization the kind of spiritual dynamic so desperately needed for survival. (83)
African Americans, despite the difficulties and harsh realities of their present existence, have to cling to hope and refuse to succumb to hate. Like Reverdy Ransom before him, King believes that African Americans have the opportunity to salvage America, albeit from King’s perspective this rescue will take place through nonviolent demonstration and suffering for the righteous cause of racial equality. This suffering has the power to transform not only the social location of blacks as a people group but society as a whole, for black suffering can lead to achievement of “humanity’s full stature.” African Americans have the chance to save Western civilization from itself, from its destructive tendencies, and to help it find spiritual life through the black struggle for justice. The redemption of the nation and indeed Western civilization is how blacks can turn the liability of segregation into an asset.
A person’s refusal to be defeated and her determination to cleave to hope despite circumstances is what King calls the “courage to be” (84). This “courage to be” is evidence that the divine image resides within every person. For King, Paul becomes the exemplar of this type of courage due to the constant oppositions he faced and the prevalence of disappointing circumstances in his life. In part of the following quote from King, the reader will see that King takes up Paul’s own words in describing his frequent challenges.
[Paul’s] life was a continual round of disappointments. On every side were broken plans and shattered dreams. Planning to visit Spain, he was consigned to a Roman prison. Hoping to go to Bithynia, he was sidetracked to Troas. His gallant mission for Christ was measured “in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren” [2 Cor. 11:26]. Did he permit these conditions to master him? “I have learned,” he testified, “in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content” [Phil. 4:11]. Not that Paul had learned to be complacent, for nothing in his life characterizes him as a complacent individual…. By discovering the distinction between spiritual tranquility and the outward accidents of circumstance, Paul learned to stand tall and without despairing amid the disappointments of life. Each of us who makes this magnificent discovery will, like Paul, be a recipient of that true peace “which passeth all understanding …” [Phil. 4:7]…. The peace of which Paul spoke is a calmness of soul amid terrors of trouble, inner tranquility amid the howl and rage of outer storm, the serene quiet at the center of a hurricane amid the howling and jostling winds. We readily understand the meaning of peace when everything is going right and when one is “up and in,” but we are baffled when Paul speaks of that true peace which comes when a man is “down and out,” when burdens lie heavy upon his shoulders, when pain throbs annoyingly in his body, when he is confined by the stone walls of a prison cell, and when disappointment is inescapably real. True peace, a calm that exceeds all description and all explanation, is peace amid storm and tranquillity amid disaster. (84–85)
King connects the peace that Jesus declares as a divine gift in John 14:27 (“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you”) with the peace that Paul speaks of in Philippians. This legacy of peace sustained Paul, the early Christians, and the slaves during slavery, and it is this peace that will be present with African Americans as they engage in the struggle for civil rights and equality. King writes the following in regard to this legacy of peace.
Through faith we may inherit Jesus’ legacy, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” Paul at Philippi, incarcerated in a dark and desolate dungeon, his body beaten and bloody, his feet chained, and his spirit tired, joyously sang the songs of Zion at midnight. The early Christians, facing hungry lions in the arena and the excruciating pain of the chopping block, rejoiced that they had been deemed worthy to suffer for the sake of Christ. Negro slaves, bone weary in the sizzling heat and the marks of whip lashes freshly etched on their backs, sang triumphantly, “By and by I’m gwin to lay down this heavy load.” These are living examples of peace that passeth all understanding [Phil. 4:7]. (85)
King makes significant parallels in this selection. First, in each case Paul, the early Christians, and the slaves have beaten and bloody bodies due to persecution. Second, each example contains an element of singing in the midst of suffering, whether it was Paul singing in a jail cell while bearing the marks of Jesus on his back or the slaves singing sorrowful songs in the fields with slavery’s marks upon their bodies. And third, peace in the midst of suffering connects these historical figures with each other. With these linkages King places black suffering in the context of Christian history and inserts black suffering into the Christian narrative. Like Paul and the early believers before them, slaves endured much hardship, and in doing so become exemplars themselves for the legacy of peace as described in Scripture. Once again, as he did in the “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” King merges the suffering of African Americans with that of Paul and the early church, demonstrating in this convergence a shared reality of Christian existence, that is, black lives become part of Christian salvific history. Black suffering is a symptom of living in a hostile world that rejects God and God’s people. Against the backdrop of a nation that repeatedly denied black significance, King locates black lives within sacred history, thereby demonstrating the worth and sanctity of black life.
King closes the essay by appealing to faith in God as the ultimate antidote for shattered dreams. Even if a person dies without seeing her dream realized, she must trust that in death as in life she belongs to God and that “God through Christ has taken the sting from death [1 Cor. 15:56] by freeing us from its dominion [Rom. 6:9]” (86). Death, then, for King is not the end but the beginning of a mysterious, glorious new existence in which God “ultimately join[s] virtue and fulfillment.” This is the type of faith, King declares, that Paul writes about in Romans 8:28 when he states “that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose,” signifying that God works out all things for the believer’s good, for even those disappointments and shattered dreams somehow through divine machination become part of God’s overarching plan and purpose.
In summary, King employs Paul in a number of ways in his sermons and speeches. He uses Paul to critique segregation and its underlying notion of black inferiority. He utilizes the apostle to proclaim that segregation is sin and those who sanction it are not following the Word of God, despite their claim to be Christian. In fact, King declares that condoning segregationist policies is conforming to the ways of the world, not to the ways of God. One’s heavenly citizenship transforms how one thinks about earthly life and compels one to see and participate in God’s justice and love for all humanity.
Moreover, Paul’s “body” imagery enables King to highlight the importance and value of black bodies and thereby to focus upon significant aspects of his body hermeneutic. Because the body of Christ consists of black and white believers together, when black believers suffer, as they do under Jim Crow, the entire body suffers. With this body imagery, King seeks to affirm the connectedness of every human being to each other. Whites cannot harm blacks without at the same time doing harm to themselves.
The Pauline body imagery also allows King to talk about the suffering of black bodies as they present themselves as sacrifices for the black struggle of liberation. They endure beatings and imprisonment for the sake of black freedom, and so Paul’s sacrificial language of the body coheres with the lived experiences of King and other civil rights activists.175 In addition, like Paul, who bore the marks of Jesus on his body, King and the civil rights workers bear the marks of Jesus, the extremist for love, on their bodies as well. When King talks about the suffering of the early church and the persecution those Christians endured, he merges the sufferings of the civil rights movement with this history and underscores his view that black suffering is part of sacred history. By doing this, King affirms the sacredness of black bodies in a time when black bodies were considered nothing and expendable. King fuses the two histories into one proclaiming that just as the martyrs of the early church underwent persecution, so too are black Americans undergoing persecution for Jesus’s gospel of liberation.
Furthermore, along with understanding “that the gospel of Christianity is one that seeks social change religiously and morally,”176 King also understands that people are coworkers with God and partner with God to bring about the manifestation of these changes on earth, so that justice and liberation are never only a human enterprise nor solely a divine endeavor. Quoting Pauline language of being coworkers with God, King believes that the Divine and human work in concert to bring about change, for when one becomes a new creature, this transformation of the inner self leads to transformation of the outer world. The need for divine and human collaboration becomes extremely clear in King’s narration of one of the most difficult moments in his life, the moments after he receives a phone call from someone who threatens his life:
It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point…. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had almost gone, I determined to take my problem to God. My head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never before experienced him. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice, saying, “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever.” … My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything. The outer situation remained the same, but God had given me inner calm.177
In this account, King highlights the centrality of God in the struggle for justice, for human strength, wisdom, and knowledge are finite. Yet the Infinite One can renew strength and provide courage and hope, as well as peace in the midst of chaos and in the face of death. When King cites and echoes Paul’s words of Philippians 4:7 regarding a peace that surpasses understanding, he knows from real-life experience what the apostle means in that verse, and he attempts to convey to his audience that they too can experience this peace in the midst of all that they undergo to bring about God’s liberative will upon the earth.
Like so many of the black hermeneuts before him, King adopted and adapted Pauline language and demonstrated that the apostle could be employed in the fight against racism, specifically Jim Crow and segregation. Yet compared to earlier interpreters, King broadens the use of Paul by taking on the persona of Paul and writing a letter to America in the apostle’s name. Similarly, the fact that he pens a letter from the Birmingham jail makes him even more similar to Paul, who writes epistles during his imprisonment. Both were jailed because of what they proclaimed: a gospel of liberation. Paul is not just someone King quotes and cites; King takes on his mantle and sees himself as a modern-day Paul answering the Macedonians’ cry for help, writing letters of encouragement and exhortation from prison, traveling around preaching the gospel, and bearing in his body the marks of Jesus.
Into the twentieth century, black hermeneuts continue to discuss the figure of Paul in their speeches, sermons, and writings, illustrating that the apostle remains an important figure during this time for black discourse. Reverdy Ransom employs Paul in a number of ways, one of the most important being his use of Paul’s language to speak of Christ abolishing the wall of partition between Jews and gentiles, which becomes for Ransom a paradigm for the destruction of the division between black and white. In regard to the theme of a body hermeneutic, a theme we have traced in previous chapters, Ransom takes on Paul’s “Spirit of Christ” language to critique the United States and to state that America’s actions against African Americans, including the silence around the lynching of black bodies, demonstrate that as a nation, it does not contain the Spirit of Christ, despite its claims. Moreover, for Ransom, black bodies and lives are salvific for the nation, rescuing it from itself by transforming society from one filled with hate to one filled with love.
William Seymour adopts Paul’s language regarding the Jerusalem collection to emphasize that the baptism of the Spirit has practical implications. As Paul encourages his congregations to give to the poor in Jerusalem, Seymour sees the collection as a model for Spirit-empowered believers to try to help those in financial need. In regard to racism, Seymour takes up the apostle’s image of a grieving Holy Spirit to depict divine lamentation over racial division. He also employs the body of Christ motif to declare that the church is one and consists of black and white believers together. Also, part of Seymour’s body hermeneutic is that Spirit manifestations upon the body, such as glossolalia and divine healings, have transformative implications for society. Equally important for Seymour is that black bodies experience God’s power, an experience that challenges the notions of black inferiority and black rejection by the divine. Moreover, just as Paul spoke out against Peter when Peter separated himself from the gentiles, Seymour speaks out against racial divisions taking place in the Azusa Street congregation. Although the racial unity Seymour desires does not last, one of his lasting legacies is that “[Azusa Street] was an egalitarian, ecumenical, interracial, interclass revival that for about three years defied the prevailing patterns of American life.”178
Like Seymour, Charles Harrison Mason emphasizes racial unity through Pauline language, maintaining that despite the divisions taking place in society, God wills unity between black and white people. In addition, Mason adopts a Pauline passage to designate the black-led denomination he starts, which is an important glimpse into black resistance to oppressive uses of Paul and blacks’ positive appropriation of the apostle. Mason also expands the subversive use of Paul to include advocating peace and protesting war. Part of Mason’s body hermeneutic includes rejecting the call of enlisting black bodies to fight in a war for a country that denied their humanity. Additionally, he calls upon Pauline Scripture to form his critique of the German kaiser, and by doing so he gives African American Pauline hermeneutics an international dimension to its protest tradition.
The theme of a body hermeneutic appears in Ida B. Robinson’s adoption of Paul’s words to denounce the nation’s refusal to stop the lynching of African Americans. The language of God’s Fatherhood and the bond that God creates between people of different races demonstrate that black lives are just as important as white lives. The universality of God’s Fatherhood means that humanity is one family. This reality makes whites’ murdering of their black brothers and sisters especially egregious, for they slaughter their own kin. To Robinson, such atrocities indicate that the Christianity of the South is really no faith at all.
Both Howard Thurman and Albert Cleage Jr. reject Paul because of the oppressive ways in which many white people utilized him to tyrannize and dehumanize black people. For them, Paul lends himself to such interpretations because of his privilege. According to Thurman, the apostle’s Roman citizenship enables him to write such passages as “Slaves, obey your masters” and makes him irrelevant to blacks and others whose backs are against the wall. Cleage believes that Paul is responsible for Christianity’s distortion because the apostle takes away the important black nation-building element of the gospel and turns the gospel into an individual phenomenon for white gentiles. To Thurman and Cleage, Jesus and Jesus’s life are more akin to the African American experience.
The last interpreter examined in this chapter is Martin Luther King Jr., who employs Paul extensively in his speeches and sermons. In “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” King brings to a climactic point Paul’s place in the nation’s discourse regarding black and white relationships. It is because the apostle has been such a central figure historically that King sees the importance of penning a letter in his name to an audience that consists of black and white citizens. In addition, for King the apostle’s sufferings reflect the afflictions of the civil rights activists. In his body hermeneutic, King merges these sufferings with those of Paul, and by doing so asserts the fusion of black history with sacred history, indicating that despite white historical claims to the contrary, black lives are important to God and to God’s history with the world.
1. Julia Foote, A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch by Mrs. Julia A. J. Foote (Cleveland, OH: Printed for the author by W. F. Schneider, 1879), reprinted in Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, ed. William Andrews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 218.
2. Calvin S. Morris, Reverdy C. Ransom: Black Advocate of the Social Gospel (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990), 130.
3. Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 197.
4. Morris, Reverdy C. Ransom, 130.
5. Morris, Reverdy C. Ransom, 130.
6. Morris, Reverdy C. Ransom, 152.
7. Making the Gospel Plain: The Writings of Bishop Reverdy C. Ransom, ed. Anthony Pinn (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), 44. Hereafter, cited as Ransom, Making the Gospel Plain.
8. Ransom, Making the Gospel Plain, 44.
9. Ransom, Making the Gospel Plain, 44–45.
10. Herbert Marbury, Pillars of Cloud and Fire: The Politics of Exodus in African American Biblical Interpretation (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 139.
11. Jennifer T. Kaalund, Reading Hebrews and 1 Peter with the African American Great Migration: Diaspora, Place, and Identity (London: T&T Clark, 2019) 26; Ransom, Making the Gospel Plain, 45. See also Marbury, Pillars, 136–40.
12. Ransom, Making the Gospel Plain, 45. See also Marbury, Pillars, 136–40.
13. Calvin White Jr., The Rise to Respectability: Race, Religion, and the Church of God in Christ (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2012), 12; James Brewer Stewart, “Abolitionists, the Bible, and the Challenge of Slavery,” in The Bible and Social Reform, ed. Ernest Sandeen (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), writes of the failure of the abolitionist movement to ensure equality of freed slaves: “Emancipation came as a result of military necessity, not moral suasion, and throughout North and South long established patterns of white supremacy were to endure. Despite the best abolitionist efforts, the former slave was destined not to become an equal citizen but a segregated sharecropper, intimidated and coerced by vengeful whites. By the early 1870s, as abolitionism lost all coherence as a movement, whites in both sections found increasing areas of agreement concerning the subjugated position of the black race” (53).
14. Grant, White Women’s Christ, 197.
15. Ransom, Making the Gospel Plain, 45.
16. C. Eric Lincoln, Sounds of the Struggle: Persons and Perspectives in Civil Rights (New York: Friendship, 1968), 229. Also quoted in William C. Turner Jr., The United Holy Church of America: A Study in Black Holiness-Pentecostalism (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2006), 8. See also James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), who denotes 1880–1940 as the “lynching era” (3).
17. Kaalund, Reading Hebrews, 27.
18. Ransom, Making the Gospel Plain, 45–46.
19. Morris, Reverdy C. Ransom, 74, citing Timothy L. Smith, “Slavery and Theology: The Emergence of Black Christian Consciousness in Nineteenth Century America,” Church History 41 (December 1972): 504.
20. White, The Rise to Respectability, 14.
21. Ransom, Making the Gospel Plain, 48.
22. Ransom, Making the Gospel Plain, 48.
23. A phrase used to describe him by President R. R. Wright of Wilberforce University. See the preface of Ransom’s book The Negro: The Hope or the Despair of Christianity (Boston: Ruth Hill, 1935).
24. Bishop Reverdy C. Ransom, The Pilgrimage of Harriet Ransom’s Son (Nashville: Sunday School Union, 1949), 261. See also Milton C. Sernett, African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 337–46.
25. Kenyatta Gilbert, A Pursued Justice: Black Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017), 43.
26. Ransom, Harriet Ransom’s Son, 47.
27. Ransom, Harriet Ransom’s Son, 49.
28. Ransom, Harriet Ransom’s Son, 82.
29. Ransom, Harriet Ransom’s Son, 83.
30. Ransom, Harriet Ransom’s Son, 105–10. Gilbert, A Pursued Justice, 43. A number of scholars note the impact of the Social Gospel movement upon Ransom. Gilbert states that Ransom was an example of how “in the hands of certain Black preachers, the Social Gospel was refashioned to become something of a tertium quid [a third something]” (42). In other words, Ransom may have been influenced by the Social Gospel but in the end converted it into a theological and social approach that met the social, spiritual, moral, and industrial needs of African Americans. See Gilbert’s discussion, A Pursued Justice, 39–45; Susan Lindley, “ ‘Neglected Voices’ and Praxis in the Social Gospel,” Journal of Religious Ethics 18, no. 1 (1990): 75–102; Ralph Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Ransom, Making the Gospel Plain, 49–56.
31. Ransom, Harriet Ransom’s Son, 112.
32. Ransom, Harriet Ransom’s Son, 85.
33. Reverdy Ransom, “The Race Problem in a Christian State,” in The Negro: The Hope or the Despair of Christianity (Boston: Ruth Hill, 1935), 64. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
34. Acts 16:9: “And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us.”
35. Ransom, Making the Gospel Plain, 51.
36. See the statistics on lynching earlier in this chapter.
37. See Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 9.
38. Ransom gave this speech at the World Fellowship of Faiths (Second Parliament of Religions) in Chicago in 1933.
39. Reverdy Ransom, “The Negro, the Hope or the Despair of Christianity,” in The Negro: The Hope or the Despair of Christianity, 1. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
40. Reverdy Ransom, “The Coming Vision,” in Making the Gospel Plain, 222.
41. The phrase the “color line” reappears later in this chapter, in Frank Bartleman’s observations about the Azusa Street revival.
42. Frederick L. Ware, African American Theology: An Introduction (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016), 141.
43. Ware, African American Theology, 142.
44. Larry Martin, preface to Azusa Street Sermons by William J. Seymour, ed. Larry Martin ( Joplin, MO: Christian Life Books, 1999), 17. The phrase “bringer of hope,” in the section heading, is a paraphrase of Calvin White’s comments regarding Seymour bringing hope to a racially divided nation (The Rise to Respectability, 33).
45. Martin, preface to Azusa Street Sermons, 17.
46. Estrelda Alexander, Limited Liberty: The Legacy of Four Pentecostal Women Pioneers (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2008), 7–8.
47. White, The Rise to Respectability, 33.
48. Frank Bartleman, Azusa Street: The Roots of Modern-Day Pentecost, introduction by Vinson Synan (Gainesville, FL: Bridge-Logos, 1980), 61.
49. Bartleman, Azusa Street, 65.
50. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 8–9.
51. William J. Seymour, The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission of Los Angeles, California by William J. Seymour Its Founder and General Overseer, Complete Azusa Street Library, vol. 7, ed. Larry Martin ( Joplin, MO: Christian Life Books, 2000), 30; William Seymour, “Apostolic Address,” in A Reader in Pentecostal Theology: Voices from the First Generation, ed. Douglas Jacobsen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 53.
52. Bartleman, Azusa Street, 66.
53. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 9.
54. Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 148.
55. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 10. But according to Jacobsen, the revival lasted from 1906 to 1908 (introduction to A Reader in Pentecostal Theology, 10). Others, such as Ronald Minor, foreword to Azusa Street Sermons by William J. Seymour, 9, claim it lasted three years, 1906–1909.
56. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 10.
57. The Pew Forum states that by “all accounts, pentecostalism and related charismatic movements represent one of the fastest-growing segments of global Christianity. According to the World Christian Database, at least a quarter of the world’s 2 billion Christians are thought to be members.” “Spirit and Power—a 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals,” Pew Research Center, October 5, 2006, http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/spirit-and-power/.
58. Jacobsen, introduction to A Reader in Pentecostal Theology, 3.
59. Jacobsen, introduction to A Reader in Pentecostal Theology, 4; David D. Daniels III, “ ‘Doing All the Good We Can’: The Political Witness of African American Holiness and Pentecostal Churches in the Post–Civil Rights Era,” in New Day Begun: African American Churches and Civic Culture in Post–Civil Rights America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 167.
60. Eric Lewis Williams, “ ‘Mad with Supernatural Joy’: On Representations of Pentecostalism in the Black Religious Imagination,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 44 (Fall–Spring 2016): 81–97 (here 93).
61. Williams, “Mad with Supernatural Joy,” 94–95.
62. William Seymour, “Receive Ye the Holy Ghost,” in Martin, Azusa Street Sermons by William J. Seymour, 49.
63. Seymour, “Receive Ye the Holy Ghost,” 49.
64. Seymour, “Receive Ye the Holy Ghost,” 50.
65. William Seymour, “Gifts of the Spirit,” in Martin, Azusa Street Sermons by William J. Seymour, 53.
66. Seymour, “Gifts of the Spirit,” 53–54.
67. Seymour, “Gifts of the Spirit,” 55. Seymour writes, “May we all use our gift to the glory of God and not worship the gift. The Lord gives us power to use it to His own glory and honor.”
68. Jacobsen, introduction to A Reader in Pentecostal Theology, 4.
69. William Seymour, “Sanctified on the Cross,” in Martin, Azusa Street Sermons by William J. Seymour, 103–4.
70. Seymour, “Sanctified on the Cross,” 104.
71. William Seymour, “The Baptism of the Holy Ghost,” in Martin, Azusa Street Sermons by William J. Seymour, 108.
72. Seymour, “The Baptism of the Holy Ghost,” 108–9.
73. Seymour, “The Baptism of the Holy Ghost,” 109.
74. Turner, The United Holy Church of America, 124.
75. The Pentecostal belief in supernatural miracles is evident in this statement by Seymour.
76. Seymour, “Receive Ye the Holy Ghost,” 50.
77. William Seymour, “Money Matters,” in Martin, Azusa Street Sermons by William J. Seymour, 35.
78. Seymour, “Money Matters,” 36.
79. Seymour, “Money Matters,” 35.
80. Seymour, “Money Matters,” 37.
81. Seymour, Doctrines and Discipline, 30; Seymour, “Apostolic Address,” 53.
82. Paul says in Gal. 2:14: “But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?” (emphasis added).
83. Interestingly, this response to racial divisions occurred in 1915, the same year the film Birth of a Nation was released (see above in this chapter). It is also important to note that not all whites at Azusa exhibited prejudiced behavior. In this same “Apostolic Address,” Seymour acknowledges that “Some of our white brethren and sisters have never left us in all the division; they have stuck to us. We love our white brethren and sisters and welcome them. Jesus Christ takes in all people in his Salvation” (Doctrines and Discipline, 30).
84. According to Ithiel C. Clemmons, Bishop C. H. Mason and the Roots of the Church of God in Christ (Bakersfield, CA: Pneuma Life Publishing, 1996), “Pentecostalism is the only denomination of the Christian faith in the United States founded by African-American people” (31).
85. Jacobsen, introduction to A Reader in Pentecostal Theology, 5.
86. “Charles Harrison Mason,” in Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present, ed. Martha Simmons and Frank E. Thomas (New York: Norton, 2010), 434.
87. “Charles Harrison Mason,” in Simmons and Thomas, Preaching with Sacred Fire, 434.
88. E. W. Mason, The Man … Charles Harrison Mason: Sermons of His Early Ministry (1915–1929) and a Biographical Sketch of His Life (Memphis, TN: Church of God in Christ Publishing House, 1979), 13. See also Sherry Sherrod DuPree, A Compendium: Bishop C. H. Mason Founder of the Church of God in Christ (Gainesville: Sherry Sherrod DuPree, 2017), 12.
89. Jacobsen, A Reader in Pentecostal Theology, 214. Ithiel C. Clemmons maintains that the “roots of the Church of God in Christ go back at least thirty years before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Slave narratives, with their heartwrenching descriptions of conversion experiences, provide a rich resource for exploring the beginnings of the Church of God in Christ tradition” (Bishop C. H. Mason, 20). See chap. 4 for some of these conversion experiences.
90. Jacobsen, A Reader in Pentecostal Theology, 214. For information on women in the COGIC, see Anthea Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). For a more general overview of women in the sanctified church as a whole, see Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “The Role of Women in the Sanctified Church,” in If It Wasn’t for the Women … : Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001).
91. Jacobsen, A Reader in Pentecostal Theology, 214; “Charles Harrison Mason,” in Simmons and Thomas, 434–35.
92. E. W. Mason, The Man, 19.
93. Jacobsen, A Reader in Pentecostal Theology, 214; “Charles Harrison Mason,” in Simmons and Thomas, 435.
94. E. W. Mason, The Man, 20.
95. See also Mason’s words regarding the Spirit, Spirit baptism, glossolalia, and interpretation in Mary C. Mason, ed. and comp., The History and Life Work of Bishop C. H. Mason (1924; reprint, Memphis, TN: Church of God in Christ, 1987), 57–59.
96. Clemmons, Bishop C. H. Mason, 70; “Charles Harrison Mason,” in Simmons and Thomas, 435.
97. Mary C. Mason, The History and Life Work of Bishop C. H. Mason, 31.
98. Clemmons, Bishop C. H. Mason, 27.
99. Clemmons, Bishop C. H. Mason, 71; “Charles Harrison Mason,” in Simmons and Thomas, 435. Albert Raboteau, American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), eloquently writes about the interracial origins and possibilities of the Pentecostal movement and the movement’s subsequent capitulation to societal racism: “The Holiness-Pentecostal movement seemed poised to develop a truly interracial Christianity. The great three-year-long Azusa Street revival, begun in Los Angeles in 1906, involved interracial leadership, and included the participation of Asian and Mexican as well as European and African Americans. Early Pentecostals understood the interracial character of their movement as a sign of its authenticity—a new Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit on diverse races as well as diverse tongues. For a time, black Pentecostal leaders ordained whites to the ministry and involved themselves in interracial revivals. But once again, race emerged to constrain the movement’s flow and turn it aside into the old well-worn paths of discrimination” (97).
100. Jacobsen, A Reader in Pentecostal Theology, 218.
101. According to DuPree, A Compendium, “On the first week of April 1914, Elder C. H. Mason traveled to the Hot Springs convention to invoke God’s blessings on the General Council of the Assemblies of God. He preached to more than four hundred white preachers. Elder C. H. Mason never showed racist or hostile intent after the whites dropped his church’s name, which resulted in the formation of the Assemblies of God in 1914. [He] viewed his lifelong task as one of preserving the ‘Holy Ghost spiritual essence’ and the ‘prayer tradition’ of the Pentecostal religious experience” (40).
102. Juanita Williams Faulkner and Raynard D. Smith, eds., It Is Written: Minutes of the General Assembly Church of God in Christ Held at Memphis Tennessee, 1919–1932 (Memphis, TN: COGIC Publishing House, 2017), 47; see 61–62 for a similar but extended statement; also quoted in Raynard D. Smith, “Seeking the Just Society: Charles Harrison Mason’s Quest for Social Equality,” on With Signs Following: The Life and Ministry of Charles Harrison Mason, ed. Raynard Smith (St. Louis: Christian Board Publication, 2015), 107. See also the FBI documents regarding the surveillance of Mason in Sherry Sherrod DuPree and Herbert DuPree, Exposed!!! Federal Bureau of Investigation Unclassified Reports on Churches and Church Leaders (Washington, DC: Middle Atlantic Regional Press, 1993), 9–11, 15, 31–32. My thanks to Sherry Sherrod DuPree for alerting me to this source. See also DuPree, A Compendium, 44–52.
103. White, The Rise to Respectability, 65. See White’s chapter, “Mason Told Us Not to Fight,” which provides detailed information about the hardships Mason and others faced in objecting to the war.
104. Daniels, “ Doing All the Good We Can,”168.
105. Raynard D. Smith, “Seeking the Just Society,” 107.
106. Raynard D. Smith, “Seeking the Just Society,” notes that Mason’s preaching and teaching were quite persuasive, for, although the black population was nearly 80 percent in Holmes County, Mississippi, where Mason’s church was located, more than half of those eligible for the draft did not sign up (107–8).
107. DuPree and DuPree, Exposed!!!, 9; White, The Rise to Respectability, 74.
108. DuPree and DuPree, Exposed!!!, 32.
109. White, The Rise to Respectability, 75.
110. Raynard D. Smith, “Seeking the Just Society,” 108.
111. E. W. Mason, The Man, 36.
112. E. W. Mason, The Man, 36.
113. E. W. Mason, The Man, 36, 38.
114. Mary C. Mason, The History and Life Work of Bishop C. H. Mason, 39.
115. E. W. Mason, The Man, 37, 39.
116. E. W. Mason, The Man, 39.
117. Raynard D. Smith, “Seeking the Just Society,” 104.
118. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 119. According to the 100th anniversary edition of the Mount Olive Times (vol. 2, issue 1), the bishops that succeeded Robinson after her death were Bishop Elmira Jeffries (1946–1964), Bishop Agnes Ziegler (1964–1969), Bishop Mary Jackson (1969–1980), Bishop Sylvester Webb (1980–1991), and Bishop Amy Stevens (1991–2000). The first male leader of the church was Bishop Sylvester Webb, and as of this writing, the pastor is Bishop Thomas Martin, who began the pastorate in 2001.
119. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 121.
120. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 122.
121. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 123.
122. Rosalie S. Owens, Bishop Ida Bell Robinson: The Authoritarian Servant Leader (Middletown, DE: Rosalie Owens, 2019), 39. According to Alexander, Limited Liberty, although Robinson left the United Holy Church, she remained friends with its leaders and continued to fellowship with them in services (125). See also Owens, 39–40.
123. Bettye Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850–1979 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 194.
124. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 125.
125. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 130–31. Alexander notes that many African American Pentecostals were pacifists during this period.
126. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 132.
127. DuPree and DuPree, Exposed!!!, 37. See also 38, 48, 53.
128. Alexander, Limited Liberty, 132.
129. Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder, 203. Parts of this sermon are also quoted in Alexander, Limited Liberty, 133–34. Collier-Thomas calls this text a sermon, whereas Alexander refers to it as an article that Robinson wrote for her organization’s newsletter, the Latter Day Messenger.
130. Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder, 203.
131. Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder, 204.
132. Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder, 204. The full citation is as follows: “One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (Eph. 4:5–6). See also the discussion of this sermon in Collier-Thomas, 197–99, and Alexander, Limited Liberty, 133–34.
133. Peter Paris, “The Bible and the Black Churches,” in Sandeen, The Bible and Social Reform, 135.
134. Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder, 198; 2 Cor. 4:4 reads: “In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.”
135. Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder, 204.
136. Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder, 195–96.
137. See the insightful analysis of Howard Thurman and his life by Raboteau, American Prophets, 95–117, who writes, “In looking at the life and thought of this mystic, poet, ecumenist, and preacher, Howard Thurman, perhaps we may gain a measure of hope and wisdom for our own situation, if we, like him, are truly committed to the search for common ground” (98).
138. Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber, eds., A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 3–6; Raboteau, American Prophets, 101–8.
139. Raboteau, American Prophets, 108.
140. Raboteau, American Prophets, 108.
141. Raboteau, American Prophets, 110.
142. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Richmond, IN: Friends United, 1981), 31. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text. For collections of additional writings by Thurman, see Fluker and Tumber, A Strange Freedom; The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, ed. Walter Fluker (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009–2017).
143. In this work Thurman does not deal with the peristasis catalogues that appear frequently in Paul’s letters and list the sufferings that he undergoes, including violence at the hand of the Roman authorities (e.g., 2 Cor. 4:8–12; 6:4–10; 11:23–29). See my brief discussion of Paul and the violence of the Roman state in Lisa Bowens, “Painting Hope: Formational Hues of Paul’s Spiritual Warfare Language in 2 Corinthians 10–13,” in Practicing with Paul: Reflections on Paul and the Practices of Ministry in Honor of Susan G. Eastman, ed. Presian Burroughs (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018), particularly 117–20.
144. Thurman, like all the black hermeneuts discussed in this monograph, does not distinguish between the Paul of Acts and the Paul of the letters. Modern critical biblical scholarship does make the distinction, however, and so there is current debate as to whether Paul really was a Roman citizen, since he does not mention this fact in his letters.
145. Marbury, Pillars, 174, 176, 177. See also the important analysis of Albert Cleage in Paris, “The Bible,” 148–51.
146. Marbury, Pillars, 177.
147. Marbury, Pillars, 177, 178.
148. D. Kimathi Nelson, “The Theological Journey of Albert B. Cleage, Jr.: Reflections from Jaramogi’s Protégé and Successor,” in Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna and Child, ed. Jawanza Eric Clark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 23.
149. Nelson, “The Theological Journey,” 24.
150. Marbury, Pillars, 178–79; William C. Turner Jr., “Preaching the Spirit: The Liberation of Preaching,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 14, no. 1. (2005): 4.
151. Marbury, Pillars, 179. Marbury’s insightful analysis of Cleage’s views and his relationship to King and the civil rights movement is invaluable. See 174–200.
152. As quoted in Marbury, Pillars, 178.
153. Jawanza Eric Clark, “Introduction: Why a White Christ Continues to Be Racist: The Legacy of Albert B. Cleage Jr.,” in Clark, Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna and Child, 1–2; Nelson, “The Theological Journey,” 22.
154. For example, see the discussion in chap. 2 regarding narratives told about black people’s origins.
155. Albert B. Cleage Jr., The Black Messiah (Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1968), 85–86. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
156. Paris, “The Bible,” 149. See also the recent collection of essays on Cleage entitled Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna and Child.
157. Turner, “Preaching the Spirit,” 4. The phrase “slaveholding Christianity” comes from Frederick Douglass. See chap. 2.
158. Paris, “The Bible,” 141. Paris places King in the prophetic strand of the black church, and he defines this strand as “that of criticism, subjecting the prevailing institutions, beliefs, and practices to scrutiny in order to uncover their racist bias. This strand assumes that the nation has the will to correct its practices and beliefs when its errors are pointed out. Hence its style of criticism is constructive … it neither affirms nor celebrates the past uncritically but subjects all events, deeds, and actions to rigorous evaluation in accordance with the principles of the black Christian tradition. It diligently seeks to reveal the contradictions inherent in the life of the nation and to clarify the moral dimensions of those contradictions and to urge their resolution” (140–41). See also Obery M. Hendricks Jr., “An MLK Birthday Sermon,” in The Universe Bends toward Justice: Radical Reflections on the Bible, the Church, and the Body Politic (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), 195–206.
159. Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word That Moved America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 12.
160. Lewis Baldwin, Behind the Public Veil: The Humanness of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 5.
161. Rufus Burrow Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Theology of Resistance ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 5.
162. Simmons and Thomas, Preaching with Sacred Fire, 514–15.
163. Simmons and Thomas, Preaching with Sacred Fire, 515.
164. Martin Luther King Jr., “ ‘Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool,’ Sermon Delivered at Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church,” August 27, 1967?, Stanford University Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/why-jesus-called-man-fool-sermon-delivered-mount-pisgah-missionary-baptist.
165. King stands in a long line of black ministers whose concern for the whole person permeates their work. This idea that the gospel transforms the entire individual was in direct opposition to some whites’ theology in which the gospel affected the soul but not the body. Thus, slaves could be free spiritually but not physically. Blacks could be Christian, but they still needed to sit in the back of the bus. See additional analysis in the section on King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”
166. Simmons and Thomas, Preaching with Sacred Fire, 515.
167. Martin Luther King Jr., “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” in Strength to Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 127. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text. Letter greetings usually consist of sender, addressees, and wish of grace and peace from the sender to the recipients. See, for example, Rom. 1:1–7; Phil. 1:1–2.
168. Throughout the discussion of this essay, I place Paul in quotation marks to denote King taking on Paul’s persona in this correspondence.
169. King’s bold declaration that segregationists oppose God echoes Lemuel Haynes’s provocative statement back in the 1700s that “Slavery is sin!” See the discussion of Lemuel Haynes in chap. 1.
170. Sernett, African American Religious History, 519.
171. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986), 290. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text. See also my discussion of this essay in “God and Time: Exploring Black Notions of Prophetic and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in T&T Clark Handbook of African American Theology, ed. Antonia Daymond, Frederick Ware, and Eric Williams (New York: T&T Clark, 2019), 219–21.
172. See the discussion of this passage in the section on Reverdy Ransom.
173. Martin Luther King Jr., “Transformed Nonconformist,” in Strength to Love, 8–9. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
174. Martin Luther King Jr., “Shattered Dreams,” in Strength to Love, 78. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
175. This language of sacrifice echoes Walker’s use of Paul to characterize his own death in divine terms as a sacrifice on behalf of his fellow African Americans. See the discussion of Walker in chap. 1.
176. King, “Shattered Dreams,” 116.
177. King, Strength to Love, 107; Peter Paris, Black Religious Leaders: Conflict in Unity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 104. Paris’s comments regarding King’s view of God are apropos: “In all of King’s thought, speeches, and writings no other theme is more pervasive than that of God. I contend that all other important concepts pervading his works—for example, nonviolence, love, justice, human dignity, reconciliation, freedom, morality—are either explicitly or implicitly related to his understanding of God” (100).
178. Clemmons, Bishop C. H. Mason, 58.