CHAPTER 11
THE HOLY SPIRIT
AS LIBERATOR
An Exploration of a Black
American Pneumatology
of Freedom
LEON HARRIS
THE DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT has been part of the black experience in America at least since 1619. The black church in many forms speaks of the presence of the Holy Ghost as an experiential reality that determines salvation, their humanity, and their social reality. On May 18, 1952, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached a sermon titled “The Relevance of the Holy Spirit” at Ebenezer Baptist Church; unfortunately, no extant text of this sermon remains. The point here is that although King did not originate the relevance of the Holy Spirit for the black church community, he was aware of what was already important to the survival of the black community. To this end, my goal is to demonstrate that in the experience of black people during American slavery, the activity of the Holy Spirit provided the language, knowledge, and impetus for the liberation of the slaves. I will do this primarily using a phenomenological approach through the voices of the slaves themselves. I will also demonstrate through three representatives of black theology that liberation is a central part of the black theological enterprise. Then, finally, I will outline liberation as an essential element of pneumatology.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AS LIBERATOR OF (AFRICAN) AMERICAN SLAVES
It is not uncommon for evangelical Christians to credit evangelical Christianity for the abolition of African slavery in America, with the primary credit given to William Wilberforce. Regarding the abolishment of slavery in England in 1807, one writer says that “it was a victory for Wilberforce and his friends, but more importantly it was a victory for humanity, accomplished in the name of Christianity.”1 Throughout this author’s discussion of the abolition of slavery in England and America, very little—if any—responsibility or credit is given to the slaves. And when the abolition of slavery is viewed through a theological lens by North American Christians, the credit is usually given to Christianity as a world shaping ideology. An ideology that has inherent properties to re-create humanity by overcoming sin when individuals assent to the propositional truth claims of the gospel. Typically, what is missing in this theological retelling of the abolition of slavery is the Trinity. Specifically, the possibility that the Holy Spirit was already working on behalf of the slaves apart from evangelical Christians, who were the slaveowners, is neglected: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17). It should be no surprise that when the slaves cried out to God for deliverance, God heard and answered their prayers. In light of the liberating Spirit, I will propose that it was the Holy Spirit who liberated the slaves. It was the slaves’ prayers to God the Father and their belief in Jesus Christ that moved the Spirit to act on their behalf.
In order to organize this section thematically, I will use the tradition’s psychological model of faith, that is, the intellect (notitia), affection (assensus), and volition (fiducia) in order to demonstrate how the Holy Spirit flamed the African slaves’ imagination toward liberation, which, in the face of evangelical Christian opposition, illuminated the slaves’ intellect, warmed their affections to be free, and empowered them with a holy call to resist slavery by any means necessary. What is missing in many evangelical accounts of the abolitionist movement is the witness of the slaves themselves. So I will make use of slave narratives, testimonies, and interviews in order to allow the slaves to speak. The slave narratives are not without problems due to the duress that many of the slaves experienced when retelling their experiences. Yet, even when under the scrutiny of hostile white authority, “the volumes of slave narratives provide a theological abundance of religious experience from non-Christian bearers of God’s freeing spirit.”2 Therefore, I will assume the slave narratives are as truthful as most other documents during this time period. It is the theological lessons about the Holy Spirit that are of interest—that is, how did the Holy Spirit, who delivered Israel, also demonstrate the same divine action of liberation within the life of the slaves.
EPISTEMOLOGICAL LIBERATION
Regeneration as an aspect of soteriology is attributed to the work of the Holy Spirit who regenerates and renews through the washing of rebirth (Titus 3:5). Calvin puts it this way, “Therefore, as we cannot come to Christ unless we be drawn by the Spirit of God, so when we are drawn we are lifted up in mind and heart above our understanding.”3 For Calvin, the Holy Spirit regenerates our mind in such a way that the believer is illuminated to the truth and grace of Jesus Christ. Without taking away from the tradition, I would like to expand this epistemological arena of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, as the perfecting cause within the Trinity, perfects the understanding of the oppressed by illuminating their minds to the truth that they are divinely made for freedom. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom from the oppressive brainwashing that binds people to the belief that they are inherently and divinely created to be slaves. The Puritans, who served as chaplains on slave ships, who served as slave owners, masters, and overseers, taught the slaves a theological anthropology that situated the African—or any black body—as less than human by divine fiat. But the Holy Spirit taught the slaves a radically different theological anthropology. It was under these circumstances that the former slave James Curry realized that God did not create him or any other African to be a slave. Curry says,
When my master’s family were going away on the Sabbath, I used to go into the house and get down the great Bible, and lie down in the Piazza, and read, taking care, however, to put it back before they returned. There I learned that it was contrary to the revealed will of God, that one man should hold another as a slave. I had always heard it talked among the slaves, that we ought not to be held as slaves; that our forefathers and mothers were stolen from Africa, where they were free men and free women. But in the Bible I learned that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth.”4
Notice that for Curry, slavery is against the revealed will of God. At this point, it might be a leap to attribute this to the work of the Holy Spirit, but when this episode is approached theologically, the conclusion seems plausible. First, if the Spirit illuminates the mind to the truth of the Word, it seems reasonable to assume the Spirit is at work. Curry was not instructed by his slave owners, for he was careful “to put it back before they returned.” In order to supervise the slaves’ Bible reading, Christian masters kept their slaves under strict orders not to read the Bible outside their masters’ watch. Curry probably was taught that slaves should obey their masters as recorded by the apostle Paul. Curry probably was taught the curse of Ham theory, that slavery is actually proper to God’s will for Africans. Yet Curry states that this is against the revealed will of God. Again, Curry admits that he was familiar with the rumors or tales that the slaves originated as free people from Africa, but those stories do not seem to persuade him of his right to be free. It was the liberating work of the Holy Spirit through the Scriptures that illuminated Curry’s imagination that the God who created the white slave owners also created the black slaves—freedom is given to all people by the same God.
THE HOLY SPIRIT WHO LIBERATES DIGNITY
To be a bearer of the imago Dei is to be granted the dignity afforded to human creatures by our Creator, a dignity that was corrupted but has been restored through Jesus’s life of obedience, his death on the cross, and his resurrection, culminating in his ascension to the right hand of the Father. Jesus, who was baptized with the Spirit, now restores God-given dignity by baptizing humanity with the Holy Spirit. During times of slavery, American Christianity espoused a theology that privileged immaterial nature over material. This meant that white Christians eventually acquiesced by allowing slaves to be baptized and converted as Christians, though their status as slaves remained unchanged. Black Christians were taught that their souls were worthy of redemption, but their bodies—their status in society—were established by divine fiat for servitude, with less value and status than white bodies. So the Holy Spirit used the gospel of Jesus Christ to restore the imago Dei to the slaves, even if white American society failed to recognize it; black Christians knew, believed, and responded in word and action in a new restored manner. Dwight Hopkins says,
To know oneself as both an object of and co-laborer with divine initiative emboldened one to act in a self-initiating manner. Because one’s ultimate authority was greater than the plantation hegemony, black chattel could seize space and time of self-assertion in some of the most least expected instances. To know oneself as belonging to the divine, in a word, empowered one to claim opportunities for life.5
The divine grace of the Holy Spirit freed the mind and affections of enslaved black Christians to recognize in the cross of Christ their restoration in a holistic manner. Jesus died in an embodied state, so the slaves surmised that he died for their bodies as well. This way, liberation is a holistic act that includes immaterial and material existence because the black body is worth just as much as the white body. One way this image was restored was during the slaves’ secret church meetings, where they would encounter the presence of the Holy Spirit, who in turn liberated their humanity from the hegemonic theology of slavery.
The divine action of the Holy Spirit restored humanity to the slaves because they no longer saw themselves as alone; there is a God in Jesus Christ who is concerned with their struggle. This gave black Christians a sense of agency to cooperate with the Spirit in order to codetermine their own being in the world. Enslaved black Christians now felt a sense of agency and the divine right to resist the physical oppression; the theological hegemonic teaching that defined their life was now considered demonic; the slave masters’ worship time designed to control was replaced by secret meetings controlled by the Holy Spirit. Cummings says that for the slaves “their religious independence became a means of defying the dominant powers and creating their own means of coping with the reality of their exploitation and suffering. This defiance, born of the Spirit, was poignantly expressed when the ex-slaves talked about the prayers of the slave community.”6 For the slaves, it was the Spirit who gave them their songs; it was the Spirit who formed their community of love; it was the Spirit who empowered them to defy the direct orders of their slaveowners and interpret the Bible as liberated black Christians. This secret community constituted by the Holy Spirit became a community of hope for the slaves; an expression of the Spirit’s work of liberation. The hope became action in which the enslaved black Christians interpreted sanctification as an individual purification of sins which now also include the community’s deliverance from the sin of slavery. Just like Israel, enslaved black Christians learned the lessons of Joshua and Caleb that they are coworkers with the Spirit, meaning that they now have the right and obligation to resist and destroy oppression. Now that their dignity has been restored through independence of thought, worship, and action, they also have a right to the same promised land as white people. This way, the Holy Spirit transformed the affections of enslaved black people to accept, embrace, and reorder their existence based on human dignity and freedom—the slaves have hope that one day all slaves everywhere will be free as a result of the redemptive work of the eschatological cosmic Spirit of Christ.
THE HOLY SPIRIT WHO LIBERATES THE VOLITION
In Philippians 2:13, Paul says that “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” We also read in Acts 10:38 that Peter preached saying, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit will result in the desire to do the Father’s will. Prior to the empowering of the Holy Spirit, the individual lives in a state of ruptured humanity, which is manifested in a variety of ways depending on the social location of the individual. In regard to the enslaved black Christian, the rupture in humanity was so severe that resisting slavery was unthinkable—to actively campaign for freedom was not an option. There is a sense that the Holy Spirit’s love was and is displayed within the individual and communal life of the slaves when both aspects were “born again” with a renewed desire to be free. When viewed strictly biologically, healthy organisms have a drive for survival; a drive to be a particular organism free from external constraints to be otherwise. The Holy Spirit liberated enslaved black Christians by restoring the drive to be that particular human being and human community; the will to obtain the necessary component of being human—freedom—is transformed from an imagination to reality.
The Holy Spirit transformed the theological anthropology that was grounded in the authority of the white master to the rightful authority of God in Jesus Christ—black people have the divine right to resist oppression. Hopkins states that “a divine right to resist, along with the method of co-creating the black self by seizing sacred domains, also fueled black folk’s struggle to reconstitute and regenerate their own new reality.”7 This reconstitution is realized when black Christians participate in their self-definition and self-determination, which begins at their secret church meetings. This way, enslaved black people leave their old relationship based on the interrelationship between white master and black slave and enter a new relationship based on the interrelationship between Jesus Christ and black bodies. The slaves are now constituted as a new creation with the corresponding drive to experience and participate in the freedom—materially and immaterially—that each Christian has because of the cross of Christ.
The desire to actively fight for freedom is theologically grounded in the notion that black Christians saw themselves as partners with God to deliver them from white Christian oppression. Harriet Tubman will serve as an example of a black slave freedom fighter who used her belief in Jesus Christ as the theological and philosophical impetus to act, which in turn demonstrates the role the Spirit had in moving these heroes to act. She sang the following song to alert enslaved black people to get prepared to flee:
When that old chariot comes,
I’m going to leave you.
I’m bound for the promised land.
Friends, I’m going to leave you.
I’ll meet you in the morning
When you reach the promised land
On the other side of Jordan,
For I’m bound for the promised land.8
When Tubman sang this song, she was using biblical imagery of God’s deliverance of Israel to encourage her fellow freedom fighters, and it was a signal that the time to leave the plantation was now. Hopkins says that “the use of liberation language indicated that the coast was finally clear for one more soul’s journey to freedom. And it was a joyful song symbolic of praising the power of God’s grace over oppression.”9 It was Tubman’s belief that the same Spirit who liberated Israel will now liberate enslaved blacks.
Admittedly, this is not an exhaustive treatment of the history of the black church during slavery. What I attempted to briefly demonstrate is that theologically speaking, we can see that the Holy Spirit was moving the slaves toward freedom through the psychological framework of mind, affection, and volition. The enslaved black people encountered the Holy Spirit through the witness of the Word, and in the face of opposition they were moved to resist and partner with the triune God to create a new humanity of free people in Jesus Christ. This same Spirit, through partnering with black Christians, then moved white Christians to partner with them toward the abolishment of slavery. This way, both black and white Christians owe the responsibility for liberating slaves to the grace of God in Christ by the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit.
PNEUMATOLOGY IN BLACK THEOLOGY
On June 13, 1969, the National Committee of Black Churchmen issued a statement regarding black theology. The statement explicated that black theology is not an expression of the theology given by white slave masters but an appropriation and interpretation of the gospel by and for black Christians. The Black Churchmen described black theology as “a theology of black liberation. It seeks to plumb the black condition in the light of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, so that the black community can see that the gospel is commensurate with the achievement of black humanity.”10 The Churchmen delineated that black liberation does not mean the oppression or violence against whites; black liberation means freedom for black people and freedom for whites to stop their racism against black people. The Churchmen conclude with, “the demand that Christ the Liberator imposes on all men requires all blacks to affirm their full dignity as persons and all whites to surrender their presumptions of superiority and abuses of power.”11 This is the driving force of pneumatology within black theology. By reviewing three representatives of black theology in the persons of Dwight Hopkins, James H. Evans Jr., and J. Deotis Roberts, a pattern will emerge that gives a general agreement to a pneumatology that reflects the experience of enslaved black Christians as rehearsed earlier.
DWIGHT HOPKINS: PNEUMATOLOGY AS COWORKER WITH THE SPIRIT OF LIBERATION
Dwight Hopkins formulates his pneumatology within an encompassing theology of liberation that is the framework for the doctrine of God, Christology, and the redemption of humanity toward freedom. In other words, liberation becomes an overarching metaphor that shapes his theology through the experience of the Holy Spirit beyond mere doctrinal presentations. The Holy Spirit is construed as God for us because God is the Spirit of total liberation. God acts for our freedom because in the Holy Spirit God is freedom. This means that instead of revelation being a revelation of the reality of Jesus Christ, revelation is the freedom received in Jesus Christ: revelation is the knowledge by the Holy Spirit that God is freedom for us. Jesus Christ is the Spirit of total liberation with us, he is with us in the presence of the Holy Spirit co-constituting the African American self—as well as the poor and oppressed—toward a total liberation in social, economic, and cultural terms. So, faith in Jesus means that “faith lets the poor know that trouble does not last always.”12 Jesus’s blood alone is the final arbiter and authority on liberation because the Spirit of liberation rests on Jesus as the one who gives the Spirit. Ultimately, black identity and black culture is given validation, that is, the dignity to exist, because of Jesus and no other. It is the experience of Jesus as the Spirit of total liberation where the eschatological purpose of humanity is conceived as the Spirit of total liberation in us.
The Holy Spirit is not relegated to personal sanctification for Hopkins, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of liberation in us, that is, in the individual black body and the black community. The Spirit does this through co-constituting the identity and the ontology of the black person through politico-economics, daily social interactions, linguistics, and racial cultural identity levels. Hopkins says, “These disciplines entail what we have also called methods of the self—that is, knowing oneself and taking care of oneself. In other words, implementing disciplines of creativity is to work with the Spirit to constitute the self through methods of self.”13 This way, salvation is when the Spirit liberates the black community—and also the poor and marginalized—toward a self-determination and self-definition of their existence apart from external hegemonic evils. The ontology of the oppressed is now a new creation, or a re-creation, because their existence is grounded in the freedom of God in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Hopkins does not limit the work of the Holy Spirit only in the oppressed or marginalize, but he does not venture far from liberation as the defining framework. Hopkins states, “To be a human is to work with the Spirit of liberation within us on behalf of the oppressed, in contrast to working with the legion of demonic spirits within us that would turn us away from God’s new humanity and new Common Wealth and toward selfishness.”14 In summary, Hopkins defines the work of the Spirit through creation, re-creation, sanctification, and the eschaton as an event of restoring the freedom that is ontologically God for us, incarnationally God with us, and eschatologically God in us.
JAMES H. EVANS JR.: A PNEUMATOLOGY OF BELIEF AND PRACTICE
James Evans Jr. recognizes the interconnection between the doctrine and experience of the Holy Spirit within African American theology as a nexus that shapes the individual and the community. There is no theology of the Holy Spirit apart from a thorough consideration and exploration of the diachronic and synchronic historical experiences of the black church. Evans says, “The theological understanding of the Holy Spirit, or pneumatology, among African Americans, has taken into account the essence and existence of black religious life.”15 This frames pneumatology in a way that guards against the tendencies of some theologians to associate the Holy Spirit primarily with ecstatic emotional experiences, for the Spirit also provides counsel and guidance for the sociological development of the black church. It is in the experience of and in the black church where the work of the Holy Spirit is nurtured, received, and experienced.
Evans locates pneumatology in the black church within three models in relation to black religious belief and practice: radicalism, liberation, and survival. Belief and practice are the links that maintain a coherent pneumatology for Evans. Black radicalism is not a description of subversive activity but a recognition that blacks were meant to live in freedom and with dignity—the black community is precious in God’s sight. Instead of subversive activity, black radicalism is grounded in the Spirit’s empowerment and right to protest and struggle for freedom in the here and now—the right for life abundantly. Black radicalism is grounded in the belief that God the Spirit is the Creator and Redeemer for them just as the God liberated the oppressed in the Bible. In other words, black radicalism is not social deviance; it is a spiritual way of life, grounded in the Holy Spirit, toward an affirmation of black life. Evans says, “The assertion here is that this radicalism is at the heart of the understanding of the Holy Spirit as Creator in black theology.”16
There is a pneumatological freedom that takes the form of liberation and survival—theologically speaking, redemption and providence. The Holy Spirit brings joy in the morning because Jesus is the Anointed One who liberates the oppressed. The Spirit liberates from individual and institutional sins; the strictures in social levels, brought about by sin, are abolished. The new community is a community of freedom because the Holy Spirit has redeemed the black community so that it can order its existence apart from the strictures of a fallen reality toward the freedom in the redeemed community. The Spirit sustains the black community through the gifts of the Spirit, which sustain the church through God’s providential care. The wilderness becomes a place of transformation, just as it was for Israel, through the sustaining presence of God in the black community, as well as the communities of the poor and marginalized. Ultimately this means that black Christians’ dignity, sense of liberation, and actual life of freedom are sustained by the continuing work of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, belief and practice shapes African American pneumatology in a way that impacts the historical reality of the black religious experience through the creation of black identity, the liberation of the black community, and the maintenance of the identity and freedom of the black community due to the providence of the Spirit.
J. DEOTIS ROBERTS
J. Deotis Roberts develops a pneumatology that has a structure similar to that of Evans. For Roberts, there must be a realization that Black theology “does not endorse the Western-oriented division between the personal and the social or the physical and the spiritual.” When discussing pneumatology in a black theological context, the orthodoxy-orthopraxy scheme must not give priority to one over the other; both necessarily inform pneumatology. So, for Roberts, the Holy Spirit means that God is a vital, acting God; God is that which gives life in creation and re-creation—God is active in human life: “The pneuma of God is God acting in Creation, providence and redemption.”17 Roberts desires to remain faithful to the evangelical tradition by maintaining the indissoluble relationship between Christology and pneumatology. He is concerned that some black Pentecostals have been criticized for being too pneumatically oriented and minimizing the christological relationship.
It is interesting that in critiquing Pentecostalism Roberts explicates a robust black pneumatology. For Roberts, liberation becomes the focal point for praising and criticizing Pentecostalism. Roberts explains that black Pentecostalism includes an element of liberation, namely, liberation from the authoritative structures of early Pentecostalism that attempted to deny black members leadership and ministerial roles. On the other hand, Roberts says, “With all of its fervent claims to the outpouring of the Spirit in the individual soul, there is so little evidence of concerns for making life more human for the oppressed.”18 As we saw with Hopkins and Evans, liberation becomes an overarching ruling metaphor for determining a proper pneumatology in Black theology. The Spirit for Roberts works within the church as an institution and an event. As an institution, the Spirit liberates the structures and social order in the historical situatedness of the black church toward creating freedom of the black individual and community. As an event, the Spirit liberates the affections of the black community through an empowering presence that energizes the community to action. Evans finds that the black church is moved by the Spirit’s empowerment in such a way that it is concerned with individual relationships with God, but equally the relationship between individuals constitutes a Spirit-filled life. The “fruit of the Spirit” is considered an inherent part of the gospel proclamation, as well as the outcome of the gospel: the fruits of the Spirit create a community that co-creates with the Spirit of liberation. This way, the fruits of the Spirit are now defined as having a proper concern and action for the oppressed and poor as an essential aspect of a Spirit-filled empowered gospel of Jesus Christ.
A PNEUMATOLOGY OF LIBERATION
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. If we consider the experience of the Holy Spirit within the context of the African slaves and then later enslaved black Christians, as well as the theological explication of pneumatology from the three representatives of black theology, it is clear that liberation is a primary aspect that is common to black theology. At this point, I will assume that black Christians’ voices are just as valid as any other voice, and their contributions are not merely as black Christians but as Christians. Therefore, for a pneumatology to be complete, it must engage with a robust account of liberation that does not privilege the immaterial over the material. Liberation must include an ontological freedom to be that is constituted relationally so that the individual, as well as those social structures that constitute individuals within a given set of relationships, is liberated. In other words, as the individual emerges through a complex series of relationships, which themselves emerge from lower into higher social realities, each social stratification is interrelated so that the individual needs the community, and the community needs the individual. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit who perfects koinonia and freedom. Karl Barth says that “God’s being consists in the fact that He is the One who loves in freedom. In this He is the perfect being: the being which is itself perfection and so the standard of all perfection. . . . The one perfection of God, His loving in freedom, is lived out by Him, and therefore identical with a multitude of various and distinct types of perfection.”19 Therefore, liberation is that which is lived out in our created reality in a way that alters the structures of reality that determine the ontology of the individual; our particularity is determined by relationships in our social reality, so our freedom is a work of the Holy Spirit to create a community of freedom.
In a sense, the divine action of liberation as witnessed in the economic life of God must be the same divine action that is in God’s immanent life: God reveals as he is. The Holy Spirit liberates creation to be itself because God relates to creation out of free love, not necessity. In this way, because the Spirit’s action is that of perfecting in love, creation is free to relate to the Creator, but as a creature. The perfect love between the Father and the Son, which is shared by the Holy Spirit, is now turned toward creation by the same action within the triune God. The Holy Spirit prepared Christ a body so that Christ can share God’s love with creation—an action of perfection by the Spirit. The Holy Spirit anointed Jesus Christ at his baptism to inaugurate Christ as the head of a new community that shares in God’s love. At the resurrection, the Holy Spirit created a new spiritual existence that demonstrated the Father’s love, which was given to the Son, and which through the action of the Spirit was also shared with creation. Creation is liberated from fulfilling some lack in the Creator because the Spirit is continually perfecting the love that was given from the Father through the incarnated Christ—God is complete in himself. Creation is not necessary for God to demonstrate love, for God is co-love in his eternal being: creation is free to respond to God in an appropriate manner without becoming God to do so because God does not rely on creation to experience love. Freedom is shaped by God’s love, which means that freedom in creation is conceived as a gift from God that is ultimately for and to God. Freedom is not to be conceived as the freedom to be away from God or other creatures. The Father’s two hands, the Son as redeemer and the Spirit as liberator, actualize freedom in creation so that creation is free to be in a relationship with God and with other creatures.
There is an active element of liberation in pneumatology in that the Holy Spirit liberates the Father and the Son to be that Father and that Son. Colin Gunton states that “we may say that the Spirit’s function in the Godhead is to particularize the hypostases . . . to liberate them to be themselves, to be particular persons in community and as communion.”20 This means that this particularizing act is an act of the Holy Spirit whereby the Father and the Son attain perfection and retain their distinctions. The Father’s perfection is actualized when his relationship with the Son is perfected when it is shared with the Holy Spirit. The Son’s perfection is likewise only truly actualized when the love he received from the Father is shared with the Holy Spirit. The distinctions of the Father and the Son are maintained because the Father is ever the source of this reciprocal love, and the Son’s love is begotten by the Father’s love. The Father is the originator and the Son is originated eternally in love. The personhood of the Father and the Son are each perfected because the Holy Spirit takes this divine reciprocal love they share and completes it by allowing it to become a perfected charity-love per Richard of St. Victor. The Holy Spirit’s distinction is also maintained because the Spirit receives love from the Father and the Son. There is a logical taxis but not a temporal one; the activity of love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is an eternal activity.
This active liberation of the Holy Spirit in the immanent life of God is translated into an active liberation within creation, within our creaturely reality. The Spirit liberated Christ’s humanity to be free to be the Son of God in relation to the Father and free to be the Son of Man in relation to humanity. Jesus announces that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him. For Jesus, this anointing with the Spirit is realized in that he gave good news to the poor, released the captives, gave sight to the blind, and freed those who were oppressed. The year of Jubilee was not simply a release of moral guilt, it was a material release from socio-economic oppression. Jesus is announcing a radical shift in the sociological existence of the world, a shift that is now determined by liberation, by the freedom that is God and is given by Jesus’s empowerment with the Holy Spirit, who perfects freedom. Jesus liberated those oppressed spiritually as well as socioeconomically and politically. Jesus consistently crossed sociological boundaries in order to invite outsiders inside; he established a church that was commanded to be a different type of sociological existence, an existence of sharing resources and existing as a community of persons-in-relation. Just as the Holy Spirit actively participates in the freedom of the Father and the Son, the Spirit liberates believers toward a Spirit-filled Christlike existence of dying to the world’s strictures and living for the other to free them from oppression, poverty, captivity, and blindness—materially and spiritually. The Holy Spirit demonstrated this active liberation in the book of Acts when the church freely shared their resources in Acts chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6. In the dispute between the Hellenistic and the Hebraic Jews, the Spirit reordered the social reality of the early church in Acts 6 to liberate the widows among the Hellenistic Jews from the denial of their daily resources to live. So pneumatology must include an element of active liberation of those who are afflicted by the sinful structures and strictures of this fallen world. In concrete terms, the active side of pneumatology liberates believers from an active participation in the oppressive structures and strictures of our fallen world toward an active participation in working against those same oppressive structures and strictures toward the liberation of those powerless in our world. The Spirit of liberation transforms individuals’ fallen nature of selfishness into a self-giving to others in order to fight alongside with the Spirit to destroy all forms of socio-economic-political oppression—as a form of sin—that has fallen upon others.
There is also a passive element to pneumatology that allows those who are suffering from oppressive elements in this fallen world to embrace the hope of the liberating Spirit. Frank Macchia uses the root metaphor of Spirit baptism to ground his theology in the work of the third person of the Trinity. Macchia explains,
Central to the Trinitarian structure of the story of Jesus is the Father’s loving bestowal of the Spirit lavishly (“without limit,” John 3:34) on Jesus at his baptism as the sign of divine love and favor and to declare Christ’s sonship (Matt. 3:17), an anointing that begins at Christ’s conception (Luke 1:35), is found at his crucifixion (Heb. 9:14), and culminates in his resurrection (Rom. 1:4).21
In Macchia’s scheme, the Father “baptizes” the Son with the Holy Spirit; the Son returns the love of the Father by “baptizing” the Father with the Holy Spirit. Here baptizing is a metaphor for the action of love between the Father and Son in the person of the Holy Spirit. This divine action of love, which culminates in the Son being baptized with the Spirit and becoming the one who gives the Spirit, is the same action which God displays as love for his creation. The Spirit is the bond of love because the Father pours out the Spirit on his Son and through his Son on creation. Elsewhere, Macchia says that “we need to exercise caution here so that we do not de-personalize the Spirit by eliminating the Spirit’s participation as person in the koinonia of Father and Son, relating to them in ways appropriate to the Spirit.”22 In this way, the Spirit is the third person of the Godhead who opens God’s communion and mutual indwelling beyond God’s self to the other; the Father-Son relationship moves to the other, the Holy Spirit, who in turn opens communion to the many of creation. The experience of God’s love is located in the presence of the Holy Spirit when creation, especially the church of Christ, is baptized with the Holy Spirit who liberates.
This way, pneumatology must include a passive element in which the Father’s love and Jesus’s grace are experienced in the liberating work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit who is given by the Father and the Son, or through the Son (this is not the place for the filioque debate), in order to liberate those who are oppressed by the sins of this fallen world. The divine action of liberating Israel from societal slavery is that same action we rehearsed in the African slaves. The Spirit is working not just to open our hearts to the reality of Jesus Christ but also to re-create the social structures and strictures in our churches and society at large. It is in the church where we should develop a pneumatology of liberation that works on behalf of those who are powerless in this world to extricate them from those demonic forces working toward slavery instead of the freedom that is given to every human being by God. Concretely speaking, the passive side of pneumatology means that some will receive liberation from participating in the selfishness of this fallen world, and others will receive the liberation of having their dignity restored through the Spirit’s work. The outcome will be an ecclesiology that is giving to others in need (the active) and restoring the dignity and self-determination to be for the oppressed and marginalized (the passive).
CONCLUSION
I attempted to demonstrate that the Holy Spirit is responsible for granting freedom to the slaves. First, by actively giving enslaved black Christians the drive to participate as a partner with the Spirit to resist slavery and fight for freedom. Second, the Holy Spirit worked passively on the slaves’ behalf through the structures of society to move key figures to fight on behalf of the slaves (who were already resisting slavery by various means). I also briefly introduced three representatives of black theology to demonstrate that liberty is a common theme in their projects. Finally, I attempted briefly to develop a pneumatology that requires freedom as a perfection of God through the active and passive work of the Holy Spirit. Hopefully, this will create an ecclesiology that is pneumatologically grounded, one that constitutes a community that gives of itself to work for the liberation of those who are oppressed and treated as less than human, a church that realizes that all members have equal access to the table of our Father through Christ, meaning that each community has a voice that should be heard and not dismissed. The Spirit liberated each community to be that community in Christ in our historical reality, so they deserve to experience a life of freedom in the Spirit. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
NOTES
1. Paul Backholer, How Christianity Made the Modern World (Poole: ByFaith Media, 2009).
2. Dwight N. Hopkins and George C. L. Cummings, Cut Loose your Stammering Tongue: Black Theology in the Slave Narratives (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), xvii.
3. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 1:3.2.34.
4. John W. Blassingame, “Narrative of James Curry,” in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 131. Note: I paraphrased this quote in respect to the slaves and the biased reporting by many white interviewers who tended to dumb down the language in order to present the free blacks as uneducated and unintelligent; I will do this for the remainder of this paper.
5. Dwight N. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 115.
6. George C. L. Cummings, “The Slave Narratives as a Source of Black Theological Discourse: The Spirit and Eschatology,” in Cut Loose your Stammering Tongue: Black Theology in the Slave Narratives, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins and George C. L. Cummings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), 50.
7. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over, 128.
8. Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 16.
9. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over, 130.
10. Milton C. Sernett, African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, 2nd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 564.
11. Sernett, African American Religious History, 565.
12. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over, 201.
13. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over, 238.
14. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over, 238.
15. James Evans Jr., “The Holy Spirit in African American Theology,” in Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, ed. Katie G. Cannon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 166.
16. Evans, “The Holy Spirit in African American Theology,” 169.
17. J. Deotis Roberts, “The Holy Spirit and Liberation: A Black Perspective,” Mid-Stream 24, no. 4 (1985): 398.
18. Roberts, “The Holy Spirit and Liberation: A Black Perspective,” 407.
19. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010), II.1, 322.
20. Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 190.
21. Frank D. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 118.
22. Frank D. Macchia, Justified in the Spirit: Creation, Redemption, and the Triune God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 302.