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REVELATION AND LIBERATION
The two stubborn facts of African American Christian existence are that God has revealed Godself to the black community and that this revelation is inseparable from the historic struggle of black people for liberation. These facts are not merely the product of an experiential appropriation of the gospel but are themselves reflected in the biblical witness. Both the call of Moses (Exod. 3:1–17) and the missiological declaration of Jesus (Luke 4:16–30), the scriptural touchstones of African American Christianity, reflect the inherent connection between God’s self-disclosure and the manifestation of God’s liberating intentions in the context of a people who suffer under the yoke of oppression. The Hebrew term employed in the Old Testament to refer to God’s liberating and illuminating word is dabar. Dabar, however, does not mean the disembodied utterance of a distant Deity, but rather refers to the active engagement of God in bringing about what God proclaims.
In the call of Moses God reveals no new knowledge, engenders no new mysticism, but situates God’s appearance in the context of and as a response to the enslavement of Israel. What Moses learns in this encounter is that God has promised to fulfill the covenant relation established with Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Rachel. The bondage of the people of Israel stands as an affront to the fulfilling of that covenant. Further, God informs Moses that the liberation of the slaves will bring the disfavor of their captors, but that even Pharaoh’s army is no match for the power of God. Thus, in this encounter we have the backdrop of a prior, covenantal relationship between God and Israel, an immediate confrontation between Moses the chosen messenger and that God, and the pressing, existential situation of the enslavement of Israel.
In the annunciation of Jesus, he draws from the oral prophetic tradition of Israel and situates himself as the anointed one whose mission it is to bring the good news to the poor and oppressed. He tells his listeners that even today the words of the prophet Isaiah are fulfilled. However, the reaction of the hometown folks of Nazareth turns from praise to condemnation when Jesus indicates that the poor and oppressed to whom he is referring are not the calloused, self-righteous, and complacent citizens of Israel, but are those marginalized people of Zarephath, Syria, and Sidon.1 A similar pattern to that described above is evident here. We have the backdrop of the prophetic, justice-seeking, tradition of Israel, an immediate encounter between Jesus as the fulfillment of that tradition and the community of hearers, and the cries of oppressed peoples whose voices are not heard even in Israel.
There is within African American Christianity a structural similarity to the instances cited above. That is, black Christianity developed against the backdrop of a religious sensibility born of African traditional religions, in direct response to the immediate encounter of African slaves with the Jesus of the Bible, and in the existential situation of oppression and unmerited suffering. The religious sensibility of African slaves prior to (and in spite of the conditions of) their introduction to European American Christianity is evidence that Africans were not pagans or infidels. They were not forgotten by God. African theologians are quick to reply to suggestions that the European missionaries brought God to Africa. Their response is that “we already knew God before the missionaries arrived.”
In spite of the ravages of their kidnapping and the disorientation that they endured, African slaves retained an outlook on their experience that continually reaffirmed their worth as individuals and as a people and affirmed God’s unmistakable presence in the created order. The Jesus whom they encountered as they were exposed to the Bible was a caring and liberating friend who shared their sorrows and burdens. Further, this Jesus was able to bring real change in their personal condition and their collective estate. It was impossible, however, to speak of this Jesus without relating him to the condition of slavery and exploitation. There was no revelatory significance to the biblical account of Jesus if he could not speak to the real suffering of a voiceless and invisible people.
What this means, theologically speaking, is that to attempt to formulate an understanding of God’s revelation apart from an analysis of the unjust structures of social existence does violence to both the significance of that revelation and to the integrity of the liberation struggles carried on by the victims of society. Such a separation would make God’s revelation a quaint addition to our knowledge of an ancient religion with no salvific significance for the world in which we live. It would also distort the transcendent dimension of the universal human longing for freedom and justice.
The history of revelation and the history of liberation are the same history.2 God’s self-disclosure is not meant to increase humanity’s storehouse of cognitive merchandise or to intensify one’s inward feeling of piety, but to demonstrate that God’s presence and power are limited by neither geographical boundaries nor political structures. What we learn in the revelatory moment is that God is invested in the struggle of the oppressed for freedom.
The Meaning of Revelation
God’s revelation is both dynamic and multidimensional. Its dynamism is evident in that it takes place in history. It is not an abstract, timeless event, but the manifestation of the will of a living God. The revelation of God is permanent, final, and ultimate in the sense that what we know of God is absolutely trustworthy. All of Christianity stands or falls with the promise of God to be faithful to God’s word. Therefore, God’s allegiance with the enslaved Israelites and Jesus’ solidarity with the victims and outcasts of society are permanent in that they are axiomatic assumptions. From this perspective one can say that God has made Godself known to suffering humanity.
But God’s revelation is also contingent, partial, and incomplete in the sense that human history is yet unfolding. Unanticipated, novel, and surprising moments await humankind. The open-endedness of our historical experiences and the limitations of our human condition suggest that this is a revelation that we do not possess, but that possesses us. This is the root of the dynamism of the revelatory moment. There are both novelty and continuity, confirmation and surprise in every encounter between God and humanity. Yet Moses’s call and Jesus’ annunciation are prototypes, or basic paradigms, through which all our subsequent revelations are judged. Therefore, revelation is dynamic in that while we may not know what God will do in the future, we do know that God’s future acts will not contradict God’s past acts. We may not know in what garb or visage Christ will appear among us in the future, but we do know that his future identity will not contradict his past identity. In the words of a hymn often sung in African American churches, “We may not know what the future holds, but we do know who holds the future.”
The dynamic character of God’s revelation is important in understanding the shape of African American Christianity because black Christians have lived face to face with the contingency of their own reality. From the sobering recognition of slave parents that their days with their children could be capriciously cut short by the auction block, to the disease of black middle-class persons whose tenuous ties to a comfortable lifestyle may be suddenly cut by the market forces of an economy over which they have little control, the contingent nature of African American reality is ever-present. Yet the truth of God’s promise is not dependent on the human capacity to apprehend its totality, but is finally rooted in the unshakeable Word of God.
God’s revelation is dynamic, and it is also multidimensional. Since the seventeenth century, theologians have responded to the Enlightenment claim that religion cannot share the same ontological ground with reason by attempting to demonstrate that revelation is a kind of knowledge. These theologians became so preoccupied with the problems of epistemology that they lost sight of the deeper meaning of God’s self-disclosure. Much of this was based on René Descartes’ notion that reason precedes existence (cogito ergo sum—I think therefore I am), and that knowing (ordo cognoscenti) precedes being (ordo essendi). What was lost is that God’s self-disclosure was the disclosure of a self, not merely a disembodied rational mind, and that Jesus’ revelatory declaration in the Gospel of Luke was not the disclosure of some new information but the uncovering of the God’s preferential option for the poor and oppressed. Because of this detour in the history of theology, theologians limited their inquiry regarding revelation to two questions, “What is the content of God’s revelation?” and “How is that revelation legitimated?”
From the perspective of the poor and people of color, God’s revelation involves more than solving abstract epistemological problems. The emergence of the Enlightenment period accompanied the imperialistic expansion of Europe and the large-scale encounter between Europeans and aboriginal peoples. This encounter, and the exploitation of those peoples that followed, resulted in the demise of the classical homogeneous picture of humanity. In terms of the doctrine of revelation it was now necessary to address two further questions, “To whom is this revelation given?” and “Where does this revelation occur?”
The first question became necessary because of Western Christianity’s confrontation with people designated as “the other,” i.e., people of color and women. The confluence of Christianity and political confrontation meant that one could not speak of God’s revelation without some consideration of the question, “To whom is God revealed?” The ulterior motives of enslaving Africans, exterminating Jews, and rendering women invisible and aboriginal peoples extinct blinded theologians to the importance of this question, and in most cases they merely assumed that, of course, they (as members of so-called civilized European societies) alone were the recipients of God’s revelation.
The second question became necessary because of Western Christianity’s complicity in the territorial conquest of other (i.e., “foreign”) lands. Christianity’s relation to Constantinian expansion in the distant past and the colonial occupation of Africa and Asia in the recent past meant that one could not speak of God’s revelation without considering the question of the locus of revelation. However, the incredible bounty extracted from these lands and their eventual enrichment of the European American churches compromised the integrity of most theologians, and they merely assumed that the locus of God’s revelation was wherever they (as bearers of so-called civilized culture) happened to be. The notions of some people designated as “other” and some places designated as “foreign” meant that those with military and political power in these contexts were tempted to deem themselves as the only chosen receptors of God’s revelation and the ground on which they stood and lived as the only revelatory ground.
God’s revelation is multidimensional for African American Christians because they were the “other” to whom God’s self-disclosure had been presumably denied. However, they knew differently. African American Christians have always resisted ideas of revelation that confined it to pure abstract knowledge. To paraphrase Blaise Pascal, revelation has more to do with the reasons of the heart than with the reasons of the head. Further, African American Christians have consistently resisted the tendency to divorce the fact of God’s revelation from the identity and social location of those to whom it is given. This is why black religious testimonies are full of specific personal and topographical references when speaking of an encounter with God in Christ. African American Christians will often cite the date, time, and place of their conversion/revelation experience as a sign of authenticity. In addition, many will affirm that God called them by name. God’s revelation is multidimensional because it is essentially a personal encounter. That revelation concerns whole persons and whole communities in their particularity. It is the loving and gracious giving of Godself to the world.
The Meaning of Liberation
Like the notion of revelation, the idea of liberation is also dynamic and multidimensional. Its dynamism lies in the fact that at any given time the desire for liberation is a response to the concrete historical and existential concerns of the oppressed. The term “liberation,” unlike the word “liberty,” is employed precisely because it points to the real, visceral character of the human struggle against the principles of evil in the world. The term “liberty” has become associated with laissez-faire economic theory, individualist political theory, normative ethical theory, and uncritical patriotism, to the extent that it has lost any symbolic power for those whose condition is more than theoretical. Liberation, to this point, has the advantage of being associated, for good or for ill, with concrete historical movements.
To speak of liberation as God’s work and intention in the world means that one must understand liberation as a permanent, final, and ultimate feature of one’s existence. That is, God’s will is irresistible, and...