On June 20, 2015, essayist and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a short Twitter essay on Black anger. This was just three days after a white supremacist had murdered nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and less than a year after the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott. Sandra Bland would die in police custody only three weeks later. Many in the Black community took to the streets to lament and protest, demanding an end to the killings and insisting on the most basic principle that Black lives do indeed matter. Their protests were met by manyâparticularly in the white churchâwith calls for forgiveness rather than anger, reconciliation rather than protest.
In response to these calls for forgiveness and reconciliation, Coates wrote:
[I] find the idea that black anger has no real legitimacy disturbing, and ultimately racist.
Feeling very weird watching coverage around Charleston. Insistence that something âpositiveâ or âhopefulâ will come out of this is bracing.
Think this might be a relic of not coming up in the Christian Church. Insistence on âforgivenessâ is beyond me.
There never seems to be much time for anger, sorrow, even hate, for black people.
The divine call for âforgivenessâ and âloveâ is selective. And tends to fall hardest on certain people.
A few weeks later, Joshua Lazard, a Christian theologian and minister at Duke University Chapel, penned an essay in which he likewise argued for the necessity of a robust Christian theology of sorrow and anger in the Black community, particularly in the face of white supremacy. Lazard wrote:
Just a day after the massacre in the historic Emanuel AME Church of Charleston, the son of one of the victims, Sharonda Coleman Singleton, offered forgiveness to Dylann Roof. As more of the victimsâ family members emerged to publicly forgive Roof I found myself caught between the Christian imperative to forgive that had driven them to do so, and an emotion that was irreconcilable: anger. . . . The Christian tradition doesnât uplift anger as a human experience worth having. Anger is reserved for God. The fact that the liturgical calendar doesnât have a season for anger, or include in its canon a âRighteous Indignationâ Sunday, speaks to just how ingrained our anti-anger theology truly is.
Together Coates and Lazardâone writing from outside the church and one from within itâraise crucial questions for the Christian community. How do we make space in our community for those who are angry, whether with God or with us? How do we respect the value of anger and protest for those who have experienced trauma, whether communal or individual? Rather than forestalling sorrow and anger with calls for forgiveness, Coates and Lazard challenge the church to make space for sorrow, anger, pain, and protest without trying to cut them short or turn them into something else.
The book of Lamentations, which reflects the humiliation and anger of the people of Jerusalem following the destruction of their city by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, provides a starting point for thinking about how to create such a space for sorrow, anger, and protest within the Christian community. Perhaps the most unflinching book of the Bible, its expression of anguish and accusation resonates wherever there is suffering, whether public or private, communal or individual. It stands within the Bible as a voice of protest against God, enfolding even the most angry and disillusioned of us into the community of faith, never correcting or silencing our lament.
The book of Lamentations contains multiple voices, each of which articulates its own experience of the communityâs suffering and its own theology of how to respond to it. Yet remarkably, it allows each of these voices to stand, weaving them together in a complex poetic form that holds them together as one. It recognizes that anger is necessary, that hope is difficult, and that being together in community is more important than being of one mind. It calls us to do the same.
Reading Lamentations: Setting the Stage
Lamentations gives voice to the humiliation, pain, and anger of the people following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE. The siege and capture of Jerusalem was no doubt a traumatic experience for the people, both physically and theologically. It shattered the communityâs belief that Jerusalem was the dwelling place of God and therefore indestructible, and it raised serious theological questions about how such a violent overthrow could happen to Godâs chosen people.
King Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians had laid siege to Jerusalem for eighteen months before breaching its walls. The siege had deprived the people of food, and by the end there was widespread starvation (2 Kings 25:3). The Babylonians had broken down the walls, burned the city, and destroyed the temple before carrying many of the cityâs elite into captivity. Lamentations is written from the perspective of those who remained in the land after Jerusalemâs destruction.
According to Lamentations, the community was utterly devastated by the fall of Jerusalem. The book describes the desperation of the city this way:
Things were better for those stabbed by the sword than for those stabbed by famineâ
those who bled away, pierced, lacking food from the field.
The hands of loving women boiled their own children
to become their food during the destruction of the daughter of my people. (Lamentations 4:9â10)
Whether we take this as a realistic depiction of the situation in Jerusalem or as a poetic rendering for dramatic effect, the suffering wrought by an eighteen-month siege and breach of the city walls must have been unspeakable.
Yet for all the physical suffering, the communityâs theological trauma may have been just as significant. An influential theology at the time, known as Zion Theology, had taught that since Godâs Temple was in Jerusalemâalso called ZionâGod would never allow the city to be destroyed. Psalm 46 provides a clear example of this theological perspective:
There is a river whose streams gladden Godâs city,
the holiest dwelling of the Most High.
God is in that city. It will never crumble.
God will help it when morning dawns. (Psalm 46:4â5)
Yet, when the Babylonians destroyed the supposedly indestructible city and sacked the temple, it called into question everything the people had believed. Either God was not as powerful as they had imagined or God had abandoned them in their time of need. Their lives devastated, the peopleâs theology could not address the trauma they had experienced.
In response, many turned to a theology found in Deuteronomy, which claimed that God rewards people who are obedient and punishes people who are not. A clear statement of this theology appears in Deuteronomy 30:16â18:
If you obey the Lord your Godâs commandments that Iâm commanding you right now by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments, his regulations, and his case laws, then you will live and thrive, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you refuse to listen, and so are misled, worshipping other gods and serving them, Iâm telling you right now that you will definitely die. You will not prolong your life on the fertile land that you are crossing the Jordan River to enter and possess.
According to this theology, God gives people what they deserve, reward or punishment, based on whether or not they follow Godâs commands.
This Reward/Punishment Theologyâknown in scholarly circles as the Deuteronomistic Theology because of its connection to Deuteronomyâhas great explanatory force, both in the ancient world and today. On the positive side, Reward/Punishment Theology allows people to feel like they are in control of what happens to them. If you want positive outcomes, all you need to do is follow Godâs commands. I often see this theology having a positive effect in my work with Mercy Community Church, whose members are mostly living in shelters or on the streets. Reward/Punishment Theology gives them confidence that their lives will improve if they take responsibility by making good decisions. It helps them believe that they are suffering for a reason and that they can chart a better course for the future.
But Reward/Punishment Theology also has obvious drawbacks. This is the theology that allows the likes of Pat Robertson to blame hurricane victims for their own suffering or to warn that expressions of gay pride âwill bring about the destruction of your nation. Itâll bring about terrorist bombs, ..... earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor.â Reward/Punishment Theology can be particularly dangerous when applied by an outsider to a situation they donât understand, as it tends toward vic...
