Dancing with God

The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective

Dr. Karen Baker-Fletcher

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780827206403
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Dancing With God is an exploration of the divine gifts of courage and grace in the face of evil. Moreover, it is a doctrine of God as the source of that courage. Baker-Fletcher presents an understanding of the work of the Trinity with regard to the problem of crucifixion, a metaphor she uses for unnecessary violence. She develops a process of relational, womanist theology that considers the empathetic omnipresence of God in the midst of unnecessary suffering and the healing power of God in movement of the Holy Spirit. She engages the contributions of a diversity of theologians like Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Gordon Kaufman, John Cobb, Jr., Majorie Suchocki, Charles Hartshorne, Andrew Sung Park, and Katie Cannon in her discussion of the dance of the Trinity in creation, and the problem of sin, evil, and suffering. Through creative works like that of Alice Walker's The Color Purple and journalist Joyce King's account of the James Byrd, Jr. murder in Jasper County, Texas, Baker-Fletcher reveals the healing, encouraging power of the Holy Spirit in the lives of survivors of unnecessary violence.

PART I

Task, Method, and Context

An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language—but a cry.

FROM ANNA JULIA COOPER (1858–1964),
“Our Raison D’être,” A Voice from the South
(Xenia, Ohio: The Aldine Printing House, 1892)

I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and [God] shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.

PSALM 27:13–14 (KJV)

CHAPTER 1

Renewing Our Minds
Theological Task, Method, and Sources

Violent death afflicts the global land, and the world is intent on perpetuating distortions of goodness. According to the sayings of Jesus, even the rocks cry out with no language other than a cry (Lk. 18:40; compare Hab. 2:11). In the midst of it we wonder about the who and where of God when the divine appears to be absent. And yet, something in the universe sustains life in the midst of evil and suffering when words and hope fail us. In 1892, Anna Julia Cooper published a brief essay entitled “Our Raison D’être” as a preface to her book, A Voice from the South. Eleven years later, W. E. B. DuBois would write about the cry of black folk in The Souls of Black Folk, quoting lyrics by Arthur Symons.¹ If the word God points to a truth that is real, then surely God as such relativizes all of our language about reality to naught but a cry.

The Death of Optimism

Today, we continue striving toward clearer articulation of God’s activity in relation to freedom, not only in relation to humankind but also in relation to all of creation. However, we no longer live in a world in which one can assume the progress of civilization. Anna Cooper was optimistic that the world would become more civilized through the teachings of Jesus. The truth is that the world still struggles with good and evil in ways Cooper never could have imagined. Humankind has developed nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry that could destroy the world in ways that were inconceivable during her time.

It is one thing to place hope in God who is in Jesus the Christ, quite another to place hope in “civilization’s” openness to fully participate in divine love, creativity, and justice.² By the end of World War I, Cooper’s social Darwinistic optimism began to give way to a Niebuhrian realism that responds to the problem of despair and disillusionment. Such realism flourished in the wake of World War II. More wars, poverty, assassinations, terrorism, hatred, and crime have left much of the world fighting not mere despair, but cynicism.³ The world today is as concerned about devolution as much as evolution, patterns of nihilism as well as patterns of creativity. It is aware of the potential of destroying the earth as we know it by means of nuclear holocaust or ecocide. It is aware that freedom and wholeness have not been realized everywhere. It is a world in which racialized thinking, religious bigotry, gender oppression, child exploitation, and economic greed persist in presenting obstacles to physical, social, intellectual, and spiritual freedom.

Yet Cooper’s attention to the cry of those whom Howard Thurman, in the twentieth century, called “the disinherited”⁴ continues to point to a biblical truth. Where suffering, evil, hatred, unnecessary violence, and injustice exist, the entire earth “cries out” to God. As Cooper’s title of her essay, raison d’être or “reason for being” implies, those who lament evil and suffering are not irrational. They are imbued with reason. This reason is integrated with feeling, which is the experience of reality. Such is the intelligence of the spirituals, the blues, jazz, and hip hop. Filled with the pathos of an infant’s cry at times, it quickly moves beyond pure sound to articulate meaning in the midst of suffering and joy through its tonality, rhythms, and sometimes lyrics. Certain experiences of evil and of goodness reduce humanity to naught but a cry of lament or of joy. These cries continue to rise in the twenty-first century. Theology itself, in its discourse about the ineffable, is a cry for adequate understanding of God’s response to the world, given the world’s peculiar experiences of goodness and evil.

Method and Sources

Experience

A Christian integrative relational womanist theology begins with God. Christians find the God they worship in biblical and experiential revelation. More broadly, God’s revelation is present in the experiences of scripture, tradition, and reason. Scripture, tradition, and reason are part of the human experience by which we come to understand divine omnipresence and transcendence through God in Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, our starting point is Christian experience and the relationship of the body of Christ with God who is revealed in the Word/Wisdom of God. Scripture and the traditions within Christian tradition, are common shared sources in which the body of Christ experiences divine revelation. Without scripture and tradition, the body of Christ, which is the church, is unable to consider and even debate (acts of reason) what we mean when we say we worship God who is revealed in Jesus or revealed in Jesus the Christ.

While some question the existence of God, theology presupposes that God exists. If God did not exist, then there would be no life—no universe of which to speak, no earth, no “sky,” no atmosphere, no creatures, no weather to “shoot the breeze about.” There would be no ruach, which means in Hebrew “breath,” “wind,” or “spirit.” We would not be able to breathe and live without the very power of life, which is God. With each breath we take, we are experiencing the power of life. The word “God” is a symbol for the power of life, creativity, love, justice, goodness, and compassion. To speak of all these things is to speak of experiences of God, for it is God who makes lips, tongues, vocal chords, and bodies to even speak of such things. In God—the power of life and thus the power of relations—the concept and practice of courage are possible and may be realized. In finding courage for justice and life, we may hope in the concrete movement of God in every moment.

The scientific insights of Whiteheadian, Einsteinian and quantum physics contribute new analogical possibilities for understanding God’s relationship to the world, while also maintaining understandings of God found in the religious experience of African American people of faith like Mamie Till-Mobley, James Cameron, the family of James Byrd Jr., Vanessa Baker, and classical Christian writers. This Christian integrative relational womanist theology highlights the experienced revelation of biblical writers, classical Christian theologians within the larger tradition, and experiences of God by writers and narrators from the recent past. Experience is key to understanding the divine-creature relationship, particularly as we understand that scripture, in its inspiration by the Holy Spirit, is also part of the religious experience of biblical writers.

We sometimes speak of tradition as if it were separate from experience. Experience, however, is a unifying relation of interlocking sources of tradition, scripture, and reason. Experience of God is found in tradition, experience, and reason. Tradition, which is part of the past, with its long history of experiences in the temporal world, involves the prehension or feeling of ongoing series of events. Tradition and the traditions within tradition are steeped in Christian historical experience. Their response to God emerges from a multiplicity of experiences, spanning not only years, but incremental moments and nanoseconds of time in physical space. Whenever we refer to past and present decisions, writings, liturgies, narratives, and theological treatises or when we refer to past and present situations of joy and suffering, healing and pain, goodness and evil, righteousness and sin, we are speaking of the experience of past and present persons.⁵

Likewise, language is steeped in experiences. Even the cry of infants is an expression of prelinguistic experience. Therefore, it is not helpful to argue that language precedes experience when language is a learned behavior for communicating experience. To do so leaves one bound to a worldview in which internal experience, as John Cobb argues, is ignored and neglected. One fails to see that creatures communicate experience of divine and existential reality not only in our words, but in sounds, moans, groans, sighs, smiles, frowns, ritual, and bodies. From birth, without words, we experience breath, earth, water, sun, earth, and air which sustain our bodily, animated lives and are part of God’s beloved creation.⁶

God is omnipresent, literally inspiring each exhalation and inhalation of human experience. This is the meaning of prevenient grace, that grace which protects us not only from physical death, but also from spiritual death and the loss of our capacity to enjoy each breath we are gifted to take. God as an actual entity is distinctive from us. We are finite, created actual occasions, events, and drops of experience that live and perish with hope for everlastingness in the memory of God. God alone feels, that is, experientially knows, all entities in their entirety.⁷

Even without language, creation would continue to experience internal and external creative processes. Moreover, divine creativity continuously experiences the inner workings of creation because God, who is omnipresent in creation, responds to creation. God is present, and not far off, in our imaginative and constructive processes. There is no place where God is not present. Otherwise, incarnation is a sham, and Immanuel—God with us—a delusion. When words fail and hope falters, experience of the power of life remains because God is everlastingly responding to creation internally and externally. God is available, even when it may not seem like it, to strengthen the heart and keep it from fainting. God calls the world forward, beyond the immediacy of sheer survival into abundant life. Experiences of suffering, violence, crucifixion, and death make sense only in reference to a greater norm, which is the power that makes all life possible. In relation to the greater norm of the power of life, unnecessary violence, suffering, and death lose their claim to be normative.

Scripture reveals the experience of God as understood by the writers and by human beings that they write about. It also reveals much about biblical writers’ understanding of divine revelation through creation and God’s love for creation. Likewise, whether we examine classical Christian writers or traditions within “the tradition” throughout the Christian era, that tradition emerges from human experience of God, including the experience of scientific observation of the inner and outer workings of the cosmos. Therefore, when we appeal to scripture, tradition, and reason, we are appealing to experiences of God who is the ultimate knower. Moreover, we are always appealing to an integration of faith and reason. Indeed, according to New Testament literature, God renews both our minds and our hearts. Experience is the starting point for integrative relational theology. Scripture, tradition, and reason are all aspects of human experience. Reason is not separate from experience. Experience is a form of knowing. We human beings experience God through mind, body, and spirit. This is evident in scripture and tradition. God is intimately amongst us as Immanuel. Moreover, there is no hiding place from God (Ps. 139), because God is omnipresent. Yet, God is other, knowing the whole world in its fullness. God, therefore, transcends all creaturely knowing and experience. If God is omnipresent, then the world experiences God’s presence prelinguistically and linguistically, preconsciously and consciously. The world consists of a multiplicity of entities, each one a society in its particular biological, atomic, subatomic makeup. No one entity or group of entities knows the fullness of the world as God knows it.

The Subject(s) of Dancing With God

General Understanding of the Subject(s) of Theology

God is not the object of our faith. God is the subject of our faith.⁸ The tendency of human beings to objectify God and one another is an effect of separation, violation, conflict, and disharmony, which we human beings experience as “estrangement”⁹ or sin. God is the subject of theology, because theology simply means “words about God” or “study of God.” Theology also is a study of those whom God has created and those whom God—identified by Augustine as love—loves. The first among God’s beloved is found in the immanent Trinity, in which we see God’s love of God’s own nature. As Augustine puts it, God as “Lover,” loves the Son who is “Beloved.” The Holy Spirit, who is love, unites these two.¹⁰ All three love one another relationally, in the distinctiveness of their personalities. God is communitarian within God’s own nature.¹¹ In the economic Trinity, which is God’s revelation and response to the world, the world experiences and learns from God’s love. The world experiences itself as beloved in Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. The world, then, also is a subject in theology, because not only is the Son God’s own beloved, but creation, which the Trinity has created according to the laws of its own relational and integrative nature, is also beloved by God. The world, however, does not come into existence without divine creativity. Therefore, in this sense, the world is a secondary subject in relation to divine creativity. Indeed, the world as we know it is not everlasting, because it is temporal and finite. God, however, is everlasting, even as God creates a new heaven and a new earth.

The Divine Subject

The subject of our study is exploration of the dynamically, dancing Trinity in relation to divine gifts of courage and grace in the face of evil. We will examine the source of the strength to “take heart” in the midst of hatred and unnecessary violence, as Jesus en-courages or en-heartens¹² his followers prior to his arrest and crucifixion: “The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me. I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered [overcome] the world” (Jn. 16:32–33).

The theme of Christ’s overcoming the world, specifically overcoming transgressions against divine and social justice in the world, became a key theme in the civil rights movement of 1950–1968 in the United States. Today, we still need the courage in Christ that is implied in all Christian inspired themes of overcoming. Moreover, it is important to understand the role of the Holy Spirit as the power of encouragement in Christ. Therefore, the subject of “dancing with God” is the Trinity, because if we emphasize only God in Christ, we cannot understand the full power of God to heal and transform the world. Prior to statements regarding “overcoming the world,” the author of John writes that in speaking of the world’s hatred of truth, Jesus promises to send his disciples an advocate, the Spirit of truth, who is the Holy Spirit (Jn. 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7–15). A dipolar theology will not suffice, if we presuppose it is true that God in Christ promises to send God’s Spirit of truth to his disciples and if we presuppose that this promise is realized according to the story of Pentecost in the book of Acts (Acts 2:1–423). A dipolar theology cannot adequately lead us into conscious, full relationship with God who is in Christ, because Christ reveals God the Father—who in a feminist or womanist view may be understood as God the Parent,—and God the Holy Spirit. When we talk about the source of the strength to “take heart” or “to be of good courage,” we are talking about God, who is three dynamic relations (hypostases) in one nature.

The Creaturely Subject(s) of Theology

Not only does...