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Black lives matter. This statement is true. Indeed, it is categorically and universally true. Its truth transcends the affirmations of those who proclaim it, in their many ways. Its truth overcomes those who deny it. Black lives matter. The lives of those who are a little bit browner than others, most of whom have their biological ancestry in Africa, matter. Although history has not always recognized this truth, eternity has.
The record has been well established in human history, especially within the Western telling: the narrative has been unkind to Black life, especially in recent centuries. It must be understood that the saying “Black lives matter” is a response to the notion that they do not. Of course “all lives matter”; that is the point of saying “Black lives matter.” If all lives do not matter, Black lives do not matter either. We say this not to declare that Black lives matter more but because in a large portion of human history, they really have not mattered at all.
I am placing my cards on the table. I do not write this work as a full supporter of the overtly nontheistic and anti-Christian leanings of the official Black Lives Matter movement. I offer them my respect and praise for the efforts they have wrought on behalf of Black and oppressed people around the world. But I am not an advocate of their complete ideological platform. This work, then, is not an attempt to provide biblical justification for all of their beliefs.
Rather, I am writing as a Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ. I am writing as a biblical scholar who has investigated biblical texts historically and exegetically. I am writing this book as a pastor concerned about the preaching of the gospel, which entails the dignification of Black life and the reconciliation of the nations to God. And as a consequence, I am advancing a position that rehearses the slogan “Black lives matter” but has a uniquely Christian take on this phrase. The reason is simple. If Black lives do not matter to God, do they really matter? But since they do matter to God, the one who has been revealed in Jesus, then we can boldly proclaim that they matter.
Some might ask, What kind of Christian take could one have on this phrase? It has been argued that this phrase is anti-Christian at its core. This book is an attempt to argue quite the opposite. Jesus, the resurrected Lord, believes that Black lives matter. They matter to him.
This is the message we hear from the author of Luke and Acts. When he wrote his Gospel, he portrayed Jesus as the savior of the children of Adam, those who were made in the image of God, the children of God (Luke 3:38; see Gen 1–2; 5:1–5). To express the explosion of the mission to save all of the children of Adam contained in Luke’s second book, Acts of the Apostles, Luke discusses the salvation of Black life (Acts 8:26–40; 13:1). Luke mentions the presence of African peoples as a demonstration of the reach of Jesus’s salvation. This salvation is of the Jews (Acts 2:10; see Isa 19:25). And most pivotally, when Luke wanted to express the extension of the gospel of Jesus to all of the world, he described the salvation of a person who was recognized in the ancient world as a black-skinned African (Acts 8:26–40). For Luke, Black lives mattered and continue to matter to Jesus.
A Proposal for a Biblical View of Blackness
It has been difficult for people to agree with this reading of the evidence.1 For many centuries, white supremacist theology has blinded the minds of many who have looked at the biblical text.2 As a rule, white supremacy invests the white reader with the notion that she stands at the center of all of history and eternity. Whether such a reader is cognizant of this lens or not, for this person, God may (rarely) be invisible but Jesus is most assuredly white.3 He is not a brown-skinned Jew from first-century Judea, reared in the territory of Galilee. He, in the least, may have been the only white-skinned Jew in that area, if he were a Jew at all. The point is that the white supremacist reading is always colored white. One could understand this reading given that each color group images their god in some way like unto themselves. But it has had particularly devastating consequences for a proper reading of the New Testament and the spread of Christianity around the world.
We must be clear: Jesus certainly had a color. The typical response of many that Jesus’s color did not matter is fundamentally wrong. It is interesting that many of these people have only been concerned about proclaiming that Jesus had no color, or that his color did not matter, in response to those who say Jesus looked like everyone else in Nazareth of Galilee. They had no problem with Jesus’s color while he was imaged as white for centuries. But now there is a problem with Jesus having a color.
Color-blind theology will not do with a historical reading of the biblical texts.4 The ancients would have recognized that Jesus had a color. Many Jews considered themselves to be the ideal color, which makes sense of the fact that they believed they were God’s chosen.5 But we do ourselves a disservice and we misread the biblical narratives if we suggest that skin complexion never mattered in the Bible. It mattered then and it matters now.
Yes, geography and culture also mattered. But we must be honest when we recognize that aesthetics and physicality also matter in the calculus of moral perception. Among those with ancient Mediterranean perspectives, in particular, skin color was part of the calculus for adjudication of one’s personality and worth. This is what we call physiognomy, the determination of someone’s character based on some aspect of his physicality.6
Again, we must be clear about this. Many ancients were concerned about how everyone looked. Aristotle and other ancients believed that people took on black skin complexion and features related to a black phenotype because of their location in Africa.7 His view, as I will demonstrate, was not marginal. Moreover, it was also common to believe that people’s character matched their appearance. And these descriptions might bring with them a negative assessment.8
Interestingly, we receive a decidedly different perspective in the New Testament. This point is not new. It has been established that the New Testament participates in the conventions in which it was birthed, discussing people in a way where one would expect to infer a conclusion about someone based on his physical appearance.9 But the New Testament does so to subvert and overturn said conventions. I am doing this as I write this book. I was born being told by both white and Black people that I am Black, even though the color designation is not particularly accurate. I accept this, however, not to prop up a racist system but to affirm antiracism and engage in the conversation about how we disrupt the faulty ideologies that gave rise to the devaluation of people with dark brown skin.
But white supremacist perspectives are not the only ones that affirm the white supremacist attempt to ignore the testimony of Christian Scripture. Opposing the white supremacist view, though coming to the same conclusion, are those who profess that Jesus and the Bible have never valued Black life.10 Many believe that Christianity is “the white man’s religion.” Oftentimes, Black conspiracy theorists accept white supremacist readings and argue that there is a white Jesus. And hence my enslaved ancestors accepted a white religion, devalued themselves, and wanted to please white people in the process. Again, this analysis is an unhistorical and problematic reading that equally does not do justice to the New Testament and the portrayal of Black life in the Bible.11 When we read Jewish scripture and the New Testament, we see a different picture emerge. The God of Scripture has always loved and valued Black life. And in particular, Luke wanted his readers to know that Jesus saw the salvation of Black life as essential to the spread of the gospel around the world.
Here is what I would like to argue. It will sound completely unfamiliar to most Christians, though it is the story that Luke is telling us. When we go back to the New Testament, when we look at the writings of Luke and Acts, we see the following case being made. Jesus is the savior of the entire world (Luke 24:47). The world needed saving because Israel and the nations were sinful. Adam and his descendants, all of the nations of the world, were made in God’s image and likeness. As such, they were children of God (Acts 17:26–31). But their status as God’s children was in question because of the disconnection humans had with God. God planned to have Israel become the nation that resembled him, to exemplify what it meant to be God’s child. To make this so—because sin taints every human—and bring divine childship (the status of being considered God’s child) into fulfillment, God sent his own Son, Jesus.12 Through Jesus, Israel realizes its own place as God’s child and will be used as a reconciling agent, bringing the whole world back to God, restoring all peoples to their status as God’s children. Through Jesus, the image of God is restored to its rightful appearance; humans reflect God as they are meant to. The children reflect their divine parent, their Father.
The further implementation of this soteriological project occurs through Jesus’s work through the redeemed Israel, the church in Acts.13 The symbolic redemption of all of Israel occurs at Pentecost, the cause of the Messiah grows, and Jews from around the Diaspora return to the God of Israel through Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit. This was, in part, confirmed by the presence of African Jews and proselytes at Pentecost.
The salvation of the non-Jewish nations is symbolized by the presence of Christian black-skinned Africans (Acts 8:26–40; 13:1). Luke wanted his audience to know that these people were Black. The Ethiopian eunuch was certainly Black—indeed the blackest of all Black people in the eyes of the ancients.14 And Simeon, who laid hands on Paul and Barnabas on the commencement of their apostolic journeys, is called “Black.” The point is that Luke wanted his readership to recognize these key individuals as black-skinned.
Luke, a writer aware that color mattered to the ancients, highlighted blackness because it was despised, rejected, and considered a bad omen by many other ancients.15 But for the cause of the Messiah to be completed, the redemption of the nations meant the rejection of aesthetic bias. Though despised by many ancients, Black was beautiful to the Messiah of Israel. He came to save every child of God. And just like a God who shows complete disrepute for the foolish prejudices of people, a God who loves the things humans despise (1 Cor 1:27), God arranged for the first non-Jewish recipient of the gospel to be a black-skinned African.
The implications of such a representation in Luke not only matter for the New Testament; they also matter for all of Christianity. What Luke gives us in narrative demonstrates the intentionality of God to demonstrate acceptance of all people regardless of external appearance. God accepts all colors. God does not exalt white over black, black over brown, brown over yellow. Whatever one’s complexion, whatever one’s phenotype, we all come from the same God. We all are linked together genetically. We all must endeavor to reject the sinful tendency to associate the appearance and the culture of an entire group with wickedness and indignity. We are all made in God’s image and called to be God’s children (Gen 1:26–31). My hope is that at the end of this work, the reader will have a listening ear, recognizing what biases they may have in seeing the reflection of God in a different color.
Where Do We Go from Here?
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked this question with regard to racial justice in America.16 I believe it is appropriate in our proposal for the case being made in Luke/Acts and its implications. Chapter 2 will be an evaluation of the various studies that have treated divine childship and blackness in ancient writings. What we will discover is that scholarly views, on the whole, have treated these topics in isolation. They make the most sense when seen as part of the same argument in Luke’s narratives.
In order to make the case for this work, I will offer an investigation of Jewish and Greco-Roman concepts of divine childship. My focus will be how humans are described as the children of God. Chapter 3 allows us to better understand the ways in which the nations could be perceived as God’s children.
Chapter 4 will describe how Luke explores divine childship in his Gospel and Acts. In this chapter, I will sketch how divine childship is the nexus for a multiethnic soteriology—that is, how the restoration of the children of God is described in terms of God’s mission to reclaim all ethnicities. This chapter provides the foundation for an analysis of the multivalent implications of the stories of the Ethiopian eunuch and Simeon Niger.
Chapter 5 will make the case for how the salvation of the world, the reclamation of all of God’s children, can be symbolized in the participation of black-skinned Africans in the church. In Acts, when we look with ancient perspectives of race, we discover that salvation had physiognomic consequences. The Ethiopian eunuch’s story is told in such a way not only to speak of the salvation of a gentile but also to subvert popular views regarding the shamefulness of black skin.
In the conclusion, I will engage what implications our study has for racial thinking for the ancients and bring the project to conclusion. This will allow us to attempt to understand what we may learn theologically about race.17 Even though there is no one concept of race in the ancient world, what we can learn from the theology of Jesus and the early church on it is inestimable. What we will see is that color blindness is wrongheaded. Yes, I believe Luke’s history agrees with Paul that there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ (Gal 3:28). But this call for unity does not at all destroy the diversity inherent in their histories and even their practices in Christ.18
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In Luke/Acts, humanity’s connection to the divine family is interwoven into the church’s mission for black-skinned and other gentiles.1 The two works frame the mission for Israel and the nations as the reclamation of God’s lost children (Luke 6:35–36; 20:36; 15:11–32; Acts 17:26–31). In this mission, the reclamation of God’s Black African children epitomizes and ensures the success of the total mission for the whole world (Luke 24:47; Acts 8:26–40; 13:1; 26:20).
The case for the importance of blackness in Luke/Acts is rooted in a reevaluation of the worth of humanity. Human dignity is tied to the conception of salvation through Jesus Christ. Throu...
