Since starting postulancy and seminary work, I've gone mostly silent here but for the occasional sermon. I am embarking upon a haphazard plan to go back through some of the shorter and more interesting (I say) 'reading response'-type assignments and post them here. This post is the second of a three-part series from a course I took at UVa this summer on The Black Church and American Culture. In it I am responding to Howard Thurman's chapter "Jesus—An Interpretation" in his Jesus and the Disinherited. In the future, I also hope to take up the more general question of the apparent connection between trinitarian heresy and racial justice.
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Howard Thurman rightly points out American Christianity’s tendency to preach to the privileged about their responsibilities to the needy, while not saying much about what is often central in the New Testament—the message of Christianity for “the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed” (13). And his argument about the different social statuses of Jesus and St. Paul was a striking perspective. ("Unless one actually lives day by day without a sense of security, he cannot understand what worlds separated Jesus from Paul,” 33-34.)
Ultimately, though, there was a certain psychological and socioeconomic reductionism to Thurman’s approach to Jesus and especially St. Paul. He did note that what makes Jesus “most significant is not the way in which he resembled his fellow but the way in which he differed from all the rest of them” (19). But Thurman’s Christology seems suspect. Jesus is “a spiritual genius” who “became a perfect instrument for the embodiment of a set of ideals” because he “was so conditioned and organized within himself” (19, 16). None of that precludes a recognition of Jesus’ full divinity—the Incarnate Word is fully human, after all—but, if unqualified, it reduces Jesus to a great spiritual guru. Given American Christianity’s otherworldly fatalism, Thurman is right to reemphasize the this-worldly implications of Jesus’ teaching, but he overcorrects, reducing Jesus’ message to a version of social justice divorced from the fullness of the gospel. (“Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed,” 29.)
Psychological/socioeconomic readings can be enlightening, but they can also be dismissive, allowing one to bracket off difficult passages as products of the author’s context—which results in a watered-down text that can no longer threaten the reader’s premises. This precludes wrestling with the fullness of a text. It may be that St. Paul’s teachings to slaves expressed blind spots due to privilege, but if we do not try to wrestle with how St. Paul himself would have defended his teachings, we are letting ourselves off the hook too easily. (I suspect St. Paul would have said it has to do with the multifaceted nature of Christian love and its all-encompassing demands upon the Christian; we may not like where that leads, but charity demands we attempt fully to understand, even if we do not hold to the Church's traditional teachings about biblical inspiration.)
The other problem for Thurman’s interpretation is that, taken as a whole, the New Testament's teachings do not break down so easily by class and status. For instance, every aspect of St. Paul’s theology and ethics that Thurman sees as a problematic consequence of privilege is equally evident in the first epistle of St. Peter, who did not share St. Paul’s status and privilege.
