Abstract
Copeland identifies her project as “practical-political theology” and distinguishes it from theodicy (justification of God in the face of oppression and suffering), because she emphatically affirms that social suffering (such as that endured by enslaved Africans and their descendants) is not God’s will but is the direct product of abusive White supremacy and privilege. One will not find in this book the kind of extended discussion of Western atonement theories usually featured in volumes on the cross (discussions that tend toward spiritualized, privatized, and ahistorical interpretations of Jesus’s suffering and death), for Copeland argues that the cross of Jesus represents real historical, social, and political torture—suffering and oppression that exposes the same realities in our own history and present context. Practical-political theology explores these historical, social, and political connections, for as Francis of Assisi claimed, the cross is a book. Copeland contends that “When we open that book . . . we encounter traces of the crucified Jewish Jesus in human social suffering in our world. We find traces of his cross . . . in the glazed eyes of poor and hungry children, women, and men in nation after nation; in the resigned faces of incarcerated youth, women, and men; in the anguished faces of queer and transgendered people living amidst murderous exclusion; in the grim faces of immigrants and refugees consigned to forgetfulness in detention centers and makeshift camps around the globe” (p. xxiii).
The cross was vital to the Christianity that emerged among enslaved people on American soil. In the words of a former slave, it “hooked them in the heart” (p. 25), because just as Jesus had been beaten, tortured, and murdered, the suffering of Africans from the Middle Passage (as they endured auction blocks, forced labor, cruelty, and assault) was rightly deemed as their time on the cross. Jesus understood their suffering like no one else; he was one of them. The spirituals that emerged from this crucible represented the suffering of Jesus as their own and countered enormous social and political evil, putting great harm and moral evil on full display. For example, a refrain such as “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” was intended to confront all who heard these words with their own complicity in public crucifixions in their own time and place. The spirituals also bore witness to profound faith that God’s power “interrupts, reveals, and projects justice, mercy and love into the bleakest circumstances” (p. 36). Indeed, Jesus’s resurrection was a sign that death, and slavery, would not be the last word.
For Copeland, failure to remember chattel slavery is deeply damaging to the nation and the church, for forgetfulness entails the loss of our moral integrity. The cross of the crucified Jesus counters forgetfulness by initiating us into a community that remembers his suffering and enables us to turn to, and to take responsibility for, the memory of chattel slavery, and to lament, which is a sign of hope. Remembering chattel slavery also allows us to see that “the plantation is not a relic of the past; the prison-industrial complex reinscribes the agony of slavery—surveillance, violence, discipline, control of the Black body” (p. 100). Copeland acknowledges that chattel slavery is “a dangerous memory” for the church and for theology that cannot be erased, for “the very bodies of the descendants” of enslaved people “continue to provoke the memory of an unapproached and unresolved past that reaches into the present and must be engaged.” But we can risk memory, overcome forgetfulness, and embody ethical responsibility for the past in the present for the future, for “an unreservedly loving God will hold us in our risk, will not allow us to forget, and will hold us in hope” (p. 102).
Black bodies, of course, are not the only bodies harmed by the ideology of White normative privilege. In fact, one of the striking features of Copeland’s discussion is the wide range of other suffering bodies constantly in her purview. In a profound chapter entitled “Marking the Body of Jesus, the Body of Christ,” Copeland asks the question: In light of some churches’ teaching on homosexuality, can Jesus be an option for gay, lesbian, and transgendered people? She invites us to consider a “queer mark on the flesh of Christ” (p. 73). She is not proposing that Jesus was homosexual. “Queer,” Copeland contends, describes whatever is oppositional to hegemonic hold on truth, power, or legitimacy, and this was Jesus’s positionality. So if we are the body of Christ, then our flesh is united with his “queer” flesh, and this “emboldens us to surrender position and privilege and power and wealth, to abolish all claims to racial and cultural superiority, to contradict repressive codes of gender formation and sexual orientation” (p. 78).
Copeland closes with a reflection on the wisdom of the “old slaves” who knew and moaned at the suffering and torture of the crucified Jesus and shouted at the resurrection. The wisdom of the “old slaves,” she says, can teach us how to “empty ourselves of all that would subvert or stifle or stop the quest for authentic freedom and liberation” (p. 176). The wisdom of which she speaks is not just for the oppressed and marginalized; my sense is that it is essential learning for all Christianity. The more we attend to the cross of Jesus Christ—to the actual historical, social, political torture he endured—and to the fact that his suffering and death was the result of a life of resistance to the principalities and powers of his day, the more we are enabled to discern the same realities in our own context. These are places where we are called to stand—places where God is bringing life out of the death-tending ways of the world. I heartily commend Copeland’s book. Indeed, it is important reading in our current historical moment as the nation engages in collective reckoning with the proposition that “Black Lives Matter.” Copeland issues a pointed and poignant call for us to risk remembering the harms of the past and to place our bodies in locations where the crucified and resurrected Jesus is seeking to bring justice, reparation, and hope.