The problem of the human in theological anthropology: Reading Jürgen Moltmann’s christology with intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance

I first encountered the work of Jürgen Moltmann in my undergraduate years, as a religious studies major. The major was more accurately described as a study of theology and church history rather than the generic “religious studies,” since we really only considered Christianity. One particular theology course featured a detailed interaction with Moltmann’s The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions. That course and that text has remained with me, influencing my thoughts about history, atonement, the future of humanity and the world, ever since my undergraduate years, through a masters degree and a PhD. Few texts have had that kind of impact on me.

What impacted me the most was the claim that Jesus is the “one that will be,” which is to say, the one from the future. ¹ Moltmann argued that, throughout Jesus’ life, Jesus did not have the status of messiah; it was something that he suffered. The title of messiah described the opening of a new future, and Jesus suffered in the hands of a history that, unlike him, will end. The cross and the resurrection reveal the form of belief in the messiah; the content is determined by the history of his life, which inspired authorities to kill him. ² By reference to the form, I understand Moltmann to direct our attention to the visible shape of the messiah—the representation of what is to come for all of creation, which is revealed in him as the crucified and resurrected One who inaugurates the future of the world in his death and resurrection. In Jesus the messiah, the fallen and sinful world gives witness to its end by killing the one who has no end, violently demonstrating that they have no place in the future. The hope for the world lies in the interpretation of the meaning of his resurrection, and the content for new life in the world is to be found in the content of Christ’s life as the One revealed as the future of the world.

This brief sketch is woefully inadequate to capture the significance of Moltmann’s christology, which I am not trying to do. I only intend to highlight these few pieces that have lingered with me over the many years since I encountered them in college, and have remained formative for my christology as I work on my own project in Christian ethics. As I argue, Christian ethics are derived from our interpretation of Jesus, for good or for bad. White supremacy is a common, historical way of seeing the world in the West, and is in part, an ethical product of Christianity calibrated by whiteness, to false ideals and consolidating all of humanity around a fetishized, idealized Christ as the template of normative humanity. This dominant Christianity, within its various streams, has become singularly influential throughout history for the way we understand what it means to be human, Christian, and moral in the Western world. Only by direct engagement with it, for reimagining a new humanity in light of the hope that is present in the revelation of Christ, can we see our way towards a healthier theological ethics.

Moltmann offers the theological academy a way forward that is more than historical endeavors to understand Christ by reference to councils and creeds. Rather, Christians must make a priority of praxis to recognize Christ. Accordingly, christology is best understood as christopraxis and not merely a history of creeds. Dietrich Bonhoeffer made this same claim. One cannot separate who Christ is from what Christ does. For Bonhoeffer, one knows who Christ is only in relationship; Christ is pro-me/pro-us. He cannot be known by the history of creeds, but as the One who encounters us in space and time, making concrete demands on our total person that we may describe as ethics. This encounter does not happen in the abstract world of creeds; we encounter Christ in daily life, in every social encounter with others. Christ is being-for-others, before God, and before each of us as we encounter one another. The church community is the visible representation of Christ on earth, and as Bonhoeffer said, “the church is church only when it is there for others.” ³ Both Moltmann and Dietrich Bonhoeffer argue in similar ways, for a social christology.

One of the reasons this emphasis on social christology is so important is evident in our world today, in a society torn by the violence that accompanies white supremacy and the lived reality of people who are targeted because of their aesthetic distance from the white, masculine, hetero-normative template of ideal humanity. Howard Thurman described them as people who have historically had their backs pressed against the wall. ⁴ Normative humanity is humanity regulated by a calculus of whiteness. It is humanity in the abstract, which becomes an arbitrary unit for measuring the moral claims of a society upon its marginalized members. Christianity that emphasizes creeds over praxis within its interpretation of Christ is prone to a conceptual faith that ignores lived reality and is likely to appropriate Christ for harmful political agendas.

White supremacy is one of those harmful appropriations. At key moments in Western history, Christianity was put into the service of oppressive politics, and the combination offered a diseased theological anthropology to a Western world, as a biopolitical social organizing scheme. Dominant European and American depictions of Jesus became the reflux of sick theological anthropology, which served whiteness as a scientific and theological justification for white supremacy. What it meant to be Christ centered in this history of appropriation was to be faithful to God, to country, and to family, while practicing dehumanization, valuing hatred as a patriotic and communal ideal, and committing or condoning mass murder.

Black Christians in the West have had no choice but to address this history of appropriation of Christ by whiteness. From the transatlantic slave trade that usurped Christianity as an apologetic for kidnapping Africans to assimilate them into Western empires, to the 19th-century scramble for Africa, authorized by the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, and resulting in the “civilized” colonial annexation of African territories by various Western European empires, to the hideous violence of the anti-black United States. A christological hermeneutic has been an operative source of moral guidance within forms of Western Christianity, directing encounters with others for centuries, as Du Bois said:

The characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world’s underdeveloped peoples … War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery—this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law. ⁵

The problem is not merely one of anthropological claims within christology. It is the way that combination became justification for white supremacy. Christ in Europe became a representation of cultural longing, the idealized depiction of “us,” as white Europeans saw themselves replacing Jews in God’s salvation history. Christ became white, and whiteness became hegemonic humanity. The creation of whiteness was an act of violence against people who were racialized as inferior “others.” Christ as representative of hegemonic, violent, ascendant white humanity was in truth a fetishized theological figure to stabilize a constantly shifting, self-possessed, sovereign masculine figure. This abstract figure continues to serve as a template by which to measure all of humanity.

Whiteness has so blended Christianity and a hegemonic Western anthropology, that to problematize one is to interact with the other. Scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Claude McKay, and a host of other intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance movement made a frontal attack on the white Christian appropriation of Christ, with its subsequent idealized white humanity. The social encounter between black people and white racist Christians in the overtly racist United States betrayed the lie that white Christianity has something of value to offer society beyond the dreams it gives to whites of idealized humanity for idealized community. As Harlem Renaissance intellectuals argue, white racist Christianity results in a religion that prioritizes confession and creed over social interaction. Rather, their analysis sought to highlight social interaction as the point of departure for recognizing right and wrong. And although the Harlem Renaissance was not a confessional Christian movement, its adherents made use of their familiarity with black Christian communities in their multilayered interrogation of the interconnection between whiteness and divinity.

What was most important for their analysis was what Charles Long described as theologies of the opaque. ⁶ Opaque is contrasted with transparent, which is what people and cultures on the lower rungs of the white racial hierarchy are made to become. Long refers to Paul Tillich’s interpretation of the crucifixion as a graphic illustration of transparency. According to Tillich, on the cross Jesus became transparent so that believers could see God. The suffering body is rendered invisible, and what is seen is an abstract God. Theologians of opacity will not allow this suffering body to be ignored, which is the historical treatment it receives within the hegemonic anthropologies associated with Western Europe. What is demanded in this case is to make apparent the lives of people relegated to invisibility and non-being as their suffering goes morally unaccounted for. Biological markers like skin color, within a sick theological anthropology, signify different levels of social worth and moral responsibility. Theologies of the opaque, like those highlighted by imaging Jesus as black, help facilitate the necessary deconstruction of harmful ideologies by making suffering apparent.

A healthier theological ethics begins with making social interaction the point of departure for interpreting the way of Jesus. Jürgen Moltmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance movement who demonstrate theologies of the opaque, force a look at praxis for engagement with one another with a healthier Christian ethics. This is more than instructive in days like these; it is hopeful.