Abstract
The Ground of Covenant Community lies in the Righteous Scandal of Christian Love for the World. And Jesus is the Most Supreme Scandal to which Christians owe their devotion, that is, their active faith and fidelity in the form of a rugged and sublime love for “the least of these” in temporal life and history.
Keywords
I would like to thank Princeton Theological Seminary for the honor of the invitation to deliver the Reunion Celebration Lecture. In particular I thank the staff at Eerdmans and those in the Alumni office for their hospitality and logistical support. I thank Peter Henry too for the wonderful introduction. I also wish to acknowledge the presence of long-time friends and colleagues, as well the seminary and university professors, administrators, and staff, all of whom (while responsible for much of my formal and informal training in religion and society) bear no responsibility for anything I say here.
I extend a very special note of appreciation and thanks as well to the many workers who labor to prepare and cater the meals that feed the bodies, minds, and spirits of seminary folk. I thank those (whom I do not know by name) for washing the windows, tending the grounds, changing the light bulbs, emptying the trash, and cleaning the bathrooms of our collective lives. So often these wonderful people (the very kinds of people who raised me to adulthood in the South Bronx) are the invisible ones in whom we might experience the humble-yet-powerful presence of Christ Jesus among us.
Finally, I would like to pay honor to my own Black mother. The language of a blues-soaked Christian love (taught to me by my mother) is a resilient covenantal love, which she wrapped around her Black child, a descendent of Virginia and South Carolina slaves, from birth. A slave descendent who now speaks to you concerning “The Ground of Covenant Community and the Righteous Scandal of Christian Love for the World.”
I must begin by admitting up front that since departing from Princeton Seminary about a decade and a half ago, I have had a challenging time in Christian communities discerning how we people of faith might continuously live out the theological virtues tied to the way of the Cross in temporal time. The beauty and the difficulty of 1 Cor. 13:1–13 (NRSV) are constantly ringing in my head: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
I speak of covenant as an on-the-ground-participant-in-the-life-of-faith-and-hope bound by the moral complexities and sublime beauty of Christian love. In other words, to borrow from the eleventh-century scholastic theologian Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), I am a Christian committed to a theologically grounded living faith that seeks understanding (cf. Anselm’s definition of theology as “faith seeking understanding”; fides quaerens intellectum), that is, a love of God seeking to gain a deeper (theological, spiritual, and socially relevant) understanding of God, particularly as modeled in the moral example of Jesus Christ, who bears for us an ontological intimacy which speaks of liberation and reconciliation, penance and forgiveness, grace and joy in associational human relationships.
To this end, I have for many years been confronting the scourge of a highly racialized prison industrial complex that disproportionately savages Black bodies and Black communities (and therefore the Body-of-Christ and the whole of the American democratic experiment). When I think about the ground of Christian covenant I often reflect upon the tragedy, the perplexity, and the wonder of the Gospels of Mark 15:27 and Luke 23:33 as ground-zero expressions of covenantal love: Jesus is crucified at a place called the skull alongside two criminals. In my own work since leaving Princeton Seminary, I have been perplexed and wondering about how Christians might reconcile the relationships among that bloody scene at the cross and our confrontations with the depth and scope of mass incarceration, which features the obsessive surveillance, monetary abuse, militarized policing, mass imprisonment, and authorized beating and killing of Black bodies. I have been grappling for some time now with how to express in my work the power of divinely inspired Christian Love as the mighty, enduring, bedrock and ground of Christian covenant.
Over the years I have taken care to keep in mind that Angela Davis’s observation that the prison industrial complex “trains its sights on black women and other men [and women] of color, as well as on poor white people,” cannot be ignored. 1 I acknowledge the distinctiveness of trans-terror within the fortresses of incarceration. Indeed, as Mark Lewis Taylor has pointed out in the revised and expanded edition of his book, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, “in prison, trans-persons (trans-gender, trans-sexual, and others of LGBTIQ[+] community) are subject to special stigma and abuse.” “More broadly,” Taylor rightly employs the term “trans-terror” “because when one becomes incarcerated in the U.S. system, one’s body tends to be seen as ‘deviant,’ and hence venerable, unprotected, even deserving of abuse.” 2 And of course one cannot ignore in all of this the disproportionate numbers of homeless and mentally ill residents caught up in the carceral massification of the nation right alongside those seeking refuge here from other nations.
In general, I have thought about my work in the context of my Christian faith, a faith commitment inextricably tied to the building and sustaining of life-affirming Christian communities. I continuously discern inside the porous boundaries of faith the associated world-work that is supposed to be present in our active Christian witness in this society and across the globe. I know that it is none other than the complex, tragic, sublime, paradoxical, and audaciously hopeful love of God Incarnate in Jesus Christ that bonds, and binds, and grounds communities committed to Christian covenant. And as many already know, the divine love that roots the covenant between God and humanity, and human beings one to another, continues to be expressed and embraced in an infinite number of ways across the theological disciples in which we are all grounded. In whatever theological discipline we contribute to time and history, we ought to know that the first and the “last will and testament” of covenant community is God’s action in Jesus Christ continuously discerned by the power of the Holy Spirit both inside and outside the Body of Christ. The divinely sublime Love-Bond that grounds covenant communities entails a persistent and unyielding drive toward that which is always in a state of becoming: namely, liberation from all manner of death-dealing estrangement and alienation, and this in the service of an enduring and mutually reconciling faith and audacious hope that socially, prayerfully, and worshipfully engages both the brutal and sublime realities of Christian belonging in a diverse and inclusive world.
Now this world in which Christian covenant is built and sustained is a world filled with contingencies, complexities, tragedies, and promise. And, as all of us are aware, life’s contingencies, complexities, tragedies, and promises make visits upon every human being no matter where we are or who we are. Our common human desires for safety, security, and protection; for associations with (and belongings to) things that give meaning and purpose to life; and our desire to be valued and respected by others are real-life concerns anywhere and everywhere. And as such truths may rock and roll us at times, we must continually express and embrace a distinctively New Testament proclamation of covenant, that is to say, we embrace God’s love offered in Jesus Christ, and lived out for the sake of this society and world. Indeed, the expressive interpretations of love wrestled with among Christians should not be understood as inherently exclusive to Christian communities. Covenantal love as emboldened by the Body-of-Christ living out the way of the Cross should readily express the universality and the inclusiveness of God’s love; this includes the special moral obligations that follow from it. 3
The faithful, hopeful, and love-soaked politics of Jesus that ground Christian covenant in the society and world are, of course, modeled in the biblical witness and testimonies of liberation, reconciliation, and peaceableness. Certainly, Christians ought to know well that the biblical testimony of God’s love offers us complex, confounding, and wonderous moral examples of what covenantal faith and hope require of us. Foundational scriptural examples of covenantal faith, hope, and love can be seen and considered in Matthew 22:36–40, John 3:16, and 1 John 3:18: When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
As for myself, I have also keep at the forefront of my theological mind (anchored by Love) a wonder about the meaning for Christians today of the suffering presence seen in that fateful march to the Cross where Simon of Cyrene was compelled by Roman authorities to carry Jesus’ Cross, that is, to assist Jesus with carrying the painful and suffering burdens of the world (Matthew 37:22; Luke 23:36).
I have worked hard to understand the moral implications for today of suffering companionship with Jesus, and the criminals with him, in light of the example of Jesus’ mother, his mother’s sister (Mary the wife of Clopas), Mary Magdalene, and the disciple whom Jesus loved, all standing near the cross on that fate-filled day of Jesus’ crucifixion (John 19:25–26).
I have experienced tear-soaked sorrow and wonder concerning the covenantal implications of the tender loving care given unto the brutalized, dead body of Jesus the crucified savior by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, and the watchful, spice-filled, love of women before and after Jesus’ crucifixion; not to mention that post-resurrection Jesus first appears in his Divine Glory to a woman, Mary Magdalene.
And in what is perhaps the most difficult proclamation offered by Jesus to be modeled by Christians who want to build and sustain covenant communities in the context of the death-ravages of human life and history there is the divine call to enemy love, You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of [God] in heaven. [God] causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly [God] is perfect. (Matthew 5:43–48)
I constantly ask, What does covenant community in view of the mighty Sermon on the Mount really mean for us today in light of such neglectful and tragic dimensions of human estrangement? What is enemy love? What does Christian love require of us as we all do temporal time in this society and in this world?
In the context of counter-cultural visions of liberation and reconciliation as embodiments of tear-soaked Christian love, I have also been contemplating the retaliatory violence that often accompanies the long-entrenched memories of those who continue to be systemically and hegemonically wronged. Taking African Americans as a case in point, the way of the Cross will mean not only confronting the European-American White supremacies that haunt our historical memories and material present, but such a Cross also entails a theo-ethical approach that confronts some of our own understandable, and all-too-human, blood-thirst for revenge or retribution, as tragically expressed in the executions of New York City police officers Wenjian Lu and Rafael Ramos (by Ismaaiyl Brinsley), and the White Texas cop Darren Goforth, who was shot 15 times in the head and back by Shannon Miles, and the dozens upon dozens of Black males struck down on the streets each day in fits of Cain on Abel, brother-on-brother, violence forged by persistent poverty, despair, economic disinvestment, and nihilism. Christian faith, hope, and love (the holy and blessed moral trinity of our covenant communities) cannot turn back or throw hands up to any of this.
I try really hard to keep in mind that grounding all of our confrontations with the alienations and estrangements that scatter “hate like seed to sprout its bitter barriers were the sun sets bleed” (to borrow from Langston Hughes) is the God Who is with us, and for us, in the midst of our human frailties. Our covenantal challenge is to discern and discover over and over again that which constitutes the heart of the Christian gospel for the churches, for the academy, for our society, and for our world. We are implored by faith, hope, and love to discuss, debate, and act upon the moral clues which are there for all to see in God’s self-unveiling as the lowly born, tortured, spat-upon, beaten, crucified, and risen Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
Indeed, we must bare active on-the-ground remembrance and witness to the way of the Cross as modeled by Jesus and others; and in this we ought not to be persuaded by christological arguments that make voluntary human suffering a necessary requirement of human redemption and divine salvation. Suffering and death were extracted from Jesus as a consequence of his living a life in divine companionship with the disinherited of the earth, with the least of these. Indeed, by living a life along the way of the Cross, the Crucified-Executed God, right alongside others marked for death, went through (as the seminary’s own Mark Taylor puts it) “‘the same hell’ that so many of the politically oppressed still do, whether they face the daily grind of ever-present structural oppression or the shock of some form of the state’s imposed torture and terror.” 4
The way of our humiliated-yet-risen God has been demonstrated for us in a Gospel tradition which aims at the concrete material-spiritual establishment of difficult, agonizing, liberating, and reconciling Love on numerous fronts in human relationships; Jesus sets us ablaze with active Love-Grounded-Hope for friend and enemy alike. The grace, the mercy, and the justice modeled for us in the Jesus tradition is a profound Love for others that speaks of our primordial interrelatedness, our radical mutuality for the cause of hard, costly, and reconciling liberation from the wages of what many Christians know and experience as neglectful and death-dealing alienation and estrangement.
But even in the midst of all the major and minor challenges that do and will accompany our lives within covenantal Christian communities, it is the power of an old rugged cross of Love against the encroachments of lovelessness and destruction that seeks to find a way to break through to a new and better place, where liberating-reconciling peace, justice, grace, and mercy play out loud: on the corner, in the streets, at the rent parties, in the churches, in the academic academies, in the halls of governmental and corporate power, at the half-way houses, at barber shops and beauty salons, under the bridges, and in the prisons.
Indeed, the theological virtues which give Christian covenant communities their distinctive character are never to be estranged from the work of cultivating life beyond communities of Christian faith. Our building of true covenant, and not bullshit covenant, requires our willingness to come face-to-face with many of the most intractable challenges the world has known: We must engage issues as far afield, yet as inextricably connected, as spiritual doubt and warfare, police murders, poverty, mass incarceration, drone strikes, unjust trade policies and practices, obsessive civil surveillance, decrepit schools, unemployment, political xenophobia and demagoguery, land occupations, forced migrations, the corporate commodification of human life, medical apartheid, ecological catastrophe, lynching trees, rape camps, torture cells, and the diamond-studded lives of plutocrats, whose lives of wealth and power have been formed by the suffering weight of the world.
As Christians devoted a particular divinely inspired-covenant-narrative of Faith, Hope, and Love, a fire must burn in us for the miracle of active love every time a suicide bomber ignites a vest in a public place; every time that drone strike wipes away the innocent along with a combatant; every time a gendered body marked as transgressive lies prone on the streets or hangs from a jail cell; every time the bodies of women and girls endure heightened risks of terror in domains as different as a house party on a Friday night or a war zone anywhere on the planet earth; and even every time the fires of vengeance pump a bullet into the skulls of persons marked as the oppressors of the world.
I know that many of us here will continue to stand and march and write and teach, and pray, and sing, and shout, and engage in critical self-examination alongside those who reside on the underside of history. And to the degree that covenantal Christian communities do these kinds of things well, they participate in (what our now departed-yet-still-right-here-right-now brother James Cone called) “risks of faith,” yes “risks of faith” that might require all of us getting our easy convictions about liberation, reconciliation, peace and linguistic decorum fucked-up for the sake of human dignity in the Name of Jesus Christ.
These days our pursuits of human dignity from the vantage points of our Christian communities will (in all probability) require from us a difficult, funky, smelly, pissed off, and regurgitated type of covenantal love that must be continuously reigned in (even purified) with an always-in-a-state-of-becoming pursuit of Christian care, kindness, tenderness, respect, grace, and persistent hope and love for humanity and the natural world that sustains our lives: communally, individually, nationally, and transnationally across vast institutions and nations.
When we carefully consider covenantal Christian life, we must remain aware that even when Christian Love becomes battered and bruised beyond recognition, the spiritual power of re/newed life-affirming Love always remains an active hope for our society and world. Even when God’s love appears to be all but dead and buried, out of the ground and heavens of Christian hope we still find ways to celebrate life in the midst of struggle: we must continue to dance, make love, sing and shout, make art, think and reason and imagine and pray for a human present and future bound by God’s divinely sublime Love.
As those of us who seek to embody covenant communities of love work for the eradication of death-dealing human estrangements and alienations, we should know that it is right to expect that our notions about the definition and implications of God’s liberating and reconciling Love for the world will be challenged. This is so because although our covenant of faith and hope is indeed rooted in a religious narrative of divine Love, which is bound in time to a spiritual and concrete politics of divine liberation and reconciliation, “even when at its sublime best such a politics, inevitably, never represents more than a creaturely correspondence, a shaky, unsteady, and provisional witness to the moral vision modeled supremely in the life-affirming communal testimony of Jesus Christ.” 5
Yet despite this profound truth in a contingent and temporal world, we Christians (with grace-soaked humility) still must, and do, look to the politics of Jesus, the greatest on-the-ground Love we Christians have ever known. Indeed, Jesus Christ (i.e., Love-Almighty) is the supreme Ground of Christian Faith and Hope. And in this supreme ground lies the paradox, indeed the ironies of the Righteous Scandal of Christian Love for the world. The righteous scandal in all of this is that Jesus, aching with suffering love for the very humanity who nailed him to, and then hung him from, a cross alongside two persons marked as criminals, demonstrates the confounding mixtures of pain, grace, mercy, countercultural justice and peace, and the blood-stained liberation and reconciliation that informs the continuous imagining and reimagining of Christian covenant communities.
The righteous scandal of covenantal Christian love for the world runs deep through the veins of Jesus’ Body as his own genealogy includes a glorious “prostitute,” a glorious sex worker, named Rahab. 6 Christians who have the courage to be Christians of the covenant of Love must keep firmly in heart and mind that a righteously scandalous Jesus kept company with questionable businessmen, ladies of the night, persons with physical deformities and emotional instabilities: in general those marked as the poor, the weak, the outcast, the unclean, the rotten, the alien, the despised, and the criminal. This is the way of the Cross of Love, which binds, liberates, and reconciles us one to another in a righteous scandal laid bare in a Gospel tradition for all to see. This is the divine scandal of Love that Christians might embody in our active visions of covenant community alongside other on-the-ground activists, organizers, practitioners, public intellectuals, and those everyday ordinary people who take that really early train and bus to work in the morning, as well as the many folks who really know that Ferguson is Everywhere, that #BlackLivesMatter, 7 that we must #SayHerName, that #BlackTransLivesMatter, that “We Stand With Charlottesville,” and that #MeToo is for real.
So having spoken a bit about what the righteous scandal of Christian covenant might mean and entail for us, covenant communities must also keep firmly in mind that, Christian or not, there are some central features to the paradoxes of history that make visits upon every human life there ever was. Indeed, there are numerous paradoxical observations that must humble us all, be we righteously scandalous Christians with an abiding life-affirming Love for the world or not. In everything we do, we are always paradoxically aware and unaware; we are simultaneously strong and weak; we are both bound and free; we often lack vision for the future, yet we are far-seeing in the present; we have vast knowledge, yet we frequently lack knowledge; we are creative while being destructive and destructive while being creative; therefore even the most righteous and self-righteous among us must continually remain vigilantly humbled by the reality that we humans, through all of time and in our frailty, have had a very difficult time purging even our most creative moral achievements of an unfortunate will-to-power over others. 8 (And here I am of course drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr while wanting to remind us all that James Cone was right to keep in front of us that, “During most of Niebuhr’s life, lynching was the most brutal manifestation of white supremacy, and he said and did very little about it.” 9 )
Certainly, Christian communities must be humbled by such basic facts of human associational life and history, even as we do our parts to liberate the captives from the chains of this world by rightly embracing an enduring truth spoken in 1857 out of the mouth of a nineteenth-century former Black slave turned towering abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818–95): If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are [people] who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
10
So even for those of us who have graduated from one among the very best Christian seminaries the world has ever known, we must not fail to keep in front of us that the great James Baldwin was right when he wrote, “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.” 11 Indeed, carrying on with the wise truth that Baldwin left us, “You drag your past around with you everywhere, or it drags you.” 12
So to those of us committed to the way of Jesus Christ Love-Almighty, the Ground of Christian covenantal faith and hope, we can never forget that humility and, yes, perhaps even toleration among the virtues may need continual cultivation, because reconciling various narrative traditions of happiness will forever remain an intractable problem in human history.
We will need to be humbled and tempered by the reality that most persons born into this world will end up sowing complicated mixers of fire that illuminates and warms human life as well as fire that fosters alienation, neglect, and destruction. From the same child born unto this world may emerge a moral disposition soaked with mercy, justice, and peace as well as a corrupt disposition grounded in greed, hatred, and lovelessness. So even Christian communities must remain forever vigilant about noticing when the instruments and strategies of today’s liberation and reconciliation transform to become the chains of tomorrow’s enslavement, as Niebuhr once noted. 13 Indeed, across the way over at the university, Jeffery Stout was right to remind us over a decade ago that like all other human phenomena, religion has brought to the world “ever-changing mixtures of life-giving and malignant tendencies.”
So indeed, between the cradle and the grave even Christian communities will be dogged by their share of paradoxical challenges as we work to live out the miracle of covenantal love in action, the miracles of justice and peace, of enemy love, of forgiveness, of human promise while relentlessly fighting against the complex and subtle tentacles of injustice and a bogus (or deceitful) peace.
Let us never, ever, forget that the ground and the promise of Christian faith and hope are anchored by the way of Incarnate Love graciously revealed in temporal time. This Incarnate narrative of divine love compels Christians to actively engage with the realities of our times. The covenant communities we fashion in geopolitical spaces across the world constitute an engaged politics of liberating-reconciling love, which serves as a contribution we Christians offer in the name of Christ as we live at the crossroads of Good Friday and Easter.
Our strivings in the name of our executed-yet-risen God offer a politics of love that is indeed a “utopian” goal Christian communities must strive toward. And remember too, that our strivings are also a profoundly spiritual quest because they are a politics expressive of human participation in the divine life. Such participation in the intersectional material and spiritual life is a politics because it is concerned with the manner in which we human beings better arrange and manage our common lives together across wide-ranging differences, including versions of happiness.
I am sure that as PhD Alumni of Princeton Theological Seminary, many of us have continued to study, to reflect and pray, to make and enjoy new friendships, to laugh and sing and love and dance and celebrate the worshipful life of Christian communities. I also imagine that since leaving our doctoral student days we have grown in our commitments to fashioning a better world by way of dedicated intersectional love-in-action both across and beyond our theological disciplines. And in these regards I trust that all of us continue to make significant contributions to the building and sustaining of covenant Christian communities that express the Love of Jesus Christ in a world in which Christian narratives of faith and hope are inextricably tied.
Finally, I wish to say that I have been wondering and hoping (theologically of late) about the possibilities for a life-affirming Christian recovery of a true grammar of “evangelical faith” in our current sociopolitical times. Times, now, where the Good News of God’s Love in Jesus Christ seems to have been stolen away into the hands of other Christians who have embraced (full-bodied) the death-dealing necro-politics of demagoguery and terror: in their pews, on the streets, in the halls of government, right up to the White House.
Yet I am hopeful that Covenantal Christian Love can resist exile into the realm of theological amnesia regarding both the risks and unspeakable wonder of Christian faith. And to the extent that we are willing to struggle in the service of life-affirming Christian Love, I hope that we can draw inspiration from (for example) the combined spirits of Menno Simons, Allen Boesak, and Karl Barth: “true evangelical faith cannot lie dormant: It clothes the naked; it feeds the hungry; It comforts the sorrowful; It shelters the destitute; it binds up that which is wounded; It fights poverty, seeks justice, [respects and preserves the natural world] and foretells [of] peace.” 14 Such liberating and reconciling faith must never be “an escape into the safe heights of pure ideas” (theological, philosophical, scientific, theoretical, or otherwise); the pursuit of such liberation and reconciliation (grounded in the Divine Love which animates and sustains covenant communities) “is an entry into the need of the present, sharing in its suffering, its activity, and its hope.” 15
Footnotes
Author biography
1
Angela Y. Davis, “Race, Gender, and Prison History: From the Convict Lease System to the Supermax Prison,” in Prison Masculinities, ed. Don Sabo, Terry A. Kupers, and Willie London (Philadelphia: Temple, 2001), 35.
2
Mark Lewis, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, second edition, revised and updated (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2015), 101.
3
James S. Childress and John Macquarrie (eds.), The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1986), 137.
4
Taylor, The Executed God, 31.
5
James Samuel Logan, Good Punishment? Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 243.
6
Joshua 2 and 17:6–25; Matthew 1:5; Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25.
7
The BlackLivesMatter movement was cofounded by three black activists: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. The movement began as the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter, after George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. In 2014, the movement gained momentum after the shooting of Michael Brown, the shooting of John Crawford III, and the death of Eric Garner. Currently, there are 23 Black Lives Matter chapters in the USA, Canada, and Ghana. Several media organizations have referred to it as “a new civil rights movement.”
8
These paradoxical observations are drawn from, Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Volume I Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 181, and, more broadly, all of chapter 7, “Man as Sinner,” 178–240.
9
James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), 45; cf. 32, 46, 48.
10
Frederick Douglass, “The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies: An Address Delivered in Canandaigua, On 3 August 1857,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Volume 3 1855–63, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven: Yale, 1885), 204.
11
James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt.”
12
James Baldwin, “Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone,” in Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martins, 1985), 641.
13
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 231, passim.
14
Quoted (with some paraphrasing and addition) from the following sources: Menno Simons, The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, ed. C. J. Wenger (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1956), 307, and Allen Boesak in Bob Goudzwaard and Harry de Lange, Beyond Poverty and Influence: Toward an Economy of Care (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 72. Original Boesak source, “God van de armen” [“God of the Poor”], in Met de Moed der Hoop, Opstellen Aangeboden aan dr. C. F. Beyers Naudé [Encouraged by Hope: Essays Dedicated to Dr. C. F. Beyers Naudé] (Baarn: Bosch, Baarn en Keuning, 1985), 73.
15
Quoted (with some paraphrasing and addition) from Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, translation from the German, John Bowden (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 100.