Racial Justice and the Mission of Eastern Nazarene College

Racial Justice and the Mission of Eastern Nazarene College

Justice has long been the rightful concern and practice of the people of God in this world as a faithful response to the God of justice and the call of the Christian scriptures to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with this God. 2 These scriptures repeatedly call for just and equitable structures across communities as a whole, reaching well beyond simple calls to charity or philanthropy into the very organizing patterns of our life together. Most importantly, Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God, particularly as it is incarnated in his own life, death, and resurrection, invites us into a prophetic critique of the power structures of this world as well as a hopeful envisioning and embodying of God’s new creation in the midst of the old. Since racism persists as one of the most deeply rooted systems of injustice in this old creation, a failure to name, critique, and seek to correct systems of racial injustice signifies an incomplete vision of the new creation God is working among us. As an institution of Christian higher education, our mission includes a mandate to truthfully name structures of racial injustice and act as agents of Christ’s love in dismantling and replacing those structures with more equitable practices so that we might be a transformed and transformative community.

The formation of Israel was itself rooted in the exodus, a liberative act of justice by God against an oppressive regime. As the foundational, salvific event in Israel’s story, the exodus witnesses to Israel’s experience with the God who enacts justice on behalf of the marginalized. Israel’s legal texts likewise witness to a God who seeks to ensure that these same oppressive practices are not perpetuated by the newly delivered, calling upon them to remember that they were once slaves in Egypt. 3 These laws include mandatory regulations regarding equitable economic practices like the remission of debts, the manumission of slaves, practices of restitution, and policies of land use. 4 They address explicitly legal and judicial matters like property boundaries, witnesses in court, and fair treatment of the poor in lawsuits. 5 They call for judges to be appointed who carry out justice and refuse to show partiality or accept bribes. 6 They also directly address political matters; placing limits on the authority of the king who was expected to enact justice on God’s behalf. 7

When God’s people and their leaders fail to enact justice, God’s prophets do not hesitate to name these injustices as sinful. Amos condemns those who “trample the poor” and “who take a bribe and push aside the needy” asserting that God rejects all of their religious offerings so long as they fail to establish systemic justice in the land. 8 Speaking through the prophet Micah, God describes those who fail to enact justice as ones “who tear the skin off my people,” and asks “Can I tolerate wicked scales and a bag of dishonest weights?” adding “Your wealthy are full of violence.” 9 The prophet Jeremiah enumerates acting justly toward the alien, the orphan, and the widow as conditions for God’s continued presence with Judah. He also says that those who commit acts of injustice and then retreat to the supposed safety of worship in the temple treat that sacred space as a robber’s den – a place to hide from the consequences of their unjust actions. 10

As important as all of these scriptures are in their witness to a God of justice, Christian theology has typically declared that the person of Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation of God. 11 As a result, the most critical test of any Christian claims about God and what it means to be God’s people is the witness of the New Testament regarding the person of Jesus. Of course, Jesus and his earliest followers, as a tiny minority spread throughout the Roman empire without any meaningful political power, found themselves in a somewhat different social and political context than the prophets who addressed Israel and Judah as nations with their own laws and systems of justice. Nevertheless, the writers of the New Testament resist individualistic views of salvation that might suggest that Christ-followers have nothing to say about the injustices of this world. The apostle Paul says that the salvation accomplished through Christ is for the entirety of creation. 12 Likewise, the Revelation of John portrays restored and renewed creation as the ultimate goal of God’s salvific work in the world. 13

The four gospels portray Jesus as one who engaged in a regular prophetic witness to a God who cares for the marginalized and calls upon his followers to analyze and challenge the power structures of this world which contribute to such marginalization. The canonical gospels attest to the proclamation of the kingdom of God as the central facet of Jesus’ life and ministry. 14 Jesus repeatedly emphasizes that this kingdom is radically different from all the other kingdoms of the world insofar as they are built on typical manifestations of human power and strength. Jesus’ kingdom, on the other hand, calls blessed those that the world regards as meek and lowly. The character of God’s kingdom is exemplified by Jesus’ ministry to the blind, the sick, and the poor. 15 Jesus’ disciples are taught to pray that this kingdom would be established on earth and he declares that all the nations of the earth will be judged by how well they enact the kingdom principles of feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick and imprisoned. 16

The Gospel of Luke bluntly witnesses to the implications of the gospel for just social practices. Mary celebrates her son’s birth as a sign that God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” 17 Jesus announces his own ministry in the synagogue of Nazareth with the words of Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
        to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 18

Above all else, however, it is Jesus’ identity as the crucified messiah which invites his followers into a radical critique and analysis of the power structures that shape our world. The tension in that very phrase – crucified messiah – is illustrated well in Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ at Caesarea Philippi. 19 Peter rightly confesses that Jesus is the messiah but when Jesus begins to speak about the suffering and death he will face, Peter rebukes Jesus because he sees suffering and the role of the messiah as mutually exclusive. Peter expects the messiah to be a king who will establish a victorious and mighty kingdom. According to Peter’s expectations, the suffering and death Jesus foretells would be the surest possible sign that Jesus was not the messiah Peter had just proclaimed him to be. Jesus responds to Peter’s rebuke with a rebuke of his own and it is one the strongest we find anywhere in the gospels; Jesus calls Peter “Satan,” telling him that his mind is on earthly things rather than the things of God. Peter has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of Jesus’ kingdom and its relationship to power and so also fundamentally misunderstood Jesus. We cannot see Jesus clearly, the gospels declare, if we do not see that his proclamation of the kingdom of God, his very own suffering and death, subvert the power structures of our world. 20

Paul summarizes well the manner in which the crucified messiah invites his followers into prophetic critique of the world’s power structures when he tells the church at Philippi “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” 21 For Paul, the mindset of Jesus is one of continual lowering and emptying oneself of power and privilege. Although “he was in the form of God” he “did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself,” taking on the lowest of positions and the most humiliating of deaths. 22 Such a pattern of lowering and emptying runs exactly counter to the typical mindset of the very Roman citizens Paul was addressing in Philippi for whom climbing the ladder of social status and political power would have been an expected practice of citizenship. Paul employs explicitly political language as he calls upon the Philippians to remember that their true citizenship is in heaven rather than the Roman Empire. 23 The mention of heaven here, however, should not be understood as an abdication of earthly responsibility but an invitation to bring the politics of heaven to earth. Earlier in the letter, Paul has already said “Politic yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” 24 Paul’s letters declare that the politics of heaven conform to the pattern of the crucified messiah and so the patterns which organize the communal life of his followers should as well.

Of course, Paul and the other New Testament writers did not directly address racial justice as a distinct topic in their writings. Race as a categorization of people by skin color is a modern concept created by European explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries as they encountered (and in many cases, sought to subjugate) those who appeared different from themselves. 25 Biblical writers naturally did not address ideas and practices of racism which arose centuries after they wrote just as they did not directly address so many topics which are distinct to our own context. Nevertheless, these scriptural texts invite us as followers of Jesus to consider creative, Spirit-led ways in which the God of justice would have us bear prophetic witness concerning the principalities and powers of our racialized world.

The narrative combination of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles is particularly poignant in shaping our imaginations for the ways in which the Spirit who anointed Jesus “to bring good news to the poor” and “let the oppressed go free” might also be empowering us to speak and act prophetically regarding racial injustice in our own context. Although the first century division between Jews and Samaritans was not a racial one in the modern sense, the story told by Jesus about a Samaritan who rescues a Jewish man who had been robbed and left for dead on the road to Jericho is likely predicated on the ethnic animosity which existed between Jews and Samaritans at the time. Jesus tells this story in response to a lawyer who agrees with Jesus about the importance of loving one’s neighbor “But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” 26 The lawyer’s question presumes there are some who do not fall into the category of “neighbor” and so are not among those who must be loved. Jesus inverts the lawyer’s question, asking at the end of the parable “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” If we are open to considering the full implications of the gospel in the midst of a world shaped by racialized imaginations, we might hear the Spirit calling us to far greater responsibility in this parable than acts of individual charity toward those in need. Jesus’ question urges us to resist the limitations which we might be tempted to place on the category of “neighbor,” perhaps especially when those limitations are rooted in ethnic or racial labels, and calls us to consider all the ways in which we are not living up to our responsibility as “neighbor.”

The Acts of the Apostles portrays the ministry of Jesus’ earliest followers as the continuation of his ministry as depicted in Luke’s gospel. The same Spirit which empowered Jesus to proclaim good news to the poor and release to the oppressed empowers these disciples to the same ends. On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit immediately compels Peter and the other disciples into cross-cultural ministry as “Jews from every nation under heaven… heard them speaking in the native language of each.” 27 Peter declares that this takes place to fulfill the prophecy of Joel that the Spirit would become available to all people rather than an exclusive few. 28 The rest of the book of Acts gives narrative shape to this promise as the disciples become Jesus’ “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” 29 Their tasks as witnesses, however, is far more than the distribution of a pre-packaged message about Jesus to the unenlightened masses of the world. The radically new and unexpected movements of this Spirit-empowered mission demand change and adaptation even from those who are identified as its leaders. Peter states frankly his hesitation about sharing in fellowship with Cornelius and the rest of his gentile household. 30 Nevertheless, when he sees the gift of the Holy Spirit “poured out even on the Gentiles,” Peter concludes that he cannot stand in the way and calls for them to be baptized. 31 Likewise, when the apostles gathered in Jerusalem hear about all that God has done among the gentiles, they decide that circumcision is not a requirement for inclusion even though it had been the identifying mark of the covenant between God and Abraham’s descendants for centuries. 32 The book of Acts envisions a Christian community of cultural intimacy and reciprocity in which those to whom the message of the gospel was first entrusted do not control it but are themselves continually shaped and challenged by the cultural intersections into which the Spirit propels them. 33

Indeed, after nearly two millennia of predominantly gentile Christianity, the Church stands in constant danger of succumbing (and too often has succumbed) to a certain kind of cultural amnesia regarding its status as those who have been “grafted in” to a tree which is otherwise entirely Jewish in nature. 34 Ephesians reminds its readers forcefully:

So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called the uncircumcision by those who are called ‘the circumcision’ – a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands – were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is the hostility between us.”

Salvation is described here explicitly in ethnic terms. The result of God’s grace embodied in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ is emphatically articulated in the language of reconciliation and inclusion. The writings of the New Testament repeatedly attest that one of the most revolutionary aspects of the gospel for first-century audiences was the inclusion of gentiles as gentiles; in Christ ethnic divisions have been overcome without the erasure of ethnic identity. 35 Although none of these scriptures directly address the modern concept of race, it would be a grievous error to claim that theological reflection on race falls outside the bounds of Christian responsibility when cultural and ethnic considerations were so fundamentally important to the earliest and most faithful expressions of the good news of Jesus Christ. The salvation revealed in Jesus Christ, so thoroughly intertwined with considerations of ethnicity and culture as it is in the Christian scriptures, readily invites us into critical reflections and conversations on race and the impact of racial structures on ourselves and our neighbor.

Our theological forefather, John Wesley, models for us a faithful Christian approach to addressing systems of racial injustice as he exhibited no hesitancy in bearing prophetic witness against the oppressive, racialized systems which existed in his own day. In his treatise “Thoughts Upon Slavery,” Wesley directly confronted the racial myths which were utilized to justify the practice of slavery. He also repeated detailed accounts of enslaving practices, ranging from raids and the inciting of wars to induce the capture of people for enslavement, to the barbaric journey across the Atlantic, and finally the sale and subsequent treatment of enslaved individuals. He told the truth about an oppressive system and the economic interests which perpetuated it. Directly addressing planters in the colonies who claimed “I pay honestly for my goods: and I am not concerned to know how they are come by,” Wesley writes “Now it is your money that pays the merchant, and thro’ him the captain, and the African butchers. You therefore are guilty, yea, principally guilty, of all these frauds, robberies, and murders.” 36 John Wesley did not limit his analysis to the individual treatment of merchants, captains, and planters toward those they enslaved and he did not limit his Christian witness to purely spiritual matters. He named, analyzed, and critiqued an entire system as unjust and implored anyone who would listen “If therefore you have any regard to justice, (to say nothing of mercy, nor of the revealed law of God) render unto all their due. Give liberty to whom liberty is due, that is to every child of man, to every partaker of human nature.” 37

As an institution of Christian higher education in the Wesleyan tradition, do we not also have an obligation to tell the truth about the oppressive systems that deal death and destruction in our world? Is it not our sacred obligation to offer intellectual analysis and critique of unjust structures and to work toward policies and solutions which bear prophetic witness to the work of God’s new creation among us? Does not the gospel compel us to act first and foremost as agents of Christ’s love and truth right here in our own beloved community? Racism has become one of the mostly deeply entrenched power structures in the modern world and it continues to wreak havoc up to this very moment. Study after study has demonstrated the persistent pervasiveness of racial injustice in our legal systems, our housing policies, health care, and education. 38 The faithful work of the Racial Justice Task Force has demonstrated that Eastern Nazarene College is not exempt from the cancer of racial injustice but their report has also provided the first steps toward greater health. Our ability to provide a transformational education that equips a body of diverse students to serve the world as agents of Christ’s love and truth will largely correspond to our ability to tell the truth about ourselves and to act in love to address the structures of inequality we find when we do.