A Biblical Rebuke of Femicide

This article is part of a Learning Center course called, Reading the Bible as a Mujerista Evangelica set to release on March 8th. To learn more about WOS online courses, visit learn.worldoutspoken.com.

We have to be better readers. We have to learn how to read. And we must learn how to tell stories. To know when to raise our voice and when to lower it. When to pull the people in with a whisper, and when to increase our volume!

My professor and mentor has told me this before, and now to the countless others he has taught. His love for Charles Dickens and Don Quijote seeps into the way he reads and writes, even in his academics.[1] It makes his writing interesting to read, but only because he knows that a good reader makes a good writer. It’s the reason why I am intentional about my own reading. I regularly rotate fiction and poetry books into my repertoire. I, too, believe that a good writer learns the art by being a good reader. You communicate to others by noticing the ways that best communicate to you.

The biblical authors know this too. The Old Testament narratives have this way of drawing in the reader. These writers quickly shift from artful prose to well-developed poetry, even within the stories of the historical narratives (like Deborah’s victory song in Judges 5). These stories aren’t just dry attempts to narrate without a purpose; no, these stories are meant to convey something deeper about the condition of life and add to what we already know about God. I invite you to look at Judges 19 with me, a story so grotesque that maybe you’ve skipped it over, but a story so carefully crafted that the narrator is undeniably attempting to communicate something to the readers on the other side of the page.

(Trigger warning: Rape, domestic violence, and murder. Please feel free to skip over this article.)

Judges 19[2]

In those days, when there was no king in Israel, a certain Levite, residing in the remote parts of the hill country of Ephraim, took to himself a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah. But his concubine became angry with him, and she went away from him to her father’s house at Bethlehem in Judah, and was there some four months. Then her husband set out after her, to speak tenderly to her and bring her back. He had with him his servant and a couple of donkeys. When he reached her father’s house, the girl’s father saw him and came with joy to meet him. His father-in-law, the girl’s father, made him stay, and he remained with him three days; so they ate and drank, and he stayed there.

“In those days, when there was no king in Israel…” Already the narrator sets the scene for us. Knowing the period of Judges as a time where “everyone did what was right in their own eyes” (Judg 17:6), this statement already stirs up fear for the reader. What will happen in this narrative, during a dark time of chaos and free reign?

We read that a concubine becomes angry at her Levite husband. In her anger, she decides to set out to her father’s house for a long four months. What I find interesting about this story is not what it says, but what it doesn’t say. As a Levite, this man had a higher status and honored place in society.[3] The concubine, who in contrast has a lower status in the ancient Near Eastern world as legal property of her master, does not speak. We have no clue as to why she became angry. We have no clue if her father welcomed her with open arms, but we do know that he opened his arms to his son-in-law. The narrative states the Levite’s intent to “speak tenderly” to his concubine, almost in an attempt to see him in a positive light, but then the reader begins to wonder: Why did it take four months for him to come find her? And the story states that he stayed to eat and drink, but there is no mention of the Levite actually speaking to the concubine—the very reason he came to his father-in-law’s home. In actuality, it stirs up even more uncertainty. Pay attention to how your body feels, to what remains unsaid, and to how your attitude toward the Levite shifts.[4]

On the fourth day they got up early in the morning, and he prepared to go; but the girl’s father said to his son-in-law, “Fortify yourself with a bit of food, and after that you may go.” So the two men sat and ate and drank together; and the girl’s father said to the man, “Why not spend the night and enjoy yourself?” When the man got up to go, his father-in-law kept urging him until he spent the night there again. On the fifth day he got up early in the morning to leave; and the girl’s father said, “Fortify yourself.” So they lingered until the day declined, and the two of them ate and drank. When the man with his concubine and his servant got up to leave, his father-in-law, the girl’s father, said to him, “Look, the day has worn on until it is almost evening. Spend the night. See, the day has drawn to a close. Spend the night here and enjoy yourself. Tomorrow you can get up early in the morning for your journey, and go home.” But the man would not spend the night; he got up and departed, and arrived opposite Jebus (that is, Jerusalem).

He had with him a couple of saddled donkeys, and his concubine was with him. When they were near Jebus, the day was far spent, and the servant said to his master, “Come now, let us turn aside to this city of the Jebusites, and spend the night in it.” But his master said to him, “We will not turn aside into a city of foreigners, who do not belong to the people of Israel; but we will continue on to Gibeah.” Then he said to his servant, “Come, let us try to reach one of these places, and spend the night at Gibeah or at Ramah.” So they passed on and went their way; and the sun went down on them near Gibeah, which belongs to Benjamin. They turned aside there, to go in and spend the night at Gibeah.

Here the narrator drops another hint. We know now that the Levite is traveling not only with his concubine, but with one of his servants. His title has now been changed to “his master,” almost as if the narrator is detaching the Levite from the concubine and shifting focus onto the servant. His servant makes a suggestion: to spend the night in a city of foreigners. The master says, “No thank you!” He refuses to be part of a community that does “not belong to the people of Israel.” We remember too that his association as a Levite meant that in theory, he practiced the law of the LORD. However, the reader wonders if his disdain toward foreigners disregards a law that states to love the foreigner—not tolerate, but love (Lev 19:34). He dismisses his servant’s suggestion and does what is right in his own eyes.

He went in and sat down in the open square of the city, but no one took them in to spend the night. Then at evening there was an old man coming from his work in the field. The man was from the hill country of Ephraim, and he was residing in Gibeah. (The people of the place were Benjaminites.) When the old man looked up and saw the wayfarer in the open square of the city, he said, “Where are you going and where do you come from?” He answered him, “We are passing from Bethlehem in Judah to the remote parts of the hill country of Ephraim, from which I come. I went to Bethlehem in Judah; and I am going to my home. Nobody has offered to take me in. We your servants have straw and fodder for our donkeys, with bread and wine for me and the woman and the young man along with us. We need nothing more.” The old man said, “Peace be to you. I will care for all your wants; only do not spend the night in the square.” So he brought him into his house, and fed the donkeys; they washed their feet, and ate and drank.  

The woman has still been largely absent up to this point. Was she not intended to be the focal point of this entire narrative, the reason the Levite man even went out in the first place, and now the reason they are traveling back? The reader begins to wonder why the narrative feels empty, and it is the lack of focus on the woman that contributes to this emptiness. The Levite even tells this man, “Nobody has offered to take me in” instead of “Nobody has offered to take us in” (italics mine).[5] The narrator continues to drop clues about the Levite man’s character and the blatant disregard for his servant and his concubine.

While they were enjoying themselves, the men of the city, a perverse lot, surrounded the house, and started pounding on the door. They said to the old man, the master of the house, “Bring out the man who came into your house, so that we may have intercourse with him.” And the man, the master of the house, went out to them and said to them, “No, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Since this man is my guest, do not do this vile thing. Here are my virgin daughter and his concubine; let me bring them out now. Ravish them and do whatever you want to them; but against this man do not do such a vile thing.” But the men would not listen to him. So the man seized his concubine, and put her out to them. They wantonly raped her, and abused her all through the night until the morning. And as the dawn began to break, they let her go.

As morning appeared, the woman came and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her master was, until it was light. In the morning her master got up, opened the doors of the house, and when he went out to go on his way, there was his concubine lying at the door of the house, with her hands on the threshold. “Get up,” he said to her, “we are going.” But there was no answer. Then he put her on the donkey; and the man set out for his home.

Still as the story begins to close, the woman does not speak. And now, as the Levite demands her to “get up” because they should be on their way, we as readers do not know if she is alive. It confirms all of our suspicions picked up throughout the narrative—that the Levite’s character is less than exemplary.

When he had entered his house, he took a knife, and grasping his concubine he cut her into twelve pieces, limb by limb, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel. Then he commanded the men whom he sent, saying, “Thus shall you say to all the Israelites, ‘Has such a thing ever happened since the day that the Israelites came up from the land of Egypt until this day? Consider it, take counsel, and speak out.’”

The story still never tells you if the concubine was alive or not. Her silence lingers until the very end. Instead, the Levite man takes control of the situation by gruesomely dismembering her. And, instead of taking responsibility for his actions and their outcome, he has the audacity to point fingers at the Israelites! As everyone did what was right in their own eyes, he blamed the dark and preventable death of his concubine on the state of society. Maybe if people spoke out, then the men wouldn’t have come to rape them, and then perhaps this “thing” would not have “ever happened.” We know that the Levite man’s complacency in the systemic sin found in the period of Judges contributes to this abomination just as much as the wickedness of the men did.

Being on the other side of the story, even more questions arise. Did the concubine have good reason to leave in the first place, considering the outcome of her story? Would this violence have been averted if the servant’s suggestion was followed, or was this bound to happen due to the Levite’s less-than-holy character? And finally, what is the narrator trying to convey with a story so brutal, one that begins with a woman afforded no agency or words and ends with her rape and death?

When we read stories like this, our minds always shift to ask how something like this could be included in our Old Testament Scriptures. It is important to acknowledge the implications of such a text. First, like many of the Old Testament stories, this story is not meant to be prescriptive but descriptive. After careful analysis, readers see that the narrator’s craftsmanship of the story shows that they were never on the side of the Levite. Thus, a theological, real-life lesson can be extracted. Second, the Old Testament does not shy away from acknowledging the hurts of this world. Although we hate encountering stories like this, we know that our fallen world is scattered with situations that read just like this one. And for those who have experienced these situations, it gives us words that describe something that we may not have even processed ourselves.

As Phylllis Trible puts it, this story “depicts the horrors of male power, brutality, and triumphalism; of female helplessness, abuse, and annihilation.”[6] The moment the Levite decided to mistreat his concubine, everything went downhill. If you continue on to read Judges 20, you see that things continue to spiral downward as an effect of the woman’s death. The flourishing of women, or lack thereof, is directly correlated to the health of this society. This society is indeed in need of a savior. The mistreatment of the oppressed and marginalized, specifically women here, can only result in a society that perpetuates even more oppression and marginalization.

About Michelle Navarrete

My passions stem from within the Old Testament, focusing on biblical themes and social ethics through an interdisciplinary approach. As a second-generation Latina who lives in between the Mexican and American cultures, my faith inevitably intersects with my culture and experiences. I use storytelling in my academics as a way to engage my audience and cultivate connection. People are part of my passion and I want my work to reflect that. Currently located within the Latino community of West Chicago, I am pursuing my master’s in Old Testament Biblical Exegesis at Wheaton College, and I intend to pursue doctoral studies after my time at Wheaton. During my time at World Outspoken, I hope that my contributions will renew faith perspectives in a way that mobilizes restoring change within communities.

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Footnotes

[1] Dr. M. Daniel Caroll R. intertwines his love for narrative and storytelling, and even contextualizing from the Latina/o perspective, through the prophetic voice in his new book The Lord Roars: Recovering the Prophetic Voice for Today. Shameless plug.

[2] I invite you to read this without the verses marked, like a story. For your reference, this is the NRSV translation, and the entirety of chapter 19 of Judges.

[3] Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, 66.

[4] For a more comprehensive treatment of the narrator’s possible intentions, see Jacqueline E. Lapsley’s work, “A Gentle Guide: Attending to the Narrator’s Perspective in Judges 19-21.”

[5] Lapsley, 43.

[6] Trible, 65.

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Neighbor Love and Reading CRT

This article is from a forthcoming series in the Moody Center magazine. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

When we attend to the cries of suffering people, we reflect God—not Pharaoh.

Buckling under the weight of generational systematic subjugation, Israel cried out to God and God listened. “And the people of Israel groaned under their bondage, and cried out for help, and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant…And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition” (Ex. 2:23-25). When God called Moses, God emphasized hearing Israel’s cries: “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians…And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come, I will send you” (Ex. 3:9-10). Exodus contrasts this attentive divine listening to Pharaoh’s callous indifference. When God brings Israel’s cries to Pharaoh through Moses, Pharaoh increases Israel’s labors and suffering. Israel responds by crying out to Pharaoh, not God. But Pharaoh again entrenches in injustice (Ex. 5:15-19).

In the New Testament, Jesus and the Apostles also stress the paramount importance of listening to the cries of suffering, subjugated people. Consider, for example, Jesus’s parables of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10) or the rich man and Lazarus (Lk. 16). Or recall James’s declaration that “religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (Jm. 1:27). Godliness requires listening to and caring for suffering people in their affliction. Worldly defilement does not; it fosters entrenchment in unjust sins of commission and omission—like Pharaoh’s worsening Israel’s plight and ignoring their cries.  

Impediments to Godly Hearing when We Read

Godly attentive listening follows from love. In Exodus, God’s love for the people of Israel and their covenant ancestors motivates God to liberate them from physical, political, and spiritual bondage. Jesus’s parables and James’s declaration about pure religion reflect the biblical vision of how neighbor-love motivates godlike attentive listening. Sometimes this love-infused listening is literal; we hear the cries of those suffering around us. Other times this listening is metaphorical; when we read about the suffering of others, we “hear” them through the page. Therefore, when we hear people’s suffering through reading, we imitate God.

But, as with physical hearing, impediments often obscure our ability to hear suffering people’s cries when we read. One impediment is applying the wrong kind of reading practice to a text. C.S. Lewis, for example, distinguishes between reading practices that use a text from those that receive a text. When we use a text, we treat it as a means to information or distraction. This is fine when reading a menu or a joke; it is inappropriate when reading a love letter, petition, or religious text. These works require we read to receive—that we humbly approach the texts with a willingness to let them confront and change us.     

C.S. Lewis notes another obstacle to hearing suffering through a text: We are socially located readers and thinkers socialized to hear and see some things and not others. Lewis writes: “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing [and hearing] certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.” James Cone makes a similar point. “There is no place we can stand that will remove us from the limitations of history and thus enable us to tell the whole truth without the risk of ideological distortion.” To minimize or avoid these social and ideological limitations, Cone instructs us to “listen to others outside of our own time and situation.” Likewise, Lewis encourages us to read “the old books,” because they help us recognize and adjust for “the characteristic mistakes of our own period.” 

Sadly, Lewis’s and Cone’s proposals cannot guarantee that we hear the suffering voices around us when we read. Sometimes the old books are silent about or obscure our current challenges. The Bible says nothing about the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act or its continued impacts on China and the United States. Moreover, many older histories lie about the United States.

Reflecting on the rise of intentionally false narratives about U.S. Reconstruction (1865–1877), W.E.B. Du Bois writes:

I stand at the end of [ writing Black Reconstruction in America], literally aghast at what American historians have done to this field…[these histories are] useless as science and misleading as ethics… [and they show] that with sufficient general agreement and determination among the dominant classes, the truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale that the master of men wish.

What Du Bois chastised in Reconstruction histories, Leon Litwick, president of the Organization of American Historians, applied generally to U.S. historians: “No group of scholars was more deeply implicated in the miseducation of American youth and did more to shape the thinking of Americans about race and blacks than historians.” Most in the U.S. continue to inherit these false histories and their accompanying ideologies. We suffer these injustices. Moreover, receiving these unjust histories obstructs our abilities to hear the stories of how our neighbors and we suffer from white supremacy. This impediment is especially dangerous, for as Cone observed, “When people can no longer listen to other people’s stories, they become enclosed within their own social context, treating their distorted visions of reality as the whole truth.”

Hearing Our CRT Neighbors

Enter critical race theorists. Scholars such as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Robert A. Williams, Jr. (Lumbee), Gary Peller, Mari Matsuda, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Imani Perry, and Laura E. Gómez write essays aimed at helping us see how U.S. law and legal institutions have maintained and perpetuated white supremacy and hear the cries of non-white and white communities and individuals suffering from these racist evils. CRT scholars do not claim to stand-in for these communities or individuals. Like Ada María Isasi-Díaz, they would say, “Though I do not speak for them, I speak with them and on behalf of them.”

As they speak, CRT scholars remind us of legal decisions like these:

Power, war, conquest, give rights, which, after possess, are conceded by the world, and which can never be controverted by those on whom they descended. –Chief Justice John Marshall, Worcester v. Georgia (1832) [This is still official U.S. Federal Indian law]

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument. –Chief Justice Roger Taney, Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857)

All people under U.S. jurisdiction have the same right to make contracts and pursue business opportunities “as is enjoyed by white citizens.”—1866 Civil Rights Act [This is still official U.S. law]

There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the US...I allude to the Chinese race.—Justice John Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) referencing the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

Most of us are unfamiliar with these quotations and the painful, subjugating roles they have played in shaping communities and individuals. We do well, then, to engage CRT texts, working to receive rather than use them, in order to hear these truths and the cries they amplify. These practices will help us imitate God, not Pharaoh. They will help us heal from injustice. And they will help us care for Jesus and our neighbors (Mt. 25).

About Nathan Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside.  He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic. For more about hermano Nathan, visit his website.

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Reading the Bible as a Mujerista Evangélica

Biblical interpretation is a deeply personal task. Not only does a reader attempt to make sense of the world within and behind the biblical text, but their own presuppositions must be confronted when deciding what a passage means and how it will be appropriated[1] for their context. For Christians who regularly dissect Scripture, its interpretation and application are both a challenge and a reward.

As I embarked on my academic journey in theological education, I couldn’t quite pinpoint why I was making certain interpretative choices—it just came naturally. It wasn’t until I began learning about “other” perspectives that I realized all of us—regardless of age, ethnicity, or gender—were making choices that were uniquely a combination of our culture, background, and experiences. I, too, missed things in the text that my sisters and brothers of other ethnicities caught. I was enamored by the way that each of our varied perspectives contributed something to the way a passage of Scripture was understood.

Through my learning of “other” voices, I was able to find the words describing the interpretative choices that came naturally to me. During this time, our hermeneutics class read through Santa Biblia by Justo González. I had already read González’s Mañana on my own and resonated with so much of it. It felt strange, however, to read things that resonated personally within academic spaces. It was a stale attempt to analyze “objectively” when so much of my experience was intertwined with what we were learning. And perhaps it was a burden I placed on myself, attempting to remove myself from the material so I could analyze it the same way my White classmates were analyzing it, but I did not realize at that moment that my detachment was a form of protection.

Then came the day of class. As I was sitting in my seat, I remained silent. Everyone started talking about what they found interesting in their reading of the material. “I understand where this hermeneutical choice comes from, but I personally don’t know how I feel about it,” one classmate said. “It’s not something I would choose to do. I guess I’m still processing it.”

As my classmates continued to discuss, my professor read the uncertainty on my face. He looked at me, well-meaning, and he asked, “Michelle. What do you think?”

What do I think? What do I think? As I listened to my classmates analyze Santa Biblia in a very detached, academic way, my only thought was what came out of my mouth.

“I don’t know what to think when everything González describes—exile, marginality, in-betweenness—has been my experience.”

There was a lingering silence after I spoke. All this talk about the “pros” and “cons” of Latina/o interpretation, and I think my classmates realized they were analyzing the “pros” and “cons” of my very lens. As the only person of color in my class, I didn’t know what to think—I only knew what I felt. I felt exposed, but it was a discussion I had no choice but to engage in.

This is what I mean when I say biblical interpretation is deeply personal. We must be willing to admit that each one of our lenses comes with pros and cons, but we can allow it to grow our understanding of Scripture. Learning about mujerista and Latina evangélica theology allowed me to find words to articulate the interpretative choices I make when studying Scripture.

What is mujerista theology?

Coined by Cuban American and Roman Catholic theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz, mujerista theology finds its roots in the struggles of Latinas[2] specifically in the United States. Isasi-Díaz felt feminist theologies did not adequately represent the experiences of women of color, nor did feminista theology formed in Latin America adequately encompass the unique experience of Latinas in the United States. Isasi-Díaz makes clear that mujerista theology is not exclusively for Latinas but from Latinas, inviting all to look through the lens in which Latinas theologize.[3] In her book of essays titled Mujerista Theology, Isasi-Díaz includes personal stories and observations about Latinas y sus luchas, their struggles, in life. Latinas in the U.S. often face a number of shared issues such as “bilingualism, multiculturalism, popular religious faith, marginality, poverty, colonization, migration, and cultural alienation.”[4] Mujerista theology seeks justice on these issues for the Latina community at large.

An essential tenet of mujerista theology is the value of lo cotidiano. Lo cotidiano is the shared experiences of everyday life. Isasi-Díaz unpacks the complexity of this term but essentially recognizes it is filled with subjectivity that helps describe the processes of Latina women in their lives.[5] Mujeristas know God cares deeply about every aspect of your life—from the clothes you choose to wear to the food you eat. Part of this stems from the way our madres, abuelitas, comadres, y amigas, who often have no formal theological education, recognize God working in their day-to-day lives. These faith traditions passed down from our Latina matriarchs, often named abuelita theology, work in tangent with mujeristas and how they understand their faith.

Mujerista theology is often criticized for the lack of significance Scripture holds in the lives of Catholic Latinas. The dominant influence of Catholicism from conquistadores resulted in a critical view of the Bible in the lives of Catholic Latinas, and rightly so, as it contributed to their oppression and struggle. However, Isasi-Díaz recognized the growing emergence of Latina evangélicas where the Bible became more central, and therefore, the urgency for mujeristas to articulate a biblical interpretation.[6]

What is Latina evangélica theology?

Latina evangélicas reaffirm many of the values of mujerista theology but acknowledge differences from a Protestant perspective. Loida I. Martell-Ortero, Zaida Maldonado Pérez, and Elizabeth Conde-Fraizer sought to build upon these central values in their book, Latina Evangélicas: A Theological Survey from the Margins. They recognize the complexities of varying theologies even within the Latina community. Martell-Ortero is nuanced in her naming of evangélica, stating that it does not necessarily mean the English equivalent “evangelical,” but instead embodies Latinas coming from mixed faith traditions who understand themselves to be people who preach the gospel, el evangelio.[7] This book seeks to honor contributions made by both feminista and mujerista theologies.

Latina evangélica theology distinguishes itself with its emphases on the Holy Spirit, salvation, and Scripture. First, evangélicas see the Holy Spirit as the one who “saves, heals, affirms, calls, empowers, and transforms persons and communities.”[8] Second, evangélica theology seeks to describe salvation in a multifaceted way, stating that salvation is an “incarnational reality encountered within the context of lo cotidiano, rather than solely as a transcendent reality that helps one ‘go to heaven.’”[9] That means that evangélicas care about the “here and now,” the present reality on earth, and it is an outworking of one’s salvation (James 2:14-26). Finally, Scripture is a key tenet for evangélicas. The authors of Latinas Evangélicas weave in Scripture to affirm the testimony of their theological understandings, both by experience and the text itself.

What is a mujerista evangélica?

To name oneself is a powerfully biblical act.[10] I have decided to bridge mujerista and Latina evangélica theology by naming my methodology mujerista evangélica biblical interpretation for a few reasons. One, I want to pay tribute to the way Isasi-Díaz contributed to my theological understandings. Many second-generation Latinas in the United States began their faith journey in Catholicism as I did. My theology is heavily influenced by the beauty of ritual and order. Since much of Mexican culture is interwoven with Catholic religion, this piece is significant in my cultural and theological upbringing.

Two, the power of naming my theology as mujerista reaffirms the necessity to seek justice for women of color who live in marginalization. Justice is an explicit biblical theme, from the laws given to Israel for proper treatment of the foreigner, to Jesus’ advocacy of the marginalized—the poor, widows, and orphans. When I hear mujerista, I hear an empowered word describing the journey to liberation from internalized oppression.[11] It gives a name and voice to the struggles that Latinas experience daily.

Many of the Latinas I know see themselves as bridge builders. Our brown bodies do not fit in the Black and White binary often created in the conversations surrounding racial justice. As Isasi-Díaz says, this theology is not for us but from us. The end goal is to see the beautiful diversity of God’s kingdom from every nation, tribe, and tongue (Revelation 7:9), but that means feeling valued and elevated in our own communities of faith. My methodology embodies “both/and” rather than “either/or,” because it seeks liberation in a way that names Latinas and their contributions, but also in a way that seeks liberation for all those experiencing marginalization.

I include evangélica in my naming because I am Protestant. The Word of God is meaningful in my life, especially as someone who studies Scripture academically. Although Isasi-Díaz insisted upon the lack of biblical authority in the lives of Latinas, she still contributed incredible insight about themes of exile from passages like Psalm 137.[12] Now, voices that are distinctly evangélica are needed to represent our perspective in the field of biblical interpretation. It is a field that is predominantly White, male, and growing increasingly less confessional in Christian faith. Scripture can be a powerful tool for mujerista evangélicas.

A Final Word

I hope to be transparent in my treatment of mujeristas and Latina evangélicas. There is so much more nuance and complexity, as well as beautiful descriptions of the Latina faith, found within these two books. It is too much to describe in one article, but it is worth the work that Latinas see themselves in the world of academia. It affirms, slowly but surely, work is being done and our voices are being heard. And, frankly, much more is out there, on the ground, in the grassroots of faith communities. The goal has always been for these theologies to enable a praxiological component for Latinas. Interpretation does not stop there, and its appropriation should result in constructive change.[13] Mujerista evangélicas have a dedication to completing this work en conjunto, together, on the ground.

Just as Cuban theologians like Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Justo González, and other Latina theologians from varying Hispanic heritages present distinctive viewpoints that affect their interpretative choices, my Mexican heritage also affects the way I interpret. Many second-generation children born and raised in the U.S. share similar understandings.[14] I relate to experiences of exile, but not in the way some Latinas experience by actual displacement of migration. I learned how to travel between the spaces of Mexican and American culture, between school and home, between English and Spanish. I speak Spanglish and often use Mexican idioms that my other Mexican friends also grew up saying. I went to quinceañeras y fiestas con mi familia, and I cleaned on Saturday mornings con mi mama to Cómo Te Voy a Olvidar by Los Ángeles Azules. I took Spanish in high school as an easy “A” and quickly discovered the Spanish taught to us was not the Spanish I learned in my Mexican household. Second-generation Mexican American children bond over these experiences and much more. My mujerista evangélica lens hopes to add a voice to the dearth of work, specifically in Old Testament interpretation from a second-generation Mexican daughter. I hope my lens contributes a refreshment of the Scriptures, one that makes you fall in love with Jesus over and over again.

about MICHELLE NAVARRETE

My passions stem from within the Old Testament, focusing on biblical themes and social ethics through an interdisciplinary approach. As a second-generation Latina who lives in between the Mexican and American cultures, my faith inevitably intersects with my culture and experiences. I use storytelling in my academics as a way to engage my audience and cultivate connection. People are part of my passion and I want my work to reflect that. Currently located within the Latino community of West Chicago, I am pursuing my master’s in Old Testament Biblical Exegesis at Wheaton College, and I intend to pursue doctoral studies after my time at Wheaton. During my time at World Outspoken, I hope that my contributions will renew faith perspectives in a way that mobilizes restoring change within communities.

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Footnotes

[1] When using the word “appropriation,” I mean to convey that a passage may be appropriated time and time again depending on the particular scope and context. When using the word “application,” I mean to convey the act of applying the appropriated text for the reader’s specific singular context. For more on this language of “distantiation,” “contextualization,” and “appropriation,” see Bungishabaku Katho, “African American Biblical Interpretation” in Scripture and its Interpretation: A Global, Ecumenical Introduction to the Bible.

[2] For more on the nuances between “Hispanic,” “Latina/o,” and “Chicana/o,” see the discussion in Robert Chao Romero’s Brown Church.

[3] Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology (New York: Orbis Books, 1996), 1-2.

[4] Loida I. Martell-Otero, Zaida Maldonado Pérez, and Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Latina Evangélicas: A Theological Survey from the Margins (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013), 4.

[5] Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology, 67.

[6] Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology, 149.

[7] Martell-Otero, Maldonado Pérez, and Conde-Frazier, Latina Evangélicas, 8.

[8] Latina Evangélicas, 9.

[9] Latina Evangélicas, 10.

[10] “To name oneself is one of the most powerful acts a person can do,” Mujerista Theology, 60; “Scriptural texts attest to the power of naming,” Latina Evangélicas, 3.

[11] Mujerista Theology, 60-61.

[12] Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “By the Rivers of Babylon” in Mujerista Theology, 35-56.

[13] M. Daniel Carroll R., “Latino/Latina Biblical Interpretation” in Scripture and its Interpretation: A Global, Ecumenical Introduction to the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 315.

[14] I have the privilege of working with second-generation Mexican American high school students that convey extremely similar upbringings and familiarities.

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A Language for the Pain

To borrow a line from Willie James Jennings, “The things I tell are precise accounts while being exact fabrications…everything I tell you, everything, is the truth. It is the truth in service of moving us to a new place of gathering.”

Mi Amiga

Her lowered head spoke as we sat in silence. So did her hands busily crumpling a napkin from lunch. I listened to mi amiga’s body language while she gathered her thoughts and braced to share her pain.

“This place is wearing on me, Professor Cartagena. I don’t know how much I can take. Some days I feel like I’m gonna loose it…like I’m going to explode.”

Mi amiga was silent for a moment. Her brown hands continued to work on the napkin.

“I can handle the big things—the in-your-face racism or sexism. They’re terrible, but they’re so big that people can’t pretend they didn’t happen, can’t pretend that you’re making something up. Does that make sense, Professor Cartagena?”

“It does, hermana. It does. I hear what you’re saying.”

“When students taped ‘Beaner’ posters on my dorm door, there was no hiding it, no denying it. When they dumped dried beans into my laundry, it was clear that they’d been racist and had violated my privacy and my roommate’s privacy—I mean, they went into our room and put the beans in my clothes hamper! And when white students post racist or sexist things about me on social media, my friends and I can take pictures. We have the evidence!” 

After briefly raising her head to look me in the eyes, mi amiga again gazed at the ground. Her napkin resembled a powder. The evidence of its existence was nearly gone.

“But you can’t screenshot the stares, Dr. Cartagena. You can’t make sure other people see the sideways glances and stink eyes. You can’t pause the question, ‘How did you get into this school?’ to make sure other people hear it. You can’t rewind and play the ‘You know we can date and mess around but can’t marry, right?’ question white males ask you to prove that they’re trying to exploit your ‘exotic’ body and sexuality. You can’t prove that these things happen. You don’t have the evidence, just your memory. And the pain…It’s so isolating, Professor Cartagena. And it adds up. These things add up. They take a toll on you, on your body and your mental health. Sometimes…sometimes the big racism is easier to face.”

A Language for the Pain: Microaggressions

Mi amiga was suffering. She’d experienced neon-light racism, the kind that makes skeptics about racism’s existence confident that, here, at last, is an instance of racism that they may, nay, must denounce. But if we listen to her words and her body, this form of racism wasn’t the greatest source of her pain. Something else had taken a toll, and still was.

What caused my friend to lower her head? What prompted her to dismantle a napkin? What overwhelmed her? What made her feel like she might explode? Stares, sideways glances, stink eyes, racist questions about ability, racist questions about gendered sexual exploitation—these were the culprits.

Race scholars call these culprits microaggressions. Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce introduced the term “microaggression” in his essay “Offensive Mechanisms” (1970). Reflecting on abusive behavior, Pierce writes:

Most offensive actions are not gross and crippling. They are subtle and stunning. The enormity of the complications they cause can be appreciated only when one considers that these subtle blows are delivered incessantly. Even though any single negotiation of offense can be considered of itself to be relatively innocuous, the cumulative effect to the victim and to the victimizer is of an unimaginable magnitude. Hence, the therapist is obliged to pose the idea that offensive mechanisms are usually a micro-aggression.

Pierce acknowledges that some abusive actions are glaringly gross and large scale. They include the neon-light racism and sexism mi amiga suffered. But not all abusive actions are this glaring or large. As Pierce notes, most aren’t. Instead, they are smaller slights and put-downs some people receive every day. Moreover, the cumulative effect of these smaller scale injustices takes a toll on victim and victimizer alike, leaving both bowed under these evils’ compounded weight.

In this and later work, Pierce develops the concept of microaggressions to account for subtle, quotidian forms of racism. He argues that antiracists “must not look for the gross and obvious [forms of racism]. The subtle, cumulative mini-assault is the substance of today’s racism.” Thus, Pierce encourages antiracists to look for the stares, sideways glances, stink eyes, and racist questions mi amiga suffered. He contends that “the relentless omnipresence of these noxious stimuli” fill the U.S.’s social fabric. “These cumulative, minor but incessant put-downs often remain psychopollutants in the social environment,” Pierce writes, “[and] their lingering intractability is a major contributor to the continuing traumatic stress” racialized minorities suffer individually and communally.

A Language for the Pain: Racial Battle Fatigue

Building upon Pierce’s work, race scholars such as William Smith study the toll that racial microaggressions enact upon racialized minorities like mi amiga. Within an interdisciplinary framework called “racial battle fatigue,” Smith and fellow investigators examined how the cumulative stress of microaggressions impacts Latin@s and Black Males in historically and predominately white schools. The following chart details the cause and stress responses they uncovered.

Smith, William A., et al. “Racial Battle Fatigue and the MisEducation of Black Men: Racial Microaggressions, Societal Problems, and Environmental Stress.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 80, no. 1, 2011, pp. 63–82.

Microaggressions cause physiological, psychological, and behavioral stress responses in racialized minorities. The twenty physiologically responses Smith records include headaches, hives, intestinal problems, and insomnia. Similarly, the sixteen psychological responses range from irritability to hopelessness. And the seventeen behavioral responses vary from overeating to procrastination.

In subsequent conversations, mi amiga mentioned suffering from headaches and insomnia. She told me that she struggled with frustration and feelings of helplessness. And wondered aloud why she’d grown impatient and struggled to do easy class assignments.

“Professor Cartagena, I feel like I’m falling apart. What’s wrong with me?”

“You’ve suffered greatly, hermana. And your body has kept the score.”      

Returning to Mi Amiga

Each time I spoke with mi amiga, a passage from James Baldwin’s “Uses of the Blues” came to mind. Reflecting on Black suffering, Baldwin writes:

You’ve seen these black men and women, these boys and girls; you’ve seen them on the streets. But I know what happened to them at the factory, at work, at home, on the subway, what they go through in a day, and the way they sort of ride with it. And it’s very, very tricky. It’s kind of a fantastic tightrope.…And I know that some improbable Wednesday, for no reason whatever, the elevator man or the doorman, the policeman or the landlord, or some little boy from the Bronx will say something, and it will be the wrong day to say it, the wrong moment to have it said to me; and God knows what will happen. I have seen it all, I have seen that much.

When mi amiga said, “Some days I feel like I’m gonna loose it…like I’m going to explode,” I thought, “I know what happened to you. I know what happened to me. I know what we go through in a day.” But I didn’t share these thoughts with her. I didn’t even recommend that she read Baldwin—at least not yet. Instead, I shared the words “microaggression” and “racial battle fatigue.” I offered her language that illuminated reality and empowered her to name her experience. Naming the causes of our festering wounds is an important step toward our healing.

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Donate today and help us continue to produce resources for the mestizo church.

The Patriarchy and the PhD: What Female Faculty Experience in the Classroom

Written by J.N.T

He said he thought about killing me. He said it with serenity and certainty. You know the ways your voice might crack and quiver when delivering a shameful confession? His didn’t. It was as though the thought of killing me gave him peace. I smiled. I said, “good thing you didn’t,” and I giggled.

I was alone in a classroom with him. I was standing behind a mobile podium;

I can push it into him and make a run for it.

How many steps would it take me to get to the door?

I have heels on, what if I trip and fall while making a run for it?

Can I use my phone? No, it’s in my purse and not within reach.

I don’t want to die. I have a young son, and the tragic murder of his mother would scar him for life.

“God help me,” I prayed. I slowly removed my heels.   

None of the workshops, trainings, or educational resources I completed prepared me for this moment. I only knew that I was alone with a student who daydreamt about killing me, and I had to “diffuse” the situation. I pretended his words were insignificant, his shouting was normal, and his foul language was ordinary. My words to him were careful, soothing and endearing. Thirty minutes later, he thanked me for listening and walked out. 

It took my mind about twelve hours to register what had happened, and it did so in my sleep. I left that encounter feeling physically exhausted, but not much else. It was as though my brain couldn’t immediately process what had transpired, and it became numbed. Then, in the middle of the night, I dreamt that he came into my classroom and shot me dead. “It was just a dream,” I thought. A few hours later, as I walked into campus, my body started shaking and tears flooded my eyes. My body had finally woken up, and it was terrified.

Women face disproportionately more violence in the workplace as compared to men, and the vast majority of perpetrators are men[1]. This is, in part, due to unequal power relations that position men as the ones with the most power. Women that work in accommodation and food services, retail trade, manufacturing, health care, and social assistance are the most vulnerable to workplace harassment[2]. In most situations, there is a power imbalance where, not surprisingly, the individual with less power is often the victim and the individual with less power in our society tends to be female. This type of harassment that comes from the “top-down” is well-documented and well-researched.

Academic contrapower harassment (ACPH) is a term that I recently came across as I attempted to find solace in research after another male student became hostile, defiant, verbally aggressive, and threatening. According to the article Women Faculty Distressed: Descriptions and Consequences of Academic Contrapower Harassment (2016), ACPH “occurs when someone with seemingly less power in an educational setting (e.g., a student) harasses someone more powerful (e.g., a professor).” In this study, women faculty reported significantly higher levels of stress-related illness, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and wanting to quit as a result of intimidation, bullying, and harassment from students.

Check, check, check and check.

As I was reading this article, I couldn’t help but notice that the findings resonated almost in identical form with my own experience. My trauma manifested itself through insomnia, low appetite, being hyperaware of my surroundings, and feeling tremendously anxious in the classroom. Violence has this effect on humans. It disturbs your mind, harms your wellbeing, destabilizes your sense of security and contaminates safe spaces.  

Chavella T. Pittman[3] found that women of color experienced significant defiance to their authority as well as threats and harassment from white male students. Although the term academic contrapower harassment suggests that women faculty hold all the power when compared to students, Pittman indicates that female educators of color experience their classrooms with power, as faculty members, and powerlessness, as women of color; meaning that in a patriarchal racist structure, white male students preserve and react to women faculty within the conferred power they possess in broader society. This too echoes my experience at a predominantly white institution (PWI). My student aggressors have all been white males. The students who have made intimidating comments, behaved defiantly in class and submitted appeals to contest a grading decision have all been white and have all been male. In a recent grade appeal request, submitted over Christmas break, a male student who failed to submit nineteen assignments and decided not to take the final exam, emailed me two weeks after the semester concluded, demanding an explanation as to why he failed the course. In his appeal he wrote that I was “non-responsive” to his emails, referring to the fact that I had not immediately responded to the email he wrote to me while I was on Christmas vacation.

Male students don’t often consciously target female professors; they are not telling themselves, “I can harass this professor because she’s a woman”. This behavior, not frequently displayed towards male authority figures, is a manifestation of their socialization. Their status as men has been symbolically and socially elevated to the extent that aggression towards any women seems acceptable, and this narrative is reinforced in Christian spaces. I worked in public institutions for seven years before being employed at a Christian university, and I experience significantly more harassment from evangelical male students. In The Making of Biblical Womanhood (2020), Beth Allison Barr explains that women’s subordination “became embedded in the heart of evangelical faith. To be a Christian woman was to be under the authority of men” (154). Many church traditions ban women from teaching, preaching, and mentoring male adults. I wasn’t raised in the church, so when a pastor at the first church I attended told me that I couldn’t teach Spanish to missionaries because there would be male students in that group, I laughed. I genuinely thought he was joking. My smile soon disappeared after I realized that he wasn’t trying to be funny, and that he preferred to send a group of English monolingual speakers to Latin America with no linguistic knowledge of the Spanish language than to submit his male congregants to the teachings of a woman – a woman with a Ph.D. and extensive pedagogical training. Many Christian students attend these kinds of churches, and these are the messages that have been instilled in them since childhood. It is not a coincidence that evangelical male students undermine their female professors and ground their aggressions in the evangelical faith. After all, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Christians that oppression is godly. That God ordained some people, simply because of their sex or skin color (or both), as belonging under the power of other people. That women’s subordination is central to the gospel of Christ” (Barr 173). 

Most recently, a student I repeatedly asked to leave the classroom, after he became verbally aggressive, assured me that I was just “being too emotional,” a phrase that seemed pulled directly from the How to be a Sexist Manual. These aggressions are, of course, psychologically disturbing, but they are also very time consuming. I wrote numerous emails, recounted the details of the encounter to several individuals across campus, and had at least six meetings. I spent approximately ten hours actively dealing with this incident, hours that were taken away from class preparation, grading, and research.

Studies have found that women of color faculty have heavier teaching loads compared to male and white female professors, are expected to engage in considerably more nurturing service responsibilities (Pittman 2010), and full-time female faculty earn $18,370 less yearly compared to their male counterparts[4]. Furthermore, research suggests that college students have an unconscious bias against female professors and faculty of color that is reflected on student evaluations. In a 2015 experiment published by the Innovative Higher Education journal,[5] students rated online professors with a male name significantly higher than those with female names, regardless of the actual identity of the professor. Students tend to comment on the personality, appearance and competence of female instructors to a much higher degree than that of their male teachers. Studies have also revealed that students rate white faculty more positively than faculty of color and believe that faculty of color are less credible (Reid 2010[6]; Hendrix 1998[7]). This poses a disadvantage to female professors of color because student evaluations are commonly taken into consideration for hiring, promotion, tenure, and other career opportunities, despite the overwhelming evidence of bias.

Many of the disparities that women of color face in academia and beyond remain unquestioned because they are normal practices of white-centered patriarchal organizations. The institution of higher education was built as a space for white men. Seventy-six percent of all faculty in institutions of higher education are white[8] and at Christian colleges this number is even higher – 83.8% (CCCU 2021). More strikingly, Latinas comprise only 3% of all university professors in the United States (NCES 2018). Universities claim to have a desire to diversify their faculty body, but seem unwilling to make institutional changes that create environments where all faculty can thrive and feel safe.

Academia is supposed to be a place driven by sound research and Christian academics should be concerned with engaging in scholarship that helps human beings flourish. When faculty members and administrators of faith are presented with convincing data, produced by a reputable study, that women are being disadvantaged and disrespected in the workplace, the next logical step is to inquire into what can be done to improve their experiences. However, this course of action is too rational and too unfavorable for patriarchal structures. I witnessed this phenomenon unfold when a group of researchers shared their findings of an institution’s gender climate study.  A white male immediately interjected and asked if these findings were truly representative of the female faculty experience at large. Then, a woman complained that her experience had not been included in the study and therefore, claimed that the findings were incomplete. The whole meeting was spent explaining the research methods used in the study and convincing certain people of the findings’ legitimacy. Actionable steps were not discussed. The study did not fit the ideals of patriarchy and as a result, it was dismissed.  

Women’s accounts are often disregarded, even when the research supports their claims. An absurd amount of time is spent questioning the veracity of their experiences to the point of exhaustion. Men are often not held accountable because women are not believed. In many instances, women prefer not to report workplace harassment because of the tiresome amount of time it will take for the claim to be considered and the fear of being alienated, fired or being blamed as the victim.[9]

“Why does this commonly happen to me?” I said aloud to a supervisor as I shared details of an encounter I had with a student who became threatening. In my heart I knew the answer, but I was seeking some empathy from a female leader. Her response shocked me: “Maybe it’s because you set boundaries.” She theorized that male students often turned violent towards me because I establish firm boundaries, do not let their misconduct go unnoticed and the result is that I escalate the situation. Following this explanation, I (the victim) had done something to provoke the student (aggressor). Victim blaming reinforces sexist notions that women are responsible for men’s violent actions. Admittedly, for a brief second, I entertained this thought. I’m aware of the literature that speaks about victim blaming as a product of patriarchy. I’ve counseled other women on many occasions not to blame themselves for the abuse that was inflicted on them, yet I entertained this notion, if even for a brief second. Why? People tend to be more accepting of these sexist rationales when given by people of authority. If a person that society regards as intelligent, wise, and ethical is making such claims, these statements become more compelling. Consequently, evangelical leaders (men and women) have a higher degree of responsibility to counsel women in ways that do not reinforce misogynistic notions that will retraumatize women. Also, it is often these individuals who have the authority to ensure that the abuser is held accountable.

I was told that the university had to ensure that the student who assaulted me was cared for, and that the institution embraced a non-punitive model of discipline. At this point, I was frustrated, and I replied, “That’s great. And how is the university caring for me? What consequences will this student face for his behavior? How is the university keeping him accountable and deterring him from committing further acts of aggression?” Accountability is not vengeance. Discipline is not assault. Caring for someone does not mean ignoring their wrongdoings. Spiritual language is often utilized as a method to reinforce male dominance and female culpability. Grace is code for “overlook what was done to you,” forgiveness signals “do not seek justice,” and compassion is equivalent to, “brush it off, they were just having a bad day.” The message: if you don’t overlook what was done to you, if you do seek justice and you refuse to just brush it off, then you are not graceful, forgiving or compassionate, so you must be a bad Christian woman.

Aggression against women extends to all spheres of society, and women of color bear the double burden of racism and sexism. Evangelical leaders – both men and women – commonly emphasize female submission and rigid gender roles. We must understand the harm that this messaging is causing in the lives of countless women and realize how this rhetoric is being used to inflict violence on women. Jesus empowered women; he did not come to this earth to “put them in their place,” treat them as inferior to men, or reinforce the gender inequality present in Jewish society. Jesus disrupted gendered expectations, and in so doing, showed the love of God to these women. There are many “sympathetic” leaders who simply shake their heads and cross their arms. They believe that Jesus holds both men and women in the same esteem, but this belief is not acted upon – it does not materialize. What value does a belief actually carry if it is not grounded in action? In my experience, the policies were inexistent, the process was unclear, and the consequences were vague. The policies that did exist were there to protect the “integrity” of the aggressor, rather than ensuring the safety of the victim. Accountability is crucial and institutions must also be held accountable for their inaction.

A female colleague told me, “I don’t have much power,” speaking as to why she had remained silent for so many years about her own experiences. It was the same woman that was now advocating for me. While many of us may not hold significant power in our respective spaces, we do hold collective power. This is an invitation to action. This is an invitation to utilize our collective voice. Por nosotras. Por nuestras hermanas.

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Footnotes

[1] Institute for Women’s Policy Research and U.S. Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women.

[2] Center for American Progress

[3] Race and Gender Oppression in the Classroom: The Experiences of Women Faculty of Color with White Male Students (2010).

[4] Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (2018).

[5] MacNell, L., Driscoll, A. & Hunt, A.N. What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching

[6] Reid, Landon D. The Role of Perceived Race and Gender in the Evaluation of College Teaching on RateMyProfessors.com  

[7] Hendrix, Katherine G. Students Perceptions of the Influence of Race on Professor Credibility.

[8] National Center for Education Statistics (2017).

[9] U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission (2015).

Is Your Bible Anti-Black

Editors Note: Throughout this essay, “black” refers to the color while “Black” refers to the historic racialized community.

“Our theology never comes from a blank space.””

— Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Atando Cabos

“The reclamation of racial beauty in the sixties stirred these thoughts, made me think about the necessity for the claim…Why did [Black beauty] need public articulation to exist?””

— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Christians are people of the Book, the library of sacred texts that we call the Bible. The Old and New Testaments contain the inspired word of God. They are, as the apostle Paul writes, God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16). And so, they are “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.”

Yet none of these inspired texts was God-breathed through a modern language. Each was originally etched in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic—not Mandarin, Arabic, Portuguese, or Spanish. Unless you read the former ancient languages, you encounter the sacred page through the veil of translation.  

But even translators of the original biblical languages encounter scripture through a veil. What New Testament scholar C. René Padilla writes about interpreters applies to translators: “Interpreters do not live in a vacuum. They live in concrete historical situations, in particular cultures. From their cultures they derive not only their language but also patterns of thought and conduct, methods of learning, emotional reactions, values, interests and goals.” Translators are socially situated readers and interpreters. Their contexts and commitments—to say nothing of character—infuse their handling of Scripture. As Padilla argues, “whenever interpreters approach a particular biblical text they can do so only from their own perspective. This gives rise to a complex, dynamic two-way interpretive process depicted as a ‘hermeneutical circle’, in which interpreters and text are mutually engaged.”

Recognizing these dynamics, New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley calls for Bible publishers to hire multi-racialized and multi-ethnic translation teams. McCaulley writes:

I’ve discovered that people of color and women have rarely led or participated in Bible translation. On one hand, this doesn’t trouble me much. It is hard to mess up the story of the Exodus, distort the message of the prophets or dismantle the story of Jesus. It is all there in every English translation.

On the other, I believe it matters who translates the Bible, and that more diverse translation committees could inspire fresh confidence among Christians of color….

The insight, experience and skills of female scholars might open our eyes to nuances that a committee of all men might miss. Christians for whom English is a second language might highlight ways in which our word choice is unclear. Similarly, [B]lack Christians may call to mind neglected aspects of the text. 

McCaulley supports his call for diverse translation teams by considering English translations of Exodus 12:38, beginning with the King James Version. When Israel leaves Egypt, “a mixed multitude went up also with them” (KJV). McCaulley notes that “Nearly all scholars agree that the original Hebrew meant to highlight that an ethnically diverse group of people left Egypt with the Jewish people. This group could have included Egyptians and other ethnic groups, such as the Cushites.” So, whereas “The translation ‘mixed multitude’ isn’t necessarily wrong,” McCaulley argues, “It simply does not communicate the power of this simple verse in a way that would be understood by those reading today. If I were translating the passage, I would say that ‘an ethnically diverse crowd’ went up out of Egypt.”

McCaulley’s alternative translation is a mild corrective of the KJV. He does not deem it wrong nor unfit for its time. Instead, McCaulley argues that it and modern English translations that speak of a “mixed multitude” leaving Egypt (e.g., ESV) neglect linguistic frequencies that carry important conceptual and contextual insights for today’s English readers.

I affirm McCaulley’s call for racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in translation teams and his proposed alternative translation of Exodus 12. I’d like to extend both by arguing that anti-Black racist ideas have crept into English Bible translations. To see what I mean, let’s turn our attention to the King James’s translation of a verse in Song of Solomon.

Is Blackness Beautiful?

Song of Solomon begins on an exuberant note. After noting that it is the song of songs and belongs to Solomon, the song’s primary female figure professes her enthusiasm to be with her beloved.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers…(vv. 2-4)

A supportive, enthusiastic chorus enters the text to celebrate this highly anticipated joining. “We will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee” (v. 4). All is right. All rejoice.

The text turns to the female’s first self-description. Here’s the original Hebrew, reading right to left:

שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה בְּנ֖וֹת יְרוּשָׁלִָ֑ם כְּאָהֳלֵ֣י קֵדָ֔רכִּירִיע֖וֹת

Here’s how KJV reads: “I am black, but comely [beautiful], O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon” (v. 5) Those who read Hebrew will recognize that the KJV has failed its readers.

The failure comes in verse five’s opening. The KJV’s translation team renders “שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה” as “I am black, but comely [beautiful].” But as Old Testament scholar Wilda Gafney observes, this translation choice is grammatically impossible. The conjunction וְֽ at the start of וְֽנָאוָ֔ה means “and”—not “but.” Moreover, as Gafney argues, because there isn’t a “but” in Hebrew, authors writing in Hebrew must compile “a bunch of stuff to make a disjunction”; they can’t simply use a conjunction that means “and.”

Gafney realized these linguistic truths as a child. From a young age, she loved learning languages and desired a more direct relationship with the biblical text. As she compared the Hebrew and KJV, she saw “it was wrong in the King James Bible that I grew up with, where it said, ‘I am black but beautiful.’” This sparked a second realization:

The people translating [that passage] could not see blackness as beautiful, and so their whole identity [as self-identified white men] went into that one conjunction saying, ‘in spite of being Black, she’s all right.’ But that is not what the text said. And so that was the first place where I understood that people make choices when they translate [the Bible], and those choices affect what we hear [from the text].     

McCaulley’s alternative translation of Exodus 12:38 mildly corrects the KJV’s. Gafney’s alternative translation of Song of Solomon 1:5 is a damning corrective of the KJV. It highlights that the KJV’s rendering is wrong—and layers anti-Black racist ideas onto the biblical page.

The KJV’s Racial Context

Gafney claims that the KJV’s translation team injected their anti-Black sentiments into the KJV. For many, this claim is jarring. Congregations that use the KJV rarely discuss the translation’s racial context (or content). The same holds for academic treatments of the text. David Lyle Jeffery’s, Alister McGrath’s, and David Norton’s books on the KJV say nothing about the text’s racialized context (or content). None have an index entry on “race,” “whiteness,” or “white supremacy”—let alone a sustained discussion about the anti-Black translation of Song of Solomon 1:5. Though from different parts of the globe—Canada, Ireland, and England, respectively—none of these racialized white authors ensured their books addressed the KJV’s racial dimensions. What Gafney noticed as a youth, they overlook in their mature academic writing.

Given these ecclesiastical and scholarly omissions, a word about the KJV’s racial context is in order. Let us consider two aspects of this context: international anti-Blackness and anti-Blackness in contemporary English literature and theatre.

Starting in the fifteenth century, a racial scale that prioritized “whiteness” informed European imperialism. The first recorded slave auction makes this clear. Reflecting on the year 1444, Portugal’s royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara writes:

[On] the next day, which was the 8th of the month of August, very early in the morning, by reason of the heat, the seamen began to make ready their boats, and to take out those captives, and carry them on shore, as they were commanded. And these, placed all together in that field, were a marvelous sight; for amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops [Ethiopians], and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere.

All depicted are slaves; not all are equal. Some are “white,” and therefore “fair to look upon, and well proportioned.” Others are “less white like mulattoes,” and, apparently, deserve little discussion. Others still are “black,” and hence “ugly”—as if they had come from Hell itself. Here is a scale that advances white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

European colonizers repackaged and disseminated Azurara’s scale as they constructed pigmentocracies—governments for and by those deemed “white.” Historian C.R. Boxer notes that, although Portugal and Spain respectively granted mesticos and mestizos a positive colonial status, “both Iberian empires remained essentially a ‘pigmentocracy’ . . . based on the conviction of white racial, moral, and intellectual superiority—just as did their Dutch, English, and French successors.” Race scholar and sociologist Howard Winant similarly observes that these European colonial powers believed they were “the whites, the masters, the true Christians.” And historian Winthrop Jordan succinctly captures this trend among the British, highlighting that, during the seventeenth century, English colonists treated “Christian, free, English, and white” as metonyms. For them, each word was equivalent.

The racialized language Jordan details has antecedents in English literature that’s contemporary with the KJV, which was published in 1611. In 1578, the widely read English travel writer George Best offered a damning account of “the Ethiopians blacknesse.” While discussing his Artic voyage, Best argued that, because Ham had sex on the Ark, God cursed Ham and his descendants to be “so blacke and loathsome that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde.” Thus, Best championed a racialized curse theory which linked Blackness to ugliness and hypersexuality. Similar anti-Black ideas populate William Shakespeare’s plays.

The first Black character in Shakespeare’s plays is Aaron, the evil, deceptive, hypersexual, murderous Moor in Titus Andronicus (1594). The most famous Black character in Shakespeare’s plays is also a Moor: Othello (1604). Iago, Othello’s ensign, despises the Black Othello for marrying the White Desdemona. “For that I do suspect the lusty Moor/Hath leaped into my seat,” Iago claims. And while talking to Desdemona’s father, Iago says Othello is “an old black ram/…tupping your white ewe.” Iago later tricks Othello into believing that Desdemona has betrayed him. Before Othello kills Desdemona, he cries, “Her name that was fresh/as Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d and black/As mine own face.” After Othello learns that he unjustly killed his wife, Emilia, Desdemona’s maidservant, declares: “O! the more angel she. And you the blacker devil.” The Tempest’s (1611) Caliban also recapitulates the conceptual linking of Blackness and Satan that filled European theatre. Caliban is the bastard child of an African witch from a “vile race” and a demon. Caliban is also hypersexual.

Other English playwriters also employed anti-Black ideas and images. Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605) is especially important for our discussion. Commissioned by King James I, Jonson’s play was the most expensive production made in London. Premiering in the luxurious Whitehall Palace, the play is the story of twelve ugly African princesses of the river god Niger. The princesses learn that they can be “made beautiful” if they go to “Britannia,” for there the sun “beams shine day and night, and are of force/ To blanch [make white] an Æthiop, and revive a corpse.” White women, including Queen Anne, played the Black princesses. How? They used blackface.

White supremacy and anti-Blackness occupied a privileged place in European imperialism and English literature and theatre. Shakespeare and Jonson composed and presented plays that drew upon, shaped, and perpetuated anti-Black and pro-White English sentiments. These international and cultural realities were pillars of the KJV’s racial context. 

Returning to the Song of Solomon

The KJV’s anti-Black translation of Song of Solomon 1:5 reflected its cultural context. It also shaped other cultures around the globe and across the centuries. The U.S. is a case in point. As historian Mark Noll argues, the KJV was the U.S.’s national book in the nineteenth century. Biblical language and allusions filled U.S. public discourse, and “the vast majority of public Bible references came from a single translation”—the KJV. It was this translation that filled debates about the U.S.’s slavocracy and global racialized chattel slavery. Moreover, it was this translation that became a staple in African American congregations and homes. Recall that Wilda Gafney grew up on the KJV. So did Esau McCaulley.

I grew up in a [B]lack Baptist church that revered the King James Version (KJV). Whenever it was read aloud, the congregation rose to its feet. But the KJV was more than a book read on Sunday. It shaped the culture of Southern black Christianity. Its thees and thous permeated our parents’ extemporaneous prayers. It marked the rhetoric of our most powerful preachers.

McCaulley argues that his experiences are common for Black Christians in the North or South. “If Flannery O’Connor can say that the South is Christ-haunted, then we can say that [B]lack Christianity is haunted by King James.” We hear this haunting hum in James Baldwin’s and Toni Morrison’s books and essays.

The KJV may also haunt modern English Bible translations of Song of Solomon 1:5. Consider these twenty-six translations (emphasis added):

Like the KJV, fourteen of the twenty-six versions offer a grammatically impossible translation with “but.” Four others offer a similarly impossible translation of “yet.” Only eight versions correctly translate the text’s “and.” Consequently, eighteen of these modern English translations—an arresting sixty-nine percent—give readers a wrong translation that perpetuates an anti-Black idea about beauty that the original Hebrew rejects. Thus sayeth the Lord, indeed.

Black is Beautiful

Biblical translations matter. They help or hinder our ability to encounter God and creation. They rebuff or retrench idolatry. They foster or fizzle love of self and neighbor. Song of Solomon teaches that black is beautiful. The Song’s primary female figure is beautiful and black. There is no contrasting conjunction here. Rightly encountering God and creation require seeing and feeling this truth. So does rebuffing the historic idolatry of whiteness. So does Black self-love and love of our Black neighbors. A diverse translation team populated by members with the lived experiences, communal ties, and interpretive skill of a Wilda Gafney would empower English Bible readers to experience and celebrate these God-breathed truths.

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Poor Because They Are Lazy

Richard Delgado’s words stunned me. Putting his essay down, I meditated on this unsettling passage: 

[U.S. Latin@s] suffer disproportionately from poverty and school drop-out. A U.N. study showed that if all Latinos residing in the United States were considered as a separate country, that country would rank thirty-fifth in the world in a combined index of social well-being that included income, education, and access to health care.

Delgado was citing the UN’s 1993 Human Development Report. That same document noted that “In the United States, with the HDIs of white, black, and hispanic populations separated, whites rank number 1 in the world.” The U.S. Latinx community was thirty-fifth; the U.S. White community was first. And as Delgado observed, “the racial disparity noted in the 1993 report has widened and deepened.” The UN’s 2001 Human Development Report revealed that whereas U.S. Whites remained near the top of the world’s HDI index, U.S. Latin@s had dropped to sixty-eighth.

Seeing the suffering of Mi Gente

Reading these grotesque numbers carried me back to my first experiences with Puerto Rico’s poverty. Mi abuela was driving. I sat in the passenger seat. As we rode through dilapidated communities, my young eyes, raised in a middle-class New Jersey neighborhood, poured out tears. I had never seen such catastrophes. These were mi gente, my people. And they were languishing in extreme destitution. 

“Mira, Nathan,” mi abuela said. “Ellos son muy pobres y están sufriendo; they are very poor and are suffering. God calls us to love and care for the poor. We cannot look away.”

Later that visit, I spoke with a family member about the poverty I’d seen. “Oh yes, there are many poor people here in Puerto Rico. But they are poor because they are lazy. You see the same thing in the mainland.”

My relative’s callous tone and comments jarred me. Abuela had said nothing about laziness while we witnessed our people’s misery; she spoke about our divine call to love and care for the poor. Granted, abuela never explained mi gente’s poverty. But the contrast between her focus on neighbor-love and this relative’s reductive explanation for severe poverty shook me.

Returning to the Present

Chills jerked my body as I recalled these experiences. I picked up Delgado’s essay and reread the arresting passage. How to understand these truths, the poverty I witnessed, or what my relatives told me?

This multi-faceted question becomes more pointed when you engage updated data. Ed Morales writes that “on average, prices [are] about 21 percent greater in Puerto Rico than in the United States.” Though this percentage is like “major metropolitian areas like New York and Miami,” those cities only have poverty rates of “12 percent and 24 percent, respectively” whereas Puerto Rico’s “41 percent poverty rate (compared to the United States’ average of 14.3 percent) represented a much higher percentage of the population that has a difficult time just grocery shopping.” Morales presses the point. “This high rate reflects the concentration of poverty you’d expect to see in peripheral areas of US cities, showing how “American” socioeconomic problems are reproduced in an isolated island territory.” Morales wrote two years ago. Now Puerto Rico’s poverty rate is 43.5 percent—over two times higher than Mississippi’s, which has the highest poverty rate among US States.

These ghastly percentages testify to profound human suffering. And they force us again to ask: How to understand these truths, the poverty I witnessed, or what my relatives told me? Let me offer three biblical reflections that should inform every Christian’s answers.

Biblical Reflection One: Laziness and Want

Scripture identifies laziness as a cause of poverty. As Esteban Voth writes, “the book of Proverbs states that one of the causes which had contributed to the existence of poverty is laziness.” Consider the following passages.

Laziness brings on deep sleep;
    an idle person will suffer hunger. (Proverbs 19:15)

The lazy person does not plow in season;
    harvest comes, and there is nothing to be found. (Proverbs 20:4)

Do not love sleep, or else you will come to poverty;
    open your eyes, and you will have plenty of bread. (Proverbs 20:13)

The craving of the lazy person is fatal,
    for lazy hands refuse to labor. (Proverbs 21:25)

Three verses link laziness to hunger; one links it to death. Thus, these texts reveal their agrarian context. Thus, they establish laziness’s lethal consequences.

Yet each of these passages address individual poverty, not its communal form. Three verses specifically reference a lazy “person.” The “you” of Proverbs 20:13 is singular. This limited scope matters, for as Ibram X. Kendi argues, “Individual behaviors can shape the success of individuals. But policies determine the success of groups.”

When Isaiah and Amos chastise Israel for its oppressive treatment of the poor, they highlight how Israel’s anti-covenantal policies and practices—in this context, those opposed to the Mosaic covenant and law—produce or perpetuate poverty. Isaiah writes:

The Lord rises to argue his case;
    he stands to judge the peoples.
The Lord enters into judgment
    with the elders and princes of his people:
It is you who have devoured the vineyard;
    the spoil of the poor is in your houses.
What do you mean by crushing my people,
    by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts. (Isaiah 3:13-15)

The LORD condemns an elite group—elders and princes—for establishing and exacerbating poverty through their practices and anti-covenantal policies. Likewise, Amos declares:

Thus says the Lord:
For three transgressions of Israel,
    and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;
because they sell the righteous for silver,
    and the needy for a pair of sandals—
they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,
    and push the afflicted out of the way;
father and son go in to the same girl,
    so that my holy name is profaned;
they lay themselves down beside every altar
    on garments taken in pledge;
and in the house of their God they drink
    wine bought with fines they imposed. (Amos 2:6-8)

Israel’s elite exploit and oppress the poor, gorging themselves upon this community’s limited resources, and so worsening the poor’s plight. None of these condemnations come in an individualist key. All focus on groups and group dynamics. And each echoes texts in Proverbs.

Biblical Reflection Two: Injustice and Poverty

Though Proverbs identifies laziness as a cause for individual poverty, it also identifies societal level injustices as a cause for communal poverty. As Esteban Voth observes, because the same book “proposes that many times poverty is caused by injustice,” its readers “cannot generalize and attribute the existence of poverty to laziness alone.” Consider the following verse

The field of the poor may yield much food,
    but it is swept away through injustice. (Proverbs 13:23)

Whereas verses from Proverbs we considered in the previous section linked individual laziness to individual poverty and hunger, Proverbs 13:23 links the bareness of poor people’s fields to societal injustices. Thus, Proverbs 13:23 bears a striking resemblance to the texts from Isaiah and Amos we considered. 

Similar commonalities also hold. Voth argues that “In contrast to the wisdom literature, for the prophets the true cause of poverty was found in the presence of injustice. This injustice had been institutionalized in royalty as well as in the clergy.” We noted such institutionalized evils in the previous section. Here we note proverbs that echo what we and Voth read in the prophets.

A ruler who oppresses the poor
    is a beating rain that leaves no food. (Proverbs 28:3)

Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker,
    but those who are kind to the needy honor him. (Proverbs 14:31)

Oppressing the poor in order to enrich oneself,
    and giving to the rich, will lead only to loss. (Proverbs 22:16)

Do not rob the poor because they are poor,
    or crush the afflicted at the gate;
for the Lord pleads their cause
    and despoils of life those who despoil them. (Proverbs 22:22-23)

Isaiah and Amos chastise royalty for perpetuating poverty. So does Proverbs 28:3. Isaiah and Amos rebuke Israel’s elites for exploiting the poor. Proverbs 22:16 and 22:22-23 anticipate this rebuke. And Isaiah and Amos highlight how Israel’s elites have insulted God because they oppress the poor.

Reflecting on the totality of Scripture’s witness, Elsa Tamez argues, “For the Bible oppression is the basic cause of poverty.” Tamez has communal poverty in view. She continues: “The oppressor steals from the oppressed and impoverishes them. The oppressed are therefore those who have been impoverished, for while the oppressor oppresses the poor because they are poor and powerless, the poor have become poor in the first placed because they have been oppressed.” In a prophetic, proverbial register, Tamez concludes, “The principal motive for oppression is the eagerness to pile up wealth, and this desire is connected with the fact that the oppressor is an idolater.” Isaiah and Amos do not rebuke Israel’s poor for laziness; they do not exhort them to try harder and pick themselves up. Instead, they rebuke Israel’s ruling elites for unjust policies and practices that bear the mark of idolatry.

Biblical Reflection Three: Legal Injustice and Poverty

Rulers and ruling-class elites often promote exploitation and poverty through law. Isaiah condemns Israel’s elites for this very sin.  

Woe to those who make unjust laws,
    to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights
    and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
    and robbing the fatherless. (Isaiah 10:1-2)

These unjust laws stand in sharp contrast to the laws God instituted in the Mosaic covenant. There we read:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 19:9-10);

For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe,  who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the Lord your God; him alone you shall worship; to him you shall hold fast, and by his name you shall swear. (Deuteronomy 10:17-20) 

God establishes laws to care for the poor and remediate poverty. Loving and worshiping God involves knowing that he executes justice for the marginalized and opposes oppressive, poverty-inducing regimes like Egypt’s.

Concluding With Puerto Rico

We return to the grotesque data about Puerto Rico’s poverty and our multi-layered guiding question: How to understand these truths, the poverty I witnessed, or what my relatives told me? In reverse order, we see that mi abuela was right to stress God’s call to care for the poor. We must love them—and so love their and our Maker. In contrast, we see that my relative’s linking of laziness to Puerto Rico’s wide-spread poverty is biblically dubious. Whereas Scripture links such societal level poverty to societal injustices perpetuated by ruling elites, my relative settled for a reductive and false linkage with individual behavior.

Biblically speaking, we must evaluate Puerto Rico’s poverty in terms of systemic evils perpetuated by ruling elites and the policies and practices they promote. This requires us to analyze and chastise elites on the island. But it also requires us to analyze the elites of Puerto Rico’s colonizer: The U.S. What Delgado says of Latin@s generally applies to Puerto Rico particularly: Latin@s require freedom from “the badges and incidents of conquest, including loss of ancestral lands, destruction of culture, suppression of their native language, and a public school system that systematically renders their history invisible.” And as I’ve written elsewhere, White U.S. elites crafted the laws governing US-Puerto Rico relations to solidify these badges and their accompanying poverty. These laws and the economic structures they protect trample Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico’s poor. Moreover, scholars such as Ed Morales and Teresa Delgado have shown that Puerto Rican elites like Ricardo Antonio Rosselló added cronyism and domestic domination to these evils. And unlike Zacchaeus, the island’s oppressive elites never repaid what they stole. Decolonizing this multi-sourced catastrophe requires confronting Egypt- and Rome-like exploitation and idolatry.

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Tempted to Silence

Stage Setting

To borrow a line from Willie James Jennings, “The things I tell are precise accounts while being exact fabrications…everything I tell you, everything, is the truth. It is the truth in service of moving us to a new place of gathering.”

Here is a temptation story. Does it sound familiar?

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En El Parque

We sipped our coffees between sympathetic sighs and pain-laced chuckles. We had suffered greatly and we knew it. That’s why we agreed to grab café and walk to a park where we could talk freely. We knew our colleagues wouldn’t be there. We knew the police rarely patrolled it; no need to worry about “inquiries.” Sometimes you must escape modes of surveillance so you can be—so you can listen and cry en conjunto.

Our visit did not start with sipping and sighs. Because our coffees were too hot to drink and our stories too agonizing to share without the security of a secluded space, we carried our coffees and swapped fun family updates while we walked to the park. We had much to celebrate. We had jokes to tell. Smiles adorned our faces and joyous laughter filled the space between us as we spoke. These laughs were divine gifts. We needed them and we knew it.

We reached the park and scanned the grounds. No one was there. Relieved, we selected a place to sit. Some burdens demand stillness. Sometimes movement fosters avoidance.

Our moods changed as we began discussing our personal pains. So did our cadence. Nervous, trauma-infused laughter filled the space between us. We had suffered greatly and we knew it. The brown bench bowed under our weight.

“Remember the racist meme?” I ask.

“Of course. How could any Latino or Latina forget it?”

“During a conversation, an institutional leader asked me if I had to use the word ‘victim’ when I talked about being pictured in that anti-Latin@ meme. ‘Perhaps another word is more appropriate?’ If I’m not a victim for being pictured in a racist meme that hundreds of people viewed on the internet, when would I be a ‘victim’?”

“Right? Sometimes these attempts to ‘reframe’ things to appease the constituents of historically white Christian spaces like ours leave you wondering: ‘Did I just hear that, or am I going crazy? You can’t be serious. Is it still the 1950s or something?’”  

“Exactamente. The subtle efforts to nudge Latinx folks into more ‘respectable’ speech—the kind that won’t rock the Anglo boat—infuriate and terrify me. They require so much vigilance! I’m telling you: It’s easy to become a cooked frog, assimilating to every minor temperature adjustment designed to keep ‘certain’ Anglo constituents appeased.”

“And when you resist, when you ask, ‘Why are you adjusting the water temperature?” they look you in the eyes and say, ‘What are you talking about?’”

“Preach.”  

“You see their hand on the nob. You watch them turn up the heat. But when you ask them why they’re doing that, they say they aren’t doing anything. The blatant gas-lighting is gross.”  

“Sure is.”

“Ever notice how often these leaders gas-light you right before charging you with being a troublemaker?”

“Ah—the dreaded T-word. Not sure any racialized minority can recover from being labeled a ‘troublemaker’ in a historically or predominately white institution.”

I sip my coffee; my friend is silent. No one sighs. Our muscles tense. Apprehension fills the space between us.

“Nathan, you know people are calling you a troublemaker, right?”

“I know some people are calling me much worse than that!”

“I’m serious.”

“I am too…”

“Okay, but hear me. I’m worried about you. People are labeling you a troublemaker, hermano—and some are trying to keep you from getting a seat at important institutional tables.”

“I know…and I’m grateful for your loving concern. You unfortunately have good reasons to worry.”

“Yes I do. We both do.”

“This reminds me of a line from Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. Du Bois says that the U.S. will never have a truthful history ‘until we have in our colleges men [and women] who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race.’ What Du Bois says about U.S. higher education generally holds for U.S. Christian higher education in particular—especially in historically white institutions. My speaking out against the histories of racism, white supremacy, and U.S. Anglo-Saxon imperialism has upset some folks.”

“Sí; it has.”

“Fans of white Christian Nationalism are outraged. Some have called for my job. ‘He’s racist and a liar!’ they say. ‘Fire him, or I’ll stop financially supporting your institution!’”

 “Got to love the financial power plays coming from the very people who decry ‘cancel culture.’ I wish you never faced those threats. It must be anxiety inducing.”

“You know they are, because you get them too. Nothing like having to trust God for your daily bread when people are calling for your job or labeling you a troublemaker.”

We both look down. The bench remains bowed. My hands start to sweat as I raise my coffee to drink with my friend. We sip. We shake our heads and sigh. Then we look at each other. My friend continues.

“If you dialed it back—and I’m not saying you should—I suspect you could shake the label ‘troublemaker.’”

“I can’t dial it back. We both know that. If anything, I have been too quiet. Mi gente in Puerto Rico are the world’s oldest colony. They continue to suffer from U.S. white supremacy and economic exploitation. God has called me to bear witness to their miseries and amplify their voices in places where they have gone unheard.”

“You and your people have suffered greatly. And I agree about your calling. But I worry that your pace and the labels you carry may keep you from amplifying these voices in the halls of power. I mean, just look at how I’ve been ostracized and disrespected—and I’ve said far less ‘incendiary’ things than you have.”

Pain radiates from my friend’s eyes. Psalm 35 comes to mind as I consider my next words.

“I hear you,” I begin. “And I’m sorry you’ve suffered so much for confronting institutional racism. I hate it. I wish yours wasn’t a vocation of agony.”

“Thanks, Nathan. Me too.”

“The ‘reprimands’ and gas-lighting you’ve faced have been egregious. Simply egregious.”

“Seeing the institutional underside has been rough. I’ve shed many tears while crying out to Jesus. You’re right: It’s been a vocation of agony.”  

“I got that phrase from MLK. He says promoting justice is a vocation of agony in ‘Beyond Vietnam.’”

“I haven’t read that.”

“It’s so good. That’s where King says there comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

“Some Latinx folks justify their institutional silence by saying that we need to go poco a poco.”

 “Yeah. I’ve received this counsel several times. It flies in the face of history. And it’s eerily similar to the gradualism King denounces in ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’”

“Ever the race scholar…But you’re right: Those are good connections.”

“Thanks...I wish they weren’t. I wish those pieces weren’t relevant to our lives.”

“If only…”

“Silence and gradualism remain enticing temptations. But often silence is betrayal and gradualism is an ideology that sooths flawed consciences while it perpetuates exploitation and oppression. ‘Don’t worry: We’re moving prudently—with ‘all deliberate speed.’”

“But Nathan, don’t you see, ‘We’re making big strides: We’ve written statements. You should be impressed—and grateful.’”

“You and I have heard those lines time and time again, haven’t we?”

“Yep.”

“So many evangelical institutions and institutional leaders repeat this mantra. It’s painfully predictable.”

“And it often accompanies gas-lighting.”

“You’re right.”   

We pause to sip our coffees. They’re nearly empty.

“Even when we do the work God’s given us,” my friend says, “promoting justice for and amplifying the voices of Latinx folks, we still end up in a position where we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“If we promote justice and amplify our people’s pains, people ostracize us, removing us from institutional or societal places of power. But if we’re silent or play the institution’s desired gradual game, we’ll get accolades and mammon—but we and our people suffer, though in different ways.”

“I hear you. That’s it, isn’t it? Nothing like being stuck between a rock and a hard place while you’re trying to stand firm upon the Rock.”

“It’s exhausting.”

“It sure is. Racial battle fatigue is no joke. We must recognize it. We need to take time to recover from it. I say this knowing that, for some reason, the LORD keeps preparing a table for us in the presence of our enemies, keeps calling us to a Eucharistic feast in which we participate in Christ’s sufferings.”

“In these circumstances, it is easy to succumb to the temptation to remain silent or ‘work’ for ‘gradual change.’” Those paths are less painful and the fast tracks to fame, money, and power. ‘Forget all this misery. Isn’t Christ’s yoke supposed to be light? This isn’t light—it’s heavy!”

“You got me thinking about Jesus’s temptation. We face something similar. ‘If you just bow an assimilated knee,’ figures in historically or predominately white institutions tell us, ‘all these kingdoms can be yours. No need to suffer.

And why not better position yourself to empower your people?’ As if we could have those kingdoms and advance the Kingdom. As if we could support our people by selling them out.”

“Can’t serve God and mammon. No wonder some of the nudges and calls to assimilate feel satanic.”

“Now that’s a word.”

We wrap up our conversation expressing our gratitude for friendship. We stand and the brown bench creaks in relief. It is no longer holding our burdens. Our burdens aren’t gone; our coffee cups are empty. Still our cups runneth over.  

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Racism: A Discipleship Problem?

Just prior to the death of George Floyd and a fresh wave of civil rights demonstrations taking hold of the US, InterVarsity Press released David W. Swanson’s Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity. A white man and ministry leader, Swanson pastors New Community Covenant Church, a multi-cultural congregation in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. Encouraged by his friends of color to speak to the topics of racism and whiteness in America, Swanson wrote Rediscipling in an effort to address a historic issue from this place in time. Many white Christians want to better understand the realities of systemic racism; they want to be better allies to their black and brown family. Swanson comes alongside these white believers, and the white church as a whole, with a historical, theological, biblical, and a deeply personal analysis of whiteness. Thoughtfully written and formed through the practical experience of pastoring, Swanson’s Rediscipling is a balanced resource for the ministry leader entering the hard work of racial reconciliation.

A Method Unquestioned

While Swanson’s Rediscipling is about whiteness, he begins in an unlikely place—the American church model of discipleship. The choice to begin here is an interesting one. For me, it proved successful in disarming my assumptions of the conversation. By starting with ministry method, not historical construct, Swanson reframes the topic at hand and captures the heart of the ministry leader. Swanson then employs philosopher Charles Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries. Taylor’s concept explains how our view of the world is shaped by what we expect from it.[1]  Drawing on discipleship methodology, Swanson shows how white Christians have been discipled into racism by culture and the world in which we live, leading us to conceptualize people of color biasedly. Swanson states: “White Christianity has been blind to the powerful racial discipleship that has formed the imaginations of white Christians.”[2]

It is interesting to reflect on the many ways in which the white church has rightly identified ways the culture and values of the world lead believers away from the gospel and holy living. We are quick to identity pornography as a sexual distortion and critique our culture for promoting its creation and consumption. Sadly, our whiteness has not allowed us to see how our world has enculturated us away from the reconciling gospel of God on issues of race. Rather, we have been enculturated towards viewing the world through a lens of racial difference. Swanson rightly asks, what should Christians be discipled into? How do the values of God’s Kingdom speak to race, racism, and ethnic or cultural divides? Swanson argues biblically and theologically that our white church discipleship has not produced Christians who mirror the God who desires to reconcile all things to himself: Jew, Roman, male, female, regardless of socio-economic status or color of skin. Rather we have been discipled by our world when it comes to matters of racial division. Swanson explains: “We can think of the narrative of racial difference as invisibly polluted air or contaminated water; the fact that we don’t recognize it doesn’t dull its impact on our way of moving through the world.”[3] How did we get to this place of being discipled into what Swanson calls racial difference? This is where the turn to history is important.

A History Unheard

If historical evidence has fallen on deaf ears in discussions of race, Swanson utilized it successfully. By approaching the conversation of whiteness first as a discipleship and cultural issue, Swanson interweaves the historical underpinnings for why American history and culture has discipled white Christians into white privilege. Swanson’s use of history spans the entirety of his book but comes heavily into play in the chapter, “Wounded by Race.” The conversation gets challenging here for the white believer, as Swanson unpacks the tragedy and evils of whiteness as a racial construct and white privilege, at length. He addresses this honestly: “We prefer not to linger. Yet the discipleship journey to redirect our desires toward the reconciled kingdom of God cannot be rushed.”[4] Many discussions of whiteness begin with the historical construct, using it as evidence to prove systemic racism. These evidences are not always well received by white believers as they present a new, unfamiliar, uncomfortable view of history. However, having already established the validity to the issues of race and whiteness, Swanson uses history well as explanation, not proof, for why these issues exist in America as they do. History becomes hard truth spoken to those who are ready to journey with Swanson through these tough realities. Swanson is not hurried, but he also speaks freely of the white Christian’s historical complicity to racism, segregation, and sin against their colored brothers and sisters. If you are willing to take this journey of learning with Swanson, you will make it to part two of Rediscipling, which paints the vision of the “reconciled kingdom of God.”[5]

A Vision Unseen

The second part of Swanson’s Rediscipling excites and provides hope for the ministry leader who wants practical steps forward for the internal soul work this book initiates. In each chapter, Swanson looks at a piece of congregational or fellowship life, analyzes it, and proposes ways these areas can be changed to allow believers to be re-discipled into racial reconciliation. Looking at children’s ministry, communion, liturgies, and potlucks, Swanson’s years of pastoral ministry shine through as he presents tangible ways in which white Christians can take their current practices and traditions and allow them to be informed by the reconciling gospel of Christ. Most significant is Swanson’s emphasis that re-orienting our hearts, lives, and congregations away from racial difference is possible even for believers in monolithic communities and congregations. Swanson explains that the goal of this re-imagined discipleship is to bring believers into true solidarity with the whole of the Body of Christ.[6]

This emphasis on solidarity rather than diversity, which has been championed in the race conversation at other points, allows for all to participate. Swanson explains: “The second reason for making solidarity our goal is that every expression of white Christianity can pursue gospel reconciliation immediately. Rather than outsourcing this essential Christian vocation to multiracial churches or to congregations in urban or racially diverse regions, every white congregation can contribute to the unity of the body of Christ across lines of cultural division.”[7] This vision of reconciliation, accessible even to believers in rural or suburban white communities, is a fresh vision for what must and can happen in the US church.

A Vision for All

While Swanson creatively and thoughtfully takes the reader on a journey to consider whiteness and reimagine discipleship, his target is ministry leaders. After finishing the book, I longed for a simplified and abbreviated version to hand off to my family and friends. Swanson writes as a practical theologian and pastor to those who have influence over church life. But this leaves me wondering if this critical conversation will get stuck at the leadership level, when so many lay persons are craving resources to take steps towards racial reconciliation. This brings us back to Swanson’s guiding ministry methodology—discipleship. Be it through worship, conversation, communion, the preaching of the word, or a chat over coffee, the flourishing we long to see in our church communities and our world is only made possible through the original biblical mandate—to make disciples. While this discussion of whiteness is a bit heady to make it into the layperson’s evening reading, the essential information and journey that Swanson unfolds for the ministry leader is replicable in the lives of those we disciple and lead.

A Higher Vision

The margin note that will stick with me in my personal copy of Rediscipling is this: “He cast something in my mind I have not yet fully seen.” All theologians, from the pew to the pulpit to the academy, wrestle with the “already, not yet” of our faith. Nearly ever doctrine is touched with an incompleteness that calls our hearts home to the Father and a future completeness found only in the Son, Jesus Christ. Why should it be surprising to my soul that Swanson prompted this holy discontent through his discussion of whiteness and the American church. Swanson sees, not naively, a vision of what God intends for His Body—a reconciliation of all people to Himself within His one Body, the Church. For Swanson, we can work towards that now.

We can see a glimpse of the New Earth John spoke of in Revelation in our churches today. We can make ministry choices that change the trajectory of the American church—a trajectory that has been shaped by racial difference more than by the gospel of Jesus Christ. I saw a glimpse of this vision through reading and reflecting on Rediscipling. While my vision is incomplete, and there is so much growth to be done in my own heart, mind, and actions, I am convinced there is a way forward. There is, to quote the old hymn, “a higher plane” than we have previously found. And so my prayer for all of us is to say, “Lord, plant our feet on higher ground.”

About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily C. Alexander recently completed her undergraduate degree in Ministry to Women at the Moody Bible Institute. Emily lives in Chicago where she enjoys long walks admiring architecture and pondering theological and sociological issues. Her hope is to impact the lives of women and the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.

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Footnotes

[1] 18-21

[2] 20

[3] 21

[4] 45

[5] 53

[6][6] 60

[7] 61

Too Soon To Talk About Modesty

I was a little surprised when the believer’s relationship to clothing came directly in the cross hairs of conversation following the Super Bowl Half-Time show in February. Issues of Latin culture, pop culture, sensuality, sexual purity, and modesty contributed to a charged conversation. World Outspoken’s Emanuel Padilla chimed in with an article addressing many of these issues, raising important questions about the Christian’s perspective of modesty in relation to culture. Initially, I believed my surprise was rooted in a Christian modesty ethic which framed my thinking to expect “the world” to have a different relationship with clothing than my own. Then I read Lauren F. Winner’s Wearing God and realized my relationship to clothing had shifted—no longer primarily formed by a cultural modesty ethic (Christian or otherwise) but something more.   

Modesty conversations are not new to the church and arise frequently when believers make an effort to draw distinctions between Kingdom culture and ungodly elements of world cultures. This theology of “worldliness” is found frequently in fundamentalist church circles, with James 1:27 cited as a supporting text for a believer’s physical, tangible distinctness from the world.  A helpful example of this is found in Anabaptist denominations, such as the conservative Mennonite or Brethren. These believers hold to standards of dress which set them apart from broader society, choosing sex differentiated clothing (skirts and dresses for women, pants for men) and clothing that is either homemade or what is considered the most modest of what is available. In choosing to dress in a way that is distinct from world cultures, clothing becomes a marker of identity and a communicator of holiness.

The Super Bowl discussion and the Anabaptist modesty ethic seem to be outliers from the average believer’s wardrobe considerations. Nonetheless, the Church through time has wrestled with its relationship to clothing as a cultural artifact—forming, at best, a muddled conversation. When it comes to clothing, believers may have missed a step on the way to correct practice. We have constructed our “correct belief” based on culture, forgetting that for the believer, clothing is not first a cultural artifact at all. Clothing is first and foremost a person—the person of Jesus Christ.

In her book Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God, Dr. Lauren F. Winner presents several metaphors for God frequently neglected in Christian thought. Winner proposes that some scriptural metaphors (e.g. shepherd, light) have become the sole ways in which believers imagine God, leaving the Church with a “truncated relationship” with her multi-faceted, unfathomable Lord.[1] One of these forgotten metaphors is clothing. Drawing from a robust biblical and historical-cultural theology, Winner brings newness to Paul’s declaration to the churches of Galatia: “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.”[2] Beginning in Genesis and concluding in the epistles, Winner points out that God clothes us, God is our clothing, and God invites us into clothing others.[3]  

God Clothes Us

Clothing is both identity shaping and communicative. As an identity shaping artifact, clothing acts upon its wearer, forming him or her to its likeness. Winner explains that “fashion” is not only a noun, but also a verb, meaning to mold or to shape.[4] When choosing a variety of clothing one can “play at being a different kind of self,” because the clothing we choose fashions us into different people.[5] I am reminded of this when co-workers do not recognize me in the gym. I am molded by my fitness attire to a different me, an athletic, possibly trendier version of my typical simply dressed self. My gym clothes act upon me, shaping my identity. Clothing also shapes communal identity. Winner uses a classic example of children’s school uniforms, which define community through the elimination of differences.[6] Common clothing sustains a common identity.

As God tenderly dressed Adam and Eve with clothing of skins before they left the garden, we as believers have been dressed by God with Christ. How then is our identity, our very self, being shaped by the Person we wear each day? How does Christ act upon us in such a way that fashions both our personal and communal identities? As Winner candidly states: “I let my Talbot suits and my vintage shirts remake me in their image. I want to let Jesus do the same.”[7] Church culture aptly reminds me of the ability which clothing as a cultural artifact has to shape my identity away from holiness. Yet it frequently neglects to lay proper emphasis on my original clothing—the person of Jesus Christ, who daily shapes my identity, personally to Himself, and communally to the image of His Bride.

God is our Clothing

Clothing is also communicative. Winner looks back to mourning clothes, commonly worn by widows just decades ago. A widow of the 1920’s would wear mourning clothes for months after the loss of her husband. This black dress, Winner explains, would convey to the woman’s community her state of mourning.[8] The clothing did not cause the woman’s mourning, but rather communicated her state, prompting an appropriate response (careful attention and kindness) from those with whom she interacted.

Women in particular are warned to consider the communicative power of clothing. As a Christian woman, slut shaming takes its own vicious form as women criticize women of leveraging sex appeal in their wardrobe choices. Men also are criticized, often for appearing effeminate. Gender-norms and sexuality aside, clothing also communicates economics, status, and ethnic culture. The very nature of clothing to maintain communal identity also works to construct boundaries and communicate division.[9]

Lost in this discussion is the person of Christ bound daily to the very being of believers. Winner brings this again to the forefront, discussing the communicative nature of God-as-clothing. She states: “What we are asking for, of course, is not clothing that is more articulate, but that our disposition—which is indeed on display, often to a greater extent than we wish—would be more congruent with the Jesus whom we wear.”[10] Both identity shaping and communicative, the person of Christ acts upon His children, shaping them to His image and conveying through them His personhood. Jesus is our primary clothing, eclipsing any cultural artifact we may pull out of the closet on a Monday morning.

God Invites us to Clothe Others

Contrary to most clothing discussions, Winner lands her argument in the openness of the gospel and our mandate to clothe others. Winner suggests we are involving ourselves in a “choreography of divine action” when we follow God’s act of providing physical clothing[11] Citing Mathew 25 and James 2, Winner explains that Jesus holds up clothing others as a “basic norm, a test even, for discipleship and hospitality.”[12] This theology of clothing that Winner suggests does not separate us from those who need Christ. This theology asks us to mimic God through clothing those in need—a new mom and her infant, an immigrant family, the homeless—and welcome others to experience the transforming, fashioning presence of Christ with us.[13]

It is Laura Winner’s brief look at this metaphor for God—clothing—that unveils the misplaced priorities in the clothing conversation. Each day we look into closets and open drawers to clothe bodies we may not be happy with. The world around us says, “It’s okay if you wanna change the body that you came in” and that you will be happiest when you “feel like a damn queen.”[14] Church culture tells us to maintain a distinct identity from the “world” and communicate holiness through what we wear. Scripture tells us we wear Christ.

It’s too soon to talk about modesty, if we first haven’t talked about our primary clothing—Christ. Expecting another book on modesty ethic, Wearing God surprised me. For years I listened to church cultures emphasize modesty and believed a clothing ethic was one of my highest priorities as a woman of God. Then I entered a space that preached first Christ—not ethics of holiness. In reading Winner, I realized what has taken place in my own heart is a heightened concern to wear Christ daily, rather than fixate on a clothing ethic. Tenderly clothed by God, with God, to then clothe others—this is our identity and what we communicate to the world. This is the foundation to discussing clothing as cultural artifact. It’s too soon to talk about modesty—so first, let’s begin here.

Note: Clothing is one metaphor Dr. Lauren F. Winner presents in her book Wearing God. We encourage you to read Winner’s book in full, keeping in mind all biblical interpretations and theological positions are not interacted with in this article or supported by the WOS Team.

About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily C. Alexander recently completed her undergraduate degree in Ministry to Women at the Moody Bible Institute. Emily lives in Chicago where she enjoys long walks admiring architecture and pondering theological and sociological issues. Her hope is to impact the lives of women and the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.

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Footnotes

[1] Wearing God, Lauren F. Winner, Harper Collins, New York, 2015. Pg 6.

[2] Galatians 3.27 NASB

[3] Winner, 53

[4] Ibid., 38

[5] Ibid., 38

[6] Ibid., 46

[7] Ibid., 41

[8] Ibid., 42

[9] Ibid., 46

[10] Ibid., 45

[11] Ibid., 54

[12] Ibid., 55

[13] Ibid., 55-57

[14] “Most Girls”, Hailee Steinfeld, et all. Warner Chappell Music, Inc. Downtown Music Publishing.

Planting in Babylon Pt. 2

Maybe I’m not over it. Maybe the choice to start by telling this story is proof that it still bothers me. Still. Even if I’m “in my feelings,” I’m convinced he missed the point. Several years ago, while still in grad school, I submitted a paper on a model for multi-cultural congregations that I was quite proud of in the end. I had worked hard on the paper and included a theological argument for diversity I thought was soundly reasoned. When I got it back from my favorite professor, it included this feedback:

“I am puzzled why you have turned to the Exodus narrative to emphasize the multiethnic nature of God’s redeemed people.  Why not [use] the NT passages that more explicitly emphasize … God’s design of making His church multiethnic and its theological significance?”

This question is at the heart of this article. I believe God’s plan was always about making a mestizo people that would reflect His character on earth by making the world as it should be – a place of beauty, justice, and goodness. People failed to do this time and time again, but that doesn’t change the plan. He is redeeming a mixed multitude and calling them to create, to plant gardens, and build communities that set things right and restore His order. If this was always His plan, then it should be seen in the story the first time He rescued people and called them His own. In fact, the identity of Israel should hint to God’s plan for a multiethnic people just as the Church finally displays it. And, it does.

Returning from Exile

At the end of part one of this series, I noted the promise God made to Israel while they were exiled in Babylon. He said, “I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you, and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile” (Jer. 29:14). This promise reveals a second important identity marker for God’s people. The first was our non-innocence, our inability to work in Babylon as self-righteous missionaries detached from the city. The second is our mestizaje, our mixed identity as one chosen nation, a royal priesthood called to reveal His character (1 Pet. 2:9). We do this in our work (which will be explored further in the final part of this series), but we also do this in our very existence as a community. This is the focus of this article, and with all due respect to my former professor, the best way to show the importance of our mestizaje is to start at the beginning of the story.

The first time God rescued a people from slavery and called them His own, he rescued a mixed multitude (Exod. 12:38). The exodus story – the story of how the Lord rescued Israel from slavery to Egypt by sending Moses as His messenger – is essential to understanding how salvation happens in the Bible, what it means, and what it does to those who are saved. The Exodus was a significant part of ancient Israel’s history and identity.[1] It shaped their understanding of God and His works of salvation.[2] In fact, every time salvation happens in the bible, it’s meant to be understood as an echo of the exodus, a “new exodus,” a repetition of the pattern set in Egypt. While in exile, Israel waited on God to rescue them yet again in another powerful exodus that would bring them back home to their land. However, when they finally did return home, they quickly realized they had not yet been fully freed, and the exodus pattern remained unfinished. That is how the Old Testament ends, but for the careful reader paying attention to the pattern, the start of the New Testament should thrill because it introduces a new Moses, Jesus of Nazareth.

The writers of the New Testament, being faithful Jews, framed the story of Jesus as a great exodus. N.T. Wright argues that in the letter to Ephesus Paul is using the phrase, “guarantee of our inheritance” to draw from the themes of the Exodus narrative.[3] According to Wright, Galatians chapter four is part of a larger thought-unit “of the rescue of God’s people and the whole world from the ‘Egypt’ of slavery.”  He observes clear “exodus language” in Galatians 4:1-7 that is echoed in Romans 8:12-17. He goes on to say, “by overlaying that great story across the even greater one of the accomplishment of the Messiah, rescuing his people from the present evil age, Paul is able to say… this is therefore how you are rescued from sin and death.”[4]

If the exodus is this important to our understanding of all the salvation acts in the Bible, especially the way we understand Jesus’ acts in saving the Church, then the details of Israel’s salvation identity should inform the way we read Paul and other NT writers’ words about the multi-ethnic makeup of the Church. Precisely for this reason, Exodus chapter 12 verse 38 can’t be glossed over. At the very least, the mixed multitude of Israelites who left Egypt as God’s people included the half-Egyptian children of Joseph that formed the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. That means that “Israel” included some who had the blood of their oppressor. The verse says that a “mixed multitude also” (emph. mine) went with Israel. This suggests that other non-Israelites-by-blood went out of Egypt as part of God’s people. The instructions that follow Israel’s exit assume this mixed group.

The first instructions are for the Passover meal which commemorated God’s rescue of Israel from slavery. In these instructions God includes this accommodation: “A foreigner residing among you who wants to celebrate the Lord’s Passover must have all the males in his household circumcised; then he may take part like one born in the land … The same law applies both to the native-born and to the foreigner residing among you” (Exod. 12:48-49). This instruction, including its details about circumcision, and the ones that immediately follow are all about marking the identity of Israel. They make clear who belongs as part of God’s people. For instance, the next instruction is for a memorial that would be celebrated on the new calendar God gave them (see 12:2; 13:3-9). Holidays were established for Israel to remember who they were as the rescued slaves that were now God’s people.

The New Exodus

As the greater Moses (Heb. 3:3), Jesus accomplished a greater exodus. Therefore, the mixed multitude of Israel is only but a hint of the mestizaje of the Church. Like any biblical theme, the mixed identity of Israel grows more complex yet clear as the story continues. By the time Israel was exiled in Babylon, Ruth the Moabites had married into Israel. Rahab the Jerichoan prostitute joined the nation. These are only two examples of the many times Scripture makes clear that “Israel” is a complex name for a mixed people belonging to the Lord. When Jeremiah writes his letter to the exiles, he reveals that the Israelites were going to experience another mestizaje. They wouldn’t return to Israel exactly as they had left it. They would now bring back some of Babylon with them.

The Lord’s instructions to the Babylonian exiles was to plant gardens, build homes, and marry off their children. They were to become part of the fabric of Babylon. It was there, as members of the city, that the Jewish community developed synagogues. It was there that they developed new cultural rhythms that would mark them as God’s people. When Jeremiah, on behalf of the Lord, writes, “I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you, and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile” (Jer. 29:14), he is hinting that Israel would be a land of diverse experiences with a new Israeli community that now includes cultural expressions from nations abroad. Indeed, this is seen today. In Jerusalem, near the old city, there is a series of banners along a popular bike/walk path that display people from many ethnic groups in a prayer position. The text below the banners reads, “One of the most important visions for the city of Jerusalem is its existence as a cultural and religious center for all peoples.” The banner then quotes another prophet, “for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations” (Isaiah 56:7).

Jesus was born a Jewish man in Israel while it was under Roman rule. His experience, his cultural context, included yet another mestizaje where Roman culture played a significant role. As the new Moses, He accomplished the greatest exodus of all, and through His death and resurrection, those who follow Him are part of the greatest mixed multitude to be saved from slavery. He is fulfilling that promise written by Jeremiah and more. There is one final theological contribution from the Exodus story. Peter Enns comments that the Exodus pattern is closely aligned to the new creation theme. According to Enns, “to redeem is to re-create.”[5] God, in recreating a people of a mixed identity, is now calling them to care for and develop a culture that reflects the world as He intended it. This is the subject of the final part in this series. For now, may we live in Babylon as one beautiful display of God’s unifying love for all people. Together, we are His holy nation, His Church.

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Footnotes

[1] Ronald S. Hendel, “The Exodus in biblical memory,” Journal of Biblical Literature 120, no. 4 (2001) 601 [601-622].

[2] Otto Alfred Piper, “Unchanging promises: Exodus in the New Testament,” Interpretation 11, no. 1 (January 1, 1957) 4 [3-22].

[3] Wright, Simply Christian, 125.

[4] Wright, Justification, 136. See also pg. 157-158 point 4, where Wright argues the Exodus slavery language is part of the summary of Paul’s theology

[5] Enns, New Exodus, 216.

Is God Really Hiding In The Woods? Reflections on Urban Spirituality

“What man has not encountered, he has not yet destroyed.” ”

— Wendell Berry

In two short weeks Christmas films will release in mass. Husbands, boyfriends, and fathers will grimace, or secretly join in, while their wives and girlfriends, daughters and grandmothers turn to the Hallmark channel while decorating for the holidays. A timeless plot will follow; a big city business girl gets stranded in a small town and finds faith (and a handsome man in plaid), all before Christmas Eve. Disillusioned by life in the city, the main character will inadvertently experience a life pause. Her pause will take place, of course, in front of a snow-capped mountain, or along a reclusive shoreline, where she finds herself and God. This pivotal moment in nature becomes the climax, which restores the heroine’s hope in humanity and ultimately opens her heart to love. It is a story we know well, because many of us have experienced the same sense of restoration outdoors.

When feeling lost and needing to refocus, our culture, both in and outside the church, sends us to the woods. In the popular memoir turned movie, Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s wilderness journey is one of personal and spiritual transformation. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty shows Ben Stiller’s character Walter traveling to the furthest corners of the world in the pursuit of the meaning of life. Moses found his calling while on a mountain herding sheep. Christ himself prepared for ministry through the testing of isolation in the wilds of Israel. Today, countless of adults and children seek to find God in nature. Churches, rural, suburban, and urban alike, plan getaways to lakeside retreat centers. Young adults take journeys by hiking or biking across countries or continents, Instagraming their way with deep, spiritual reflections on encountering God. In pursuing these experiences, few stop to question the practical theology implicit in this means of experiencing God’s presence. If pivotal spiritual experiences happen in the woods, where does that leave God’s people when they find themselves dwelling among the sidewalks?

If we reframed this question to ask: “Does location matter when seeking to experience God,” I believe most would answer, in the most general sense, no. One can experience profound moments with the Lord when driving to work, as when in Sunday worship, as when vacationing in the Rockies. The ability to acknowledge this is rooted in a correct theology of the person of the Holy Spirit, whom indwells believers, testifying to their union with Christ, and therefore God the Father.[1] Yet, a prevailing sense within church culture (and the world) is that God is found in the quiet, open space, and therefore, outside the city limits. I remember feeling this way when I moved to Chicago. Coming from a valley with rolling hills and broad mountains, I grew to adulthood accustomed to the security and vastness of something other than and greater than myself. After moving to Chicagoland, I frequently sought out the openness of Lake Michigan when disoriented and desiring the presence of God.

In his doctoral dissertation with Liberty Theological Seminary, Philip Joseph Parker examines on a closer level why and how people encounter God through His creation. Parker defines encounter as: “an awareness of being in the presence of someone else whether that individual is another human being or God. This includes those experiences in which there is a sensory interchange involving, for example, hearing and seeing, as well as those instances in which a person is simply aware of another’s presence.”[2] Parker correctly explains that people often have a greater awareness of God in nature; the sights and sounds provide a kind of sensory experience of His presence and work in the world.[3]

Does it follow that these encounters with God are not happening within the city? In contrast to nature cities are an engine that incubate and intensify the production of human culture.[4] What we encounter in more densely populated areas is not a lack of the presence of God, but the intensity of the human spirit and what it creates. This intensity is alluring, drawing many to dwell in cities, seeking after the energy which drives the activity. This intensity is also, in the broad sense, human-driven activity, which overtime exhausts the human spirit. The answer then, for many, is to withdraw from the populated setting to a setting perceived to be more God-driven, more untouched by human enterprise. So we step outside of the activity, the hurry if you will, and the spirit of humanity, to breathe and listen to a voice beyond the echo of our own.

This desire to step away and reconnect with God is a healthy one. We are reminded of this as the psalmist laments the condition of the world and comes to a clearer understanding when he “came into the sanctuary of God.”[5] We see another example in Christ who removed himself from the crowds to pray to the Father. This concept of hurry and rest is also currently being addressed in evangelical writings. John Mark Comer’s recent book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry speaks to just that. Comer, along with countless other Bible teachers and theologians, are tapping into the exhaustion and distracted nature of the human spirit in today’s world. However, an issue arises when a change of locality becomes an essential pattern to spiritual refreshment, a lens by which we view the working of the Spirit in ourselves and in His people. In the development of the doctrine of retreat, I wonder, have we have forgotten the point is to pause?

I propose that we have for too long focused on the location and space of our encounters with God, rather than the heart posture which facilitates these occurrences. The problem then, is not our locality, but our willingness to stop and humbly open our eyes to see the greatness and goodness of the One who is other than us. Cities display a kind of intricate beauty and tragedy that the natural world—mountains, rivers and plains, cannot. While nature, a creation of God, reminds us of His character, cities express God’s very image. Both in humanity and in the work of humanity, the image of God is showcased every moment. Sadly this showcase, a living stage play of God Himself, is flawed—often quite ugly, violent, tired, and tearful. It is no wonder that it is said of Abraham that “he was looking forward to the city…whose designer and builder is God.”[6] This is why we, as the Church, look forward hopeful and sure. Eager to take part in the restoration of all things, we live now with creative hands, active minds, and interested hearts, ready to join in God’s work of making culture.

World Outspoken exists to equip the Church to make culture. We as God’s people embody the redeemed human spirit on earth, adding to the intensity a holiness which creates a new kind of beauty, a fresh form of flourishing. In attempting to retreat from humanity, are we diverting our eyes from God’s presence around us each day on the sidewalks?

Just last week something made me look up. Sitting crouched over my phone, headphones blaring on a bursting rush hour train, I lifted my head to see the lights. As I gazed out over the Chicago river and took in the sparkling skyline of the city, my heart paused. If anyone had been watching, they may have been puzzled by the sudden smile which filled my face. In that moment the noise of the world quieted, along with my cares and uncertainties. Surrounded by the complexity of God’s creation (mankind), looking out at something bigger than myself (high-rises), my heart rested, humbled by the greatness and goodness of God. This spiritual refreshment, available to us consistently through the presence of the Spirit, merely awaits our attention and willingness. I am here to say, that even without a mountain, God can be found.

About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily C. Alexander recently completed her undergraduate degree in Ministry to Women at the Moody Bible Institute. Emily lives in Chicago where she enjoys long walks admiring architecture and pondering theological and sociological issues. Her hope is to impact the lives of women and the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.

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Footnotes

[1] Romans 8.14-17.

[2] Encountering God Through Creation https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/58821668.pdf

[3] Due to the space and scope of this article, how unbelievers experience God in relation to creation will not be addressed.

[4] https://worldoutspoken.com/idea/babylon-by-choice/

[5] Ps. 73.17; Here, the psalmist doesn’t leave the city; he steps into the heart of it. The temple had significant garden imagery, reflecting an echo of the Garden of Eden (see Bible Project Video). This should challenge us about the importance of making beautiful church buildings that reverberate with a different voice, the voice of the Lord and His cloud of witnesses that went before us.

[6] Hebrews 11.10