Suffering, experience, and Christology in womanist theology

Womanist Theology

An individual theologian's reflection about the nature of God is not strictly about God alone. Rather, it is intimately bound-up with the theologian's own way of viewing the world. One fairly recent example of this comes from Elie Weisel, a Nobel-prize winning writer. Weisel is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who has written about how his experiences in the concentration camps have caused him to think differently about God. His experience of seeing people killed and tortured has caused him seriously to question his previous ways of thinking about God. It was his experience that caused him to think of God as unable or unwilling to intervene in human suffering. He recalls watching a young boy hanging dead in the main square of a concentration camp, and he recalls the theological reflection that accompanied the moment. He heard a man from among the crowd ask, "Where is God now?" Weisel writes that, in response to this question, "I heard a voice within me answer him: 'Where is He? Here He is-He is hanging here on this gallows.' "

The reason for including this passage from Weisel is simply to illustrate that theological reflection is always influenced by personal experience. After living through the concentration camps, Weisel found it difficult to describe God as a powerful, compassionate, loving God. Instead, he found it more appropriate to describe God as he saw the young boy who had been killed, and whose body now hung limp and powerless in front of him. Once alive, but now dead. Weisel's suffering brought with it a different sort of theological reflection that is wholly inaccessible to someone who has not also lived through such terror. The nature of his theological reflection is unique on a personal level, but from a wider frame of reference, his theology may also be said to be representative of the collective experience of Jews in 20th century Europe. On the whole, then, it may be said that this contingent of Jews differs theologically from the Jews of, say, 6th century Europe. Understanding the historical context of theology is of utmost importance. Without this frame of reference, the meaning of the particular theology is often lost.

This essay will consider the larger issues of historical context and theology. It will examine the relationship between personal experience and individual theological reflection, as well as the relationship between collective experience and group theological reflection. It will deal with the individual and collective experience of suffering, and the relationship of these sufferings to Christian theological reflection on Christology. The paper begins by looking rather broadly at the issue of suffering as expressed by African-American Christians, and how this suffering influences theology. In ways similar to the Holocaust, the American slave inflicted intense suffering upon not only one generation of people, but upon generations to come. The consequences of the terrifying experiences suffered by African people brought to the Americas will not, in our lifetime, come completely to an end.

One way to enter into this experience of suffering is by closely examining history. Another way is to look at some of the theological reflection that has occurred in the wake of the slave trade. Long after the days of black slavery "officially" ended, racism continues to exist in America in many forms, which results in a continuation of suffering. Racism and discrimination based on color (even when it does not involve racism) expands the experience of suffering beyond African and African-American people; the impact of racism influences all people of color in America. In addition to America's history of racism, is America's history of sexism and gender discrimination. The combination of these two evils, racism and sexism, results in a devastatingly harsh set of conditions in which black women must exist. The theological reflection that results from living in these conditions is important, and must be heard.

The African-American Experience and the Production of Theology

Today, as never before in history, people are able to look, listen, and travel around the world. We can no longer assume that peoples' lives will begin and end without contact from people outside their own community. This global contact has brought not only the excitement of learning that people are united in certain ways, but it has brought the sometimes threatening truth that people are very different. Even if people claim the same core belief system, this core may be adorned in so many different ways that it is barely recognizable. Even though both white and black Americans regard themselves as Christian, it is important to recognize differences do indeed exist. Simply sharing the descriptive title "Christian" does not mean that all people who share the title believe the same things or think about their spirituality in the same way. Personal and collective experience has a large influence on this.

African-American people have a vastly different historical and therefore social context than any other American people. In their book, The Black Church in the African-American Experience, Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya discuss three theoretical assumptions about the black Church: the black sacred cosmos, the central institutional sector and partial differentiation, and a dialectical model.

The idea of a black sacred cosmos is most relevant to the present study. The black sacred cosmos is the religious worldview of African-Americans. It is "related both to their African heritage... And to their conversion to Christianity during slavery and its aftermath." This worldview, this sacred cosmos, is large enough to allow for the core of Christianity to be present while simultaneously acknowledging and providing for distinctive differences singular to the black community that have been shaped by their history. The authors state that, "While the structure of beliefs for black Christians were the same orthodox beliefs as that of white Christians, there were also different degrees of emphasis and valences given to certain particular theological views."

These emphases exist not for the purpose of stealthily winning people over to Christianity by taking advantage of their weaknesses and twisting the message to influence them, but for the purpose of identifying and defining one's relationship with God. For the black Church, the relationship between slavery and the theme of divine rescue that permeates the Bible results in a style of preaching that is rooted in this theme. Also, black churchgoers may be more likely to relate to "the incarnational view of suffering, humiliation, death, and eventual triumph of Jesus" than white churchgoers because of their history of oppression. Finally, the Biblical concept of people being children of God gives freedom to black people who were at one time, and unfortunately sometimes even now, considered to be not fully human. Knowing that God historically rescues and delivers people from slavery, has lived through the oppression of the incarnation, and sees all humans as equally made in the divine image brings comfort and inspiration to the black Church in ways that it could not for most white churches.

History of Slavery in America

The task of sketching a brief history of the experiences of Africans in the slave trade, or African-Americans in the generations that followed is difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, we have relatively few first-hand accounts of Africans who were brought to America during the beginning of America's slave trade. Records do exist, but as compared to the number of records of the accounts of white European or European-Americans, they are rare indeed. The records that do exist are also not as ideal as could be hoped for. English was not the primary language of these slaves, and writing was rarely taught them, the accounts we have from black slaves leave a different impression that those that we have from white slave-owners. The "primary source" material is usually the transcription of an oral history told by someone who has little or poor familiarity with the English that was commonly spoken among the slave-owners. Although these difficulties exist, they are not an excuse for not trying to tell the story of slavery.

The following excerpt is recounted by an African man whose testimony was recorded in 1798. His description is of his abduction from his home at the age of six:

They then came to us in the reeds, and the very first salute I had from them was a violent blow on the back part of the head with the fore part of a gun, and at the same time a grasp round the neck. I then had a rope put about my neck, as had all the women in the thicket with me, and were immediately led to my father... my father was closely interrogated respecting his money which they knew he must have. But as he gave them no account of it, he was instantly cut and pounded on his body with great inhumanity... he despised all the tortures which they inflicted, until the continued exercise and increase of torment, obliged him to sink and expire... I saw him while he was thus tortured to death. The shocking scene is to this day fresh in my mind, and I have often been overcome while thinking on it.

The history that African-Americans must face is a history that includes much, much more than undergoing traumatic events. As seen in these passages, the entirety of the history is traumatic. When trauma becomes a way of life, a person is constantly plagued with fear. Consider the months and months of fear of surviving the middle Passage. One account tells of the constant fear of the white men aboard the ship. The fear was never lessened, never relieved. The fear was a fear that most European-Americans could never even imagine, even in their worst imaginations:

When I looked around the ship and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted my fate. Quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little, I found some black people about me, and I believe some were those who had brought me on board and had been receiving their pay. They talked to me in order to cheer me up, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces and long hair. They told me I was not.

One story relates the difficulties that are involved in theological reflection about God as a parent figure. Most European-Americans do not have this sort of experience in their backgrounds. It is one man's account of completely losing all faith and trust in his parents as figures who could protect and comfort him. Even beyond comforting or providing mental or emotional support, this account reflects a complete severing the protective bond between parent and child that many white theologians draw upon when they reflect about the fatherly or motherly attributes of God:

When I had got away from him I ran to father with all my might, but soon found my expectation blasted, as father very coolly said to me, "Go back to your work and be a good boy, for I cannot do anything for you." But that did not satisfy me, so on I went to mother with my complaint and she came out to the man who had whipped me; he was a groom, a white man master had hired to train the horses. Mother and he began to talk, then he took a whip and started for her, and she ran from him, talking all the time. I ran back and forth between mother and him until he stopped beating her. After the fight between the groom and mother, he took me back to the stable yard and gave me a severe flogging. And, although mother failed to help me at first, still I had faith that when he had taken me back to the stable yard, and commenced whipping me, she would come and stop him, but I looked in vain, for she did not come.

Then the idea first came to me that I, with my dear father and mother and the rest of my fellow Negroes, were doomed to cruel treatment through life, and was defenseless. But when I found that father and mother could not save me from punishment, as they themselves had to submit to the same treatment, I concluded to appeal to the sympathy of the groom, who seemed to have full control over me; but my pitiful cries never touched his sympathy.

The point in recounting these narratives is not to confuse modern black Christian theologians with Africans or African-Americans involved in the institution of slavery. The point is simply to paint an historical picture as the context of modern black theological reflection.

Jacquelyn Grant

One of James Cone's students, Jacquelyn Grant, is another important thinker in American theology. Grant seeks to remind white feminist theologians that their anti-sexist critiques frequently disregard the injustices toward women and men of color. Although being a feminist theologian in many senses, Grant would categorize herself as a womanist theologian. The origins of the term "womanist" are described here by Delores Williams:

What then is a womanist? Her origins are in the black folk expression "You acting womanish," meaning, according to [Alice] Walker, "wanting to know more and in greater depth than is good for one -- outrageous audacious, courageous and willful behavior." A womanist is also "responsible, in charge, serious." She can walk to Canada and take others with her. She loves, she is committed, she is a universalist by temperament.

Her universality includes loving men and woman, sexually or nonsexually. She loves music, dance, the spirit, food and roundness, struggle, and she loves herself. Regardless.

Walker insists that a womanist is also "committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female." She is no separatist, "except for health." A womanist is a black feminist or feminist of color. Or as Walker says, "Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender."

Less abstractly, womanist theology is usually applied to African -American Christian women theologians. The phrase, "Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender" might be described to mean that even though white women in America know about oppression, black women in America have seen oppression more closely. It is less implicit, less subtle for black American women. The response is feminist, but it is a different kind. Despite legal emancipation, freedom was an empty word for most domestic workers. Grant says that, for black women, the three D's (dirty, diseased and dishonest) took precedence over the three R's of educated and privileged whites. Thus Grant's questions:

How do you justify teaching a people that they are called to a life of service when they have been imprisoned by the most exploitative forms of service? Furthermore, how do you propose that we are called to service to Jesus, the one who has been sent by God to redeem us, when both God and Jesus have been principle weapons in the oppressive [white patriarchal] arsenal to keep blacks and black women in their appropriate place?

Elie Weisel, Night (New York: Bantam, 1982), 62.

C. Eric Linclon and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).

Excerpts from Slave Narratives," Steve Mintz, ed.; available at http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/4.htm;Internet; accessed 12 December 2002.

Excerpts from Slave Narratives," Steve Mintz, ed.; available at http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/6.htm;Internet; accessed 12 December 2002.

Excerpts from Slave Narratives," Steve Mintz, ed.; available at http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/16.htm;Internet; accessed 12 December 2002.

Delores S. Williams, "Womanist Theology: Black Women's Voices," Christianity and Crisis (March 2, 1987).