God and Black Suffering: Calling the Oppressors to Account

This essay addresses the topic of religion and violence from the perspective of a people who hare end need violence in America. It is not possible, theologically, to talk about God and black suffering without calling the oppressors to account. Enslaved Africans turned to biblical religion to make meaning in a strange world. The predominant themes of justice, hope, and love have characterized black faith, assuring believers that, despite white assertion of superiority, blacks are made in the image of God and are beloved children of God. Maintaining this conviction as white superiority has continued unabated has been made possible by context-oriented readings of the Book of Exodus, the prophets, and the story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. The different approaches to combating evil of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X inspired black clergy and theologians to begin theology "from below" and develop a theology of liberation that fosters hope and the struggle for justice. In the ongoing struggle for meaning in the midst of suffering, there is no intellectual or theoretical answer that will ease the pain of evil and injustice. We solve the mystery of evil's existence by fighting it. And faith is real only to the degree it endows us with the courage to fight. O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you "Violence! " and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous therefore judgment comes forth perverted. Habakkuk 1:2-4 (NRSV) God is not dead-nor is he an indifferent onlooker at what is going on in this world. One day He will make requisition for blood; He will call the oppressors to account. Justice may sleep, but it never dies. The individual, race, or nation which does wrong, which sets at defiance Cod's great law. especially God's great law of love, of brotherhood, will be sure, sooner or later, to pay the penalty. We reap as we sow. With what measure we mete, it will be measured to us again.1 This 1902 statement by Francis Grimke. an ex-slave and Princeton Theological Seminary graduate, is an apt summary of the major themes of justice, hope, and love in African American religion from slavery to the present. These themes were created out of the African slaves' encounter with biblical religion (via white missionaries and preachers) as they sought to make meaning in a strange world. To make meaning in any world is difficult because human beings, like other animals, are creatures of nature and history. We can never be what we can imagine; but to be slaves in a foreign land without the cultural and religious support of a loving family and a caring community limits human possibilities profoundly. Because Africans were prevented from freely practicing their native religion, they merged their knowledge of their cultural past with the white man s Christian religion. From these two sources, Africans created for themselves a world of meaning that enabled them to survive 246 years of slavery and 100 years of segregation-augmented by a reign of white terror that lynched more than five thousand black people. The black religious themes of justice, hope, and love are the product of black people's search for meaning in a white society that did not acknowledge their humanity. The most prominent theme in this trinity of divine virtues is the justice of God. Faith in God's righteousness is the starting point of black religion. African Americans have always believed in the living presence of the God who establishes the right by punishing the wicked and liberating their victims from oppression. Everyone will be rewarded and punished according to their deeds, and no one-absolutely no one? -can escape the judgment of God, who alone is the sovereign of the universe. …