Palm Sunday and Oscar Romero

Franco Folini, Mural: Tribute to Archbishop Oscar Romero, https://www.flickr.com/photos/livenature/176581012

I had heard of Oscar Romero before. He’s been described to me as a liberation theologian (although he would not necessarily identify as such) and Salvadoran priest (even though he eventually became an archbishop, a rank higher than “priest”). But what I’ve learned through both the discovery of my ancestors’ own history and the theological imagination of other marginalized communities is that the particularities throughout human history matter, and they are deeply interconnected. Archbishop Oscar Romero bears the example to this praxis of deep solidarity, and the particularity of his context and life informed the way in which he lived out this life.

Alongside Mexico and Guatemala, El Salvador too was colonized by the Spanish in 1524, and such colonial effects lingered as the Salvadoran War started in 1979. Oscar Romero witnessed this war and the torture and killing of many people, one of them being a personal friend of Romero, Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande. Grande’s death prompted Romero to be more explicit and outspoken about his social and political convictions.[1] He felt a deep responsibility—a deep solidarity—not only to the poor and marginalized, but to those who were stripped of their basic human rights in El Salvador. Romero even outwardly criticized the ways that the United States contributed to the perpetual injustice by sending military aid. The interconnectedness of war, colonization, and social (in)justice was at the core of Romero’s convictions.

On March 24, Oscar Romero was shot and killed while celebrating mass at a small chapel run by a hospital specializing in care of the terminally ill.

Although this reflection is on the day of his death, it is truly meant to be a remembrance of his life. I think about how Archbishop Oscar Romero was often described to me, as “liberation theologian” and “priest.” Perhaps he did portray many of the values of liberation theology, and sure, he was a priest, but Romero made sure that the particularities of his history and life experiences informed his praxis. I had a realization that many do not even know what they mean when classifying him with such labels, nor do they know the significant ways that Romero impacted not only the people in El Salvador, but many around the world.

This year, March 24 coincidentally lands on Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday narrates the story of Jesus, who humbly chooses to enter the public square on a donkey. Jesus taught us the example of humility, deep solidarity with the poor and marginalized, and the model of a teacher who lived out theory and practice together. I would like to believe that Archbishop Oscar Romero followed closely to the example of Jesus. Maybe, then, it is not so coincidental.

About Michelle Navarrete

As a second-generation Latina who lives in between the Mexican and American cultures, my faith inevitably intersects with my culture and experiences. My passions stem from within the Old Testament, and I use storytelling in my academics to engage others and cultivate connection.  People are part of this passion and I want my work to reflect that. Currently located in the most diverse square mile of the United States in Clarkston, GA, I am a doctoral student of the Old Testament at Emory University. 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] Michael A. Hayes and David Tombs, ed. Truth and Memory: The Church and Human Rights in El Salvador and Guatemala. Gracewing: Herefordshire, UK, 1988.

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The Rocks Shall Cry Out! Why not the Dust, Too?

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

“Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. . . . All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken” (Acts 2:2, 4–6).

“Listening to wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own” (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass 48) 

“Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples!’

‘I tell you,’ he replied, ‘if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out’” (Luke 19:39–40)

From the moment of birth, children begin the amazing journey toward speech. The process, frankly, remains a mystery to us all, even the most dedicated of researchers. Fresh to the smells, sights, and sounds of the world, most babies simply offer the most basic of speech: the utterance of cries. Yet over time the communicative cries give way to thoughtful attempts to shape words. But from where do these words come? Unlike the disciples in Acts 2, babies do not receive the Spirit of obscure tongues never before known in their communities. Rather, babies listen, process, and eventually repeat. That is to say, their language is a function of their place. People all around them speak, and they speak out of their places and speak the formation of places. In a more modest sense than God’s acts in Genesis 1, people form the world around them through the simple-yet-complex utterances of language. People utter words from a prior place of reception, for we all began as babies. The cycle repeats, bringing forth new communicators taking on the languages of their places and adding to the descriptions of their places, both through the fine-tuning that happens in places and through the interactions that occur between places. We were born to form words drawn out of our places and to utter words that continue to form our places.

What I want to explore is the connection between words and places—a connection taken for granted in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures—and the malformation of places when that connection is lost. Our lives exist in the intersection of words and places, for we are communicative beings taken from the dust of the ground who live in a communicative world and who were brought into being by a communicative God who began it all with a simple, “Let there be!” Places and words are intimately connected. We know places through our acquaintance with the language(s) of a place, and we know each other within those places and through our shared (or differing) tongues. These languages are those of people but also of the earth itself. When we lose the connection between place and words, we are doomed to do violence to both people and the earth. Before turning to the violence, though, we should first turn to what we take for granted: people belong in places.

From the dust of the ground

Often seen as two “tablets” of creation, Genesis 1 and 2 present two different yet complimentary accounts of creation. Genesis 1 provides a genealogy of creation moving from heaven to earth (Gen. 1:1) while chapter 2 moves from the earth to the heavens (Gen. 2:4). The Bible persistently sees “heaven” as the abode of God, while the “earth” is the abode of humanity. The first tablet is the account of God’s movement from his abode into his formation of the abode of humanity, so the account fittingly culminates in the creation of the creatures of the earth as bearers of the image of the heavenly Father on and in the earth. The parallels of the six days of creation further clarify the movement. Days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, and 3 and 6 parallel each other, where the first day in the couplets presents creation through separation (e.g., light from darkness, water from firmament, water from land) while the second day of the couplets narrates God’s formation of places and population amid the same realms (e.g., celestial bodies, fish and birds, animals and humans). The final description is the creation of humanity to be creatures of the earth alongside animals, but the special commission to humanity is to be the presence of God in the earth and amid the creatures of the earth. Humanity was made to be God’s image.

Meanwhile, the second tablet takes up the task of describing the place of humanity, specifically the work of making places and doing so around the presence of God. Humanity was to be a species of priestly gardeners and caretakers, cultivating life in the earth encircled around the Tree of Life, which sat in the middle of the Garden (Gen. 2:9). That life was a life of promise and nourishment: in the Tree, the fruit of God’s lips joined with the fruit of the earth to be a source of life in its fullest for all the creatures of the Garden. Physical and spiritual nourishment were one in that tree at the center of the Garden. The earth received its life from God and was sustained in that life by God’s life-giving presence in her midst. Humanity’s priestly task was to direct all of creation to its fullness in God by encircling it around his place of joining. Humanity was perfectly equipped to the task, for humanity was a creature of the dirt yet received life from the breath of God himself (Gen. 2:7).

Of course, tragedy enters the tale in Genesis 3, where creation is undermined by the priestly humans enclosing creation around the false promise—the lie of the serpent—which brought death. All of creation suffers because the one who belonged to the earth betrayed the earth. The place of life in the presence of God became the place of shame and hiding. The whole earth felt the effect, for her own priest and caretaker enclosed her around death. The same space teaming with life was now the site of two places: the possibility of life through the joining of the earth and the abode of God, the heavens, and the new reality of death through the separation of the earth from God’s presence. An act equally fit for judgment and mercy, God bars the path to the possibility of life. The earth was no longer fit, for the time being, to occupy the place of life. With the fall of humanity goes the fall of the earth because the two belong together. Humanity belongs to the dust of the ground, but now facing toward death, humanity will lose its life and dissolve back merely into the earth, devoid of the breath of God.

The biblical story only just begins with the fall, though. Throughout the pages of the Bible, the people of the earth and the life of the earth remain intertwined. In Genesis 3, the earth is cursed with humanity. In Genesis 4, the earth is stained with the blood of Abel and thus protests by refusing to yield crops to Cain. In Genesis 6, humanity becomes so horrific that days 3 and 6 of creation must be undone—“baptized” according to Peter (1 Pet. 3:20–21)—as the waters submerge the earth and all its life. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, “wild beasts” signal echoes of the loss of Eden, foreshadowing Revelation, where the lion and the lamb rest together. God provides an image of a new Eden in the giving of a land flowing with milk and honey to a new humanity, the people of his covenant through whom he will bring redemption, yet in their disobedience, they too are sent out of the land and away from the presence of God. Indeed, as Jesus, the last “Adam”—meaning “person of the dirt”—proclaimed in Luke 19, the rocks cry out. Humanity and the earth belong together, so much so that Revelation culminates in the image of a new Eden with a new Tree of Life nourishing the creatures of the earth.

In the contemporary world, our imaginations are not shaped toward awareness of our being creatures who belong to the earth; nonetheless, our daily lives demonstrate this reality. Our lives are characterized by technologies that obscure the dependence: we mostly live and work in buildings with climate control systems that keep our bodies in relatively narrow bands of atmospheric conditions; we traverse space primarily in automobiles, hovering over the earth and with their own climate controls; we board public transportation and walk through cities wearing headphones and earbuds that block our auditory connection to our places. Our food travels great distances by land, air, and sea before reaching sanitized supermarkets with more climate control.

Yet the fact remains that we are creatures of the earth. Our food, from wherever it comes, is the fruit of plants, the meat or eggs of animals, or a factory combination of both through processing. Our growth from womb onward depends upon nourishment from the earth. Our muscles gain their strength from the protein in the food and the gravity of the earth, their energy from the sugar in plants, and their health from the vitamins and nutrients in the sun’s rays and earth’s soil. Despite the environmental systems of buildings and cars, the air we breathe is the air that permeates the earth, a living sign of the Spirit that hovered over the deep and filled the lungs of the first gardeners and first apostles (Gen. 2:7; Jn. 20:22). Our skin bears the marks of the soil in which our ancestors experienced differing intensities of the light and heat of the sun. Our finger nails bear the dirt of the earth that we grasp in our hands. Our bodies take their form at least partially from their terrain: people of the mountains have thicker and stronger thighs, farmers have stronger arms and hands, while ocean dwellers have bleached hair.

Our cultures are constantly changing ways of life in tune with particular places and its particular people. Indians beget Indians in more than genetic ways. Yet Indians of the village beget Indians with different sensibilities than Indians of the city, who are different from Indians in diaspora in the United States. The same can be said of Puerto Ricans. American soil and its places provide new earth in which to learn how to be Indian and Puerto Rican, as do the interactions of Indians and Puerto Ricans on American soil. We bear customs borne of the joining of places, taking customs that reflect local practices into new places, new soil, thereby creating new ways to be in the earth that are both true to the soil that bore us and to the soil of the place in which we set new roots. There is, perhaps, no better image of this exchange than language, for we are creatures of language who become audience to people and places and the earth each with their own languages. In the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, we become “audience to conversations in a language not our own.”[1]

Name the animals

Contemporary philosophers have noted that language only works for communication because it enables the formation of shared ideas on the basis of generalities that create common expression. For example, take the word “apple.” For speakers of English, the apple is so basic to our perception of the world that we rarely think twice before qualifying it. We simply say things such as “I love apples” or “I hate apples” or “buy some apples at the store.” In fact, whereas we might qualify something much less basic to our lives, such as “I like action movies but not romantic comedy movies” or “I can tolerate salmon but have no interest in catfish,” we usually do not think twice about the simple designation “apple.” No one would assume that “I hate apples” would be a way of denouncing a group of people. Yet, as I learned early in my marriage, a lot more is taken for granted in the simple designation “apple” than my wife or I realized. One day, she sent me to the grocery store with a list, and atop the list was “apples.” As a child, my mother bought red delicious, granny smith, and golden delicious apples, and by my late 20’s, I had firmly settled upon a preference. I had had other apples, but in my mind, the choice was rather clear: in the store, I would look for the red delicious apples and then move on to the next item on the list. I do not recall even noticing other kinds: my childhood, my house, my family had formed the language of “apple” in a specific way. When I returned home, my wife was appalled at my decision to bring those “spongy” things into the house (a decade later, I still don’t know what that means). For my Canadian wife born in a different place in a different family and country, red delicious was not remotely on her radar. She wanted pink ladies! Rest assured that the simple designation “apple” did not appear on a list for a long time thereafter.

A second example will solidify the point. For several years, I taught on a summer study abroad program that took primarily Euro-American college students to Italy, Switzerland, and Germany for two months of immersive learning. In Germany, we stayed in a youth hostel, and every morning, we would begin the day together with an open breakfast. Among the offerings was a bowl full of fruit. Many students were accustomed to eating fruit with their breakfast but were thoroughly bewildered at the offerings before them in the hostel. Rather than the waxed, rotund, symmetrical apples that American chain grocery stores sell, the students encountered small, asymmetrical, unwaxed apples with skin blemishes. Rather than juicy and sweet, the German apples had a much more subtle taste to them. I had one German student for whom everything seemed in order, but the American students could be heard complaining, “What kind of apples are these?”

In both examples, “apple” turned out to bear far more meaning than it initially seemed. For all of its ability to present a general category, the word “apple” gained meaning only insofar as it connected to people in their places. Apart from its connection to places, “apple” means little more than “snow” does to one who grows up in the Sahara and “heat” does to the Alaskan. The ideas of “apple,” “snow,” and “heat” bear little meaningful significance apart from life in places. We receive a hint of this joining of language and place in Genesis 2, where God tells Adam to name the animals. Actually, the situation is more enigmatic, for God first reflects that it is not good for Adam to be alone, and then tells him to name the animals. While the text does not reveal the names that Adam provided, given the close connection between language and place, we can begin to understand the divine rationale. As a gardener and a caretaker of the animals, Adam knew Eden as his home, the way that a gardener or zoologist knows her place today. Naming generally reflects some sort of intimate acquaintance, for it says something about the person or thing being named relative to the one(s) doing the naming. As caretaker, a degree of intimacy between Adam and the animals is taken for granted. His act of naming took place amid the type of acquaintance with the animals that taught him about companionship. He experienced the intimacy that a hippo shared with another hippo yet could not with him. He saw that for all his familiarity, none of the animals could take his own name. After this exercise teaches him what he is missing, God gives him “bone of [his] bone, flesh of [his] flesh” (Gen. 2:23). Adam names her from his intimate understanding of his position within his place. She is like him in a way that the rest are not. Not surprisingly, they are then together to fill the place and serve it as gardeners and caretakers. Word and place belong together, and people are creatures of both.

The rocks will cry out

So what happens when people and words lose the significance of their birth from places and earth? What happens when people forget that ideas are borne out of places rather than supervene over those places? What happens when people miss that ideas are generalities that are communicative shorthand for those practices, discursive practices, and encounters borne of and taking place in the earth? Modern history is marked by colonialism, where the normalcy of one place and its ideas, language, and practices borne of their earth imposes itself as the universal mark of “civilization” upon another. The nature of universal claims is the removal of all local specificity: it is communication in generalities. The “essence” of the apple—that is, what joins competing local understandings of apples—is the idea that is simultaneously no particular apple at all and the core of what unites all apples. The problem here is not that we have the language of “apple” that enables communication. Rather, the problem is the forgetfulness that none of us become acquainted with or know “apple” independently of the particular apples that we encounter. The generalities of language helpfully enable communication, but when we are hungry, we want an actual physical apple. That physical apple—no less than our stomachs—has no interest in universal, general claims. The truthfulness of the apple is in the particular apple before us that can satisfy our hunger.

In colonialism, though, the idea of the apple reins, but as we have seen, the idea is nothing other than the image of an apple that belongs to one group of people in one place. Yet that people has forgotten that their particularity has shaped their understanding of the universal. In that forgetfulness, they impose the “true” idea of “civilization”—goodness, beauty, nobility—upon another. Rather than listening to the language(s) of a place, rather than taste and feel the distinctives of a locale, they impose the developments of goodness, beauty, nobility, and truth of their places upon the other as though the language of their own places were universal. The colonizer often genuinely believed he was doing a good thing, for he was a theological agent of perfecting nature according to the logic of his place. In the process, though, the beautiful truth of Pentecost in Acts 2 fell away.

After Jesus ascended, he sent his Spirit to fill his disciples, and the immediate manifestation was their speaking the languages of all of those present in the court around them. What the disciples learned in that instance—even if it took thirteen more chapters for it to sink in—was that the message of Jesus was capable of taking up the specificities of any language. Everyone present heard in his or her own tongue. Indeed, the beauty of their wondrous news was the transfiguration of all peoples and places. It was the message of the return of the possibility of Eden, where every people and place—with their languages—could now receive life by being encircled around the new joining of heaven and earth. Jesus, the second “Adam” or “dirt-person,” was also the man of heaven (1 Cor. 15), and in him, the heavens and earth met in intimate union again. But the joining did not destroy the languages of people and earth. Instead, Pentecost provided an image of the transfiguration of all the languages. That is to say, the earth in all its beautiful complexity was capable of bearing the presence of God in Jesus the Christ.

Conversely, modern colonialism destroyed places, imposing the conquering nations’ languages, clothing, agricultural systems, conceptions of beauty, and systems of discipline, and they did all of this in the name of Jesus. Note, for example, the way that the world is largely divided among English, Spanish, and French speaking countries, despite some contemporary parallel efforts to form the world according to Russian or Mandarin. The modern colonizers believed that their “Christian civilization” needed to be replicated everywhere in order to bear the infinite. The logic of Pentecost was destroyed, and one by one, the potentially rich mosaic of languages foreshadowed in Acts 2 began to lose possibilities, with languages falling away.

Equally significant was the loss of speaking the languages of the earth itself. Modern colonialism views the earth as commodity, raw material to be shaped. One could refer to this as the McDonald’s effect, where the goal is rarely sensitivity to the language of a place but instead the imposition of a form of maturity upon a place. Wherever we go, we can be sure that McDonald’s is basically the same because its ingredients are produced centrally and exported to its various locations. The earth is terraformed according to the imagination of economic ideas, all of which arose from particular philosophical meditations in a particular part of the world, abstracted for the terraforming process of colonialism. The earth was no longer a collection of people speaking local languages derived from their being in the earth. It was now an idea—a “globe”—that enraptured bodies from the earth and brought them into the imagination of those who had ceased to hear the languages of the earth itself. Local languages began to die: both the languages of cultures and the languages of intricate ecosystems. The earth became raw commodity to be conquered, developed, and sold.

There is a larger tale to tell deep within the wounds. We could speak of the formation of identity. If Eden saw identity intimately binding together in life the heavens and the earth and humanity as creatures of the earth commissioned by the God of heaven, the expulsion from Eden necessarily signals identity formed in ways bound by death. We could speak of the dirt-people’s loss of ears to hear the languages of the earth and the subsequent ravaging of the earth. We could speak of the colonized pulled away from the earth such that bodies no longer received definition from being in and from the earth but instead from cultural markers of distance from the colonizers and their universal “ideas.” We could speak of racial formation amid the same colonizing and terraforming processes, as people who called themselves “white” and named others “black” and others somewhere in between established rules for who could migrate into “whiteness.” All of these are significant aspects of the tale of the modern world. But before we tell these stories, we need to listen. The rocks really do cry out—in distress, in hope of renewal, in worship. Why not the people of the dust, too?

About Ashish Varma

Dr. Ashish Varma is an Indian American theologian based in Chicago, IL. His dissertation work explored theological grounding for virtue ethics. In recent years, his research has sat at the intersection of theological engagement with race and ecology, writing and speaking on both. He is a regular contributor to the God Here and Now substack of Princeton Theological Seminary's Center for Barth Studies. Additionally, he edited and contributed to A Praying People, a collection of essays on prayer (Wipf & Stock, 2023).

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Further Reading

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983, reprint 2003.

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Have, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Woodley, Randy. Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012.

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Footnotes

[1]Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 48.

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Who do I Say that I Am?

Thirty years ago, Methodist pastor and theologian José Míguez Bonino delivered the prestigious Carnahan Lectures. In the 1997 preface to the published lectures , a translated book titled Faces of Latin American Protestantism , Míguez Bonino confesses that he chose his lecture topic—the history and identity of Latin American Protestantism—for reasons he describes as “shamefully subjective.” His topic was “almost an obsession,” a “passion” that overrode his anxiety about bandwidth and workload. The reasons for this near-obsession make greater sense to me now that I share some of Míguez Bonino’s experiences, and they give me the mettle to continue in my own ministry despite heartache and feelings of alienation. 

Míguez Bonino was nearly 70 when he delivered the lectures. He had been in ministry for decades, both as a pastor and theologian. Throughout the years he had been “variously tagged a conservative, a revolutionary … a liberal, a catholic, a ‘moderate,’ and a liberationist,” and he concedes that there is probably truth to all these names attributed to him. Míguez Bonino is known today as one of the early founders of Latin American liberation theology; one of his former students recently told me that he once helped with revisions to Argentina’s constitution. Any clergy person that would choose to involve themselves or even speak about la politica (politics) would hardly be surprised by the explosive name-calling that comes from segments of the public. But by the time of the Carnahan Lectures, all the name-calling created for Míguez Bonino a deeply felt need “to clarify for [himself his] own confessional and doctrinal identity.” This feeling is one I understand well even only after 10 years of public ministry. 

Like Míguez Bonino, I have been “variously tagged a conservative, a revolutionary … a liberal, a ‘moderate,’ and a liberationist.” I am sure his list was not exhaustive. Neither is mine. Whether these names given by others are deserved does not matter. In preparation for the lectures on who Latin American Protestants are Míguez Bonino found himself pressed to answer the question for himself: “Who am I?” His answer, given all that had been said about him, is shocking. Míguez Bonino said:

“when I do attempt to define myself in my innermost being,
what ‘comes from within’ is that I am evangélico.”

He continued:

“… it is in this soil that my religious life and [church] activity have been rooted … From this origin have sprung the joys and the conflicts, the satisfaction and the frustrations which over time have been knit together. There my deepest friendships, and also the most painful separations, were engendered; there lie the memories of dead ones I loved and the hope of generations I have seen born and grow.” 

Some will get distracted, wondering whether Míguez Bonino’s evangélico means the same as the English evangelical. To focus there is to miss the point of his scandalous admission. In fact, Míguez Bonino preemptively states that he is not concerned with others affirming or denying his self-identification. His goal also does not end with himself. By doing this introspective reflection — something Míguez Bonino admits does not come naturally to him — he is also exercising a right he wants to see honored in the people he is representing. In other words, he wants to highlight the right of Latin Americans to name themselves. He wants the world to see their faces and hear their names. 

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I have worked in theological education long enough to know how easily and often my folks are flattened into simple stories. All Latines are immigrants. All our theologies grow from the concept of mestizaje. If we are from Latin America, then we are liberationists. Even when we are born in the US, we tend toward “liberation theology.” These are some of the simple stories and corresponding names we get called, but this experience is not unique to us. In a racialized and patriarchal world, to be marginalized is to be named by those who believe it their right to identify others. 

In my communities, I saw this dynamic repeated earlier this year when a former colleague published a review of Amy Peeler’s Women and the Gender of God. In the Gospel Coalition review, Marcus Johnson explicitly does the work of naming. He writes:

“It is important to state plainly the book’s genre: it is quite obviously a feminist theology. Whether such a book ought to find commendation among Protestant evangelicals — who have historically understood feminist theology as a species of liberal theology — may be left to the reader. But the fact that we have before us a contemporary iteration of feminist theology cannot be in dispute.” 

As with Míguez Bonino, whether the name “feminist theology” is appropriate is not my concern. My observation here is the way Peeler is cast as a “liberal,” and how that suggestion raises questions about her belonging in evangelicalism. Peeler is a professor at an evangelical university, which no doubt requires affirmation of a doctrinal statement reflecting evangelical beliefs. She also served on the same pastoral staff as Johnson. Despite her professional and ministerial choices, works that speak to her likely self-identification, Johnson renames her in othering language. 

But what about Peeler’s right to name herself? How do we honor a person’s sense of belonging?

When thinking about the right to self-identification, I return to the stunning moment where Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” (Matt. 16:13). The questions are interrelated. Míguez Bonino asked about his self-identity as a model for naming Latin American protestants and their peoplehood; “Who am I” is inextricable from “who are we,” and both of these questions are reconfigured by the answer to, “Who is He (Jesus)?” 

Cone told us He is black. 

Elizondo told us He is Mestizo. 

Peeler tells us He is the son of Mary. 

All these theologians are attempting to answer Jesus’ question. Their answers illuminate Jesus’ relationship to the marginalized communities they represent. In naming Jesus, they give new meanings to their own names. I like to think their answers are graced with the God-given agency Jesus promised to Peter, the agency to bind and loosen. I believe their answers bind falsehoods about their people and loosen life-giving redefinition of who they are within the church. 

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Míguez Bonino was wise in his later years. He understood that his self-identification, whether wrong or right, was in God’s hands. “What I truly am belongs to the grace of God,” he writes. Still, he did not cheapen this grace. He dedicated his life to serving a community of Latin American protestants with whom he found a name. I love the way he ends his brief self-portrayal. He writes, “At least an evangélico is what I always wanted to be.” I hope to honor his right to that name and the legacy he leaves with it. 

About Emanuel (Ricky) Padilla

Emanuel Padilla is president of World Outspoken, a ministry preparing the mestizo church for cultural change. Emanuel is committed to serving bi-cultural Christians facing questions of identity, culture, and theology. He also serves at The Brook, a church on the northwest side of Chicago, along with his wife Kelly.

Follow him on Twitter to learn more.

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

Radical Sanctification and Resisting White Supremacy

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.

We fight the power of sin by the power of the Holy Spirit. This simple and uncontroversial claim at the heart of the Christian doctrine of sanctification contains radical power, since the Spirit also accomplishes the most radical human transformation—from death to life. Furthermore, scripture’s commands to walk by the Spirit imply that the Christian is to live a life marked by this radical transformation. It is in this demand—of radical transformation—that this simple claim finds its complexity, its challenge, and its resistance even among the most pious.

This article makes another deceptively simple claim—white supremacy is sin. This claim is, like the first, apparently uncontroversial. Most Christians would not hesitate to affirm it. However, many Christians would be hard pressed to accurately define white supremacy, locate its historical or present manifestations, or trace its effects in their own lives. Worse yet, some have so limited the scope of the problem of white supremacy that it is hardly discernible after the U.S. Civil Rights Movement apart from the most explicit instances. Under such conditions, the claim that white supremacy is sin becomes an almost meaningless platitude, a theological answer in search of a question. 

If the above premises are true--that we fight sin by the power of the Holy Spirit and that white supremacy is sin--then white supremacy should be radically resisted in the lives of Christians by the power of the Holy Spirit. But precisely how do we fight sin by the Spirit’s power? What does it mean to call white supremacy sin? And what might it look like to radically resist white supremacy in our lives? Before attempting to address these important questions, however, it is necessary to define what I mean by white supremacy.[1] This article understands white supremacy to be a globally expressed racialized social system, within which those deemed “white” generally enjoy disproportionate material and social privileges in relation to those deemed “non-white.”[2] In what follows, I take this definition for granted and explore some of its features as they support my argument that white supremacy is sin and should be radically resisted by the power of the Holy Spirit.

How the Spirit Reveals Sin

Part of the Spirit’s power for fighting sin is the Spirit’s role in identifying it. The Spirit helps us to identify sin through at least three means: scripture, circumstance, and community. In scripture we find a standard of personal and social goodness in Christ and in the kingdom of God to which we have never lived up. We also find various examples of social and individual evil by which we can evaluate our own shortcomings. For example, when the epistle writer says “you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into court?” (James 2:6, NASB), we should ask ourselves critical questions about how sin has infected our understanding of wealth, poverty, and the ways our decisions serve to dishonor the poor and elevate the rich.

The Spirit also reveals sin through circumstance or, in other words, through history. If, as we saw above, the Spirit reveals the sins of partiality and oppression of the poor through scripture, historical circumstance teaches us that wealth, poverty, and oppression of the poor exist today along explicitly racial lines.[3] Colonialism, slavery, apartheid, and imperialism were and are racial projects as much as they are economic ones. Globally, many of the countries considered “third world” (or worse) are filled with people deemed “non-white” by the Anglo empires who have exploited them and their resources for centuries. Therefore, one of the features of this racialized social system which the Spirit reveals to us as sin is the historical reality that it was accomplished and is maintained through exploitation, through the oppression of the poor.

The Spirit also reveals sin through community. In scripture it was most often the voice of the prophets urging God’s people toward repentance for sin. In our own day, the Black Church has long provided a prophetic voice in opposition to the sins of white supremacist society. Take for example, Frederick Douglass’s recognition of the incompatibility of slaveholding piety with the Christianity of Christ, James Cone’s reflections on the practice of lynching and the lynching of Jesus, or Kelly Brown Douglas’s call to action regarding the racialized implications of “stand your ground” laws.[4] Regrettably, these and many other cries of oppressed humanity have been largely ignored under the spell of white supremacy. Instead of graciously receiving correction and repenting of sin, many Christians have grieved the Spirit by dismissing the cries of the oppressed as exaggerated or untrue. In this way, white supremacy has silently flourished in the hearts, minds, and hands of countless Christians.

The Kinds of Sin the Spirit Reveals

If we have spent any amount of effort resisting sin in our lives we know that there are levels to this. On the surface, there are behaviors which we should discontinue. On another level there are impulses and motivations underlying our behaviors which also need to be interrogated and transformed by the renewing of our minds. Jesus communicated this truth in his sermon on the mount when he raised the standard for holy living from the level of action to the level of the impulses and motivations of the heart (Matt. 5:21—48). We can say, then, that the Spirit reveals both overt and covert sins—the outward expressions of sin as well as the sins working quietly below the surface.

This dynamic is also true of white supremacy. Many today only discern white supremacy in examples like the murder of the Emanuel Nine or the El Paso mass shooting when the assailants explicitly claim white supremacy as their motivating ideology. But these incidents, along with other explicitly racist activity in our society are examples of the white supremacist sin that sits overtly on the surface. In addition to these, the Spirit is revealing the deeper, covert layers of white supremacist sin. As one example, while the apartheid Jim Crow policies of the last century enforced de jure segregation in the U.S., the post-Civil Rights era has seen de facto racial segregation across the country. Some have noted how “current residential segregation has roots going back at least to the Great Depression” through means such as federal redlining practices, restrictive covenants enforced by neighborhood associations and realtors, and even mob violence.[5] When we consider the fact that where one lives in our society determines the quality of education, medical care, and daily nourishment one will receive, the racial configuration of our neighborhoods takes on a more sinister character. Furthermore, where one lives determines the kind of police surveillance one will experience on a daily basis and one’s criminal history (over)determines one’s economic and social prospects.[6] In this way, racial segregation has far-reaching effects which disproportionately harm those deemed “non-white” in our society. The insidious nature of white supremacist sin takes this reality a step further by attempting to justify this situation by ceaselessly blaming “non-white” communities for their own disenfranchisement. In this example (and through many others) we can see how the realities of covert white supremacist sin may lurk just beneath the surface of our actions. However, through the voices of the oppressed and through the work of pastors, theologians, historians, philosophers, and many others, the Spirit is revealing just how prevalent the insidious sins of white supremacy are in our world.

The Spirit and Radical Transformation

So, how does the Spirit call us to address the sins of white supremacy in our lives? The same way we are called to address all sin—through radical transformation, even daily death. The Spirit enables us to plumb the depths of our actions, impulses and motivations, even the ones that are infected with the insidious evil of white supremacy, and to walk in newness of life and liberation. Concretely, this means that we must (1) rely on the Spirit to reveal white supremacy in our lives through scripture, circumstance, and community, we must (2) rely on the Spirit to show us not only our overt sins but to dig deeper to find the covert workings of white supremacy in our own lives and communities, and we must (3) rely on the Spirit’s help to radically root out the sins of white supremacy from our lives by dying to ourselves daily and living into the new life that the Spirit makes possible.

About Michael Yorke

Michael Yorke completed a bachelor's degree in Urban Ministry from Moody Bible Institute and a master's degree in Historical Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School. He is currently enrolled in the Master of Theological Studies program at Emory University's Candler School of Theology. He is interested in race, pneumatology, and theologies of liberation. In his (hypothetical) free time, Michael is either working on a new playlist, watching a movie, or trying to remember how to play basketball. He is married to Chelsea and their first child, Jay, was born in December.

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Further Reading

Lopez, Ian Haney. “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice.”

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.

Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited.

Raboteau, Albert J. A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History

Comblin, José. The Holy Spirit and Liberation.

Zahl, Simeon. The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience

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Footnotes

[1] It is important to note also that white supremacy does not exist in a historical vacuum; a long history of social, political, and theological factors have resulted in its current configurations. For more on this, see the recommended reading list at the end of this article.

[2] My definition here relies heavily on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Bonilla-Silva writes: “When race emerged in human history, it formed a social structure ( a racialized social system) that awarded systemic privileges to Europeans (the peoples who became ‘white’) over non-Europeans (the peoples who became ‘non-white’). Racialized social systems, or white supremacy for short, became global and affected all societies where Europeans extended their reach. I therefore conceive a society’s racial structure as the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege.”

[3] This is likely to be the most contested premise of this article; however, this claim cannot be sufficiently defended in the space allotted here. See the following resources for evidence supporting this claim: Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (2017); Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010); Imani Perry’s More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Race in America (2011); Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016); Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019)

[4] See Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave; James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree; and Kelly Brown Douglass’s Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God.

[5] See Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism.

[6] See Dominique DuBois Gilliard’s Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores

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God's More

This article is from the forthcoming Moody Center magazine, set to publish spring 2022. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

One side of my family originates from the Philippines. The other side originates from the rugged desert regions of the Southwest, the borderlands. Water buffalo, rice terraces staggered across hills, the dialects of Cebuano and Tagalog, jungle foliage, and the city of Manila, once the Spanish empire’s trading capital of Asia; the arid droughts of Texas, the linguistic conflict of Spanish and English, living between and across a not-yet militarized border, and a midday sun ascending into the Southwest skies – these are the worlds my family came from, the worlds they carry in their bodies, and the worlds that touch upon my own. But they are different from my world. I am familiar with Chicagoland: freshly mown lawn, quick and slang-filled English, single-family homes, coffee shops, super stores, the aroma of asphalt on summer days, and neighborhoods largely segregated by race and class.

I inhabit what literary theorist Homi Bhabha describes as a “hybrid” space, a metaphor meant to signify how the history of European colonial expansion and an increasingly interconnected global economy have brought once separate worlds into proximity. In my family, the trading routes of merchant marines brought my father to the docks of Texas, where he then took a flight to Chicago in search of work. There, he met my mother, whose family moved from Texas to Missouri and finally to Illinois for farm work. Their marriage gave birth to not only me and my brothers, but to a hybridity in our family life: waking up to my mother and grandmother speaking Spanish but being unable to understand them, eating eggs and chorizo for breakfast, eating chicken adobo for dinner, hearing my parents argue over whether home was in the Philippines or home was here in Chicagoland, and living within largely white suburban communities that were indifferent or hostile to the hybridity in their midst.

Being raised in the church, I have tried to take seriously that God — who journeyed with Israel and is revealed in Jesus of Nazareth — is somehow present in everyday life. So, I have always wondered: How is God present within my “hybrid” life? Who is the God that abides in the presence of multiple communities as they struggle to survive and live amidst this hybrid context?

Biblically speaking, there is good reason to think about God’s relationship to those who are living in hybrid situations as my own. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Exodus specifically, the biblical text tells us that a “mixed crowd” journeyed alongside the Israelite community after God’s Passover and Israel’s liberation from the violence of Pharaoh. The Hebrew Bible scholar Terrence Fretheim suggests that this passage on the mixed crowd implies two things: (i) that Israel herself is mixed, “consisting of more than the descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob”; and (ii) that God’s liberation of Israel had a kind of burgeoning effect. As Fretheim writes, “the benefits of freedom have a fallout effect on all those whom [Israel] comes in contact, whether they are people of faith or not.”[1] Exodus, then, tells us that God looked directly upon the nightmare of oppression experienced not only by the Israelites, but non-Israelites as well. Seeing this nightmare, God acted for their salvation, and in one sweeping act created a new community of a liberated mixed crowd.

In the New Testament, Jesus acted in consonance with God’s liberation of the mixed crowd in Exodus. In other words, his ministry was also hybrid oriented, in the sense that Jesus’s mission to the Israelites flowed into and upon the lives of non-Israelites. This is seen in Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, in his celebration of the Syrophoenician woman’s faith while dining, and in his healing of gentiles such as the Roman centurion’s son. Such actions are part of what Willie Jenning’s describes as Jesus’s “reorientation” of Israel’s “kinship network” to include non-Israelites.[2] By acting for the well-being of not just Israel, but non-Israelites as well, God opens up a fellowship between Jewish and non-Jewish peoples. This expansive kinship of Jesus is on display during Pentecost, when God’s Spirit fell upon Jesus’s disciples and enabled them to speak in the languages of other peoples. Describing this Pentecostal beginning, Jennings says that “the Spirit creates joining” through immersing the disciples in the “mother tongues” of others. And by being immersed in the language of others, the disciples take on a Spirit-filled hybridity. As Jennings suggests, they are joined to the “voice, memory, sound, body, land, and place” of others.[3] Whoever the disciples are called to be, they must now consider their faith in relationship to the cultures, languages, and histories in which they were baptized.

These brief scriptural meditations suggest that God works in the material realities of multiple peoples. So, what could this mean today that God is acting among and for the salvation and liberation of multiple peoples? I want to answer this question by turning to my family history.

My family’s migration to Chicago is connected to a painful history of US colonization. Fifteen years after the end of US colonization of the Philippines, my father was born. Economic instability from World War II, the murder of his father for petty cash, and after working some time as a merchant marine, he decided to settle stateside.[4] Growing up, my father described this resettlement as a kind of choice, the will of the individual to secure the American dream. Really, the truth is more complicated. He settled mostly because a history of colonization, war, occupation, and consequently impoverished social conditions unsettled him. My mother’s story is one of more stability, but nonetheless contains the roots of an imperially induced migratory epic. From what I’ve been able to discern between her and my grandmother, my grandparents were migrant farmers who managed to secure farming land in rural northwest Illinois. From there, they raised their children, spoke Spanish and English, and worked regularly with seasonal migrant farmers and white farm owners. How they managed to secure this land while other migrant workers continued to travel for low- paying labor could be the result of their handle of the English language, English being an access point to dominant White communities and the language they encouraged their children to learn. I am not sure. At root my parents are what journalist Juan Gonzalez describes as the “harvest of empire.”[5] They were farmers within an imperial regime whose political ambitions stretched across the Pacific and US Midwest, the result being my family’s victim to colonial domination, their struggle over their heritages, the loss of languages among my brothers and I, and continual wreckoning with what it means to be mixed.

But within this history of US empire as it touches immediately upon my family, one confronts the relevance of the good news in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel. God is not indifferent to today’s regimes of violence that continue to oppress many peoples. This God was active in the liberation of a mixed crowd in Egypt, was active in the creation of a mixed crowd speaking the languages of many peoples during Pentecost, and this same God is active today in those communities who are joined together by the wide grip of the empire. In the hybrid space of my family, this God sustained my father, who farmed on land his family did not own; this God sustained my mother, a little girl who was encouraged to speak English over her Spanish.[6] The presence of a God who liberates a mixed crowd is a divine affirmation of the cultural hybridity of my family and a prophet denouncement of all claims of political, economic, and cultural domination.

About Colton Bernasol

Colton is from Plainfield Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He is a graduate from Wheaton College with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Biblical and Theological studies. Currently, he is a student at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary where he is pursuing a Masters in Theological Studies with a concentration in Theology and Ethics. He is interested in questions at the intersection of theology, race, and colonialism.

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Further Reading

Homi Bhabha, The Locations of Culture.

Mariana Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self

Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theologies and the Origins of Race.

Willie Jennings, Acts.

Brian Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto.

Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator.

footnotes

[1] Terrance Fretheim, Exodus, 143.

[2] Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, 265.

[3] Jennings, Acts, 28-29.

[4] Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America, 175.

[5] Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. Kindle Addition.

[6] Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator, 84.

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White Jesus and Brown Mouths: A Colonized Communion

This Spring we are featuring three pieces by student writers who are engaging theologically as bi-cultural leaders. We are thrilled to give platform to these up and coming voices who will surely shape the trajectory of the mestizo church. -The Editors

As a child, my family did not go to mass or recite the rosario often. Instead, cooking was our liturgy. The tortillas we made were coupled with frijoles that satisfied any unmet craving. When we did attend mass, the incense penetrated our senses as the priests’ hands presented the eucharist like a flag of victory waiving over a pueblo that didn’t feel mine. The white wafers communicated what Christ’s body is, and this body was not like that of the brown bodies in the pews. 

Years later, I converted to a White protestant tradition, and as a Chicano, whose home contained white American and New Mexican culture, my mestizaje was accepted. Still, assimilation to a kind of white culture was implied. Mexican cuisine was a source of spiritual nutrition in the home—all was well with a tortilla on the comal. Tortilla-making primed me to experience God. Yet, the protestant church that I attended worshiped outside of my cultural context, and the Christ presented to me viewed the world unlike me. The celebration of the Eucharist was less of an experience with God, rather, it was an intellectual exercise to simply “remember” Christ’s death and resurrection.  

At the height of COVID, church service was online. One time, worshiping in my living room, the congregation was invited to break bread and drink wine (juice for us). I was disappointed that all we had in the pantry were corn tortillas. “We eat this in memory of you,” the pastor said as I split a tortilla in my hands. With tortilla in hand, worship was now in my context instead of one that valued an essentialized form of communion over others.

Centuries of theological developments on the eucharist provoked an embodied fear against deviations from tradition. The white wafers I had become accustomed to were made foreign over a slight change from the norm—from wheat to maíz—and I was unsure if my act of communion was valid. Did eating a corn tortilla count as eating the body of Christ? Whiteness deeply formed my perception of the eucharist, so that instead of being fed the body of Jesucristo, I was being fed a colonizer’s “Christ.” Jesus could never be like a tortilla, nor could he be like me—this Jesus was white. The cognitive and physical experiences stood divorced from the mestizo body and replaced with a pervasive colonial imagination of the eucharist.[1] This alienation was what I came to understand as the long-lasting projection of “superior” bodies upon the elements and the degeneration of ‘other’ bodies. Colonization consecrated the sacrament to Eurocentrism at the cost of Black and Brown bodies, but as the church operates today in multicultural contexts, the perceptions of sacramental elements must be reimagined to create an inclusive partaking of Christ’s body.

The Arrival of “White Jesus”

When the Spanish arrived at the shores of Abya Yala, awestruck, they noticed first the people, then their food. The Spanish utilized the association between diet and body to identify the people they encountered as “savages.” This issued moral categories for maíz, yuca, and other foods: considering the diet of “savage” bodies reprehensible[2]. Simply put, those who ate these things, especially maíz, were considered no different from animals. Consequently, unsuccessful attempts to make indigenous cuisine disappear expected the “uncivilized” to exclusively eat Spanish cuisine. To this day, tortillas de harina (flour tortillas) are viewed in contrast to those of maíz. In some instances, they are viewed as a “treat” in comparison to the old familiar corn tortilla.

This culinary colonization was an attempt to make indigenous pueblos transfigure into Spanish bodies.[3] Their preference for Castilian bread and wine for the eucharist was a confirmation of eurocentrism and, by proxy, a Western Jesus. Moreover, preachers communicated the expectation of proper elements by appropriating the closest Nahuatl word for bread, castellan tlaxcalli or Castilian tortillas—their tongue was mastered not to understand but to conquer.[4] The strong disapproval of indigenous cuisine led to what Jeffrey Pilcher calls the propagation of a “gospel of wheat” that served as a “symbol and sustenance of Christianity.”[5] The Spanish projected their bodies upon that of Christ, a homogenous perception of the gospel.            

Rebecca Earle recounts an instance when an indigenous man mimicked Catholic mass with tortillas, anti-bread, which was later met with severe punishment.[6] Two fears grew from the faithful deviance from the “gospel of wheat”; (1) that Jesus would become foreign to the European and (2) that their European bodies would then follow suit to become animalistic.[7] This created further distance between the target population of the gospel and the Jesus behind it. Whiteness presented a gospel limited to elements never dictated by Scripture. Despite not always having access to wheat in the New World, it was standardized that it was virtually impossible to commune with Christ until inferior brown bodies folded under the kneading of Eurocentric assimilation. Because this intense folding was often followed by cruelty the indigenous had no other option but to view Christ’s body as fuel for cruelty.

Paula E. Morton’s Tortillas: A Cultural History,  introduces a woman’s childhood in Mexico, describing the relationship between maíz, the working father, and the mother who learned the art of nixtamalización (a laborious process to make maíz nutritious).[8] Tortillas were inherent to familial life, bearing a likeness to that of the sacraments. Corn itself is not nutritious like wheat until it has undergone a vigorous process to become life-giving. The work behind making corn nutritious communicates the labor needed to save the starving, to then prosper them with maíz. Christ’s life and final work on the cross can be understood in this way—he labored to not only save but to continuously nurture his people.

El Pan de Jesucristo

In the “Bread of Life Discourse” found in the gospel of John, Jesus makes extravagant claims. He reminds the crowd of their ancestors’ time in the desert when “He gave them bread [manna] from heaven to eat” (Jn. 6:31). Jesus clarifies further that the provider of the bread was the Father who wanted to “give life” (vv. 32-33). What is then revealed is that He [Christ] is the bread of life sent from heaven to give salvation.[9] The manna in the desert was the foreshadowing of Christ, the bread of heaven, that would eternally sustain the people of God.

From a deeply Jewish context, bread represented the life-giving power of Christ’s passion and resurrection. With echoes of the Jewish people’s connection with bread, God entered into their rich culture to not only communicate with his people but to commune with them. Like me, a Chicano who loves tortillas, Jesus as a Jewish man, would have a similar love for his culture’s “tortillas”. As Jesucristo spoke of bread throughout the gospels, memories of his mother kneading dough, jest conversations over the dinner table, tears, and the many Shabbat dinners were inevitably attached to his public discourse and speech at the Last Supper. Culture is deeply connected to human nature, to which YHWH has always been attentive.

Yet, as Whiteness permeated the church, this connection was forcefully replaced with eurocentric idealism. Whiteness taught the indigenous, later generations of pastors, theologians, and abuelitas that relation to God could only come from a Western perception of “bread”. Ultimately excluding Black and Brown bodies from relation to God through familiar comidas representing manna; maíz could not be our manna but their manna had to be ours.

A Blessed Proclamation

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes” (1 Cor 11:26).

When he speaks of this bread, St. Paul is not speaking of elemental specificities, rather, he is speaking of theological ones. The function of the eucharist, according to Paul, is to “proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”[10] However, traditionalism created false theological gates around the host, perpetuating eurocentrism. Involuntarily syncretizing Whiteness with theology, the host can fail to proclaim the Lord’s death free of colonial regalia, oftentimes ignoring the needs of the people.

Some sectors of the RCC staunchly maintain a wheat eucharist despite gluten allergies and limited access to such materials. In instances where believers have no access to wheat or wine: pastors and theologians must acknowledge that they are withholding a communal relationship between creature and Creator by limiting the possibilities for the host.

As the church expands, touching new soil with new comidas, we risk promoting a neo-colonial mission. One where human bodies—their preferences and needs—are diminished for the elevation of others that have deemed themselves or their traditions to be more important. Therefore, leaders of the church must prayerfully consider how Christ is presented when caring for the diverse needs of the people.

A Redeemed Communion

What I hoped for in writing this was not to condemn the way people participate in the sacrament or to inappropriately displace the host. However, the essentializing of wheat for the host mimics the way of the colonizer which has little patience for diversity. Assessing the past and the Scriptures latinamente espouses a liberative vantage point of the sacraments–freeing the oppressed and the oppressor from heterogeneous ways of being.[11]

There is no returning to 1492 to prevent the manipulation of Christian images and practices, but we can dream of a world anew. In a similar fashion to Colton Bernasol’s verbal essay on Christian symbols, la iglesia can be honest about their history with the eucharist and formulate a “liberating meaning”. This task requires a teologia en conjunto approach joined with prayerful discernment and critical reconsiderations for the future.

Three possibilities exist as a result of considering the oppressive uses of the host. The Church can reject and ignore what has happened to Black and Brown communities by the “gospel of wheat”—doing what “has always been done”. Another, as a Christian community, they can strictly adhere to a eucharist reflective of their immediate culinary contexts, deprioritizing wheat. Or lastly, a community can recognize the latter and, as a unified Body, decide to use wheat in a liberating and redeemed fashion.

Though I am a part of a tradition that prefers a wheat eucharist, I favor the second and third options as both express liberation in multiethnic contexts. I pray that the Church not only reviews its past role in the making of the “gospel of wheat” but also looks forward to an integrated approach that is inclusive of Black and Brown bodies. More specifically, inclusive of the foods adored by those communities so that Jesucristo can do what he has always done—liberate and nurture su gente out of the desert. Which will we choose, and how will we seek a redeemed perception of Christ through the host?

About Christian Silva

A biracial Chicano raised in a New Mexican home in Colorado, Christian integrates theology, biblical theology, and history to advance the Church. He is a full time student of theology at a bible college in the Chicagoland area. Christian’s family were some of the first Chicanos in the South West post “Treaty of Guadalupe”. Constantly living between two cultures, his approach to post-colonial thought, race, and ethics stem from his cultural upbringing. He hopes to further his work in graduate school to continue his studies in Latinx theologies and histories pa’ la gente. Christian is equally fascinated by the history of the South West and what Latinidad looks for him as a diaspora-Chicano navigating theological spaces. He loves drinking coffee with friends and perfecting his abuelita’s recipes.

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Footnotes

[1]Angel F Mendez-Montoya., The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist (Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012), 46. Montoya discusses in chapter 2, the relationship between sabor y saber as it pertains to our bodies’ experience and our minds’ cognition between our relationship with food and our bodies—leading to a holistic experience with the eucharist.

[2]Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience (Cambrdige: Cambridge University, 2012), 119-124. Disgust was the hermeneutic of reading the indigenous’ bodies.

[3]Ibid, 65. “Bread, wine and olive oil were thus markers of a Christian identity, and Spanish bread, wine and oil helped make men Spanish”.

[4]Dominicos, Doctrina Cristiana en lengua español y mexicana (Tecnólogo de Monterrey, 1550), 209. Credit is due to Earle in Body of the Conquistador (151) for directing me to the document for my analysis.  The adjective “Castilian” seems to be used to lay specificities despite the apparent consequences of indigenous perceptions.

[5]Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22.

[6]Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, 152-53.

[7]The term “gospel of wheat” is used differently from Pilcher to express the culinary colonization through the supremacy of wheat.

[8]Paula E. Morton, Tortillas: A Cultural History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2014), xiii-xxiii.

[9] John 6:35, 38, and 40b.

[10]Eucharistic theology encapsulates many theological nuances in various traditions. However, Paul here is speaking to a disunified audience. Paul is intending to “set the record straight”. The eating of the host proclaims a very distinct reality–Christ’s salvific work. In light of this proclamation unity should grow because they are unanimously proclaiming their shared salvation.

[11]Doing theology latinamente is to do theology in a “Latin American way”. Here latinamente means to do theology from a perspective of criticism in light of colonialism, culture, language, and our Latin@ realities. In this way we disrupt traditional theologies that deemphasize liberation. 

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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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A Gospel of Friendship

“I would like to be known as a good friend.” The words came out as I processed with my spiritual director how I felt perceived by others. I have been called intelligent, a good preacher, teacher, and even theologian (I am an amateur at best). But even if I enjoyed being on the receiving end of those compliments (I’ll spare you the not-so-positive ones), I realized the one thing I really wanted to be known for was being a good friend.

What I didn’t see at that point was that friendship is more than a nice personal trait, but that it has everything to do with the gospel, with our life of faith, and even with our theology. As it usually happens to me, a good book would enlighten me.

In La porfía de la resurrección (2008), Dra. Nancy Bedford writes several important corrections to ministry and theology: the importance of reading the Bible through the lens of women (both in its stories and the rest of history), the dangers of a toxic Christology (especially toward women), and the place of disloyalty as faithfulness to Christ. But when I read her chapter on friendship, everything changed.

As soon as I read these words: “I can’t imagine the process of ‘doing theology’ without the encouragement of the conversation with friends…especially with those people with whom we share our lives over time”, I felt this was for me. I felt this was for me.

I’ve had the privilege of studying theology at Seminary level, attending conferences, listening to hundreds of sermons, and reading books from some of the best theologians out there. However, I would argue that my best theological insights come from informal conversations with friends. Like Bedford says, especially those with whom I’ve shared my life over time. The ones that have been through thick and thin, en las buenas y en las malas.

Inspired by her words, here is my new approach to life and theology through three ideas of friendships: My life of faith as friendship with God and others, the work of theology as God-talk among friends, and the sharing of our faith as extending friendship (ours and God’s) to the world.

My life of faith as friendship with God and others

“I have called you friends,” Jesus said to his disciples (John 15:15). The gospel is not just about being saved from hell and for heaven. It is not just about our sins being forgiven and being given a second chance. The gospel is about being reconciled to God and to one another. That means we can define our life of faith as friendship with God. All because of Jesus.

Paraphrasing the church fathers, Bedford puts it like this: “the Son became our friend so that we could become friends of God”. “Jesus is the friend whose love gives life to the beloved providing intimacy with God that can be called friendship with God”, she also says.

She warns against the danger of privatizing or individualizing our friendship with Jesus. “His words are not to be taken as invitation to a privatized or individual friendship, but to express the context of a community of friends that also relate among themselves with Jesus”. This means our shared friendship with him allows for us the potential of being friends. To belong to a community of friends.

When Paul talks about the ministry of reconciliation, he binds being reconciled with God with being reconciled with one another. Just as Jesus reaffirmed the relationship between loving God and loving our neighbor.

In his book, He Calls Me Friend, author and activist John Perkins reflects on the role of friendship in his life and its potential to change the world. It all begins with a God who, from the beginning, shows us the way. Looking back at his experience of reading the Bible, he says: “I read about a God who would be a friend”. He also relates our creation as a product of that relationship in the Godhead: “I’m pretty sure we were birthed out of the friendship of the Trinity.”

In that sense, we could say God exists in friendship, creates out of friendship, and invites us into friendship (one that is everlasting). In Perkins's words: “Friendship is discipleship in action.” That’s our life of faith.

The work of theology as God-talk among friends

If we consider our life of faith as friendship with God, “What does it mean for theology?” Bedford asks.  She immediately answers: “Theology can be seen as an exercise in gratitude for God’s friendship, carried out in friendship with others.”

In other words, theology is possible because of our friendship with God, and it becomes articulate in the context of friendships with others. Theology is not for the isolated intellectual in a closed room full of books.

If theology happens only in a textbook or in a seminary class, then it is exclusively for those who have access to those resources (a vast minority). But if theology happens in the conversations between friends, then it’s part of lo cotidiano, the everyday lives of people of every background, race, gender, and generation.

The book of Job rarely comes up in conversations about friendship. If it does, it is usually to talk about the poor choices Job had made in his circle of friends. But a careful reading of the story reveals something else.

As the story goes (Job 2:11-13), as soon as Job’s friends heard about his tragedy, they traveled, and then sat in silence for seven days at his side. Friendship is more about presence than about words, and sometimes sitting in silence is the best thing a friend can do.

As Bedford says:

“Meaningful conversations with friends likewise allows an embodiment of our ideas, as we gesticulate and articulate, giving voice to what otherwise would remain silent. Even sitting in silence together does not allow for a disembodied silence: we breathe, exchange glances, feel each other’s company, and come away from the encounter subtly changed.”

Job’s friends didn’t stay silent, and many believe that was a mistake. “Calladito te ves más bonito,” some would say. But even if we can agree that they didn’t speak well (God settles that clearly in the text), they were doing theology. And doing theology is not always just about being right, but about the struggle to understand the mystery of the divine.

We could argue that they were wrong in some of their assumptions and conclusions, but still they showed up and wrestled with the situation with the knowledge and tools they had. They were present. I would even argue that Job needed that interaction, even if painful, to process his own pain and his understanding of God. In other words, it was precisely through his listening to their arguments, and his struggles with his own thoughts, that he was able to articulate his own ideas and questions, and in doing so, he met God like never before.

But it all started with a group of friends talking about God. For Job and his friends (and for many of us), theology is not an abstract study. It is about real life, right here, right now. It is doing theology con los pies en la tierra.

Sharing our faith as extending friendship (ours and God’s) to the world

Finally, we get to the idea of sharing our faith as inviting the world to friendship, with God and us. If we truly believe that we have been sent to the world, just as Jesus was sent by the Father (John 20:21); and if we understand Jesus’ saving work as becoming our friend so that we could become friends of God; then it would make sense that our proclamation of the good news is wrapped in an invitation to friendship.

In a way, loving our neighbors translates to being a friend to those around us. That’s what the “good Samaritan” does in the widely known story told by Jesus (Luke 10). The Samaritan did nothing else than treat the other as a friend. And we are called to do the same. His ‘goodness’ comes as friendship. He treated this stranger the way he would’ve treated a friend. He was a good friend. So we could say that when Jesus calls us to love our neighbors, he’s actually saying, “be a friend”.

Even going back to the Old Testament, where we see a lot more strict rules about relationships with other nations, Jeremiah reminds the people in exile of the plans God has to prosper them (29:11), and they are instructed to settle down in Babylon, build houses, plant gardens, and even marry! I don’t think it would be a stretch to say God was giving them permission, and even calling them to befriend the Babylonians.

In Jesus, God settled once and for all his plan to become our friend. Now he calls us to do the same.

To think that our friendship with others could lead to their own friendship with God is nothing short of a miracle. And if Jesus becoming our friend had the power to change the course of history, what could our befriending others still do today?

About Oscar García

Oscar is a Puerto Rican pastor and international worker with the Christian & Missionary Alliance. He earned a Master of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary in New York. Currently, Oscar serves as professor and Academic Director for SeTAU, a theological seminary in Uruguay. He is passionate about learning to read and interpret the Bible with the global church. Oscar enjoys drinking coffee, reading theological books, doing jigsaw puzzles, and playing basketball. He is married to Charlotte and has two daughters, Sofía and Sara. They live in Montevideo, Uruguay. 

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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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Is your Bible Anti-Black? Pt. 2

Editors Note: Throughout this essay, “black” and “white” refers to the colors, while “Black” and “White” refer to historic racialized communities.

שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה בְּנ֖וֹת יְרֽוּשָׁלָ֑יִם כְּאָֽהֳלֵ֣י קֵדָ֔ר

כִּֽירִיע֖וֹת שְׁלֹמֹֽה

אַל־תִּרְאֻ֨נִי֙ שֶֽׁאֲנִ֣י שְׁחַרְחֹ֔רֶת שֶׁשְּׁזָפַ֖תְנִי הַשָּׁ֑מֶשׁ בְּנֵ֧י אִמִּ֣י נִֽחֲרוּ־בִ֗י שָׂמֻ֨נִי֙ נֹֽטֵרָ֣ה אֶת־הַכְּרָמִ֔ים כַּרְמִ֥י שֶׁלִּ֖י לֹ֥א נָטָֽרְתִּי

—Song of Songs 1:5-6

This is essay two of two for the mini-series “Is Your Bible Anti-Black.” In the first essay, I engaged renowned Old Testament scholar Wilda Gafney’s critique of how the King James Version renders Song of Solomon 1:5. Whereas the original Hebrew literally reads “black am I and beautiful,” the KJV’s translators choose to write “I am black, but comely [beautiful].” Reflecting on this glaring difference, Gafney argues that the KJV’s translators “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].” The KJV’s rendering is wrong, Gafney contends, and layers anti-Black racist ideas onto the biblical page. Accepting Gafney’s argument, I extended her work by detailing the KJV’s cultural and racial context and noting how modern versions compare to it.

In this essay, I return to Song of Solomon to offer an interpretation of verses five and six. I again think with Dra. Gafney, following her lead as I listen to this ancient Song’s textual rhythms. Join us.

Setting the Stage: Song of Solomon 1:1-4

Song of Solomon shocks its readers. Whereas the song never explicitly mentions God, it repeatedly and exuberantly details human love. And this is not the love of mere friends. As Gafney observes, the text focuses on “the love of two people expressed sensuously, sexually.” More specifically, the song celebrates “the love of and between two black bodies—offered as scripture and revelation.”

The first black body the song introduces is the text’s lead woman. She is the focus of our passage and essay. And she immediately makes her romantic desires known.

May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
For your love is sweeter than wine.

Your oils have a pleasing fragrance,
Your name is like purified oil;
Therefore the young women love you.
 Draw me after you and let’s run together!
The king has brought me into his chambers. (NASB, vv. 2-4)

Intoxicating kisses, fragrant oils, an alluring name, romantic flight, and a royal bed chamber—these are the Song’s opening themes.

The beloved declares her ballad publicly. She does not conceal her sensuous love. For immediately after we read her love song, an enthusiastic, supportive chorus enters the text, greeting us and the beloved with a celebration of her imminent sexual union.

We will rejoice in you and be joyful;
We will praise your love more than wine.
Rightly do they love you. (NASB, v. 4)

All are joyful. All rejoice. All celebrate a woman’s sensuality and sexuality. All are elated about the beloved’s foreshadowed lovemaking with her beloved.

A Beautiful Black Woman: Song of Solomon 1:5

This women that the chorus celebrates as rightly loved, what does she look like? Verse five tells us.

I am black and beautiful,
You daughters of Jerusalem,
Like the tents of Kedar,
Like the curtains of Solomon. (NASB, v. 5)

As noted above, the Hebrew text literally reads “black am I and beautiful” (שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה). The order matters. As Gafney writes, the verse “emphasizes [the woman’s] blackness by opening with it.” Gafney makes a related point elsewhere: When describing the woman—the one her beloved declares the “most beautiful among women” (v.8)— “[b]lack is the first word.”

Like her beloved, the Song’s lead woman champions that black is beautiful. “I am black and beautiful.” The word “and” translates the text’s vav conjunction וְֽ at the start of וְֽנָאוָ֔ה. This basic conjunction stresses blackness’s inherent beauty. Indeed, Rabbi Marcia Falk’s translation conveys the text’s tone: “Yes, I am black! And radiant/O city women watching me.”

The Song’s lead women again highlights her blackness in verse five by comparing it to the tents of Kedar, or Qedar, and Solomon’s curtains. This analogy, Gafney notes, reveals that the women’s body “is blacker than your average brown-to-black ancient Afro-Asiatic person.” The reference to Qedar tells readers that the woman “is black as a black-haired goat.” As Gafney explains, the Song’s woman is “as black as the black goats’ hair tents woven from the famed goats of Qedar renowned for their beautiful black coats in antiquity.” Gafney’s use of “renowned” is important. As Old Testament scholar Aubrey Buster notes, the Qedar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains “were considered to be striking and beautiful” in the woman’s culture. Hence, the Song’s lead woman affirms that her blackness is strikingly beautiful, worthy of renown and communal adulation like Qeadar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains. Thus, verse five starts and ends by emphasizing the woman’s beautiful black body.

Many commentators and translators miss verse five’s celebration of blackness. Gafney laments this trend among translators:

[A] myriad of bible translators continuing into modernity persist with “I am black/dark but beautiful/comely/lovely.” Blackness and beauty cannot occupy the same space in the imaginations so they cannot occupy the same space in their translations, no matter what the text actually says. (emphasis added)

Numerous translators render verse five’s opening vav conjunction “but,” not “and.” This interpretive choice injects an aesthetic distance between blackness and beauty. Nothing in verse five requires this distance. Moreover, and more important: the conjunctive-vav’s common “and” meaning and the positive, culturally loaded invocations of beautiful black goats, tents, and curtains provide immediate linguistic and contextual grounds against this disjunctive, distancing reading.

One respected Old Testament scholar overlooks the previous two points. Tremper Longman argues that readers face a choice at verse five: “Should we translate the waw as a conjunctive ‘and’ or a disjunctive ‘but”?” For Longman, the answer is simple. “The context is actually quite clear. She is not happy with her darker-than-normal skin, so the disjunctive makes sense.” The contrast between Longman’s reading and those of Gafney and Falk is striking. So is Longman’s silence about the rest of verse five. He says nothing about Qeadar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains. It’s as if they weren’t there.

Gafney, Buster, and Falk read verse five as celebrating blackness and its beauty. Longman reads it as lamenting “darker-than-normal skin.” If verse five doesn’t’ drive Longman’s interpretive decision and commentary, what does? His reading of verse six.

Sun Gazed: Song of Solomon 1:6

Desire and joy fill verses two through five. A choir praises the woman after her opening declaration of longing to be with her beloved. Then the woman celebrates her blackness. She is black and beautiful like Qeadar’s famous tents and Solomon’s splendid curtains. Given the prevalence of parallelism in Hebrew songs and poetry, we might expect the chorus to support the woman’s celebration of blackness with their own hymn of praise. But the text doesn’t meet this expectation. Instead, it introduces the Song’s first rebuke.

The translation I’ve used throughout renders verse six thus:  

Do not stare at me because I am dark,
For the sun has tanned me.
My mother’s sons were angry with me;
They made me caretaker of the vineyards,
But I have not taken care of my own vineyard. (NASB, emphasis in translation)

This translation doubly obscures verse six’s first sentence. The word translated “dark” carries the connotation of “black” from verse five. Likewise, the sentence contrasts people’s staring/looking with the sun’s staring/looking. The KJV captures both details: “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me.” Still, the word “stare” better expresses the Hebrew meaning involved in the woman’s rebuke-saturated command to the daughters of Jerusalem. Gafney writes, “It seems the city-women can’t keep their eyes off of her. They keep staring, looking her up and down.” These stares aim to pierce, penetrate, and judge. Again Gafney:

The shout out to the daughters of Jerusalem is an acknowledgement that our bodies are always under scrutiny. We are weighed and measured, consumed and labeled acceptable or defective in a glance. The black beauty Shahorah—we can call her Ebony, Raven, Jet or Onyx—Shahorah says you call me black like that’s an insult. Let me tell you, I am black, as silky-black as the luxurious coat of a Kedari goat, like mink, only blacker.

The Song’s lead woman told the daughters of Jerusalem that she was black and beautiful in verse five. Now she tells them, Gafney writes, “don’t stare at me because my beautiful black skin has gotten even darker while I bask in the sun.”

The sun gazed upon the Song’s black woman and made her darker, gave her a tan. Some modern readers assume that the text’s implied talk of tanning entails that the Song’s lead woman is but a white woman with a tan. This reading projects a white normative gaze onto the text and ignores verse five’s repeated discussion of rich blackness. It also elides the truth that black-skinned people tan. Gafney discusses personally suffering this elision.

I am regularly asked to give an account of my presumptively alternate biology, imagined to be fundamentally different from the interrogator’s own normative experience of being human.

“Can you tan?”

“Do you burn?”

I am expected to answer when questioned. To explain myself and my race. Public access to my body is unquestioned.

And deeply entangled with the notion of otherness is the notion of beauty.

The false assumption that Black people don’t tan which regularly confronts Gafney also occupies a place in study bibles. As Gafney recalls, “Some say...doesn’t verse 6 say that she is sunburned, therefore, she can’t be black – that’s what the notes in my study bible says.” For some readers, “being black and sunburned [is] impossible, as impossible as being black and beautiful” (emphasis in original). Even Tremper Longman joins Gafney in rejecting the assumption that the Song’s lead female is a tanned or sunburned white woman. “The woman was Semitic and likely had a dark complexion to start with. The darkness about which she complains is not her natural skin color but a tan or burn.”

Yet the differences between Longman’s and Gafney’s readings remain sharp. Longman says that the woman “likely had a dark complexion to start with.” Gafney, following verse five’s emphasis on the woman’s blackness, highlights that the woman was black and “revels in the blackness of her skin.” Longman says that the woman “complains” about her “tan or burn.” Though Gafney acknowledges that “the woman in the text ruined her beautiful black Qedari complexion with a sunburn,” Gafney never says that the woman complains about her sunburn. Instead, Gafney says that the woman “embraces the kiss of the sun” while denouncing the Jerusalem women’s glares and how her family treated her. The women’s glares are “reminder[s] that everyone won’t look at [black skinned people] and see the glory that God created.” These glares carry negative class associations with field labor. And her family’s mistreatment of her has left the Song’s lead woman unable to care for her own vineyard—for herself.

Let’s unpack the previous point. Verse six’s second half reads:

My mother’s sons were angry with me;
They made me caretaker of the vineyards,
But I have not taken care of my own vineyard. (NASB)

Though the woman claims her mother, she doesn’t claim her brothers. They are “my mother’s sons.” Similarly, although the woman says her mother’s sons were angry with her, she doesn’t explain why. The text doesn’t say she did anything wrong. It does, however, stress that these sons made her care for the vineyards. The joy of agency is missing; the cruelty of coercion is present instead.   

This is not the only time the Song’s lead woman describes her “brothers” controlling her body. In the Song’s final chapter, we read them saying:

We have a little sister,
And she has no breasts;
What shall we do for our sister
On the day when she is spoken for?

If she is a wall,
We will build on her a battlement of silver;
But if she is a door,
We will barricade her with planks of cedar. (NASB, 8:8-9)

In these verses, men alone speak. We do not hear the Song’s lead woman discussing her body. We do hear the men referring to the woman’s genitals as a “wall” (i.e., premarital chastity) and a “door,” a common Near Eastern image that alluded to a prostitute. As Gafney writes, the “brothers” work “to constrain and confine her.”

And this male coercion returns us to it’s first appearance in the song, verse six. For there we read that the lead woman has not cared for her own vineyard—her own body. Because her “brothers” forced her to labor outdoors, the sun burned her. It harmed her beautiful black body. And in act of resistance, the woman rebukes the Jerusalem’s daughters for trying to inflict similar pain by staring at her. She is black. She is beautiful. She is unashamed of herself and refuses to internalize negative class associations with field labor. And she is tending to her vineyard, she is loving her body and her beloved. “It is time,” Gafney writes, “to tend our own vines and their sweet, luscious, intoxicating fruit.”

Conclusion

Let’s consider one final contrast between Longman’s and Gafney’s readings. Longman argues that “In spite of some ambiguities, [Song of Song 1:5-6] is clear about two matters: (1) the woman considers her dark skin unattractive, and (2) her dark skin is not her natural skin color but rather the result of a tan.” Both claims run afoul of verse five’s celebration of blackness, which verse six never negates. Taken together, Gafney argues, these verses teach that “Black is beautiful. Blackness is beauty. Blackness is worshipful. All blackness is divine. It is the imprint of the holy darkly radiant God in whose image we are created.”

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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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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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The Grace of Babel

Very few Latin@s in the Christian faith know the importance of small town Ruidoso, New Mexico. There, in a little hacienda in the late 80s, a group that would become some of the leading Latin@ voices in theology and biblical studies made a choice that changed the Brown Church for the next thirty years. The scholars gathered to imagine a new theological association for Latin@s. They discussed the challenges facing Latin@ immigrants to the US and the faith experiences of their people. Nestor Medina had the opportunity to interview Orlando O. Espín, a participant at this gathering, and he summarized the group’s decision by writing: “Aware of their differences and of the wrong perceptions they had of each other’s communities, they decided to downplay the differences that divided them and instead emphasize the suffering and marginalization they had in common” (emphasis added).

Downplay the differences. Emphasize the common struggle. This became the standard style for Latin@ theology in the US. To downplay the differences, the group of scholars adopted mestizaje as a central hermeneutic for understanding Latin@ identity and experience. Three decades later, theologians are asking if flattening the differences between Latin@s made certain struggles – like that of Afro-Latin immigrants who face the “double punishment” of anti-immigrant and anti-black bias – more difficult to overcome. By disaggregating the category “Latinos,” these younger academics reveal the greater challenges facing Latin@s made invisible by the homogenizing work of the past. Many today argue for a dispersion of Latin@s into smaller, specific designations rather than larger monolithic categories. Perhaps it can be said that Latin@s need the scattering of Babel. It’s time we speak in different languages.

For many, the Tower of Babel is a story of curse and punishment. The people in the story gathered to build a city and a tower to reach the heavens. After reviewing their project, the Lord thwarted their work by changing their tongues. Unable to speak to one another, the people scattered across the earth. It is common for this reading of Genesis 11 to be accompanied with a reading of Pentecost (Acts 2) as the reversal of Babel. In Genesis, God cursed the people into language diversity; in Acts 2, the Holy Spirit makes people understand one another. Several biblical scholars have challenged this reading of Babel and Pentecost, and it is important to reconsider these stories in light of the question of Latinidad. How are Latin@s one together? Must our oneness equal sameness? Must we focus only on our commonalities while ignoring our differences? How might a rereading of these stories provide a new biblical vision?

Eric Barreto points to the particulars of Acts 2 to note the disconnect between it and Babel. If God intended to reverse a curse, would God not have caused the people to speak the same language? Instead, the Holy Spirit causes those diverse speakers to hear and understand the good news in their own tongue. Language diversity remains intact. Therefore, it seems unlikely that God intended language diversity as a punishment, and the Holy Spirit does not appear to be undoing such diversity. If Acts 2 honors the diversity of languages, how does that change the way we read Genesis 11?

Pablo R. Andiñach proposes that we read the story of the Tower of Babel as an anti-imperialist story. He observes in the story an ironic use of the name Babel that relies on similarities in different languages. In Akkadian, the city is named Bab-il, which means the “door of God.” This was the short form of the full word, babilani¸ “the door of the gods.” A careful reading of Genesis 11 notes the motivation credited to the builders of the city. They wanted to make a name for themselves (v. 4). These builders, says Andiñach, were attempting to establish their supremacy by declaring their city as the gateway to the gods. Their city was to be the city, and their empire was to be endorsed by the gods connected there. It was their intention to establish this city as the seat of power. Already, Genesis 11 foreshadows the hegemonic vision of domination embedded in Babylon. The Hebrew writers mock this city when they write that God scattered the builders, and it is for this reason the place is now named Babel (Hebrew: confusion). God renames. God does not choose Babylon, nor does God permit the imperialists to absorb all peoples into their kingdom. The empire has been confused, scattered, left in disarray. What does this mean for language diversity?

“Destroy, O Lord, divide their tongues; for I see violence and strife in the city.”

— Psalm 55:9

Andiñach argues that language control, like the naming of a place, city, or people, is tied to power. Babylon is the biblical name for the empire, one which Israel would later enter as prisoners of war. The Israelites would one day be forced to speak the language of the empire, forced to live under the cultural hegemony of its oppressors. Genesis 11 is a foreshadow of God’s intention for Babylon. God condemns Babylon’s supremacy claims. God scatters the empire, and in doing so, God privileges those the Babylonians would eventually oppress. The story indicates God’s intention for the world. God does not want monolithic absorption into the empire’s ways of being. Instead, God forced the peoples back out to continue to fill the earth with teaming and flourishing. Language diversity is what God intended for the world. Babel was dismantled because it threatened God’s intended order. The rest of the Hebrew Bible cyclically shows God destroying Babylonian echoes; wherever monolithic violence is the dominant form of being, God dismantles it.

We must be cautious about how we judge the Latin@s of the past as they faced the empire’s monolithic violence. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the US was operating an assimilationist vision for racialized minorities. This vision dates back even further to the early 1900s, as Daniel Burnham and other prominent city planners imagined field houses where immigrants would be taught the “American way of life.” These field houses would also host language classes, and it was Burnham’s vision that immigrants be required to attend these classes. This vision didn’t fully materialize in Chicago, Burnham’s city, but the spirit of this planning continued in similar political programs. The goal was to produce one way of being, according to the logics and visions of white leaders in power. In the face of assimilation programs like these, the scholars of the past resisted by naming themselves and honoring their own traditions and cultures. The protection of identity and culture is, in part, what drove the Latin@ scholars meeting in Ruidoso to collaborate. To understand their decisions, they must be reviewed against the Babylonian operations of the US.

Latin@s and Asian Americans

As mentioned earlier, the hacienda meeting is the origin of mestizaje as a significant theological tool for Latin@s in the US. Those present chose to use Virgilio Elizondo’s work as a central hermeneutic for understanding the Latin@ experience. To this day, mestizaje remains the dominant way of understanding Latin@ identity. We are the mixed people of the borderlands. Those who are ni de aquí, ni de allá (not from here or there). We are, according to the logic of mestizaje, neither white nor black; we are “brown.” Mestizaje presented the possibility to speak of our in-betweenness. The usefulness of the identity marker was its gathering power. Latin@ theologians from Cuba, Mexico, the US, and Puerto Rico could now speak as one “mestizo” people. They could live under one name.

This decision is not strange for its time. In the late 60s, student activists in California went on strike for an ethnic studies curriculum. In an interview for Asian Americans Generation Rising, Penny Nakatsu says she heard the term “Asian American” for the first time in 1968 while attending these strikes. The 60s and 70s were a time of coalition building, of gathering people from diverse nationalities under a single name. With their larger numbers this group could apply political pressure to get their needs met. Like the Latin@ theologians, Asian American students were most concerned about the shared suffering and marginalization of their peoples. They gathered to resist a common oppressive regime.

In 2021, Asian American, Latina/o, Hispanic, and other similar designators are contested by politically active students and scholars who share the motivations of their counterparts in the 60s and 80s. Today’s activists use a greater diversity of identifiers with the expressed desire of advocacy for unseen groups. This commitment is an echo of the past, but many in this younger generation believe the terms of the past are too homogenizing. Too monolithic. Among Latin@s, some even accuse the scholars of the past of essentializing the Latin@ identity. Essentialism is the inflection point. Yet the turn to more specific identities may not solve the essentialism problem. In a video about the erasure of black Latinas from reggaeton music videos, La Gata suggests we reinstate the brown paper bag test to ensure sufficiently dark Afro-Latinas are cast; Afro-Latinas with the potential to “pass” are her concern. In a desire to do justice, she risks essentializing Afro-Latinidad around the boundaries of pigment.

Missed in the tension between generations is the origin of the essentializing/naming problem. The marginalization of distinct groups in the 60s, which demanded a gathering response, and today’s homogenizing of minorities into a single “othered” group, which demands a scattering response, are both operations of white supremacy. These machinations are part of what Emilie Townes refers to as the fantastic hegemonic imagination of the US. “The fantastic hegemonic imagination traffics in peoples’ lives that are caricatured or pillaged so that the imagination that creates the fantastic can control the world in its own image.” The fantastic is not limited to works of art, marketing, or media. Townes argues that images of and about minoritized peoples shape the very fabric of the everyday. Yolanda M. Lopez reveals this most vividly in her 1994 art installation The Nanny, from the Women’s Work is Never Done series, in which she sets the uniform of a nanny, often worn by Latinas, between two marketing posters depicting white women exploiting Latinas. The marketing, in this case a tourism ad and a wool fabric promotion from Vogue magazine, continues to perpetuate an imagination that negatively shapes material conditions for the most abject.

Artworks like The Nanny demonstrate what Townes calls the cultural production of evil. The ads, uniform, and other elements of the installation demonstrate the way little everyday things perpetuate evil imaginings of minoritized peoples; they maintain the fantastic hegemonic imagination. The ubiquity of things that perpetuate this imagination ensures that everyone internalizes it. Townes again: “It is found in the privileged and the oppressed. It is no respecter of race, ethnicity, nationality, or color. It is not bound by gender or sexual orientation. It can be found in the old and the young. None of us naturally escape it, for it is found in the deep cultural codings we live with and through in US society” (emphasis added). How, then, do we avoid the cultural production of evil that consistently marginalizes whole collections of diverse peoples? How do we resist the fantastic hegemonic imagination and its tendency to group, name, and define people according to its own image? How do the generations work together to resist the empire?

ESSENTIALISM AND WEST SIDE STORY

In the 60s, when Latin@ scholars chose to live under a single name, they did so to gain greater political power within a system that ignored them unless they assimilated. The system, however, turned their gathering efforts into a tool in the fantastic hegemonic imagination, and it was used to perpetuate visions of Latinidad that further marginalized the people it named. This is perhaps most evident today in Spielberg’s recent remake of West Side Story. During a recent panel discussion with leading Puerto Rican scholars, Grammy-nominee Bobby Sanabria shared about his involvement on an advisory board that consulted Spielberg, Tony Kushner, and their team on the cultural issues to consider for their remake. Sanabria explained that the original film resonated with him personally because he remembered having to join a Puerto Rican gang in the 50s “to protect ourselves from the white gangs that didn’t ‘dig us’ too much…” He continued, “it’s a reality that happened and is still a reality today.” Brian Eugenio Herrera, another panelist, pushed back, noting that the reality of gangs was and is certainly true, but the impact of West Side Story is that it filled the US imagination with images of Caribbean Latin@s as criminal gang members.

The image produced by the film is not of gang life as self-defense but rather gang life as violent criminality. Over the 60 year period since the release of the original film, young Afro-Latinos have resisted this perception. What had been impactful for Sanabria was poison for the next generation. The problem, as explained by Herrera, was the development of an aesthetic archetype, a permanent caricature of what it means to be Puerto Rican. The film may have portrayed something specific to its time, but this image became the universal, essential description of Latino youth even beyond Puerto Ricans. With the release of this remake, the question of essentialism returns to the fore.

RESISTING THE AESTHETIC ESSENTIALISM OF BABYLON

The debate about West Side Story runs along the grain of the generational tensions already described here. An older generation praises the film; a younger generation resists it. Some within the older generation perceive positive power in it. A younger generation feels debilitated by it. Herrera rightly notes that the film, like the scholars of Ruidoso, set the style for what it means to represent Latin@ people. The scholars of the hacienda in Ruidoso also set the theological style for Latin@s, adopting mestizaje as their tool to downplay their differences. To resist the empire today, however, perhaps what we need to do is release the hegemonic controls of style and aesthetic. Again, we need the grace of Babel and the affirmation of Pentecost.

Victor Anderson, Professor of the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, observes a similar generational tension in the work of his black students. According to Anderson, students continue to ask questions he thought were resolved by the previous generation of scholars. Questions like, “What makes one black? Must black scholarship be political? Are black films, literature, and arts anything produced by a black person? To what extent may black scholars embrace multiculturalism as a mode of difference and remain distinctively black? Is not there something about being black that is shared with no other race?” These questions echo contemporary questions about Afro-Latinidad and Latin@s more generally.

Instead of essentialized styles that restrict the identity to one form, Anderson proposes that black scholars conceive their work as expressions of the manifold manifestations of blackness. For Anderson, blackness should be understood as an “unfinished state” and a “complex subjectivity.” By unfinished state, Anderson is suggesting that the final, definitive word on black identity remains unsaid. Each new generation contributes to the shape and formation of black identity; they add another manifestation to the manifold. Complex subjectivity is an acknowledgement that each person within a group is multi-site, connected to other worlds that shape their identity. As Emilie Townes puts it: “we do not live in a seamless society. We live in many communities – often simultaneously.” Together, the ideas of these scholars point to a post-Babel world that affirms the desires of both generations and opens to a diversity of peoples.

The story of Babel and Pentecost reflect God’s affirmation of a diversity of peoples. Again, Babel is not a curse into diversity, nor is Pentecost a reversal into homogeneity. In both stories, God affirms the minoritized other and does so in contrast to the empire. (Pentecost serves as an early encounter between the Church and Rome.) How do we reconcile the two generations and avoid the essentializing tendency of Babylon? There are at least three lessons presented by the scholars discussed here.

1)    Resist the fantastic hegemonic imagination inside us

Emilie Townes stressed the real possibility that the hegemonic imagination can be internalized. This is just as true for the older generation as it is for the younger. Is it possible that the older generation failed to see the inherent essentialism in their advocacy? Yes, of course. However, to critique them without acknowledging the ways they resisted hegemonic forces of assimilation in their own day is to reduce their story. Is it possible that contemporary discussions about Afro-Latinidad risk essentializing blackness in Latin@ communities? Again, yes. But, to ignore the ways black experience was made invisible since mestizaje became an archetype would align us with the empire’s tendency to erase and assimilate. All peoples are non-innocent regarding the empire. To remember the Latin@ story in detail, that is part of our resistance. To acknowledge what inspired students in California to adopt “Asian American,” to remember why Latin@s adopted mestizaje, to remember why their differences were less important than their shared struggle, this is what’s required if we are to collaborate against the empire’s operations.

2)    Celebrate “Complex Subjectivity” as the grace post-Babel

While trying to explain her womanist theo-ethics, Emilie Townes writes, “life and wholeness (the dismantling of evil/the search for and celebration of freedom) is found in our individual interactions with our communities and the social worlds, peoples, and life beyond our immediate terrains.” The point is that diversity does not equal a society without seams. Diverse communities, however distinct, continue to have points of intersection. And, as Townes says so well, wholeness demands we work within our distinct group and with others beyond our tribe. We can delight in and celebrate the gift of Babel, the gift of diversity in language and peoples, while still connecting along the seams of connection. To say it differently, we can now celebrate the differences instead of downplaying them. This celebration should parallel our continued work against our common struggle. Celebrate difference. Resist the common struggle. That should be the formula going forward.

3)    Work in the Everyday (lo cotidiano)

For Latin@ and Black scholars, the everyday is the location for resistance. The artwork of Yolanda M. Lopez reminds us that the fantastic hegemonic imagination of the empire produces everyday objects of evil. So, our resistance must also operate in the everyday. Everyday we must be attuned to the ways our imagination is being shaped, and everyday we have an opportunity to make otherwise worlds. As non-innocent, complex subjects who live together in the grace of God’s work in Babel and Pentecost, we can create virtuous cycles of cultural production that set people free to live into their language and identity. Everyday arts, everyday products, everyday words can liberate people from the monolith. Everyday rituals can point people to the Word that judges Babylon and sets its captives free to testify of His goodness in their tongue and tribe.

About Emanuel (Ricky) Padilla

Emanuel Padilla is president of World Outspoken, a ministry preparing the mestizo church for cultural change. Emanuel is committed to serving bi-cultural Christians facing questions of identity, culture, and theology. He also serves at The Brook, a church on the northwest side of Chicago, along with his wife Kelly.

Follow him on Twitter to learn more.

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