The Man from Galilee
Ruminations in African American Christology, Part 1
About the author: Jason Oliver Evans is a research associate and lecturer at the University of Virginia. He is a constructive theologian working at the intersection of Christian systematic theology with theological and social ethics, Africana studies, and studies of gender and sexuality. Evans completed his dissertation on the person and work of Jesus Christ through critical engagement with key texts by Karl Barth, James H. Cone, Delores S. Williams, and JoAnne Terrell. Drawing upon these authors, Evans renders overall a constructive Black queer theology of atonement and Christian life.
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” — Matthew 16:15, NRSVDo you know the man, do you know the man, do you know the man from Galilee? He walks out on the water, and he calms the raging sea. Do you know the man from Galilee? — Rev. Willie Morganfield, “Do You Know the Man,” 1967I know the man from Galilee who paid the price. I know the man from Galilee who gave his life. — Gabriel Hardeman Jr. “I Know the Man,” 1979
My Afro-Baptist faith tradition taught me to know Jesus, “the Man from Galilee.” In my early childhood, I would listen to my maternal grandfather, the late Reverend Ora M. Locust Jr., who was also my first pastor, preach the good news of Jesus Christ every Sunday. Whether he was preaching from the canonical gospels, the Hebrew Bible, or the New Testament epistles, “Pop-Pop” would end nearly every sermon in a celebratory manner—proclaiming Jesus Christ and the triumphant event of his cross and resurrection. I would watch the saints respond to Pop-Pop’s sermons with shouts of praise and thanksgiving to God for what God in and through Jesus Christ has done for them. Pop would then “open the doors of the church” to extend an invitation to Christian discipleship for anyone who felt prompted by the Spirit of God to know Jesus as Lord and Savior. The question, “Do you know the man from Galilee?” and its declarative form, “I know the Man from Galilee,” both capture what Afro-Christians have emphasized for generations, namely, that knowledge of Jesus Christ is primarily, if not fundamentally saving knowledge. In other words, to know the Man from Galilee is to encounter him not merely as a historical figure but also a present, living, and transformative reality in the lives of African American disciples.
Following Simon Peter, African American Christians confess Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matt. 16:15). While not necessarily adverse to engaging in formal theological speculation, African Americans draw from the witness of the Bible and their Christian religious experience to offer accounts of the person and work of Jesus Christ. But rather than presenting them in abstract academic prose often favored by European and European American theologians, African American Christological reflections are primarily but not exhaustively found in first-order theological discourse, that is, the language of witness memorialized in the church’s hymns, songs, testimonies, prayers, praises, and sermons.1 As James H. Cone reminds us, what is predicated of Christ Jesus in African American Christological discourse arises from African Americans’ personal encounter with the crucified and risen Christ, who reveals himself and is presently active in their struggle for total freedom from white supremacy and racial subjugation.2 African Americans have captured their Christological affirmations using their cultural, literary, and religious imagination, often setting them to song.
Jesus is a Rock in a weary land, a shelter in the time of storm… Ride on, King Jesus, no man can a-hinder me… You’ve been a heart fixer, a mind regulator, made a way out of no way... When I think of the goodness of Jesus and all that He’s done for me, my soul cries out “Hallelujah!” I thank God for saving me!
In these utterances of first-order or embedded theological discourse, African American Christology is first and foremost soteriological and doxological. It is soteriological in the sense that the God African American Christians encounter in and through the man Jesus Christ is the One who wills their total deliverance from the powers of sin (personal and structural) and death. They find in Jesus Christ, using the nineteenth-century African Methodist preacher Jarena Lee’s memorable phrase, a “whole Saviour,” the One who is presently active by the power of the Spirit in the historical situation in which all African Americans find themselves—marked with pervasive antiblackness and racism, sexism, queer-antagonism, economic exploitation, and other systemic ills. This same Jesus, through the Spirit, empowers them to resist these forces and emboldens them to bear witness to Christ’s liberating love in their daily living. African American Christology is doxological; African Americans give glory and offer thanks and praise to the God made known in the person of Christ in the power of the Spirit. Moreover, these statements are also didactic or instructive. Along with Scripture, these testimonies, sermons, and songs of the faithful also aid in teaching disciples the content of the Christian faith; thereby, the saints strengthen their faith in God, gain wisdom, are encouraged to follow Jesus in his way, and, by the Spirit of God, they strive to do God’s will in the world.
However, African American Christology is not merely first-order or embedded theology but also deliberative. Howard W. Stone and James O. Duke define deliberative theological reflection as “the understanding of faith that emerges from a process of carefully reflecting upon embedded theological convictions.”3 African Americans’ Christologies are deliberative in the sense that African Americans tend to evaluate alternative Christological positions that they discern to be inadequate at best or, at worst, a “false gospel,” namely those of white Christians that justify African Americans’ enslavement and racial subjugation. So, even in the form of first-order theology, African American Christologies were indeed critical of white American Christianity. Indeed, every generation of African Americans who “decided to make Jesus their choice” have had to offer adequate accounts of the identity and mission of “the Man from Galilee” as they continue to live in the wake of Western settler colonialism, chattel slavery, racial segregation, economic exploitation, and white supremacy.4
Today, African American Christology continues to be a necessary and critical mode of theological reflection, especially with the rise of white Christian nationalism and persistent antiblackness. Additionally, the decline of religious affiliation among African Americans, the rise of calls for “deconstruction” of Christian beliefs and practices that betray misogynoir, queer-antagonisms, and other forms of oppression require further Christological reflection. And so, I want to offer a series of “ruminations,” putting key thinkers in African American theology in conversation with Karl Barth. While it is beyond the scope of this series to render extensive constructive statements, it hopes to explore how might African Americans in particular and the church more broadly understand “the Man from Galilee” more adequately and faithfully follow his way in the world.
For Further Reading:
Cone, James H. God of the Oppressed. Revised ed. Orbis Books, 1997.
Douglas, Kelly Brown. The Black Christ. 25th anniversary ed. Orbis Books, 2019. First published in 1994.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
Stone, Howard W. and James O. Duke. How to Think Theologically. 4th ed. Fortress Press, 2023.
For a helpful discussion of embedded theology, see Howard W. Jones and James O. Duke, How to Think Theologically, 4th ed. ( Fortress Press, 2023), 3–7.
James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, rev. ed. (Orbis Books, 1997), 100.
Stone and Duke, How to Think Theologically, 8.
Here, I retrieve critical theorist Christina Sharpe’s vivid phrase “in the wake” to signal the damaging effects of these institutions and systems continue to effect African Americans’ lives in the contemporary situation. See Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016).
Will look forward to a further conversation…long ago, as in 40 years I wandered into a hillbilly Adventist church in Oregon, spent a few years, then wandered into the black Adventist church in Seattle, two young children baptized…wandered on, me, big strong college educated white boy, so many gifts and I thought I was broken on the Rock, but I was only fishin, I was no fisher of men; perhaps the great whale swallowed me and 40 years later I stumbled on Karl Barth’s “epistle to the Roman’s” and the whale spewed me out…to have your eyes opened is one thing, to know the Word was made flesh
Is another; eternity enters a sinners time…
This article is like a fresh whiff of breeze. Great to read it. Instead of feeling helpless over the magnitude of oppressions, the Afro American community has propelled itself to handle their situation in a positive and constructive manner via Christ and Christian theology....thanks for sharing.