The Man from Galilee, Part IV

Ruminations in African American Christology

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.

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The Man from Galilee is the One who is with and for others, including the most vulnerable among them. This insight into the person and work of Jesus Christ has been powerfully attested by the religious experiences of African American women over four centuries of living in the United States. Jesus of Nazareth is the Savior of all God’s beloved human creatures in the witness of Black Christian women. However, both anti-black racism and patriarchy have undermined the truth of Black women’s human dignity and co-equal inheritance of Christ’s saving benefits. These structural forces have also denied the strength of Black women’s witness to the saving and liberating power of Jesus Christ, along with denying them their freedom and bodily autonomy. Despite being recipients of salvation in Christ, some Christians continue to question the authority of Black women to proclaim the gospel because of their gender. The early 19^th-century African Methodist evangelist Jarena Lee once protested her male colleagues’ challenges to her authority to preach on a Christological and soteriological basis: “If a man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Saviour, instead of a half one? As those who hold it wrong for a woman to preach, would seem to make it appear [sic].” ¹

In our contemporary situation, some of Jarena Lee’s spiritual daughters continue to not only challenge the racist and patriarchal assumptions that are embedded in the preaching and teaching of many Christian churches but also challenge how Jesus Christ’s person and work are articulated by white male, white feminist, and Black male liberation theologians alike. Drawing on writer Alice Walker’s definition of womanism, these womanist theologians aim to reconstruct the meaning of Christ and his saving significance for Black women among other theological tasks.² In so doing, womanist Christological reflection might faithfully foster and promote the full human flourishing of the Black community and its communion with God. 

African Methodist theologian Jacquelyn Grant ignited academic womanist Christological reflection in her groundbreaking work, White Women’s Christ, Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. Grant, essentially, agrees with Black liberation theologian James H. Cone’s contention that Jesus Christ is significant for the liberation of Black people. For Grant, in the person of Jesus Christ, God self-identifies and stands in solidarity with Black people as the divine so-sufferer. This understanding of Christ’s person and work is especially significant considering Black women’s experience of racist and gender oppression. Grant explains:

For Christian Black women in the past, Jesus was the central frame of reference. They identified with Jesus because they believed that Jesus identified with them. As Jesus was persecuted and made to suffer undeservedly, so where they. His suffering culminated in the crucifixion. There crucifixion included rape, and babies being sold. But Jesus’ suffering was not the suffering of a mere human, for Jesus was understood to be God incarnate.³

And yet, despite their intentions, Grant criticizes Cone and other Black male liberation theologians for failing to articulate Jesus’ liberating significance concerning what she calls the “tri-dimensional” oppression that Black women experience, namely racism, sexism, and classism. If Jesus of Nazareth came to minister to and liberate the “least of these,” then it follows that any adequate Christological account must speak to the fact that many Black women find themselves as the most vulnerable within the Black community or, in other words, “the least” among “the least of these.” Moreover, Grant insists that Black women’s experience of tri-dimensional oppression must be understood within the context of a larger, ongoing struggle against oppression by all marginalized and minoritized peoples. Thus, Black women’s liberation and the liberation of all others are inextricably linked. Considering this, the universal significance of Jesus Christ can be understood through the particularity of Black women’s experiences of oppression and redemption/liberation. ⁴

While she does not offer a standalone constructive Christology, Grant argues that the risen Christ is the one who stands in full solidarity with Black women, having himself been intimately acquainted with the forces of death via structural oppression. However, any retrieval of the Christ symbol by womanists must not be understood as one that leads to the romanticization of Black women’s experiences of racism, sexism, and classism. Rather, the risen Christ provides the grounds for Black women envisioning and enacting a living hope beyond the destructive forces that impinge upon them. With this in mind, Grant insists that Christ Jesus is significant for Black women in three ways. 

First, Jesus of Nazareth identifies with Black women in the context of their oppression. Second, Jesus affirms Black women’s full humanity. Third, the risen One inspires active hope in Black women so that they may contend for their lives in the present world. In so doing, Grant offers a revised and expanded vision of the Black Christ, one that corrects earlier Black male liberationist accounts and radically locates “Christ in the community of Black women.”⁵ Overall, Grant contends that a womanist Christology must demonstrate that for Black women, Jesus’ liberating significance is found in his humanity, not his maleness. This involves the whole course of Jesus’ history—his life, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection.⁶ By highlighting the experiences of Black women’s struggle against racism, sexism, and classism, Grant’s womanist Christological reflection both challenges the forces that thwart Black women’s flourishing and affirms the saving, liberating power of Jesus Christ as the One who is with and for all members of the African American community. 

Further Reading:

Copeland, M. Shawn. Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious
Experience. Orbis Books, 2018.

Douglas, Kelly Brown. The Black Christ, 25^th anniv. ed. Orbis Books, 2021.

Grant, Jacquelyn. White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. Scholars Press, 1989.

Hayes, Diana L. “Christology in African American Theology.” In Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, ed. Katie G. Cannon and Anthony B. Pinn, 153–163. Oxford University Press, 2014. 

1. See Jarena Lee, “The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee,” in Sisters in the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, ed. William L. Andrews (Indiana University Press, 1986), 36.

2. For her famous definition of womanism, see Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Harcourt Books, 1983), xi–xii.

3. Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (: Scholars Press, 1989), 212.

4. Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, 217.

5. Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, 217.

6. Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, 220.