In his classic 1949 book Jesus and the Disinherited, the African American preacher, mystic and theologian Howard Thurman sets out a pattern for reflection on the importance of Jesus, especially for those in society “with their backs against the wall,” that, to my mind, stays unsurpassed.
Thurman opens the book by relating a life-altering conversation he had with a devout Hindu man while sojourning in India. The person asked Thurman how he, a Black man, could justify adhering to Christianity, a faith that for thus long had been used to subjugate and deny the dignity of African Americans, and indeed all “the darker peoples of the earth.” The abrupt sincerity of the query set the 2 men to talking for a lot of hours. Jesus and the Disinherited represents Thurman’s try and respond in a more systematic solution to the person’s challenge. “What does the faith of Jesus offer to those in society who stand with their backs against the wall?”
Haight identifies the three cultural challenges to Christian faith and theology in our times as metaphysical skepticism, relativism and ontic pessimism.
The structure of Thurman’s book is telling. The primary chapter describes the social, political and spiritual context of Jesus’ life and ministry. To know Jesus, insists Thurman, we must begin with the proven fact that Jesus was “body and soul” a Jew, one in every of society’s “disinherited,” holding no social status or protection under Roman occupation. In the ultimate chapter on “Love,” Thurman suggests that Jesus’ witness to like of neighbor within the face of oppression and even physical death represents the apogee of spiritual freedom for those with their backs against the wall.
Yet Thurman doesn’t attempt to handle the “love ethic of Jesus” before he lays out, within the book’s middle three chapters, the deep and sometimes intractable obstacles to like, what he calls the three “Hounds of Hell” that overshadow the lives of the disinherited: fear, deception and hate. One cannot take Jesus’ love commandment seriously until one first confronts the powers of fear, deception and hate as positive technique of survival among the many disinherited.
Thurman’s evaluation of Jesus and why the Gospel stays a source of liberating excellent news, above all for the oppressed, is a master class in Christian apologetics. It stays unsurpassed because Thurman deals so directly and truthfully with the psychological forces in human beings that resist the liberating power of affection that Jesus embodies, often for good reasons having to do with survival within the face of societal oppression.
The Jesuit theologian Roger Haight’s latest book, The Nature of Theology, is likewise a master class in Christian apologetics, for reasons each similar and dissimilar to Thurman’s approach in Jesus and the Disinherited. Not unlike the Hindu who challenges Thurman to justify his faith in Jesus, Haight’s study rises from pointed questions put to the believer, and thus to anyone attempting to do theology responsibly, by the prevailing culture of our times, questions that can not be ignored or wished away.
How might the contours of Christianity’s central beliefs be articulated in fresh ways in which find purchase within the imaginations of latest seekers?
If Thurman’s book identifies the chief obstacles to like as fear, deception and hate, Haight identifies the three cultural challenges to Christian faith and theology in our times as metaphysical skepticism, relativism and ontic pessimism. These “filters of perception” are ever-present “as questions or suspicions, as doubts or opinions, that resonate in culture and inside the critical theologian.” Though Haight doesn’t ascribe to those forces the rhetorical, life-or-death intensity of Thurman’s three “Hounds of Hell,” each represents a serious challenge to a holistic, all-encompassing Christian way of seeing, judging and acting on the planet. And like Thurman’s hounds, they arise as strategies for survival from inside a horizon of immense human and planetary suffering, alongside a scientific picture of nature and an infinitely receding cosmos that seems indifferent to human beings.
Is it still possible to seek out meaning and hope within the religious “grand narrative” of a God, in Christ and thru the Spirit, who sustains all things and loves all and sundry, every creature, infinitely? Many reasonable people today answer no.
The climactic chapters of Haight’s book try and meet this query with a positive, though critically informed, yes. How might the contours of Christianity’s central beliefs—God as creator, Jesus Christ as mediator, the Holy Spirit as God who sustains all things and empowers human freedom for love—be articulated in fresh ways in which find purchase within the imaginations of latest seekers?
Much as Thurman did in his climactic chapter on “Love,” Haight resists a constructive response before first reckoning with the hold that skepticism, relativism and pessimism have on the culture today. The center three chapters tackle these forces head-on. As in previous books, the rhetorical, life-and-death center of gravity of Haight’s concern is the theodicy query, the challenge to faith and to all God-talk within the face of evil. For Haight, the Hounds of Hell traverse the planet relentlessly today in the shape of massive human deprivation, poverty and hunger, “focused human hatred, and vast lack of opportunity for natural human development,” forces structured into the material of society that solid “a pall over human existence itself.”
With theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez and James Cone as exemplars, Haight makes his most compelling case here for theology as a “practical, humanistic discipline.” If Christian theology “is critical interpretation of the world through the symbols of the Christian community,” then all theology “needs to be liberationist to be faithful to the gospel and to be credible as a mirrored image of the human spirit within the face of cosmic pessimism.”
How, then, to articulate each the inside and outward-facing dynamism of religion before the mystery of God? And learn how to accomplish that in ways in which open up the narrative of salvation because it unfolds not “up there” or “on the market”—as a drama that takes place primarily, so to talk, between God and God—but relatively as a drama that might be recognized within the very contours of human life and indeed the entire of fabric creation, life coming into its own full and free participation within the everlasting life story of God? The ultimate third of the book takes up this task with an exploration of the central symbols of Christian belief, constructing from images and concepts that Haight has developed in his previous landmark works in spirituality (Spirituality In search of Theology; Christian Spirituality for Seekers) and systematic theology (Faith and Evolution; Jesus Symbol of God).
For Haight, the revelatory encounter with God for the Christian unfolds not first or foremost in assent to doctrines but in the non-public encounter with a human being, Jesus of Nazareth.
Not incidentally, for Haight a minimum of for Thurman, the revelatory encounter with God for the Christian unfolds not first or foremost in assent to doctrines but in the non-public encounter with a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Jew of Palestine, as his life and teachings unfold within the Gospels. “When someone asks, ‘What’s God like?’ the Christian responds, “God is like Jesus.”
Not everyone will agree with Haight’s interpretation of the core beliefs of Christianity. His emphasis on the symbol “God as Spirit,” for instance, and development of a thoroughgoing Spirit Christology during which God’s presence to Jesus is qualitatively no different than God’s presence to all human beings and inside all material creation, has been a much-debated aspect of his work for a long time. Yet few theologians have taken so seriously essentially the most pointed questions of our contemporaries, questions that, at the top of the day, are really our own, as followers of Christ who live under the shadow of skepticism, unjust suffering and looming despair.
It is claimed that Martin Luther King Jr. often carried a replica of Jesus and the Disinherited in his pocket, so essential was the book to King’s understanding of the center of Christianity. Haight’s The Nature of Theology just isn’t the sort of treatise that many Christians or Catholics today could be inclined to hold around of their pocket. While he describes the book as an introduction to theology that “directs the eye of a critical intellect to the questions that folks are literally asking,” Haight’s rhetorical style is more suited to an audience present in a seminary or graduate theology classroom than to participants in public protest or nonviolent civil resistance within the streets.
Nevertheless, the basic pattern and liberating thrust of Haight’s inquiry into the character of theology is akin to Thurman’s classic in striking ways. What are we doing after we dare to do theology? Out of affection for a suffering world, we dare to offer an account of our enduring hope within the God of creation; in Jesus Christ, who reveals the character of God; and within the Spirit of God, who liberates human freedom and provides the courage to assist realize and defend God’s dream for humanity. For Haight’s contributions on this recent book, the sum of a lifetime of teaching and writing, and for his many books on the liberating nature of Christian theology and spirituality, I’m very grateful.