In "Racial Reconciliation in the Flesh of Jesus: Part I," I ended with a quote from Peter Goodwin Heltzel's Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics: "[Dr. Martin Luther] King's Christology," according to Heltzel, "emphasizes Jesus as a redemptive sufferer who suffers with the oppressed and as a prophet who challenges sin both in the human heart and in social structures" (63). Here in Part II, I wish to use this statement as a launching point for investigating the way(s) in which Christology may be the lens through which we can investigate racial reconciliation. In A Testament of Hope, King claims that "the cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is a symbol of God's triumph over all the forces that seek to block community" (20). While I do not share King's theory of atonement, I do think that he is on to something regarding reconciliation. (And, certainly "community" is a much contested term as well.) Jesus' own life should be understood as the paradigm for how one engages with and within a community.
I wish to make several points in this regard. First, one should not attempt to relativize Jesus to fit a particular context other than the one to which he belonged, i.e., 1st c. Palestine. If Christology is the key, then one should compare particulars to Jesus, not vice-versa. Second, this first comment needs some nuance for which I will turn to Graham Ward:
First, Christological enquiry is a profoundly hermeneutical one--no appeal can be made to immediate knowledge of God....We have no access to how Christ views and knows things. We only have access to interpretations of the way Christ views and knows things; interpretations which may participate in God's grace, but which we cannot claim to be so inspired without scandal. Secondly, the focus of this hermeneutical inquiry is the nexus of relations in which the historical, social and cultural engage with the divine. Every statement about Christ cannot be reduced to, but is, nevertheless, a statement about ourselves and the times and cultures we inhabit. Thirdly, the enquiry itself is governed by the time and circumstances within which it takes place. For to speak of operations is to speak of what has been observed in the past but always in the present....Hence... the engagement of Christ with culture and the enquiry is to engender Christ; to enter the engagement is to foster the economy whereby God is made known to us. To do Christology is to inscribe Christ into the times and cultures we inhabit. It is therefore an operation of redemption undertaken in obedience to witness by faith, in grace. (Christ and Culture [2005], 1-2)
At first glance, it may appear that these two points stand in contradiction. However, the conclusion to be draw here is that (1) Jesus cannot be relativized, (2) the interpretations of Jesus can be made to fit particulars, and (3) Christology is the key to Anthropology.
A. What is it about humanness that Jesus takes upon himself? Capax divinitas: the capacity to divinity is built in to being human.
B.How can the finite mediate the infinite? The incarnation itself is an event, an operation; to be Christ is to be actively in operation.
C.We further the effects of Christ in the world. Our own furthering of these effects is to continue the event/operation of Christ. In other words, the study of Christology is a moment of Christology.
So, how do these claims relate to racial reconciliation? Let us look at Ephesians 2:13-16:
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh, abolishing the law with its commandments and legal claims, that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile both with God, in one body, through the cross, putting that enmity to death by it (NAB).
Heltzel also points to this particular verse. He explains that the invocation of this Pauline Christology in the context of racial reconciliation unveils the Jewish flesh of Jesus as the very site in which the Jew and the Gentile are reconciled. The reconciliation between the Jew and the Gentile in the early church period becomes the theological basis for the reconciliation of black and white in the Americas. For white evangelicals to listen and learn from black evangelicals about racial justice entailed a deeper transformation of evangelical theology. Christologically this meant that Jesus would not longer be viewed primarily as divine, but also as a fully human, earthly prophet whose ministry crossed "racial boundaries" and whose death and resurrection is the site of redemption for people of all races and ethnic groups (141).
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