Prophetic Rage

By Johnny Bernard Hill

In this book Johnny Bernard Hill argues that prophetic rage, or righteous anger, is a necessary response to our present culture of imperialism and nihilism. The most powerful way to resist meaninglessness, he says, is refusing to accept the realities of structural injustice, such as poverty, escalating militarism, genocide, and housing discrimination.

Hill’s Prophetic Rage is interdisciplinary, integrating art, music, and literature with theology. It is constructive, passionate, and provocative. Hill weaves through a myriad of creative and prophetic voices of protest -- from Jesus to W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and President Barack Obama -- as well as multiple approaches, including liberation theology and black religion, to reflect theologically on the nature of liberation, justice, and hope on contemporary culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Dec 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781467439008

Johnny Bernard Hill

Johnny Bernard Hill is associate professor of philosophy and religion at Claflin University, Orangeburg, South Carolina. A dynamic voice for justice, reconciliation, and human rights in America, he is also the author of The First Black President: Barack Obama, Race, Politics, and the American Dream.

Book preview

Voiceless

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Black Religion and Nihilism

2. Empire and Black Suffering

3. Resistance, Rage, and Revolution

4. Profits versus Prophets

5. Dark Waters

6. No Ways Tired

7. Building the World House

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

We can do absolutely nothing without the support of community. Those persons who have surrounded me (colleagues, friends, family, and students) have been and continue to be the wind in my sails. Without them, nothing would be possible. First and foremost, the editors of this series (Bruce Ellis Benson, Malinda Elizabeth Berry, and Peter Goodwin Heltzel) are to be celebrated and applauded for introducing such a series at this important moment in history. Their prophetic imagination and keen intellectual precision have made possible this present work; to them I am forever thankful. I would like to offer a special debt of gratitude to Paul Myhre and the Wabash Center for Religion and Theology for the very generous gift of the Research Fellowship, and to the staff of the Association of Theological Schools, Steven Graham and Dan Aleshire, for the support of the Theological Scholars Grant. Both grants helped to support the research of the project, and for that I am eternally grateful. The title for this book was inspired by a presentation delivered by Mark Taylor at the American Academy of Religion in 2008. I am very appreciative of his courageous and creative witness for justice and liberation.

This book is the product of many lectures, presentations, sermons, and exchanges that have taken place in recent years. I would like to thank students, friends, and colleagues at those communities, such as the University of Chicago, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Johns Hopkins University, Bellarmine University, McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Spalding University, Shiloh Baptist Church of Plainfield, New Jersey, and Morning Star Baptist Church of Queens, New York.

I would like to offer a special word of thanks and appreciation to the students, friends, and colleagues at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Thank you for reminding me of the power of Sankofa and the ways in which Christianity at its best is prophetic. Colleagues such as Dr. C. T. Vivian, Stephen Ray, Karen Jackson-Weaver, Young Lee Hertig, Walter Silva Thompson, Gerald Lamont Thomas, Amy Plantinga Pauw, Ken Walden, Robin Dease, Monica Coleman, Peter Heltzel, Ronald Peters, and many others were incredibly helpful in their words of wisdom as well. I thank my students at Louisville Seminary, the Interdenominational Theological Center, and Claflin University for challenging me with their questions and reflections, and in particular, Adam Clark and Darvin Adams for assisting with the research for the book.

My children, Regan and Jonathan, are so wonderful and truly make life worth living. They are my inspiration, and to them I say thank you for their sacrifice and support of this work.

Introduction

"I hate, I despise your religious feasts;

I cannot stand your assemblies.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,

I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,

I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!

I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,

righteousness like a never-failing stream!"

(Amos 5:21-24 NIV)

Revolution is mankind’s way of life today. This is the age of revolution; the age of indifference is gone forever. But the latter age paved the way for today; for the great masses of mankind, while still suffering the greatest oppression and the greatest affronts to their dignity as human beings, never ceased to resist, to fight as well as they could, to live in combat. The combatant dignity of humanity was maintained in an unbreakable though not always visible line, in the depths of the life of the masses and in the uninterrupted fight — slandered, attacked, but alive in the very center of history — of little revolutionary vanguards bound to this profound human reality and to its socialist future, and not to the apparent omnipotence of great systems. . . . Today the great systems have died or are living in a state of crisis. And it is no longer the age of little vanguards. The whole of humanity has erupted violently, tumultuously onto the stage of history, taking its own destiny in its hands.¹

Prophetic Rage is a manifesto of liberation, hope, and reconciliation. It is the cry of millions from around the world, both Christian and non-Christian, representing all races and ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and faiths, yearning to be free, to be whole, to flourish. Inspired by the long and creative legacy of prophetic Christianity, Prophetic Rage is the call for renewal and transformation in the quest to resist empire and establish alternative spheres of peace, justice, reconciliation, hope, and redemption in the world. It represents the challenge of establishing a political theology of difference, rooted in the prophetic call for justice and reconciliation in the church and society. By summoning and reclaiming the prophetic dimensions of black religion and black theology’s challenge to white supremacy, Prophetic Rage offers a new vision for resisting and overcoming empire, and its related tentacles of racism, patriarchy, violence and militarism, and economic exploitation. Beverly W. Harrison observes in The Power of Anger in the Work of Love: Christian Ethics for Women and Other Strangers that women’s bodies have taught us great lessons about the power of righteous anger, so prophetic rage is insightful as we think about forging a constructive postcolonial theology of liberation for our present age.²

Prophetic rage courses through my veins. I am the great-great-grandson of the enslaved. I was raised in the gutbucket belly of the South, grandson of a sharecropper. My mother cleared bedpans and tended to the wounds of the sick and dying bodies of white racists. My father was a sanitation worker, not unlike those that Martin Luther King Jr. marched for and subsequently died for in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. In a real sense, Dr. King gave his life standing and fighting for my father, a hardworking, decent man, tall and strong. The rage that beats in my heart is a righteous rage, grounded in the love for humanity, yet yearning for redemption and hope. Because of what Dr. King represents, and sacrificed for men like my father, the sanitation worker, I have dedicated my life, heart, and soul to fight, resist, and struggle for the cause of freedom, justice, and equality. It is through this lens that I make the case that prophetic rage is a necessary prescriptive response to the present culture of imperialism and nihilism.

We now stand in a time of remembrance. The great revolutionary movements of yesterday have given way to the stigmatizing forces of consumerism, materialism, and violence. It is time to reflect on the state of humanity. Now is the time to sound the trumpet of justice and human dignity once again, as did the great modernist thinkers of the Enlightenment period. On the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington in 1963, the urgency of forging a new theological vision that is inclusive, multidimensional, yet grounded in the particularity of a people’s contextual experience, has become blatantly clear, as struggles for justice and human dignity have become so insidiously entrenched in mainstream society.

Prophetic Rage and the Quest for Human Dignity

One aspect of the enduring legacy of slavery, colonialism, and racism in the modern era is found in the assertion that somehow black life is solely of concern to black peoples, that black life has very little to teach the rest of the world. However, we are discovering now more than ever before that the last very well may be first and the first very well may be last. The decline of Western culture, along with the crippling reality of secularization and nihilism, means we must look elsewhere for hope and possibility. And since the destiny of the world and its inhabitants is intertwined with the fate of the Western world, we are now faced with mutual hope and transformation or the reality of mutual destruction and damnation. I agree with Leonardo Boff, who proclaimed the emergence of a new global civilization, a new global society, being brought into being largely by the rise of technology, mass communication, and transcontinental travel. This global age means rethinking the meaning of human dignity and personhood in a day when the voices of the oppressed are being suppressed behind the guise of technological and consumeristic progress. The illusion of socalled progress could not be more contradictory than in the lives of black bodies in cities across the United States, in the diaspora, and in the developing world. The destiny and fate of humanity may well be inextricably bound up in the plight of humanity’s darker peoples.

By reflecting on the ways in which black life has resisted and challenged the onslaught of suffering and meaninglessness that has arrived in the demons of slavery, colonialism, genocide, Jim Crow segregation, and apartheid, we may well have much to say about how to attend to the great struggles of empire and nihilism today. The central motif of Prophetic Rage expands the gaze of black theology and black religion in a way that gives voice to the multiplicity of human suffering in the global world. The forces of globalization and technology, and the totalizing effects of empire, have exposed the ways in which struggles of freedom and human dignity are indivisible. Prophetic Rage shows how the black experience, in its resistance to nihilism and empire, may point the way forward as individuals and groups in America and around the world struggle to overcome the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and patriarchal systems, both individually and collectively.

Liberation is multidimensional, and so is human experience. The rigid compartmentalization and boxes that restricted dialogue and fluidity of ideas are fading away. Moving and flowing within human bodies are complex, multilayered, and dynamic identities. This means that, inasmuch as liberation may appear in different forms, what binds them together is a common demand for freedom and justice, to be heard and to seek human fulfillment. Prophetic Rage recognizes the multiplicity of oppressive systems and the gift of black people’s lives in offering a way forward for the human family in overcoming the stagnating and destructive forces of nihilism and empire.

Theologies of liberation and resistance — feminist theologies, black theologies of liberation, Latin American liberation theology, as well as mujerista theologies, minjung theologies, gay and lesbian theologies and queer theologies — all share a common demand for the voice of the voiceless to be heard. What distinguishes these theologies is their contextual emphasis, the belief that social location is what orients and grounds theology. They stand in sharp contrast to the colonizing, grand narratives that marked the modern world. Prophetic Rage reflects the ways in which black religion has typified the struggle for oppressed and marginalized voices in the context of their particular experience to resist empire, and fight for freedom, justice, and human dignity.

I have seen this at work in my own experience. I was raised as a black boy in the Deep South, on a dirt road on the edge of an old plantation. As Langston Hughes said, I’ve known rivers: I have known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. In the South, we were poor but loved. We experienced hardship but lived with dignity. I shared a small country house with seven sisters, each full of grace and love and dignity. They were young but strong and wise. They carried with them the blood of slave women like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Harriet Jacobs. Like me, they toiled in tobacco fields as children to help feed the family and to purchase school clothes. They were mocked and ridiculed by their peers, but they never acquiesced to the dehumanizing structures of patriarchy, racism, and white supremacy that were and continue to be normative in the South. In my black male body, I carry the memory, experience, and wisdom of my sisters and their plight. As with my father whose hands carried the sewage and scum of society and my mother who dressed the wounds of dying humanity, I lift up the voices of my seven sisters, voices discarded by the noise of empire and the threat of nihilism itself.

Prophetic Rage and Resistance to Empire

I was born after the civil rights struggle. The memory of Martin Luther King Jr.’s great speeches, the militancy of black power, and the poetically passionate pleas of activists and revolutionaries had all but dissipated. As a child born in the 1970s, what I inherited was the crushing consequences of globalization and postindustrialism. The great factory jobs across the nation, especially in the South, were transported overseas. Well-paying jobs that stabilized communities and offered a sense of dignity and livelihood for families could no longer be looked upon with any sense of assurance. All that was left were abandoned communities, unemployment, homelessness, failing school systems, and the meandering escapism of drug addiction, crack cocaine, violence, and suffering. Now, it would seem, at every street corner, shopping mall, online store, website, bookstore, city park, coffeehouse, restaurant, or latrine, the sting of hurt, pain, and despair nags at blacks and others like flies on a sore under the weight of Georgia heat on a summer afternoon. The globalization and commercialization of hip-hop and popular culture, a hallmark achievement of the reality of secularization and cultural nihilism, have rendered black theology at best suspect, at worst emphatically irrelevant to the task of liberation.

Since James Cone’s release of Black Theology and Black Power in 1969, and even since his recent book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, black theologians in particular have tried to articulate the suffering of black people in America and liberation from white racism in America. Today, there is a need to reintroduce black theology to a new generation of thinkers, and also to recontextualize the black theological task in light of the reconfiguration of global society. This need also arises out of the postmodern dilemma, the problem of nihilism, as well as the social, political, and economic context ushered in by a new age of technology, globalization, and empire.

The most powerful way to resist meaninglessness is prophetic rage, or the refusal to accept the realities of structural injustice such as poverty, escalating militarism, genocide, and housing discrimination. I suggest that black theology may also provide a gateway or insights into the prospects of overcoming the broader quest for meaning in Western society in particular. I believe I am not alone when I say that the present conditions before blacks throughout the African diaspora require the kind of courageous faith, dangerous discipleship, and unapologetic prophetic rage that circulated through the veins of those ancient prophets like Moses, Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Habakkuk, and Jeremiah, and lived in the zealous pilgrimages of souls like Sojourner Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer, Mary McLeod Bethune, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and even present-day truth-tellers like Nas, Common, Missy Elliott, Alicia Keys, and Kanye West. In the same manner that black South Africans were compelled to question the very legitimacy of the apartheid government, black folks of every hue are also driven to ask, does the land that black folks have bled for, fought for, died for, and cried for, since the inception of this modern experiment, have the kind of democracy that is of black people, for black people, and by black people? In a time when the nation is at war, not only with a foreign enemy but also with itself over its own ideals, history, and destiny, black folks must begin to ponder once again what it means to be human and Christian in today’s post-Katrina, Jena Six, poverty-stricken America. On a larger scale, if America, as the lone superpower of the modern world that has now produced perhaps the greatest militaristic monster in human history, has its fate inextricably bound to the rest of the world through an ever increasingly globalized economy, it may very well be that the promise of human survival and flourishing on the planet rests with the prophetic witness of black folks, and others who share their plight, in this mammoth imperial beast of the new world order.

Understanding the nature of empire and its relationship to the black experience creates the space to understand the ways in which blacks share a common struggle of resistance alongside other oppressed bodies in the modern and postcolonial world. By recognizing that the black experience, from slavery and colonialism to Jim Crow segregation and mass incarceration, exposes empire for its violence and all-consuming nature, the door opens to resist and dismantle related systems of marginality and injustice as well. I agree with Nestor Miguez, Joerg Rieger, and Jung Mo Sung, who, in Beyond the Spirit of Empire, described empire as a way of exercising power through different legalities (and illegalities).³ The World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) described empire as the convergence of economic, political, cultural and military interests that constitute a system of domination in which benefits flow primarily to the powerful. Centred in the last remaining superpower, yet spread all over the world, empire crosses all boundaries, reconstructs identities, subverts cultures, overcomes nation states and challenges religious communities.⁴

While the language of empire is receiving renewed attention today, the black experience with empire, up through the events of transcontinental slavery, struggles with apartheid and Jim Crow segregation, and lynching, has revealed not simply the horrors and perversity of empire; it has also unveiled the creative power of black protest and hope (infused with Christian love, forgiveness, and reconciliation) as a means of resisting and overcoming its destructive darts of nihilism and domination. Blacks’ prophetic refusal to surrender and their desire to maintain hope amid dark clouds of despair reveal the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of empire. Even when discarded, black bodies emerged with a fierce and determined hope, a forceful struggle to be human and exist as free moral agents.

Today, black life, whether in prisons, nursing homes, crumbling ghettos, roach-infested trailers, or urine-consumed alleyways, must no longer be discarded into the wasteland of indifference and shame. Too many people are suffering for those of us who claim to follow the God of the prophets, the children of Israel, Jesus, and the martyred saints of history to find refuge behind false notions of achievement, fame, capitalistic desire, intellectual isolation, and a shallow pop culture of consumption and stifling individual gratification. The only appropriate, and possibly reasonable, response is prophetic rage — not the kind of rage that leads to bitterness, hatred, violence, hopelessness, and despair, but the kind of indignation that insists on processes of prophetic action, transformation, truth telling, and courageous risk taking for the present moment.

I approach the task of addressing these questions not as a detached, unbiased academic, but as a survivor, victim, parent, brother, friend, priest, preacher, and child of humanity who, like many of my generation, is fed up with (no, downright sick of) faith, theology, the church, scholarship, and even esoteric conceptions of God that have nothing meaningful to say to the reality of human suffering in the world. So-called postmodern scholars wish to say that humanity has now reached a point in which it will either self-destruct by its own thirst for power, greed, and selfishness or burst open into a new, more complex interrelated world of fluid consciousness and sharing, a world that recognizes itself as that which Leonardo Boff describes as an enormous living organism. What has not been addressed are the ways in which ordinary narratives of the black experience and cultural life in general are indispensable resources for challenging the nihilistic threat.

Why Prophetic Rage? Why Now?

History has proven that whenever a civilization or culture has had to confront the chilling sting of nihilism, those who survived emerged with prophetic zeal to resist and speak with a resounding voice to the silence of despair. Poor blacks throughout the African diaspora, and certainly the world’s poor in general, are, like the psalmist, singing,

By the rivers of Babylon —

there we sat down and there we wept

when we remembered Zion. (Ps. 137:1 NRSV)

New realities of globalization and technology, creating cultures of abundance for the few and cultures of scarcity and survival for the many, now demand a theological response rooted in radical praxis, echoing the voices of the ancient biblical prophets and those of the church. With the recent rise of President Barack Obama, it is clear that a new paradigmatic moment is sweeping across the American geopolitical landscape and perhaps the world. Through the shackles of nihilism, a persistent cry of hope and revolutionary change is swelling up from the depths of ordinary human experiences.

Under the weight of empire and its systemic companion, globalization (as an economic ideology and exploitative reality of