And of course #CalvinistTwitter is mad because a preacher yesterday used the suffering servant passage to talk about John Lewis instead of Jesus. So let’s talk about that. #thread
Was John Lewis wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities? Did his stripes cause us healing as a people? I don’t think any white person should ever say anything close to that. It would be terribly presumptuous. But can a black preacher?
One of the most important theologians I’ve read is Jon Sobrino who talks about the pueblo crucificado who are crucified with Jesus. James Cone similarly makes an analogy between the lynching tree and Jesus’ cross. For me, Cone and Sobrino rescue the cross from irrelevance.
If the Calvinist twitter bros are right and Jesus’ cross is an entirely abstract theological arithmetic that treats humanity’s sin generically, then Eric Metaxas and all the other white supremacists are right to say that Jesus is white and Christianity is a white religion.
Whiteness is not an ethnic category; it is a claim that human nature is abstract, generic, and ahistorical and thus a judgment against humans who are unable to be assimilated into the generic sea of culturally transcendent humanity created by European Christian empire.
To accept white Jesus as your personal lord and savior means to embrace a generic individual understanding of sin and a one size fits all salvation in which historical oppression is nihilistically brushed aside since what matters is getting to the Disneyland in the sky.
So the Calvinists who say the suffering servant passage can only be about the abstract divine arithmetic of Jesus’ cross indeed worship a white Jesus. The brown Jesus I worship is not accomplishing theological arithmetic with the cross but solidarity with his pueblo crucificado.
In my view, we cannot be saved by Jesus’ cross until we see that he gets crucified every time a Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown gets shot. We must be “cut to the heart” (Acts 2:37) by the cross and say “woe is me; I am lost” before we can say “here am I; send me.”
If it’s really Jesus, then he’s the voice who knocks us blind off our horse of religious zealotry and says, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” Jesus is not the divine math that makes white Calvinist bros feel self-justified. His blood convicts us so that he can make us just.
Despite the best efforts of white Calvinist bros to make Jesus’ blood an abstract arithmetic that doesn’t stain the white carpet, our society is haunted by Jesus’ blood and that’s the reason that the blood of the victims of police brutality has moral authority.
The awful truth is that the victims of white supremacist Christianity are the ones who are crying out from under the altar in Revelation saying “How long O Lord?” Eric Metaxas and all of his clones are not on the side of the lamb in that story; they are on the side of the beast.
Jesus tells us to take up our crosses and follow him. For a young John Lewis beaten by white Christian sheriff’s deputies in Selma, that means “I see your cross and I march with you.” For someone like me, it means “Come out of Babylon and join me in the streets of Ferguson.”
The way that Jesus keeps healing the world through his cross is by calling Christians into the streets with their crosses to march with John Lewis even if the cops who beat them are white evangelicals who feel absolutely justified crucifying their own messiah again.
