THEN THE WHISPER PUT ON FLESH

THEN THE WHISPER PUT ON FLESH
New Testament Ethics in an African American Context
By Brian K. Blount
Abingdon Press, 2001. 232 pp.
ISBN #0-687-08589-6

Some weeks ago I found in my library a mostly unread copy of James Cone’s “God of the Oppressed”, published more than twenty years ago. I read it thoroughly, making many notes. It was at once engaging and provocative, hopeful and polemic. Cone, who is still professor of Theology at New York’s Union Seminary, is African American, and wrote his theology strictly from a liberation prospective.

I next found on my shelf a smaller volume, completely unread, by Wendell Berry: “The Hidden Wound,” written just a few years earlier than Cone’s volume, during a time of social unrest. The opening historical narrative by Berry, a white man, did better than anything I have ever read or heard to explain the systemic nature of racism. Berry sought to identify a wound deeper than racism in our society, the separation of humans from labor and from the soil, and argued that racism was one result of that separation.

I then chanced upon in a bookstore a contemporary volume by one of my own seminary professors, Brian K. Blount. Since I had so recently read two books dealing with experience of Black Americans, the title of Blount’s book caught my eye, and I bought it: “Then the Whisper Put on Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African American Context”.

Blount’s work has a slightly different focus than Cone’s. It is more exegetical in nature, and less argumentative. Cone wrote that liberation was the necessary foundation for theology, saying “What has the gospel to do with the oppressed of the land and their struggle for liberation? Any theologian who fails to place that question at the center of his or her work has ignored the essence of the gospel” (Cone, introduction, p. 9). His argument was that theological discourse was not ONLY universal, but also particular, and that the experience of his people was a fundamental tool in theology. What I found provocative, but did not necessarily disagree with, was his insistence upon doing theology from that particular perspective.

Like Cone, Blount argues “that the Bible has always been read through the experiences of the people holding it. The meaning they draw and the ethics they build are directly related to the lives they lead. It is no wonder that for a people in slavery and yearning to be free that the Bible would mean and encourage liberation” (p. 15). Blount differs from Cone, however, in his acknowledgment of other lens for reading the Bible, even within the African American tradition (p. 50).

The focus of Blount’s work then shifts from Cone, as Blount then begins to do the work that Cone argued needed to be done: using the lens of African American history, and his exegetical skills, he interprets the New Testament from a liberation perspective. There is a separate chapter for the Synoptic Gospels, one for John, one for the letters of Paul, and one for Revelation. This was clearly different from Cone, for I noticed very early in Cone’s work that there was practically nothing in his use of the New Testament outside of the synoptics.

What made this book come to life for me were Blount’s numerous descriptions of actual encounters of slave communities with the texts.

The synoptics are where Blount begins, and where he finds his easiest going. But what makes the book valuable to the preacher, and especially to me, a white preacher, are the other chapters. Even from a non-liberation perspective, I find John difficult to preach, but Blount offers some exciting possibilities.

Briefly, Blount describes the ethics of the synoptics as “Kingdom Ethics,” each with a slightly different twist: Mark as boundary breaking, Matthew as “visual institution”, and Luke as “ethics of reversal.” I found personally interesting his view of Matthew’s ethics defined as “an identifiable, alternative worship community in an environment he believed was hostile to its reconfiguration of the faith of God’s people” (p. 64). I find this personally interesting because of the thought I have been giving to the manner in which preaching forms community, and especially “alternative community.” There is much in Blount’s work that gives me something to work with.

Commenting on John, Blount says, “When we carefully read John’s work in the light of its first-century context, we find his language and symbolism to be the stuff of active, counter-cultural, community resistance” (p. 93). He describes a way African slaves had of seizing and making their own reality inside of their suffering reality, quite vividly, telling the story of a corn shucking. In the reality of their own construction, “the injustices that presently plagued them were ‘in truth’ no more” (p. 95). Blount argues that the gospel of John served the same function in its original context, and can do so still.

If there was one thing in the book that really moved me, it was Blount’s description of the interpretation and appropriation of scripture by slaves. Think of it: they could not read. All they knew of the Bible was what some white person decided to tell them, and yet they immediately discerned that it was good news- that it meant liberation. While Blount never draws the conclusion that the Holy Spirit was an active agent in this discernment, or that the very nature of Gospel itself makes such discernment by oppressed people’s inevitable, I could not help thinking along those lines.

Blount tells a particularly forceful story, quoting two sources, of something that goes beyond this: slaves rejecting a letter of Paul (Philemon) as authentically belonging within the canon. No wonder that Cone ignored Paul!

Yet there is a lot within Paul’s letters, especially the authentic letters, that proclaims liberation and Blount makes excellent and helpful (from a preacher’s standpoint) use of it. Blount not only points this out, but does the more difficult work of correcting false interpretation of less obvious passages of Paul. In the end, though, Blount must conclude, “Paul apparently did not have the full ethical courage of his Galatians 3:28 convictions” (p. 149). But, he reminds us, neither has the historical black church always had all of its courage (specifically with respect to women). And I suspect that many a church historian would concur about that deficiency in all of the church!

Finally, Revelation provides the inspiration and direction for “active resistance.” Agreeing with Cone, Blount argues that the Gospel is not an opiate, “because the people who lived the symbolic language also lived the contrary lives of opposition to the political and religious powers of their respective worlds” (p. 159). Even more, he argues that “personal escape from the horror” is not the “hoped for and enacted conclusion. Divine judgment that would transform the human historical landscape was anticipated instead” (p. 164).

I found the book not only inspirational, but also helpful, and I expect to use it often as a reference.

August 28, 2002