post<\/a>, I ended wanting to explore the connection between the black church (assuming the \u201cnon-white\u201d context of the early Christian church) and the Black Lives Matter movement, discussing the theological and practical aspects of the movement as a possible extension of the black, or womanist, church in the 21st century. Moreover, drawing from the work of\u00a0Albert Cleage, in what James Evans called an ecclesiology of praxis rather than one of the proclaimed Word\u201d (156),\u00a0<\/span>I would like to suggest that this ecclesiology of praxis is made manifest in the foundation, structure, rhetoric and actions of the Black Lives Matter movement.<\/p>\nExploring similarities between the movement and what W.E.B. Du Bois set forth as \u201cthe \u2018marks\u2019 of the black church: the music, the preaching, and the frenzy,\u201d (J. Evans 144), in this post, I will question whether the Black Lives Matter movement might reasonably be contextualized as a hybrid of the contemporary black church, with its emphasis on community, refuge and wellness for the totality of one\u2019s being (and not just the spiritual self), and of the Invisible Institution, subversive in nature, born of necessity, steeped in secrecy and imbued with the power of those who band together against institutional and social oppression, daring to proclaim words of liberation at the risk of great personal cost. In this analysis, and as a member of the millennial \u201cchurch defecting\u201d generation, I will also explore whether the rag-tag and rough-hewn elements of the protest movement might be understood to more closely resemble the vision of \u201cekklesia\u201d set forth in the Christian Gospels and the epistles than does the contemporary church, regardless of the color of its congregants.<\/p>\n
Contemporary definitions of church tend to focus equally on the building or gathering space used for worship, and on the individuals or corporate body making up the congregation. Church may also be understood as the overarching ecclesial organization that represents one particular denomination, or the Christian body of worship as a whole entity. In the days of the earliest church, however, \u201cchurch\u201d did not exist as a formal space for worship. Church was counter-cultural, subversive and dangerous business; the gathering spaces were covert and private, typically located in the homes of believers who had the means to accommodate a small gathering of worshippers. To this end, \u201cchurch\u201d in the first century was indicative of a body of believers, not a formal house of worship. Church was fluid and omnipresent, and could not be relegated to any one single space.<\/p>\n
Emil Brunner, a neo-orthodox theologian, indicates a problem with translation that further marks a distinction between the modern Christian church and that of the first generation of believers. In the New Testament, the church is understood as a spiritual community referred to as the \u201cekklesia\u201d \u2013 a word that appears 114 times in the Greek Septuagint translation, but only appears 44 times as \u201cecclesia\u201d in the Latin Vulgate translation. Clearly, the creators of Scripture struggled to land upon a consistent and accurate word to represent the gathering of Christ followers bound together in love through the power of the Holy Spirit. \u201cEkklesia,\u201d often translated to mean \u201cchurch,\u201d serves as the root word for \u201cecclesiology,\u201d which is the study of the church, and \u201cecclesiastical,\u201d roughly translated to mean that which is not secular. The term \u201cchurch\u201d has its origin in the Greek word \u201ckyriakos,\u201d which means \u201cbelonging to the Lord.\u201d While each of these terms stems from a similar place of origin and may be understood as largely synonymous, Brunner asserts that \u201cif we wish to follow the New Testament, we cannot simply translate Ekklesia by the word \u2018Church,\u2019 and we have the right to say only of the Ekklesia and not of the Church that it is essentially bound up with faith in Jesus Christ\u201d (22). James Evans explains that \u201cwhile Protestant Christianity emphasizes the personal dimension of faith, the ekklesia is, according to Brunner, the social form of faith\u201d (148).<\/p>\n
Although the individuals who have joined the Black Lives Matter movement may be the least likely individuals to claim that their work is \u201cessentially bound up with faith in Jesus Christ,\u201d this is not to be entirely unexpected. Christianity, which was once a risky and counter-cultural practice, is now one of the most mainstream, wholly Americanized and \u201cvanilla\u201d social institutions to which one can subscribe. We have appropriated the notion of what it means to be Christian, and we have bleached Jesus Christ so thoroughly over the course of 2,000 years that most all of his radicality has been scrubbed from the minds of those who profess to love and follow him. Many of the same individuals who claim to be Christian are the same individuals who both benefit from and propagate the systemic injustices against which the Black Lives Matter movement is crying out. As such, protestors may be both unwilling and unable to identify their cause with the radical works and teaching of Jesus, but the message of the movement \u2013 a leveling of the social infrastructure, and liberation from oppression for the marginalized \u2013 is perfectly in keeping with the message of the Gospel.<\/p>\n
The Black Lives Matter movement is certainly subject to the effects of external, governmental law, but within the movement itself, one can surely recognize the dynamics of a spiritual personhood, inviting and functioning independently of a stifling hierarchical structure. The movement is emblematic of \u201cekklesia\u201d in its resemblance to the inclusive, grassroots nature of the earliest Christian church, and in its spiritual character as a gathering of people bound in spirit, through love, to achieve a common good. As James Evans writes of ekklesia, \u201cin this ideal community, the bonds are not formal or structured, but free-flowing, other-centered expressions of agape<\/em>\u201d (148-149).<\/p>\nAlso important to note is that, while the earliest Christian church is not traditionally understood as a direct precursor to either the Invisible Institution or the contemporary black church, members of the early church were, geographically speaking, most certainly people of color. Cain Hope Felder, professor of New Testament at Howard University School of Divinity, speaks to this point in his critical efforts to establish a corrective, Afrocentric biblical hermeneutic. Felder declares that race, as understood as a modern social construct, was not a relevant factor in the first-century world\u2019s social structure and class system. To be sure, ancient peoples experienced many disputes based on land, ethnicity, tribal disputes and other political, geographical and social concerns, but skin color \u201cwas by no means a political or ideological basis for enslaving, oppressing, or in any way demeaning other peoples\u201d (Felder Race<\/em> 127). According to our culture\u2019s contemporary definition of \u201cblackness\u201d \u2013 constructed based on physical attributes and the presence of African blood in one\u2019s lineage \u2013 many noteworthy individuals in scripture \u201cwould have to be classified as \u2018Blacks\u2019\u201d (Felder Ideology <\/em>189). Felder argues that \u201cmany Black women and men are fully part of the salvation history within the Bible itself\u201d (Ideology <\/em>191).<\/p>\nBy this reasoning, if the earliest Christian church was comprised almost exclusively of \u201cnon-white\u201d individuals, and many Afro-Asiatic individuals who were neither Greek nor Roman, then the early church could be argued to share more in common with the Invisible Institution of African American slavery than with the \u201ctraditional\u201d fair-skinned church of European origin. Demonstrating a clear ontological connection between the first-century church and the secret slave church helps to lay the groundwork for an understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement as an extension of the ekklesia.<\/p>\n
To be Continued<\/em><\/p>\nRead part 3 here<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my previous post, I ended wanting to explore the connection between the black church (assuming the \u201cnon-white\u201d context of the early Christian church) and the Black Lives Matter movement, discussing the theological and practical aspects of the movement as a possible extension of the black, or womanist, church in the 21st century. Moreover, drawing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2271,"featured_media":3137,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,59],"tags":[61,44,705,62,4],"class_list":["post-3157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-contributors","category-katherine-whitfield","tag-black-lives-matter","tag-black-theology","tag-katherine-whitfield","tag-millennials","tag-theology"],"yoast_head":"\n
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