My first conversion, my born again experience in 1949, did not address the important biblical issues of oppression and justice. In other words, it was a spirituality without justice conversion. In 1968, I needed a second justice conversion to create a biblical blend of spirituality and justice (Isaiah 58:6 ff, Luke 4:18-19). Until April 1968, I had only a shallow understanding of the issues driving the civil rights movement. Then God used the death of Martin Luther King to bring about new life in me. At the time of King's assassination, I saw for the first time the depth of the social evil of white racism in America. I saw that white racism was at the core of American identity. About twelve years later, I began to grasp that the American vocabulary of prejudice, discrimination, race and racism was not adequate to explain fully the depth of this American social evil. I discovered much better biblical concepts - ethnocentrism and oppression.
I also began to discover the American concepts of justice and the concept of social justice were not adequate concepts so I began using the terms Jubilee justice and kingdom justice. These biblical concepts have more specific content to them. They refer to a justice that releases the oppressed and rebuilds oppressed communities.
Once I had better biblical concepts, I could now reinterpret American history and current social problems. Nearly everyday, my understandings, insights, and actions have deepened on oppression and justice.
For fifty years, I have constantly been reading and writing on oppression/justice issues, biblically, historically and sociologically. To read my nearly 470 blogs that I have written over the past five years, google my blog "Lowell Noble's Writings". I have been forced to reinterpret, relearn nearly everything I learned about the Bible, American history, American sociology, even those things I learned at Christian liberal arts colleges. After living ninety-one years, teaching thousands of white evangelical students in college, listening to hundreds of sermons, I think that almost all of my fellow white Christians also need a second conversion, a conversion to the justice issues of the Bible.
Now some more comments on Martin Luther King's impact upon me. When Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, 1068, the Holy Spirit used this tragic event to show me the horror of racism; a flood light revealed the nature of this deep seeded social evil and soon I began to see the need for social justice. This concern bout oppression and justice burns as brightly today, fifty years later, as it did in 1968.
In 1968, the white evangelical American church had very little theology to help me understand social evil and social justice, so I turned to secular sociology for help. For the next twelve years, I milked sociology and anthropology for insights; I also memorized portions of Isaiah 58, Matthew 25, and James 2.
At the same time my wife and I lived in the black community in Jackson, MI for a period of twenty years, during which time I taught sociology at Spring Arbor College, a overwhelmingly white, middle class, Christian liberal arts college located ten miles west of Jackson. So daily I moved back and forth between the relatively poor Afro-American community and the much richer Euro-American college community. Daily I experienced the differences in culture and economics. At the same time I was teaching courses of social problems of racial and cultural minorities, wrestling with these same issues intellectually. The sociological concepts of prejudice and discrimination were helpful in understanding of what was going on, but in 1980 I became keenly aware that the problem was much deeper than the best of sociological insights. I realized I need to develop a theology of society - a set of biblical concepts to explain social evil - such as principalities and powers, cosmos, ethnocentrism, and oppression.
See my blog Lowell Noble's Writings for more on this theology of society.
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