A Theology for the Multi-Ethnic Church
God is love, and this truth is a theme that runs throughout the entirety of Scripture. The greatest expression of God’s love for humanity, separated from God through sin, is found within the incarnation of God in Christ. God as love is revealed in the reconciling work of Christ. In The Message, a version of Scripture translated by Eugene Peterson, John 1:14 states, “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory of God with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.”
God shows the extent of his love for broken and divided humanity through a direct social proximity to humanity. God becomes human in Christ Jesus. The all-Holy, all-powerful, and only true God came into the world as flesh in Christ. This is what makes the incarnation not only the foundation of reconciliation, but radical. It introduces a whole new understanding of God. God is not simply a distant God who can only be known in supernatural, cosmic expressions. God can also be known in the natural form of a human being with the purpose of salvation, liberation, and justice. Cone explains the incarnation of God in the following manner:
The grounding of liberation in God’s act in Jesus Christ is the logical consequence of any Christian theology that takes Scripture seriously as an important source for the doing of theology. . . . It also expresses God’s will to be in relation to creatures in the social context of their striving for the fulfillment of humanity. That is, God is free to be for us. This is the meaning of the Exodus and the Incarnation. . . . God is the God of Jesus Christ who calls the helpless and weak into a newly created existence. (Cone, God of the Oppressed, 128.)
Christ becomes one of us so that all of us who make up the human family would have access to liberation and reconciliation. God becomes human and enters into the social divides of male and female, privileged and marginalized, colonizer and exiled, as well as those deemed righteous and those excluded. Christ is born in an under-resourced setting among farm animals. Under the government-sanctioned threat of Hebrew male babies being annihilated, Christ and his earthly parents flee into Egypt as immigrants. Christ is beaten unmercifully by a military police-like force of the Roman Empire. Christ is incarcerated and receives the death penalty, though the governing authorities admit finding no fault in him. These experiences of God revealed in Christ show that God does not simply have compassion and mercy for the immigrant, the incarcerated, the poor, and the marginalized. God in Christ became the immigrant, the incarcerated, the poor, and the marginalized. Theologian and mystic Howard Thurman addresses the relevance of the context and ethnicity in which God shows up as human:
It is necessary to examine the religion of Jesus against the background of his own age and people, and to inquire into the content of his teaching with reference to the disinherited and the underprivileged. We begin with the simple historical fact that Jesus was a Jew. The miracle of the Jewish people is almost as breathtaking as the miracle of Jesus. . . . The economic predicament with which he was identified in birth placed him initially with the great mass of men on earth. The masses of the people are poor. If we dare take the position that in Jesus there was at work some radical destiny, it would be safe to say that in his poverty he was more truly Son of man than he would have been if the incident of family or birth had made him a rich son of Israel. (Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 15, 17-18.)
Thurman sheds light on how spiritually and socially radical the incarnation of God is. The radicality is found in God becoming marginalized and poor. This incarnational God informs the ministry praxis of the reconciling church because it reveals the way in which God reconciles himself to sinful humanity. God becomes human and takes on the weight of the systemic sin and division impacting all of humanity. This also provides the opportunity for humanity to experience reconciliation in a way that deals with the various social divisions systemically and relationally between human beings. Once again, this points to the radicality of the incarnation of God. God addresses the social divisions within humanity by entering into those divisions as a human being. Reconciliation theologian John Perkins states the following about the social impact of the incarnation of God: “God was able to identify with us because He came down from heaven to be a man. He relocated. You don’t get to the heart of people faster than when you go live with them and eat with them and fellowship with them—that gets you to peoples’ hearts faster than anything else.” (John Perkins, With Justice for All: A Strategy for Community Development, Rev. ed. (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 2007), 101.)
This deep connection of the incarnation of God with the marginalized and oppressed informs the identity of cross-cultural and justice-oriented disciple makers within the reconciling church. Members of the reconciling church go beyond unleashing compassion to the marginalized and oppressed to finding community and extended family with them. Justice ministry in this light is communal both with the one in need of justice and with God. God calls the reconciling church into the same solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed that God himself participates in through the incarnation.
The incarnation of God revealed in Christ is both a reconciliation between God and humanity and between divided humanity itself. This work of Christ provides salvific reconciliation, and it models social reconciliation. The ministry praxis of the reconciling church should embody both of these vertical and horizontal dimensions of reconciliation. God shows how much he loves humanity, in spite of our sins, through the incarnation. God dwells among sinners and makes reconciliation possible by bringing an empowering love up close. God’s love prioritizes social proximity. God in the human form of Christ gets up close to the diseased, the left for dead, the blind, the paralyzed, and the outcast. That is what the incarnation is; it is God being proximate. This is God being visibly intimate with humanity. The implication for the Church is that the Church must be proximate to the oppressed and suffering. The Church, in these times of disparities, injustice, and division must go beyond a Sunday worship center and become a community transformation center.
For the reconciling church, the incarnation is contextualized by both the diversity and oppression of the people initially receiving the empowering love of God. The people of the church in Corinth to whom the Apostle Paul writes are an oppressed and marginalized people under the rule of the Roman Empire. Though the love of God is for all people, the incarnation of God in Christ and the ecclesiastical mission of the Apostle Paul is presented significantly to the oppressed and marginalized. Sanders states the following about the ministry and mission of Jesus Christ: “Jesus centered his proclamation of the good news in the life situation of the marginalized people of his day. It is clear that Jesus gave priority to the ethical principles of justice and love in his interactions with others. . . . The people on the margins of society celebrated his ministry among them, while those identified with the centers of religious power joined forces to crucify him.” (Cheryl J. Sanders, Ministry at the Margins: The Prophetic Mission of Women, Youth, and the Poor (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1997), 11.)
From the context of God’s love revealed to and received by the oppressed, it is made possible to all. It is from this reality that God loving the whole world cannot be refuted. God’s love revealed to the oppressed and marginalized strengthens the case that it is a love available to all. The incarnation of God brings reconciliation and salvation to sinful people and reconciliation and social transformation to divided people. This is brought about through God’s empowering love shown within the ministry activities of the church. Regarding how the Church can embody the incarnation of God in this way, Sanders writes,
Whenever we feed the hungry, take in the homeless, visit the hospitals and nursing homes and prisons, we show God’s promise to be true. We make good on the good news in the eyes of the dispossessed when we minister to them in the name of the Lord, because our ministry is God loving people through us- God feeds the poor in our kitchens, God comforts the lonely in our embrace, God heals the sick when we lay our hands on them, God consoles the prisoner with our words. This is the mandate of the kingdom, that the people of God cooperate with God by doing God’s will. (Cheryl J. Sanders, Ministry at the Margins: The Prophetic Mission of Women, Youth, and the Poor (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1997), 30.)
The reconciling church embodies the love of God through ministries of solidarity with the marginalized, poor, and oppressed. The reconciling church must align its mission and purpose with the prophetic and justice-oriented ministry and mission of Christ. The prophetic and justice-oriented ministry of Christ meets a marginalized Samaritan woman at a well, it disrupts a woman caught in adultery from receiving the death penalty, it allows a touch from the hands of a woman with an incurable disease, and it speaks liberation to a terrorized man crying out from a cemetery. The reconciling church must find it prophetic and justice-oriented place among the poor and oppressed in its surrounding community.
