Wisdom tradition is in quotation marks because I recognize it is not really a tradition. It is Stuart Weeks who has in a variety of places argued against the distinct wisdom tradition. Instead he sees it as a much more fluid movement where the literature is “intended more to entertain and provoke than deliberately to persuade its readers to adopt any particular understanding of the world.” Stuart Weeks, “Wisdom in the Old Testament,” in, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Wisdom in the Bible, the Church and the Contemporary World, ed. Stephen Barton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark 1999), 29.18 18 Celia Deane-Drummond, Christ and Evolution: Wonder and Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), chapter 3. This chapter is outstanding discussion of the importance of wisdom in Christology. Much of this chapter is building on Deane-Drummond’s discussion.
19 19 James D. G. Dunn, “Jesus: Teacher of Wisdom or Wisdom Incarnate?” in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Wisdom in the Bible, the Church and the Contemporary World, ed. Stephen Barton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark 1999), 77.
20 20 Dunn, “Teacher of Wisdom,” 78.
21 21 I am grateful to Joyce Mercer for this observation.
22 22 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam’s Son, Sophia’s Prophet (New York: Continuum 1994), 139.
23 23 Fiorenza, Jesus, 157.
24 24 Fiorenza, Jesus, 162. Schüssler Fiorenza has a convention of following the Jewish practice of not reproducing the name of God (hence G*d) as a way of challenging the traditional patriarchal image of God.
25 25 Elizabeth Johnson, “Jesus, Wisdom of God,” Ephemerides Theologiae Louvaniensis Vol. 61 (1985): 261, as quoted in Don Schweitzer, Contemporary Christologies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2010), 68.
26 26 Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad 1992), 266.
27 27 Don Schweitzer, Contemporary Christologies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2010), 69.
28 28 I am happy to recognize a debt to Karl Barth here. If we are going to know what God is like, then we need to trust that God has spoken. The disclosure of God in the Eternal Wisdom made flesh is our control on our theology. Any legitimate affirmation about God and God’s relations with the world need to be justified, grounded in, or deduced from the Incarnation. See my Understanding Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) for further discussion.
29 29 Stephen C. Barton, “Gospel Wisdom,” in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Wisdom in the Bible, the Church and the Contemporary World, ed. Stephen Barton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 94.
30 30 To talk of Jesus as the Wisdom of God opens possibilities. Colin Gunton has a radical inclusivity when he explains that the Wisdom of God embodied in Christ embodies all the wisdom of even non-Christian cultures. So Gunton writes, “To say that the crucified Christ is the Wisdom of God is to say that he is the key to the meaning of the whole of the created order, and therefore the source of true wisdom, wherever that is to be found.” Colin Gunton, “Christ, the Wisdom of God,” in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Wisdom in the Bible, the Church and the Contemporary World, ed. Stephen Barton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 260.
31 31 See Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003).
32 32 In some ways this is a defense of a kenotic Christology, although I am hesitant to formulate the precise form this took. I prefer to talk about the Eternal Wisdom interpenetrating a human life. This would mean it is not a “transformational model” (of, for example, Trenton Merricks) nor is it just relational. It is a more like a “spirit-filled” Christology. Jonathan Hill’s map of the current options in the debate is very helpful, see Anna Marmodoro and Jonathan Hill, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 1.
33 33 I am grateful to those who took the time to read an earlier draft of this article. These include Joyce Mercer, James Farwell, Barney Hawkins, Keith Ward, and Isabella Blanchard. Finally, I am grateful for the extraordinary gift of Ms. Ellen Hawkins (a person with Down’s syndrome) who has taught me so much about faith and trust.
3 Racial Stigma and Southern Baptist Public Discourse in the Twentieth Century
Pamela D. Jones
RESEARCH LEVEL 1
Editors’ Introduction
Some of the best pieces of writing start from a very simple question: How can Christians committed to the Golden Rule support slavery? No one would say that they would like to be treated as a slave. In this powerful piece of historical analysis, the author starts with this question. The answer, this author explains, is that assumptions about the inferiority of African Americans created a culture where the Golden Rule is evaded. She then develops a substantial case study. The author takes the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and divides the history into three periods: the Jim Crow Era, post the 1954 Brown decision, and the 1995 Apology. She argues that African Americans are so traumatized by the racism of the denomination that the “change of heart” may not be sufficient to heal African Americans’ mistrust and skepticism toward the denomination as racist.
They had for more than a century before been regarded as being of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. ... And no distinction in this respect is made between the free negro or mulatto and the slave, but this stigma, of the deepest degradation was fixed upon the whole race. Dred Scott, 1857. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 HOW.) 393 (1857) 1
The historic theological crisis in American race relations between blacks and whites not only has been a conflict with biblical interpretations that justified slavery and segregation, it also has involved conflicting views about what it means to be fully human and who has the power to define this. The heated biblical debates of the nineteenth century over whether slavery could be justified moved into the twentieth century in the debates over Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy. Whether to extend notions of Christian
