I’ve been looking forward to being with you. I think Pastor John called me on my cell phone and I was driving somewhere and I have a five speed car. I was in the middle of going through the gears when the phone rang. I like a stick shift.

The Unchurchables

Some people think I’m a little weird. I was just thinking about that song as we sang it. I stand before you as a grace junkie. I hope I have some company here. Grace is amazing when I think of what God has done in my life. I’m not supposed to be here. I shared, I think, in one of the Sunday school classes on Sunday that most of us in church divide the world up or society up into two groups. We think in terms of churched and unchurched. But I suggest to you that there’s a third category of people called “the un-churchables.”

The un-churchables are people who just happen to be allergic to or have a very negative reaction to the particular cultural expression that Christianity has chosen and its proclamation. They have a problem with King James language, for example, or they have a problem with four-part harmonies — those kinds of things. A lot of unchurchables are raising the church and it doesn’t make any sense to them, but they long for God and they end up going towards the mosque or entering into the mosque.

How do I know about the unchurchables? Because I’m one of them. I wasn’t supposed to hear the gospel. I was raised in the church and I heard all this stuff and it never made any sense to me until a strange kind of a guy, who had a sidekick, met me. Now imagine, I’m in Gary, Indiana and I went to Roosevelt High School. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but that’s where some of the older members of the Jackson Five went. I can show you their house even to this very day, but there was this guy who wanted to be a communist when he grew up and he had a sidekick who wanted to be a Nazi when he grew up. Now can you imagine a black Nazi? The guy who wanted to be a communist became a Jehovah’s Witness, and the guy who wanted to be a Nazi became a Seventh-day Adventist. Everybody knew they were weird. And by the sovereignty of God, both of them came to Christ.

I asked them about their faith and they explained it to me in ways that I could understand. They did not explain it in church culture. For the very first time I heard the gospel. As I look over my life, I think it begins to make some sense who my people are? My people are the un-churchables. And that’s why I go after Muslims, because Americans who convert to Islam, for the most part, are un-churchable. They don’t hear the gospel in the way we present it and they long for God and they end up becoming Muslim.

A Cultural Revolution

Well, earlier in my life I used to get in God’s face. Now when I first became saved, of course I ran to my nearest Christian bookstore and I started reading all these books, and as I looked around my neighborhood, I began to get angry at God because I didn’t see the presence of evangelicalism in my neighborhood, and I was kind of like Elijah. Remember Elijah? I like Elijah. He said, “God, I’m the only one left.” But I made the mistake of thinking in an evangelical-centric way in assuming that the presence of evangelicalism equaled the presence of God. I thought, “Maybe we’re second class citizens in this thing,” so I immersed myself with this evangelical stuff and I had about five Bible verses so that I could solve all the world’s problems.

Then when I was at Hampton, a great cultural revolution took place. In the spring of 1967. Just about everybody on campus was a Negro Christian and by the time the fall of 1967 came, everybody was an Afro-American anti-Christian, and all of a sudden I realized that what I had to say had no bearing whatsoever to what was going on. So what little evangelical witness there was virtually wiped out by the black cultural revolution of the late sixties.

So my problem with God became even worse. I became an angry young man. Finally in desperation I said, “God, something has to be done here.” In desperation, I just threw all my evangelicalism away, I threw everything out, and I started with God, went to Genesis 1:1, I started reading and rebooting myself, as it were, to see what God had to say. Now I was taught that only Paul’s letters applied to us and all that kind of stuff. I began to see in the Scripture that when I got to the prophets, they were saying some of the same things that some of the brothers on campus were saying. They were concerned about some of the same issues and I began to realize that I’d been sold a bill of goods.

So as a result, I ceased being an evangelical and I became biblical. We all need to go through that experience. I used to have the second coming of Christ all figured out. I didn’t know the hour nor the day, but I knew the week and the century. And then I started reading my Bible and got all messed up. I’m still being messed up to this very day. So brothers and sisters, I suggest to you that if you don’t want to mess up your doctrine, don’t read your Bibles.

The Product of a Struggle

So what came out of that struggle? What came out of that whole struggle? God works in everything, doesn’t he? What came out of that whole struggle was a new God-centered, biblical outlook and with that biblical outlook, I discovered that God had been in my neighborhood all along and I didn’t notice him. Too many of us are hung up on the wrong paradigms. If I go out looking for oil, I go to Oklahoma, I dig a couple of wells and this liquid black stuff comes out and I say, “Oh, I got oil.” Then I go to Wyoming, I hear there’s a lot of oil in Wyoming. I go there and I dig through mountains and mountains of shale and I keep digging, and I keep digging, and I keep digging, and after about 30 wells I’ve dug, they’re all dry. So I conclude that there’s no oil in Wyoming.

All along the problem is I had the wrong paradigm because there’s more oil in Wyoming than there is in Saudi Arabia. It just happens to be in the form of shale rock. And if we’re looking for God and we’re looking for what he is doing in the world, we need to be open about our paradigms and we need to be more biblical and we need to see through the eyes of God, through the eyes of scripture because the scripture is profitable for reproof and correction and teaching.

So having discovered that God was with us all along, out of that whole thing came Free at Last, out of that whole experience and I’m still unpacking all that stuff. I was genuinely encouraged by Pastor John’s address last night. He’s one of the few brothers who really caught the deep down vision that I had when I wrote Free at Last. My purpose ultimately was to discuss how God is at work through history and culture in general, and I used the African American experience as my case study. He caught that and I appreciate that, brother, I appreciate that. It never ceases to amaze me how interwoven we are. The very first letter I got after the book came out was from a guy in New Zealand and he said how it had helped him and I was just flabbergasted because I was just writing the book for some of the boys in the hood. I wasn’t thinking about New Zealand.

It turned out after I met him and talked to him for a while, that in his society there were the dynamics between the English and the Maoris, which are the Aborigines of New Zealand, and they were exactly along the same lines. They had the same dynamics as the black-white dynamics and that’s when my eyes began to open. I began to realize that all of the people groups that are represented right here, no matter how we define these people groups, are significant to God. And what God does through us, both individually and collectively has global significance.

So as you read Free at Last, yeah, I’m speaking to black folks, but intentionally I’m asking others to listen in and learn because you see, when I studied at Westminster, I read a whole lot of theologians who were speaking to white folks, but I got a lot of good stuff out of it. It ain’t bad just because it’s European, which convinced me that we all have gifts, you see, as we see not only as individuals, but even as people groups, as cultures.

God not only deals with individuals, but he deals with cultures and people groups and nations and every one of us, every one of the people groups represented on the earth have a unique contribution to make, at least one, to the body of Christ. So Brother John, you asked last night, as you were trying to wrestle with this idea of the sovereignty of God and the soul dynamic, and how do you link those two, you said something to this effect: “Would anyone help me?” And I want to go on record saying, you can count on me.

The Roots of the Soul Dynamic

Now, the roots of the soul dynamic are global. The roots of the soul dynamic are global. Now, what I’m going to do for you this morning is I’m going to try to bring you from way back up to the present and tonight let’s go from the present and let’s look at some future possibilities of the soul dynamic.

The roots of the soul dynamic are global in Paul’s address to the people of Lystra, remember he was trying to tell them to turn away from idols and he says in Acts 14:15, “We are bringing you the good news, telling you you to turn away from these worthless things to the living God who made heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them.” Now, here’s where it gets deep:

In the past he let the nations go their own way, yet he has not left himself without testimony (Acts 14:16).

That struck me because I realized evangelicalism may not have been present, but the testimony of God was there and I began a great journey in discovering what their testimony was. When you go to a people and God tells us to go to all the nations, he tells us to come to all the nations. Why? Because he’s already there on the part of his testimony. Now, not everything that the nations do is right, we know that, but God has left something there.

In Acts 17:26–28, as Paul addresses the Athenians, he says something to this effect: “From one man, God made every nation that they should inhabit the whole earth and he is determined and set the times for them, the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out and find him, though he is not far from any of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.” It’s a remarkable quotation he brings from a man named Epimenides — “In him we live and move and have our being.” He was a Cretan, who had nothing to do with Israel or anything and yet still God through him spoke and Paul later on and Titus calls this man a prophet.

Now Robert Brow, in his book Religion: Origins and Ideas, he points out along these same lines that at one time the whole world was dominated by people who worshiped the true and living God, whether it be in ancient China, or ancient India, or Greece, or Persia, or wherever. People all over the world worshiped the one true God and this is true in Africa.

If we’re going to understand the emergence of the soul dynamic, we have to go way back. And way back in those days, say 2000 BC, maybe 3000 BC, everybody approached God through sacrifice, and the sacrifices were usually for things like thanksgiving, fellowship, repentance, and consecration. As people began to settle in cities and become less nomadic, towns developed, career specialization set in, and as a result, you begin to have different kinds of folks. You had warriors and you had nobles and you had priests and the priesthood developed.

Then eventually the priesthood started to degenerate. Why? Because the concept of works-righteousness began to come in. Priests who were perceived as having the right stuff began to dominate and become more powerful. So a priest who could offer the right kind of sacrifice, the magic formula to assure you victory, he’d come to a general and say, “I can offer you a sacrifice that’ll guarantee you victory. I want 20,000 dollars,” and the general says, “No way, I’m not going to pay that money.” He says, “Okay, I’ll go to your enemy and offer it to him. Oh, okay, you’ll give me 20,000?” He still goes to the enemy and he says, “I want $30.” You see what I’m saying? And eventually this thing began to get worse and worse and worse and worse, and eventually the priests gained control over society. I guess I came up with a term for that: preach-craft.

Developing Tendencies

Now, there were some general tendencies as this thing began to develop among the Samedic people, these rival priesthoods were determined by tribes, and thus God became reduced to a tribal deity. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Among East Asian people in the ancient Greeks, these rival priesthoods made gods out of the many names of God and thus polytheism developed and these gods began to lust and fight one another and the priests began to imitate their behavior and they became decadent. It happened among the Chinese priests, the Indian Brahmans, the Persian Magi, and the Canaanite priests.

Now among Africans, the priesthoods began to develop mediators that they put up between themselves and God, and these sub-deities became a bureaucracy of gods to shield themselves from the wrath of God. You see a manifestation of that in Egypt under the ministry of Moses. The Egyptians had all these gods up here trying to shield themselves from God — the god of the Nile, the god of the flies, the god of the frogs — and every time God hit them with the plague, he knocked off one of those gods. In the final analysis, the Egyptians were faced with God and they didn’t know what to do about it. They tried to appease God by giving all their stocks and bonds, their Enron stocks and keys to their Lexuses and all that rest of that to the Israelites. And in time these gods were reduced to ritualistic systems and this is where you begin to have magic. The ethics of the priest degenerated.

Degenerating Priesthood

Now, what happened and why am I sharing all this? Because I’m trying to help you to understand that the emergence of the soul dynamic goes way back. A great revolt broke out in the 6th century BC where people overthrew the power of the priest. They tried to in Greece, they came up with the sophists and the rest of these guys. In Persia, Zarathushtra led the revolt. In China, the revolt led to Confucianism and Taoism. In India it led to Jainism and Buddhism and a few other things.

Among the Africans and the Semites, the priests never gained a choke hold over society as it did in other places, so as a result, the priesthood continued to degenerate. The theology became more bizarre. Fertility deities and infant human sacrifices came up and the priesthoods developed, especially in Africa, to animism where spirituality is seen behind everything and eventually the bureaucracy of gods was augmented by a bureaucracy of evil spirits. This is where you have witchcraft. The sacrifices were directed then towards appeasing the evil spirits and not towards earning the favor of the gods. In spite of all this confusion, yet the memory of God was still there among the Africans. The memory of God was still there.

Unlike the Europeans who developed a sacred versus secular scheme, which came from Plato, the African religions gave us a sacred versus profane scheme. You see, there’s a difference. Even among African-Americans, only recently we started thinking about secular and sacred. We always thought about profane and sacred. It was always that everything that had something to do with God, and this had a significant effect on the development of African American theology and the soul dynamic.

Well, as you know from your biblical history throughout scripture, Africans played some pretty important parts. Remember Ebed-Melech, the Cushite who rescued Jeremiah from an assassination attempt? Do you remember that? It’s an African brother in Jeremiah 38. The coming of the gospel saw Africa become a very fertile ground among the God-fearing Jews, from every nation under heaven, on the day of bin cost, there were some Africans. Simon of Cyrene, an African, was picked to carry the cross of Christ. And of course in the Book of Acts when they scattered as a result of the persecution, some went to Antioch and they started telling the gospel to the Jews only, and I’ve often wondered how could they tell a Jew from a non-Jew because everybody had about the same complexion? Well, I guess he said, “Hey, let me tell you about this gospel of Jesus. Oh, wait a minute, let me check you out here. Come on, let’s go over here to the corner.”

But you see in those facets in Acts 11 where some men from Cyprus and Cyrene came to Antioch and began to proclaim the message to the Gentiles also. The church in Africa grew in leaps and bounds I think because in a lot of ways as the gospel spread, people began to realize, “Hey, I remember I heard about God a long time ago.” I can tell you tribe after tribe after tribe that had these faint memories.

I don’t know if you realize this, but many of our great church fathers were Africans: Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, and Athanasius. Where would we be without them? And I hear a whole lot of talk about reformed theology. Calvinism. Where did Calvin steal a whole lot of his stuff from? Augustine. But of course, unfortunately the church in Africa became preoccupied with trivia, and as a result, the Muslim conquest came, and with the Muslim conquest came slavery. It never ceases to amaze me why so many African-Americans embrace Islam saying it’s the religion of the black man, when it was the Muslims who enslaved us in the first place and it was the Muslims who sold us to the European slave traders.

Well, the European slave trade comes along, and of course these Muslim slavers then began to sell to the Europeans, and as a result of the discovery of the New World demanded tremendous cheap labor and the slave trade exploded.

The Early African American Experience

So here we come to the earlier African American experience. Now tonight I’m going to talk later on about what is this whole issue of identity that we look for? And as I said, all of us can learn from this. Because as God has worked through this history, there are lessons that we can all learn and there are lessons for the church at large.

Contrary to popular belief, slave masters did not want their slaves exposed to Christianity because they had too many dangerous ideas in it, like, “We are created in the image of God,” and, “God has called us to freedom,” and things like that. Yet the slaves were able to pick up bits and pieces, bits and pieces of biblical teaching, and they were turned on by it.

If you really want to understand how this thing develops and how the soul dynamic came to be, then we’ve got to see how theology develops among the people. How does theology emerge among the people? I’m defining theology here that’s applying God’s word in every area of life. Well, theology requires two things. It requires a life situation and it requires biblical truth. You can’t have theology without those two. And it’s true among African Americans, there was a life situation we were in and we had biblical truth. Now of course, the early slaves were not allowed to read and therefore were denied access to the Bible. That didn’t mean that we didn’t have biblical truth because we had other ways of doing it.

I used to think it was the height of ignorance when I used to go to preach in a traditional church and say, “Open your Bibles 2 Corinthians 2:5,” and no pages would flip. I would think, “What’s wrong with this?” But I began to realize, “Wait a minute, these folks had the word of God in a different form,” and we’ll talk about that. What we developed was an oral tradition and without understanding that oral tradition, you cannot understand the soul dynamic, and we’ll talk more about that.

When you have an interaction between biblical truth and your life situation, the result of that is what the theologians called praxis. What do I mean by that? I mean putting it into reality according to our life theme. What’s going on in your life? What’s happening? And you’re trying to put this stuff into reality according to your life theme. Now this is all going to make sense in a minute, but you can’t communicate that too well. So what do you need to communicate it? You need a biblical paradigm. In other words, you need some basic pattern that connects with your life situation. If you’re going to have a theology that speaks to you at all, you have to understand that as this theology speaks to you, then someone in the Bible has already gone through what you’re going through. I’ll quote a piece of the oral tradition, “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? Well, I know he’ll deliver me.”

You get me? It’s a biblical paradigm. So when you have praxis and a biblical paradigm, what you have emerging is theology. So there is an African American theology. There is a European theology. As a matter of fact, I was at Westminster just last week teaching a course on the history of the African American church, and I mentioned this concept of African American theology and one of my students said, “Wait a minute, why can’t we just have theology?” I said, “Is that what you have?” He said, “Yeah, yeah, we just study theology.” And I had checked out two books from the library and one of them said, “An introduction to Scottish theology,” and he said, “Oh okay, I see your point.”

Cultural Theology

When the Westminster Confession was put together, why wasn’t that good for the whole church? Why did they have to come up with a Belgian Confession? Because the issues were different. The life themes were a little different. There’s no theology that covers the whole nine yards. It always asks questions. It amazes me when I hear people come to tell me, “Do you believe in the five points of Calvinism?”

The last time I read Calvin and I read those five points, I thought, “That certainly isn’t Calvinism.” That’s where Calvinism disagrees with Arminianism. Okay, I’ll buy that. I was sharing around the dinner table last night with the speakers and sometimes we think we have something going, right? And maybe we do have something going, but this whole Calvinism-Arminiansm debate happened in India in the 3rd century between those who believed in cat grace and those who believed in monkey grace. What on earth is that?

It had all to do with how God’s grace works. How does God keep us? Does he carry us like a mother monkey carries her young when the baby monkeys hang onto the stomach and if they let go they fall. Is that the way it is? Or does God carry us like a mother cat carrying the baby by the scruff of the neck and no matter what is going on. Praise God for cat grace. But they had that debate way back in the 3rd century. You see what I’m saying? And all my time at Westminster, they never taught me that. Now I appreciate my education at Westminster, but hey, I used to have some of my professors talk about theology proper. So I wrote a paper called “Theology Improper.”

Well, you see, all theology is historically and culturally determined. Because you see my situation always gives me new questions to go to God about. My theology of 1970 is not adequate to carry me in 2002, I have to do it all over again. The Bible tells us to do theology, doesn’t it?

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15).

Dealing with Core Issues

Well, so what began to happen in our experience, we had this theology begin to develop and it was an oral theology, an oral theology. It was carried by the oral tradition. We were not allowed access to literature and if you really want to understand African American theology, at least historic African American theology, understand the oral tradition. The oral tradition survives even to this day. Now tonight I’m going to show you a little slideshow that illustrates something about the oral tradition and just stay tuned for that.

Now here’s another point. One of the reasons why the soul dynamic had such a profound effect on African Americans was because it addressed core issues. And when I talk about core issues, I’m talking about life-defining and life-controlling issues, and we don’t understand core issues unless we understand all three types of core issues. And understand this: One of the reasons why I think we have gotten so scared about all this diversity stuff is because we are afraid that our theology isn’t going to work. And the fear is well-founded because our theology, our evangelical theology, is inadequate. I didn’t say it was wrong, I said it is inadequate, and I’ll show you later on what I mean by that. It is inadequate.

Why don’t I like to go down to the hood and talk to the brothers? Because I have nothing to say to them. I don’t understand their core issues. Now, when we talk about core issues, there are basically three types of core issues that I’ve been able to identify. Remember how I’m defining core issues. I’m talking about life-controlling and life-defining issues. There are three types of core issues. One, there are personal core issues and all of us have those. Those are pretty universal aren’t they? I don’t care who you are — loneliness, anxiety, fear, stuff like that, they tend to be unchanging and universal. If you go all over to Tasmania and you talk to somebody about personal issues they’re going to talk about the same stuff. Everybody has the same ones. I think that’s what links us all together, isn’t it? We all have issues, don’t we? If I was to ask for a survey of what those issues were in particular, I think I’d get about three of them that would make the list for everybody. But let’s not go there.

Then there are what I call social core issues, and these are also universal, but these are collective, stuff like education, health and all those kinds of things. These are also universal, but they vary according to the historical and cultural situation of a particular people group. So family issues for a family in the middle of the hood will have a different manifestation than family issues for someone who lives in Beverly Hills. Got it? But it’ll be a family issue.

And then finally, we come to cultural core issues and this is where it gets kind of deep. These are directly related to particular situations and they tend to be unique to every people group.

Now, our problems, I think, as we go into this, trying to make these linkups and trying to do a reconciliation and all the rest of this kind of stuff, is that we do not deal with all three types of core issues. If we do deal with core issues, we almost exclusively deal with personal ones. That’s easy. Everybody has the same ones. And what has happened, I think, in our theology, in our inadequate theology, we have taken the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the power of God unto salvation and we have imprisoned it in a triangular prison. The names of the walls are “I, me, and my.” Listen to our music. It’s all “I, me, my” stuff. Read the song sometimes. Yeah, there’s some of that. There’s a whole lot of other stuff in there too.

I’ve always been amazed as I’ve looked at other societies and say that would be comparable to ours and why these societies didn’t quite make it. Now I realize the slave thing and all that, but let’s take America and Brazil, let’s take those two societies. They both had a history of slavery, so we can cancel that out. What made the difference? What made the difference were Christians who really had a broad understanding of the Great Commission who began to put together institutions and a whole lot of other things to transform society, whereas in Brazil, they didn’t have that because they didn’t have an adequate theology.

Interlocking Issues

Now, these three types of core issues are not mutually exclusive. They have an interlocking relationship. So in some cases you’ll see some issues would have both. Now here’s the problem. We have only dealt with personal core issues; we have not dealt with social core issues. Ever since the battle of the Bible at the beginning of the 20th century, we as Bible believing Christians, have abandoned that whole area because we didn’t want to be like the liberals. Oh, by the way, you know who won the battle of the Bible? No one did. We both lost.

Well, in the last part of the 20th century, some evangelicals began to come together and say, “Hey, we got to deal with some of these issues out here,” and we began to come up with things like the Christian Community Development Association and other things and we began to discover the social core issues. Praise God for that. And we need to continue to do that. But we wonder why aren’t we getting two of the brothers in the hood? You name the urban ministry and you’ll find this dominated, in terms of the people who benefit from it, by women.

Why do the brothers go out and hear Louis Farrakhan still? Why are they not seeing the point? Can I suggest something? Women and men have the same personal core issues. Well, when it comes to these others, women tend to have a higher proportion of social core issues and men tend to have a higher proportion of cultural core issues.

Cultural Core Issues

Let’s talk about those cultural core issues. The cultural core issues are particularly related to a particular people group. So when I come to talk about African American cultural core issues, they tend to be unique among African Americans and if I get that specific, somewhere in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to offend my white brethren. I don’t want to bring that up,” and so I won’t do it. I won’t deal with it. Look, brothers and sisters, we’ve got to deal with all three. If we love one another, which we should be doing, then we should understand that there’s a difference between strategy and fellowship.

Now let’s say we’re riding in a car together and there’s a Klan rally over there. I’m with a white brother and we decide those people need to hear the gospel. I say, “Hey brother, you go on over here and talk to them. I’ll stay back here and pray.” And then we pass a nation of Islam, mosque number five. Okay, I’m the point man there. Do you see what I’m saying? We shouldn’t be offended because sometimes we deal with particular culturally-related issues, and I think that’s one of the things that we have to watch out for in the name of reconciliation. You see, reconciliation is a wonderful thing and I’m all for it. The Bible teaches it. But we can become so preoccupied with the dynamics of reconciliation that we never get around to doing ministry.

Southern Antebellum Theology

So what began to happen in the African-American context as this theology began to emerge? Well let’s look at southern antebellum theology. Let’s look at what happened among African Americans. Now remember what I talked about as theology emerges, what do you have? The interaction between the and the biblical truth and your life situation produces what? Praxis. But then to make it understandable, it’s got to be couched in what? A biblical paradigm. And when you have those two things, you have theology.

What happened in the south? Well, what happened in the south was that the slaves began to contemplate their situation and wonder, “What in the world is happening? What’s it all about?” So in the South, they developed a theology of suffering. That was the praxis. One song says:

I’ve been ‘buked and I’ve been scorned. I’ve been talked about sho’s you born

See, the oral tradition still survives, right? Let me start another one and we’ll see who knows the oral tradition. All right, here’s one:

He picked me up He turned me around He placed my feet on solid ground

That’s part of the oral tradition. You see, it survives. And that’s a statement of sovereign grace by the way. You know, cat grace? This stuff make a little sense to you? In the south, the slaves developed a theology of suffering. In Reformation Europe, especially during the time of the missionaries, there was the theology of triumph that came out of that — onward Christian soldiers marching us to war with the cross of Jesus going on before. Now slaves wouldn’t have come up with that if that wasn’t our situation.

One song says, “You talk about me all you please, and I’ll talk about you on my knees.” That’s a theology of suffering. But what do they couch it in? They couch it in the paradigm of the Exodus.

Go down Moses Way down in Egypt land Tell old Pharaoh To let my people go!

Now you know they weren’t talking about some Egyptian. You got me?

Deep river, my home is over Jordan. Deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground.

It’s a theology of suffering. If we’re going to understand the soul dynamic, we’ve got to understand it is an expression of the theology of suffering, it comes out of the theology of suffering that we developed. Well, remember I talked about cultural core issues? What were the cultural core issues of African Americans in the South? They were survival and they were issues of refuge. You come to a traditional African American church and you will see that the church is considered to be the ark of safety. It’s the place where you get away from the troubles of the world.

Down on the plantation the slave masters thought that the slaves were being pacified by Christianity — as long as they stayed in church, he wouldn’t bother them to pick the cotton. Now you put yourself in the slave’s place. What would you rather do? Sit up in church and have church? Or would rather go out and pick that cotton that you’re not getting paid for? I was talking to a white couple the other day. The wife said, “Well, we decided to go to a black church this Sunday. We knew the service started at 11 a.m., so I put a roast in the oven.” You know what happened to the roast, don’t you?

Resisting Oppression

The third great cultural core issue that this theology of suffering addressed was the issue of resistance to oppression. Those are very important things. We resisted a lot of times by singing. When the master would be kind of mean and all that kind of stuff, and we knew he went to church. Sometimes we’d have to drive him to church and we’d be singing songs like, “Everybody talkin’ ‘bout Heaven ain’t goin’ there” and the masters didn’t know we were singing about him.

Now, what do I mean by oppression? Again, the theology that whether it be evangelical or Reformed or however we want to define it, has had a tendency not to deal with the issue of oppression. Now, doesn’t the Bible deal with the issue of oppression? Of course it does. So what is oppression? What is ungodliness? Ungodliness is when I sin and suffer my own consequences. Oppression happens when I sin and try to force somebody else to suffer the consequences. Or it’s when I try to impose my sin on someone else. So there’s the resistance to oppression.

One of the things that I have found helpful that a lot of folks have asked me to do over and over again, and I wasn’t planning on doing it this time, is to understand a biblical view of unrighteousness. Now, if we’re going to understand the soul dynamic and what it taught us, we talk about this issue of unrighteousness and unrighteousness, biblically speaking, has four dimensions to it. I believe that even in the soul dynamic, even in African-American theology, we begin to understand some of these kinds of things.

We talk about the problem of unrighteousness, and of course unrighteousness is the opposite of righteousness. Righteousness is a relational or a covenantal term. It means what? Simply doing right by the other party in the covenant. That’s pretty simple. God always does right by us, right? Therefore we must what? Do right by him. “God has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you?” (Micah 6:8). And then there’s unrighteousness of course. Unrighteousness is simply a failure to do right by the other party in the covenant. It’s very simple.

Now as I’ve looked at the oral tradition, and as I’ve understood the soul dynamic, I began to understand that the slaves — even though they wouldn’t have referred to it this way — seem to refer to four dimensions of unrighteousness, that is ungodliness and we’ve already talked about that. When a person suffers his own consequences. Then there is oppression, remember? Then there is the individual dimension that’s this face-to-face intentional sin. That’s all we think about sometimes.

But then there is what has come to be called the institutional dimension, that is, sin that has woven into the fabric and social structures so much so that one does not have to consciously do it to have it done. I do not have to be prejudiced against somebody. All I have to do is go along with the system that discriminates and the system does it for me.

Now, if we’re going to be Christians and the body of Christ, it seems to me, that what we must be in the name of Jesus are saboteurs to destroy those structures. What do you think the strongholds are that the apostle Paul is talking about? The problem is sometimes that some of us are beneficiaries of the structures as they exist and others of us are not benefited very much. And this is human nature. This has nothing to do with color or race. This is the universal, fallen human condition.

I use this illustration all the time. The most conservative person in the game of King of the Mountain is the king. Once he gets on top of mind he says, “Okay, okay, let’s have tranquility, harmony.” This is just fallen humanity, and one of the reasons why we haven’t recognized some of these things is that those of us in the dominant culture, however you want to define that, the system gives its best to those in the dominant culture. It’s hard to see the evils in a system that delivers the goods so well. It’s hard to see it. That’s why we need to fellowship with one another. That’s why we need to listen to one another.

Digging Deeper into Oppression

Well, if there are four dimensions to unrighteousness, and there are four manifestations — ungodliness, oppression, individual, institutional — do you know what our problem has been? First of all, we are on theological welfare. We are on welfare to either somebody else in some other culture or we are on welfare to history. The Westminster Confession of Faith is one of the finest theological documents out there, but it ain’t dealing with a lot of today’s issues. You show me a statement in the Westminster Confession that talks about crack cocaine.

The problem that we have had is that we have tended the atrophy in three of those things, so therefore, what has happened is that we have attended only to limit our understanding of unrighteousness to the upper-left hand quadrant, individual ungodliness, and we left the other three to guys like Lewis Farrakhan, Elijah Muhammad, Jesse Jackson, and whoever else you might think of. No wonder people think we’re irrelevant, but the slaves understood all four of those pains. They understood all four of those pains.

Let’s look at this resistance and this issue of resistance. First of all, there are those who would tell you that God is on the side of the oppressed, and some might think that that’s not such a great statement, but my ancestors were told that God is on the side of the oppressors. And the great question that many African Americans had was, “God, why do you hate us so?” This thing about the Ham myth and all that, you know all that stuff, right? Oh, by the way, the Ham myth was a Muslim myth. It was put together by Muslims. You didn’t know that, did you?

Understand what I’m saying now. Don’t go out here quoting me with some weird stuff here. Okay? Understand what I’m saying. We take a relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. The oppressed are always more righteous than the oppressor within the bonds of that relationship. Do you get it? Why? Because we know there’s going to be resistance. It is more righteous to resist oppression than it is to inflict it. It is more righteous to resist oppression than it is to give into it. Understand that.

Now, here’s where the prophetic edge of the gospel comes in. Some of our black leaders of the late 1960s did us a great service in helping us to understand those truths because you see, somehow we didn’t see it in the Bible. We had a hermeneutical problem. We were just like those disciples on the way to Emmaus. They had a hermeneutical problem so much so that they didn’t even recognize Jesus. So we can thank God for some of those guys to tell us all about that, but here’s where they messed up. You see, that righteousness differential — the oppressed more righteous than the oppressor — is a functional righteousness, a relative righteousness, but the brothers of the 1960s somehow got it into their heads that it was an ontological righteousness or an inherent righteousness. And when you start getting into that kind of thinking and the oppression is lifted and you start doing the same stuff, you can’t recognize it.

It’s no wonder the black consciousness movement fell apart. It could have had a great power if it had had an adequate theological base, and I think back on the civil rights movement, and again the soul dynamic. Dr. King took this theology of suffering that emerged in the South and used it as a powerful and potent weapon against the oppression of segregation, but of course, up North they didn’t have it. So that’s why it fell apart.

See, we’re all sinners. You reverse the roles, you put the white folks on the bottom, put the black folks on the top, it’ll look different because we have a different style, but it’s going to be the same old song. We’re all fallen, you see? And we need to begin to recognize that we’re in this thing together.

Harmony with Oppressors

Now, sometimes you might have what I call harmony between the oppressed and the oppressor, so they’re all on the same page, but you see, that’s the way it was in the garden. After Adam and Eve rebelled against God, there was this harmony between Satan and humans, even though Satan had humans under the yolk of slavery, but God said, “Hey, I’m going to break that up, and make it so y’all don’t get along. So I will put enmity between you and the women, between your seed and her seed,” and God has guaranteed that there will never be harmony between the oppressed and the oppressor.

So let me share this with you. Understand what I’m saying here. When we talk about sin, do I have sin in my life? Yes, you bet your bippy I do, right? Now, if we’re going to talk about sin though, we got to see sin from two different perspectives. Yes, I have sin in my life. Yes, it’s true that sin comes from the human heart. Sin is the fruit of an unrighteous heart, is that right? Is that what Jeremiah says? The heart is deceitful, right? Above all things, who can understand it? Jesus says it. He said, “It’s not what goes into you that makes you defiled, it’s what comes out of you. Out of the heart comes all this mess.”

But you see, here’s something that we’ve got to understand if we’re going to work on this thing. Not all the sin in my life comes from my own heart. Some of it does and the sin that comes from my own heart is what I’m going to call “indigenous sin.” Again, this is something that the soul dynamic has given us. The sin that’s in my life that comes from my own heart is indigenous sin, but that doesn’t account for all the sin that’s in my life. You see, when people are oppressed, their own indigenous sin does not account for it all. Some sin is imposed upon them and this imposed sin can be called “alien sin.”

Every one of us knows these realities. All of us who are pastors know this reality. How many times have you had to counsel a young lady who was molested when she was six years old, and now she is 36 and she has carried the guilt of that for all these years. It was not her guilt. That was something that some pervert did to her. That’s alien sin. And how do you deal with that? How do you deal with that? How did Jesus deal with that?

Test Cases for the Effects of Sin

Let’s say we can codify a sin. Let’s say we can break it down on the units. That might shed some light. All right? So let’s look at two cases of how people are affected by sin. Now, here are two people. Here is a person from a privileged background, and here is a person from a disadvantaged background. And we’ve breaking sin down into units now, so we see the person from the privileged background has 10 units of sin in his life and the person from the underprivileged background or the disadvantaged background has 20 units of sin in his life. So in other words, the brother from the hood walks by the fruit stand and he takes an apple, but the brother from the burbs doesn’t take the apple.

What’s going on? Which one of these is more of a sinner? Well, if you were going to use your numbering system, you’d say the guy from the disadvantaged background is more of a sinner, but that’s not true because what do we have here? We have to understand that yes, while the brother from the disadvantaged background has his 10 units of indigenous sin, he also has 10 units of alien sin that have been imposed upon him by his oppression. Do you get it? So in terms of the heart stuff, they’re both the same. Does that make sense?

So how do we deal with that? Well, how did Jesus deal with it? Well, you see, they both have the same indigenous sin, but as I said, the person from the disadvantaged background has some other stuff that’s been heaped upon him. So neither one is a greater sinner than the other.

Themes of the Gospel

Now, let’s look at the gospel here. The biblical gospel embodies several themes. When you look at the biblical gospel, it embodies several themes. There is the theme of repentance. We understand that, right? There is the theme of liberation. That’s a biblical theme, isn’t it? There is the theme of forgiveness, reconciliation, peace with God, and wholeness. These are themes of the biblical gospel. These are perspectives on the biblical gospel. Then there is healing and rest from burdens. Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are tired and weary, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Now, let’s focus on just a couple of these things.

First of all, let’s focus on the issue of repentance and let’s look at the theme of liberation or freedom and of course, there are some scriptures that deal with that. Let’s take those two things. How then do we address the issue of indigenous sin?

Well, when proclaiming the gospel to the oppressed, when we’re proclaiming the gospel with the people who are really downtrodden, it is essential we make this distinction. Why? Because you see, what has happened is if we don’t make the distinction between indigenous sin and alien sin, and we say, “You just got to repent from it all,” we may miss them. I go back to the 36 year old who was molested when she was six years old, you got to tell her to repent from being molested, what does she have to do? She’s got her own sin first. You got it? Then she repents. She never gets around to dealing with the issues that she’s got. All right?

But you see, when we talk about the issue of alien sin, we need to understand that the appropriate gospel message for alien sin is one of liberation and the appropriate gospel basis for indigenous sin is one of repentance. You got me? The problem I have with liberation theology is that it is not radical enough.

Now, that’s the key. Even Jesus gives us an understanding of that. The woman caught in the very active adultery, there it is. She’s caught in the act and of course, what does the Bible say? You take both of them and you stone him to death, but it’s only the woman, right? Obviously this is a setup. So what he does is right on the ground and all these guys leave, right? He liberates her from that. He doesn’t condemn her for that. It was a setup. But now she isn’t pure as a driven snow either, is she? He acknowledged that she had indigenous sin because what did he say? He said, “Go and leave your life of sin. Go and sin no more.” You got it? Even Jesus did that. And if we’re going to do this thing right, if we’re going to really break down some of these walls, then we’re going to need to communicate the gospel in a much broader sense.

Removing the Veil of Alien Sin

You see, when a person is oppressed, they tend to focus and they tend to define all their problems in terms of their oppression. That’s biblical. Nehemiah had a good federal job. It’s a GS-13. He was living large, right? He had a high rise condo with the wide rack, the whole nine yards, the plasma widescreen TV with a DVD player, all that stuff. All right? And he’s concerned about the boys in the hood. So he asked his brother, “Yo holmes, what’s up?” Rough translation. But I studied Hebrew at Westminster, so they made me a dangerous person with Hebrew. So he finds out that things ain’t so hot. What’s going on back home? Well, how does Hananiah describe it? The walls are broken down and the gates are burned with fire and the people are in great distress.

How is he defining their problem in terms of their oppression? It was Sanballat and Tobiah, Uncle Tom Jew, who kept him oppressed. If you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, you discover that Uncle Tom was not an Uncle Tom. But you understand what I mean. But they define their problem in terms of their oppression. So Nehemiah comes back and you know the story. He listens to them, he understands how they perceive their problem, and he begins to empower them to overcome this oppression. He tells them all about how God raised them up when the folks don’t say anything and then he says, “I got the papers from the king.” They say, “Okay, now let’s build the wall.” And they start building the wall and pretty soon they discover what their real indigenous problem was.

It was Jew-on-Jew exploitation. That’s what the problem was. He got to the heart of the problem. If we’re going to get through to an oppressed people, you’ve got to liberate them from their alien sin because as long as they resist that oppression, as long as they focus on their resistance, their own sin is driven beneath the surface and they never get to it. So that’s why we must liberate the oppressed, so they can discover that they’re sinners. That’s why God got the Hebrews out of Egypt. He said, “Let my people go so they can worship me.” They got out of there thinking that they were all right, “Yeah, we’re free now.” And they discovered that they really weren’t all that free were they? We’re all sinners, y’all.

Well, you see, if we understand this thing right, we understand that the gospel of Jesus Christ is a little more universal than we thought, it’s a little more multifaceted than we thought. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. If the soul dynamic has taught us anything, it has taught us that the last word on theology has not been written.

If you read Free at Last, you discover that in the African American context, sin always destroys our humanity, doesn’t it? But thanks be to God that he gave us Genesis 3:15, which guaranteed that our humanity would not be completely destroyed. When people are oppressed, they are driven inward to the raw image of God that the oppression is trying to destroy, and the cultural expressions that come out from those kinds of depths are a very penetrating culture. That’s what I call the cultural dynamic. And when the slaves rediscovered the truths about God, they picked up these bits and pieces and they’ve developed this oral tradition as I talked about, which is the theological dynamic and when these two things came together, they formed the soul dynamic and it had a profoundly powerful effect on the slaves, and it exists even to this very day.

Knowing the Soul Dynamic

Now, I might say that the sole dynamic is beginning to disintegrate a little bit because of neglect, but one of the things that the slaves learn how to do. Remember we talked about Christianity and Christianity-ism. Christianity is a valid application of the word of God or of the gospel of Jesus Christ in a particular culture. Christianity-ism is an expression of the cultural paganisms in the language of Christianity. And the Christianity-ism that came out of the attempt to justify slavery biblically was imposed on the slaves and the slaves learned how to do double entendre communication. So we appeared to go along with the program, but in fact, we were saying something else and that exists to this very day.

Finally, I’ll close with this. The soul dynamic enabled us to address the three central themes that run throughout the African American experience. Are you starting to get the point here? We all can benefit from this. I don’t care who we are because this is part of the church of Jesus Christ.

There are three themes that run throughout the African American experience. One is resistance to oppression, we’ve already discussed that. The other is a quest for freedom. How do the slaves understand freedom? Today we talk about freedom in terms of autonomy. The slaves didn’t understand freedom that way. The slaves understood freedom in terms of being under the right authority in the right way. That old freedom song expresses it well:

Oh, freedom, Oh, freedom Oh freedom over me And before I’d be a slave I’d be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free Oh, freedom

It wasn’t autonomy. The slaves understood that the sovereignty of God had two functions to it. One was a freedom function, and the other was a manipulation function and they knew that the slave system was trying to force them under manipulation and they were saying, “That’s not it. We’re going towards freedom.” Freedom is rightly related to the sovereignty of God. In Psalm 2, you see the nations conspiring against God and raging against God and saying, “Let’s throw off our chains.” And all they can do, when we rebel against God, is remove ourselves from freedom and put ourselves under manipulation.

And the third great theme that you see the soul dynamic addressing throughout the ages is a quest for dignity. And we know the basis for human dignity is not in our skin color, though that’s part of it because we all know black is beautiful, right? We all know that. We’ve always known that. But you know, white is beautiful too. Amen. It’s all beautiful. But our real dignity rests on the fact that we are in the image of God. I would suggest to you that the soul dynamic has taught us this one thing, that the more theology deals with these themes, the more theology deals with the core issues of the people, the more prophetic the voice of the church will be.

So let us study to show ourselves approved. Let us see how God is at work in other people groups other than our own. Let us learn the principles of how God works by looking at how he dealt with one particular people group, namely the Israelites. And let us go on out there with this powerful weapon that God has given us and do some serious damage to the evil systems that are out there and the sin that grips people. Let us bring a gospel of liberation, empowerment, reconciliation, and restoration.