The End of White Christian America: A Conversation with E. J. Dionne and Robert P. Jones

91:25
Just two quick points.
One is I think there has been a tension
throughout American history between prophetic religion
and what you could call the alternative.
Liturgically, you could call it law-based.
And the African-American church has always
partaken of the prophetic.
And I’ve always found that you can–
if you’re talking about talking to a Christian,
you know which side they are on by whether they quote Micah,
Isaiah, and Amos or Leviticus.
And whether they–
[LAUGHTER]
–quote– whether they quote the social passages of the New
Testament or the conversion passages of the New Testament.
And I think you saw that in the fight over slavery.
You saw that over social justice issues
in the progressive era in the ’30s.
I mean, you saw it in the Civil Rights years.
I think that’s a deep tension that’s always running
through American religion.
100:21
that obviously, slave owners wanted their slaves
to be Christians, but that they were–
I remember reading this.
I haven’t seen evidence of it.
That they actually had Bibles printed up
for slaves, in which the Bible was printed,
but the Book of Exodus was left out.
Yeah.
Oh, OK.
I’ve heard that, yes.
I want to get that on display somewhere.
I’ve heard that, as well.
And what’s fascinating is how deeply important the book
of Exodus is in every African-American church,
and how central it is African-American preaching,
for obvious reasons.
I mean, “let my people go.”
But yes.
I’m going to try to remember where I have found this
because there were very–
the first slave owners tried to keep the slaves illiterate,
and actually didn’t want them reading the whole Bible
because the Bible is very dangerous.
And there was often a tradition of one slave, at least,
becoming literate.
And the original African-American churches
were in the woods, and they were–
and the slaves were very conscious of those parts
of scripture that pointed to the freedom.
And so I think, in some cases, they were limited Bibles.
But in a lot of cases, the effort
was to keep the slaves illiterate so
that they would only hear the parts,
say, of Saint Paul, that said slaves, obey your masters,
and that sort of thing.
Which was the part that influenced Billy Graham when
he spoke in Moscow— in Russia.
Spoke in Russia, yeah.
Thank you.

ABOUT THE NBN BECOME AN NBN HOST LAUNCH AN NBN PODCAST PITCH US YOUR NEW BOOK! PARTNER WITH THE NBN Arts & Letters Peoples & Places Politics & Society Religion & Faith Science & Tech Books Received DONALD BERRY Glory in Romans and the Unified Purpose of God in Redemptive History

In this program, we discuss Glory in Romans and the Unified Purpose of God in Redemptive History (Pickwick Publications, 2016), a revision of Donald Berry’s doctoral dissertation. With this publication, Berry fills in a gap in Pauline studies, setting forth the glory of God as central to Paul’s theology. Not only does his book cover a significant motif in the New Testament, but it also provides crucial insights into the Epistle to the Romans and to the field of biblical theology. Donald Berry is a pastor at Christian Fellowship in Columbia, Missouri. He holds a Ph.D. in New Testament from Amridge University in Montgomery, AL, and an M.Div. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Dying and Rising : Christ Means “Annointed” (Richard Rohr)

And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came to the sepulcher at the rising of the sun. —Mark 16:1‑2

Continuing Cynthia Bourgeault’s reflections, drawn from her book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene:

[Mary Magdalene’s anointing of Jesus] provides a powerful ritual access point to Christianity’s own deepest transformative wisdom. To begin with, it makes it virtually impossible to experience the Paschal Mystery in any other way than as an act of redemptive love. When Mary Magdalene is returned to her traditional role as the anointer of Jesus, a very important symmetry is also restored. We see that Jesus’s passage through death is framed on either side by her parallel acts of anointing. At Bethany she sends him forth to the cross wearing the unction of her love. And on Easter morning he awakens to that same fragrance of love as she arrives at the tomb with her spices and perfumes, expecting to anoint his body for death. He has been held in love throughout his entire passage.

As Bruce Chilton succinctly summarizes: “She connects his death and Resurrection.” [1] And she accomplishes this precisely by bracketing the entire experience in the parallel rituals of anointing. In so doing, Chilton adds, “Mary Magdalene established the place of anointing as the central ritual in Christianity, recollecting Jesus’s death and pointing forward to his resurrection.”

But what is it that she is actually pointing forward to? What is this Paschal journey from a wisdom standpoint? In the common understanding, Christianity has tended to view the resurrection as Jesus’s triumph over physical death. But for Christians in the wisdom tradition (who include among their ranks the very earliest witnesses to the resurrection) its meaning lies in something far deeper than merely the resuscitation of a corpse. Jesus’s real purpose in this sacrifice was to wager his own life against his core conviction that love is stronger than death, and that the laying down of self which is the essence of this love leads not to death, but to life. . . . Thus, the real domain of the Paschal Mystery is not dying but dying-to-self. It serves as the archetype for all of our personal experiences of dying and rising to new life along the pathway of kenotic transformation, reminding us that it is not only possible but imperative to fall through fear into love because that is the only way we will ever truly know what it means to be alive.

Within the context of the resurrection, then, anointing becomes the ritual most closely associated with the passage from death of self to fullness of life, from egoic alienation to “union on a higher plane.” As such, it conveys the very essence of Christianity’s transformative wisdom.

And its gatekeeper is Mary Magdalene.