Sublime

I first observed this faith as a child in the lives of black women and men of Bearden, Arkansas. They affirmed their dignity as human beings against great odds as they held on to faith in Jesus’ cross—the belief that his suffering and death was for their salvation. For them, salvation meant that

What was so profound about the Younger when Barth sat with him in 1915 was not that he used the word “God” but that he never wavered from thinking through every issue from the angle of the is. The Younger never wavered in his commitment that God is the one who speaks, who heals, who acts. Even in this world of immanence, God is God, because God is.

I knew that that response was not only humiliating and insulting but wrong. It revealed not only an insensitivity to black pain and suffering but also, and more importantly for my vocation as a theologian, a theological bankruptcy. The education of white theologians did not prepare them to deal with Watts, Detroit, and Newark. What was needed was a

protect

Derrida

themselves, and that they cannot demand protection from their persecutors.

the anhypostatic side claims that Jesus Christ is without flesh. He is fully God, eternally and forever the second person of the Trinity. If the enhypostatic union claims Jesus’s universal and complete bond with all humanity, then the anhypostatic side claims Jesus’s unique particularity.

My brother and I (aspiring young theologues at the time) often discussed the need to confront the white “Christians” of Bearden with the demands of the gospel by invading their Sunday worship service with our presence, making them declare publicly that all are not welcome in “God's” house. But the fear of bodily harm prevented us from carrying out