“He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5-8). If you grew up in a black Baptist church like I did, you probably heard this passage from the preacher as their sermon came to an electrifying and celebratory close.
Every Sunday, my pastor would preach and always find his way to Calvary to tell the ancient story of Christ’s crucifixion. In many “old-school” Baptist churches, you didn’t “preach” unless you went to the cross. It was a requirement.
During my early years in ministry, I would end every sermon by “going to the cross.” Eventually, though, I began to question many of the tenets instilled in me as a child.
You may have been there as well. Maybe you look to notable scholars, pastors, and theologians for their interpretation of why Christ went to the cross in the first place. Perhaps their answers did not remedy any of your fears and doubts.
For centuries, it has been the consensus that Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins. This school of thought is known as Penal Substitutionary Theory.
This framework suggests that Jesus was sent to earth to die on the cross to pay the price for humanity’s iniquities. His demise satisfied the demand for justice, resulting in God forgiving humanity for their sins.
The theory began with the idea that sin entered the world through Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. After this, society reeked of sin and unrighteousness so much that God would need to come to earth in human form to “pay the price” for human sin.
Instead of sacrificing an animal as instructed in Leviticus 16:7-10, God sent Jesus, God’s son, to die. All this is said to be because God’s love and justice are at war with each other: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).
Jesus died at thirty-three years old as a sacrifice for the shortcomings of humanity. Because of this, there is no longer a need for the sacrificial offering of whole and unblemished animals because Jesus is the perfect sacrifice.
Thus, we should be eternally grateful to God for the offering of his son, who died in our place so that we can live an abundant life. The blood of Christ defeats sin and makes a new life and a relationship with God possible.
Various viewpoints and theories have arisen over time, but the Penal Substitutionary Theory is considered “orthodox” within Christianity today.
In 1993, after centuries of Penal Substitutionary Theory being predominant, Dr. Delores Williams published her landmark work, “Sisters in the Wilderness,” which helped establish womanist theology. This publication draws on the biblical narrative of Hagar, the mother of Ishmael. Williams draws parallels between Hagar and the daily struggles of Black women. The book critiqued any theology, particularly “liberation” theologies, that ignored black women.
“Sisters in the Wilderness” created a framework to uplift and enhance black women and the entire black community.
Dr. Williams suggested that “Jesus represents the ultimate surrogate figure; he stands in the place of someone else: sinful humanity” (Williams 162). This suggests that Jesus and Hagar have something in common. They are both forced to bear something they never intended– coerced surrogacy.
Williams questions what that understanding of salvation has to say in the lives of black women. While traditional theologies of salvation assert that humans must rely on the coerced surrogacy of Christ, black women shouldn’t be obligated to accept this as a means of salvation.
A more faithful understanding is that “salvation is assured by Jesus’ life of resistance and by the survival strategies he used to help people survive the death of identity,” Williams writes.
She continues by highlighting Jesus’s agenda in Luke 4, where he speaks of healing the body, mind and soul of humanity. Notice that Jesus here never mentions dying on Calvary for “sins” as a part of his agenda for his mission. Instead, his agenda was to “show humans life – to show redemption through a perfect ministerial vision of righting relations between body (individual and community), mind (of humans and of tradition), and spirit.”
Williams’ ministerial vision is defined as “the reign of God.” Jesus came to demolish hierarchical powers and principalities that destroy human relationships.
He came not to destroy the world but to offer a better route to abundant life through the power of love. This resulted in the intervention of “human principalities and powers” to destroy Christ’s revolution by crucifixion.
How must Black women receive redemption? Certainly not through the shedding of blood. Williams says, “The womanist theologian must show that redemption of humans can’t have nothing to do with any kind of surrogate or substitution role Jesus was reputed to have played in a bloody actor supposedly game victory over sin and or evil.”
Another “controversial” claim made by Williams is that Jesus didn’t defeat sin through death on the cross. Instead, “Jesus conquers the sin of temptation in the wilderness by resistance–by resisting the temptation to value the material over the spiritual, by resisting death, by resisting the greedy urge of men’s monopolistic ownership.”
Jesus overcomes sin as he doesn’t succumb to evil forces tasked with defiling and dismantling humanity.
What this says to black women and black people as a whole is that God never intended them to suffer! God never intended them to be impoverished, discriminated against, abused or sexualized by their oppressors.
In Williams’ framework, “the cross is a reminder of how humans have tried throughout history to destroy visions of righting relationships that bring about transformation of tradition and transformation of social relations sanctioned by the status quo.” Humanity is “saved” through Jesus’ mission to introduce the ministerial vision during his life, not his death.
Additionally, “there is nothing divine in the blood of the cross…Jesus did not come to be a surrogate,” Williams wrote.
While this is a massive blow to our established understanding of the cross, Williams believes it is necessary to clear the air of the ideology that the suffering of black women was required to receive some sort of “greater good.”
Lastly, Dr. Williams encourages black people, especially black women, to remember the cross but not to glorify it. For to glorify the cross is “to glorify suffering and to render their exploitation sacred.”
To fetishize the cross is to fetishize one’s own suffering and oppression, which eventually leads to embracing what Dr. JoAnne Terrell calls a “hermeneutic of sacrifice.” Thus, it is fair enough to remember their heartaches, headaches, trials, and tribulations but not to fetishize and theologize them in hopes of some sort of the “greater good” that is to come “in the sweet by and by.”
Trauma will no longer be theologized and glorified. Abuse will no longer be a medal of honor. Sexual violence will no longer be worthy of rousing applause, only for the victim to be thrown into what Dr. Katie Cannon calls the “Epistemological Sea of Forgetfulness.”
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