Imagery and Narrative: Reflections on Racism, the Flesh and the One New Man. by Michael Philliber
Imagery and Narrative
I had recently retired from 20 years
in the Air Force and became the stated supply (the regular student preacher) of
this small-town church. There he was, one of my elders in his late 70s, and he
was appalled that I, his minister, had purchased a Toyota. When I asked him
what was so wrong with having a Toyota, he replied; “It was made by the Japs!”
Needless to say I was startled by his comment, and so I stammered my way
through the question, “Why does that matter?” The response was just as shocking
as his statement. As he put it, he had grown up during World War II, and
recounted how the government propaganda in the news during the time and on
posters, hammered into him that the “Japs” were evil. And now there he was in
1999, some 54 years later, and he still couldn’t bring himself to purchase
anything Japanese. Similar stories could be recounted from World War I and the
way the imagery and narrative about the horrible “Huns” affected and infected social
perceptions of Germans.
Imagery and narrative were coupled
together and employed to speedily answer the “why” questions for both wars, and
to construct a ready resilience in the American population for the war-making
machinery. This is an important concept to keep in mind when trying to decipher
peoples’ responses to various ideas. It’s important to ask: How have diverse
media, agencies, governments, and movements merged together imagery and
narrative to pragmatically build consensus and results? A case in point might
be the word “racism”.
The term “racism” has been fused with
portrayals and plotlines of lynchings, burning crosses and bloodshed on the
silver screen, television, print, newscasts, textbooks, and other platforms.
There appear to me to be at least two results from this merger of imagery and
narrative; (1) it “others” racism, “Why, that’s what those other people do.”
And (2) when saying that racism is still alive in our country and churches, the
marriage of those images and accounts of lynchings and burning crosses burble
up and evoke strong reactions that spawn a deafening defensiveness. Add to
these two results the way certain groups use the expression to shut down
conversations or intimidate people who disagree with them and their particular
religious/social agendas, then you can begin to understand why resistance becomes
rampant. None of this is my sole imagination. Ta-Nehisi Coates observed the connection
between imagery and narrative back in 2008 when he wrote, “In some measure, the
narrowing of racism is an unfortunate relic of the civil rights movement, when
activists got mileage out of dehumanizing racists and portraying them as
ultra-violent Southern troglodytes. Whites may have been horrified by the fire
hoses and police dogs turned on children, but they could rest easy knowing that
neither they nor anyone they'd ever met would do such a thing.”1 Therefore, I would like to posit a different word and another approach.
Flesh
My suggestion is to place racism back
inside the biblical continuum of “flesh”. This is not to denude or deny the
term, or take away any of its importance. Rather, it is intended to give that
concept a location inside a different narrative, as part of an extensive
storyline that has a Christ-centered remedy. By doing this it will help to show
that racism, and its resolution, has been on God’s radar for a longer time than
any of us, or our forbearers, have been around. To make my case, I am going to
come at this subject from two slightly different angles.
Teamed Together
To begin with I will take us
somewhere else to gain an example. Christians normally affirm that according to
Scripture sexual aberrations are errant. And yet to pull one erotic anomaly out
of the biblical continuum and to obsess over it, preach against it every other
Sunday, and regularly demonstrate against it at State Capitols, creates an
unhealthy over-emphasis. That unhealthy over-emphasis ends up forming an
environment that feels hostile to those trying to tackle and tame their sensual
attractions. It also fosters the impression that the rest of us are okay (or think we're okay) because we don’t engage in “that sin”. Therefore, to keep peccadilloes in their
biblical context helps all of us to realize that when we point one finger at
someone else, there are three more pointing back at us.
For instance, when Paul lists sins he
often teams them together. In 1 Corinthians 5 the Apostle moves the Corinthian
church away from targeting sexual immorality by itself, and itemizes it along
with greed, idolatry, reviling, drunkenness, and swindling. He does this again
in the very next chapter, “Or do you not
know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be
deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men
who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor
revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians
6.9-10). Clearly, when we point one finger at someone else’s sin there are three
more pointing right back at us!
By following the Scriptural pattern
of keeping vices generally teamed together it helps save us from self-righteously
thinking we’re okay because we don’t practice “that sin”. It also enables our
churches to be redemptive, restorative fellowships for people who are
overwhelmed by their own weakness. With this in mind we can step on over to my
second thought.
Litany
The Scriptural category “flesh”
encompasses a whole range of immoralities, iniquities and injustices, to
include what we have come to call “racism”. Here’s how the apostle addresses
it: “Now the works of the flesh are
evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity,
strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy,
drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before,
that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Galatians
5.19-21). If we keep the storyline and emphasis of Galatians in mind, then we can
see how many of the different aspects of “racism” are mentioned in this litany
called “the works of the flesh”.
The issue that provoked Paul’s ire
and roused him to write this letter was that certain people who claimed Jesus
as Lord also demanded of everyone else either ethnic assimilation or racial
apartness. These Jewish disciples of the Messiah mandated that Gentile
followers of Jesus had to believe in Jesus plus become Jewish; and if they
would not then they were to be placed outside of “our” fellowship. One of the
results is that this assimilation-or-apartness shattered communion. No longer
were the Jewish disciples eating with the Gentile disciples; they were pulled
apart and the fault line was tribal, ethnic, and clannish (Galatians 2.11-14). And
so Paul declared that this segregating “conduct
was not in step with the truth of the gospel”! The remainder of the letter
was written to counteract this fault by exposing how harmful it is (5.19-21), and
by exhibiting the ways justification works out and works into our relationships
and churches, and turns tribalism on its head (3.26-29; 5.22-25).
Therefore the “works of the flesh” encompass a wide spectrum of sins and sinful
tendencies, many of which promote assimilation-or-apartness: enmity, strife,
fits of anger, dissensions, divisions, “and things like these.” By returning
racism to the range of actions listed under “the flesh” it does several things.
For starters, when we are tempted to point out other people’s prejudices, we can humbly
recognize that our own favorite sins are marching in lock-step with the other’s
bigotries. We come to perceive that the category "works of the flesh" is like a laundry basket filled with our soiled linen.
Further, by keeping “racism” inside
the works of the flesh, it is no longer narrowed down to a 20th and 21st
Century class struggle but is shown to be something every Christian throughout
the ages must address in themselves. We’re in this together, and we all need
God’s help with this issue together, since “in
Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were
baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there
is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in
Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs
according to promise” (Galatians 3.26-29).
Next, it moves us away from depending
on fashionable secular remedies, or modern-day pluralistic resolutions. By
keeping “racism” in the spectrum of “flesh” it reminds us that we’ve been here
before, thus one of the reasons Paul wrote Galatians, Ephesians, Romans, etc. And
if we’ve been here before, then we are not here alone. Over the last two
thousand years, there have been several moments where this sin has been properly
handled, and times when it has been mishandled, and we can learn from those
who have gone before us.
“Regarding the past, believers look with horror upon the sins of slavery and Jim Crow, and rightly condemn both institutions. But do they really think that many believers today would have avoided the cultural pressures that captured so much of the church at that time? Would most of today’s white Christians really have been among that small, persecuted minority in the antebellum American South who actively opposed slavery? (…) When today’s believers evaluate the sins of past generations, humility and empathy are always in good order, even as they speak the truth and hold to the standards of God’s Word. Christians might also consider what future generations will say about today’s church when believers look back at our cultural accommodations. All have sinned and Fallen short of the glory of God.”2Additionally, returning “racism” to the “works of the flesh” places our prejudices, and locates our congregations and denominations back into the rocky, rearing rodeo called “sanctification.” Here in this biblical framework of sanctification we find that “the work of God's free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole person (both individually and collectively) after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness” (Westminster Shorter Catechism 35) is still being applied to us by God. Since these racial biases are part of the works of the flesh, which God is amending through his Spirit’s work, we become freed from faddish, state-of-the-art resolutions that are divorced from any recognition of total depravity and expect heaven-on-earth in our time. We become liberated to be freshly charitable and patient, knowing that ultimately the satisfying conclusion to the works of the flesh will finally come when Christ returns, when in the fullness of time the Father will “unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1.10). All of these thoughts bring me to my conclusion with one more observation.
The New Imagery and Narrative: One New Man
When we approach racism as somewhere
inside the realm of “the works of the
flesh” we are given a new imagery and narrative. In Ephesians 2 Paul is
again challenging the assimilation-or-apartness divide. And there he brings it
to the cross in a similar, though slightly different way. “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near
by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one
and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility…, that he might
create in himself one new man (ἕνα καινὸν ἄνθρωπον
– hena kainon anthropon)
in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us
both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility” (Ephesians 2.13-16). Christ’s
redemptive work draws together disparate tribal groups to Christ giving us a
whole new way of being human – together; we become one new man!
Paul plays this out a little later
when he calls on the Christians “to put
off your old self (τὸν παλαιὸν ἄνθρωπον – ton palaion anthropon), which belongs to your former manner of life
and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of
your minds, and to put on the new self (τὸν
καινὸν ἄνθρωπον – ton kainon anthropon), created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4.22-24). Part of our
redeemed vocation is to strip ourselves of the old way of being human (the old man Ephesians 4.22), that way
that enfleshes tribalism as well as falsehood, stealing, corrupting talk,
bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander, malice and unforgiveness (Ephesians 4.25-32).
Instead, we’re to live out into the other direction, to live out a whole new
way of being human, the new man, together.
The new cross-shaped, Christ-bought
imagery and narrative is that together in Christ, we are part of Christ’s new
way of being human; we are engrafted into his new humanity (the new man and the one new man), which gives us a new identity together and a new
way of interacting and engaging with each other together. It liberates us from
our palaion anthropon, that old way
of being human, with its vindictiveness and tribalism, ego-centricity and
ethno-centricity. And being raised together with Christ, and seated together
with him in the heavenly places (Ephesians 2.5), we are beginning to be what we
will one day be completely, a new humankind!
This paper is property of the Rev. Dr. Michael W. Philliber
The WWII Propaganda picture was accessed on 17 December 2018 at https://study.com/academy/lesson/anti-japanese-propaganda-poster-during-world-war-ii.html
2. Christopher A. Hutchinson, "Rediscovering Humility: Why the Way Up Is Down," 204-5.
The WWII Propaganda picture was accessed on 17 December 2018 at https://study.com/academy/lesson/anti-japanese-propaganda-poster-during-world-war-ii.html
1. www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_minute/2008/03/playing_the_racist_card.single.html
(accessed 2 June 2017).
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