Then the Whisper Put on Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African American Context

Then the Whisper Put on Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African American Context. By Brian K. Blount. Nashville: Abingdon, 2001, 232 pp., $21.00 paper.

This provocative volume of just over 180 reading pages is a theological exposition based on various sections of the NT, chosen because of their contribution to NT ethics and their usefulness in African Americans' reading of the Bible: The Synoptic Gospels is the source of "Kingdom Ethics"; the Gospel of John supports "the Christology of active resistance"; the "undisputed Pauline writings" exemplify a "theology that enables a liberating ethics"; and the apocalypse of Revelation bears "witness of active resistance" theology and offers hope for the future. In his first two chapters, Blount lays out his basic pre-understandings: The NT's apparent "hodgepodge of moral exhortations" have their own structure of ethics, called "events ethics"-that exist at the literary level of "narrative"-and can be liberating to African Americans. Oppressed conditions keep African Americans in a state of "psychological occupation" and contribute to their disenfranchisement as well as the disintegration from within the African American community. However, this community has a legacy of reading biblical narratives "from 'in front of the text' " by having their oppressed situation influence and be influenced by their interpretation of the Bible (pp. 24-26). The slave narratives with their 150-year history of engaging the biblical text provide a liberation lens through which the oppressed black community can now find liberating ethics in the NT.

Blount correctly notes that the Gospels do not offer a "universal, systematic presentation of what New Testament ethics should look like"; they offer narrative ethics and "make clear the implications of confessing faith in Jesus as the crucified and resurrected Christ for the life and actions of the community of faith" (p. 46). "The presence of Jesus as the incarnate revelation of God's will" is a unifying factor for the ethics of the kingdom at the heart of the narratives. The breaking into human history of the kingdom in the presence of Jesus ushers in a new ethics for the community of God, one that "pushes on against human landmarks that were once established to regulate life" (p. 52) and set peoples apart.

In Mark, Blount sees kingdom ethics as cast in unavoidable conflict with the established religious, cultural, and legal traditions that formed boundaries between the Jewish people and other communities. Mark offers a "transformative boundary-breaking" ethics expressed in the Golden Rule that creates a new ethics characterized by love and liberating action (pp. 54-60). In like manner, Matthew's transformative kingdom ethics points to "a better righteousness," an ideal for the people of God, as seen in the Sermon on the Mount and other Jesus narratives. This ethics is based not on external observance and legal obligations for on a higher level of moral behavior and inner character. In Luke, this kingdom-driven ethics offers social and political reversal, "a perspective that is distinguished by its solicitude for the poor and oppressed and by its concern for the mutual respect of Jewish and Gentile Christians" (p. 79). Says Blount, "The liberation theme hits home in the narrative demonstration of God's care for the poor and oppressed . . . the captive, blind, oppressed, hungry, weeping, excluded, reviled, maimed, lame, and leper" (pp. 80-81).

John's narrative on love is probably the last place in the NT in which one might look for a theology of resistance. Yet, therein Blount finds an ethic of resistance characterized by a self-sacrificing, community love based on the work and example of Christ. Jesus provides the link that binds faith and love together; Jesus loved and laid down his life for others. The community-centered love shown among Americans across ethnic lines during the Civil Rights struggle is a passive resistance love but it is strong enough to resist hostility, alienation, and oppression (pp. 93-108).

According to Blount, some African Americans have, in the past, shown an ambivalence to Paul in whom they see a double take on Christian ethics, an apparent support for slavery on the one hand and a gospel of freedom from bondage on the other. Blount solves this problem by examining only what he regards as undisputed Pauline writings that proffer a liberating ethic, one that shatters the racial, ethnic, social, religious, and other boundaries separating the people of God. This boundary-breaking ethic has as its axis justification by faith in Christ which places everyone on the same level in an "existence where humans are reconciled with God, and thereby brought into right relationship with one another" (p. 128). For Blount, Paul's boundary-crossing ethic is required of the community of faith in Christ where love conquers ethnic and class distinctions.

This theological work is a must read for theologians, seminarians, preachers, and other Christian insiders, persons who are brought together through Christ and who are attempting to live out the true meaning of their new status in a community of faith. Blount's crafty interweaving of a vast knowledge of biblical scholarship with the black experience in the interpretation of Scripture provides a fresh way of doing biblical theology with an ethics label. In spite of its African-American focus, the book's theological engagement can find currency among all biblical scholars and Bible-believing communities. The book creates its own space among well-known works the likes of Victor Paul Furnish's The Theology and Ethics of Paul, Cain Hope Felder's Stoney the Road We Trod, and Raboteau's Slave Religion.