Doing Theology As Though Our Bodies Mattered

Last updated on: August 27, 2014 at 3:24 pm by Guest Contributor

Doing Theology As Though Our Bodies Mattered 2014-08-27T15:24:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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The shooting of Michael Brown, the subsequent protests, and the police response in Ferguson, Missouri has made public once again the festering disease that is race in America. The profiling of African American men and women, police brutality and proportion of African Americans killed by police has persisted in the United States. In many ways, the events that led to the protests in Ferguson were nothing new. But perhaps what was new was not the anger of the African American community, but the visibility of racialized animus in the Ferguson Police Department’s response. The militarized deployment of police soldiers and the subsequent deployment of the Missouri National Guard to protect the police in contrast to the brazen protest of Cliven Bundy highlights the persistence of our racial divide, but even more just how emboldened some have become to defy, suppress, and criminalize black bodies.

In the face of such a vehement and violent police response we also see how interpretations of these events fall along racialized lines with the Pew Research Center reporting that 80 percent of African Americans polled believe race is a prominent factor in Michael Brown’s shooting death as opposed to only 37 percent of white Americans. But even more, the event has highlighted the still-deep racial divisions of the American church as so many Christians and pulpits remained silent as events unfolded.

But in what ways are these events theological? What does it mean to study God and God’s world with Ferguson in view? Given the church’s relative silence, but perhaps even its contribution to this silence, we must begin to ask what is not at stake for Christians in this moment? What questions are being asked and what questions remain unnoticed and inconsequential? If theology does anything should it not at least speak to the realities that mark our lives together as human beings? And if this is the case, how can theology that confesses who God is, not also acknowledge the bodies that confess? In this way theology has failed to glean one of Augustine’s most fundamental insights, that Christian theology is always a dual confession. We confess who God is, but always bound to those words are confessions of who we are (and who we are not). What are the realities that shape what we believe we should confess and what is “natural” for us? How does theology speak to the bodily realities of my day-to-day life and to the lives of those whose bodies and lives are so violently marginalized by society?

Can we do theology faithfully without attending to the shape of our formation, understanding the structure of the problem as theological problems?

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