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Attempting to evade her white owner's sexual advances, Harriet Jacobs, author of the earliest extant female slave narrative, climbed into an airless, mice-infested, nine-feet long, seven-feet wide, and three-feet high attic-like garret under the roof of her grandmother's house in 1830s North Carolina. Hidden there, the prostrate Jacobs reflected on Jesus' suffering during Holy Week. His crucifixion on Friday culminated in the God-forsakenness of Saturday's entombment in the grave, she noted, not unlike the claustrophobic space she presently occupied. If Jacobs, who eventually escaped across the Mason-Dixon Line with the help of abolitionists, could identify with the suffering Christ of Friday and the abandoned Christ of Saturday, the dominant white men negotiating her future emphasized Sunday's "triumphal Lord of the Resurrection."
Peter Heltzel, an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and assistant professor of theology at New York Theological Seminary, seeks to integrate these two profound theological insights. Too often, he asserts, white evangelicalism's emphasis on Sunday's victory over death obscures black evangelicalism's emphasis on Friday, the day when Jesus was lynched. Heltzel demands that "the white architects of a Euro-American modernity be interrogated concerning the problem of race." In Jesus and Justice he does precisely that, circling back to Friday's injustices, only to return again to Sunday in declaring his confidence in a resurrection of authentic social justice. Switching metaphors, Heltzel concludes that American evangelicalism has matured into a prophetic movement "in a shade of blue-green—blue representing the tragedy of black suffering and green symbolizing the hope of a new social engagement with poverty, AIDS, and the environment."
Following a lengthy and learned discussion on the ambivalent evangelical heritage of antebellum slavery and antislavery activism, Heltzel fast-forwards to two prominent 20th-century "evangelical" theologians who fashioned the new shade of blue-green. If each had his limits—Martin Luther King, Jr., unable to restrain the civil rights movement from devolving into identity politics; Carl F. H. Henry, "ensnared in the logic of the 'half-Gospel'" and never fully able "to integrate ministries of social justice"—taken together they prefigured a beloved community that could transcend black and white.
Henry, whose fingerprints marked evangelical institutions such as the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today magazine, and World Vision, burst onto the scene in the late 1940s with The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, a seminal tract that repudiated the "evaporation of fundamentalist humanitarianism." Heltzel ably charts the theological origins of Henry's social awareness. A Reformed foundation supporting a "radical Baptist vision of social engagement" allowed Henry to move toward broader social reform of racism and a critique of the harsher elements of capitalism. If Henry's programs of education, evangelism, and cultural literacy ultimately were unable to transcend the assumptions of 20th-century evangelical whiteness, they nonetheless reoriented fundamentalist otherworldliness toward a more public faith.
To Henry's greening of public engagement, King added the blues. Heltzel contends that King developed a sophisticated theology of suffering, rooted not only in lynching and economic servitude but also in evangelical theology. In an argument derivative of David Chappell's A Stone of Hope (2004), which found the deepest secret of the civil rights movement in black Christian faith, Heltzel explains that King's realism about human nature, grounded in black revivalism and a biblical theology of love that stressed love of enemy, forced the white liberal establishment to end Jim Crow. King taught modern evangelicalism that "a cross-centered Christian life will mean suffering, persecution, and even martyrdom."
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