On the Parousia: The Black Body Electric

Abstract

For the black church to effectively address the problem of body that has fragmented human communities throughout modernity and contemporarily manifests intracommunally in the form of sexual-gender oppression, it must engage the critical work of repositioning the moral currency of the “in the flesh” and the “according to the flesh” in accordance with a logic of incarnation that parallels the enfleshment of Jesus Christ, the primary image that informs the black church’s identity. Though established to respond to injustice in the world, the church’s moralscape must not be guided by the kata sarka precisely because, as the moral problem of “making men” reveals, injustice too often begets injustice. Instead, even the church, and the Social Gospel–driven church especially, must ground its identity in Jesus Christ first and intentionally consider how the embodied identity of the God it confesses relates and responds to the social-historical realities that unjustly pirate and confer human value “according to the flesh.” Thus, the church’s escape from its complicity in reproducing injustice is dependent on its displacing of the primacy of the sociohistorical, and its appealing to its God-image in order to better understand how the image of God manifests in the world, while recognizing that the image of God does not always correspond with inherited narratives of history and memory.

And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom. …1

—Matthew 27:51