Renewing: The Third Spiritual Pillar

 The secret to changing your mindset from accepting the way things are on other people’s terms, to taking full responsibility for your own life on your own terms, requires that you build 7 Spiritual Pillars, the third being the Renewing Pillar.

You build your personal Renewing Pillar by understanding that life moves, and you must move with it. Whatever you thought yesterday may not be relevant, useful, or otherwise appropriate for the issues that confront you today. You must constantly have a fresh, new mindset that refuses to think in stiff, staid, and stupid mind-atrophying stereotypes. Rather, you are to be renewing your mind continually—opening it up to new ideas, new truths that God wants to impart to you, truths and ways of thinking, being, and doing that only a daily, committed, and vibrant walk with God can afford you.

You have to train your mind to think only of the good, the positive, the true, the beautiful, and the beneficial, and refuse to think of the negatives that, like weeds, attempt to surround, subdue, and strangle your positive thought life.

You must add to your Bible study the reading of great literature that reflects your historic struggle to be free, as well as the cultural creations that your people produced as a result of their life struggles.

In other words, you must fill your free time with positive learning and thought material that will help you grow in a well-rounded way so that you can relate to your people by being informed about their positive interests. How better can you make disciples—recruit and train people for Jesus’ counter-hegemonic struggle to bring the kingdom of God to this earth—than by engaging your sisters and brothers in conversation about the issues, concerns, good ideas, and mutual areas of interest that matter to them and you.

The Renewing Pillar is the most difficult of the 7 Spiritual Pillars because it requires constant struggle within your own mind to refuse to think about the negative thoughts that come to you. Your mind is constantly being assaulted by all kinds of thoughts, most of which are negative or otherwise of no use in moving you forward toward the goals you have set for yourself. Seek and accept the Holy Spirit’s help to win the battles raging in your mind.

Remembering: The Second Spiritual Pillar

 Don’t be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can figure out what God’s will is—what is good and pleasing and mature.

Romans 12:2 CEB

The secret to changing your mindset from accepting the way things are on other people’s terms, to taking full responsibility for your own life on your own terms, requires that you build 7 Spiritual Pillars, the second being the Remembering Pillar.

You build your Remembering Pillar by continuously calling to mind what God has done for you in the past. It is this kind of remembering that moves you to be thankful to God and express your gratitude to Him for how He has brought you from where you began with Him at birth to where you are now.

You should remember both the bad times and the good times with God. You should remember the bad times because if you remember well, you will recall that it was God who brought you through every single bad time you have ever had. And you should remember the good times, because it was God who blessed you with every really good time you have ever had.

It is through building your Remembering Pillar that you are comforted when all hell seems to have broken loose in your life, and it is this Remembering Pillar that encourages you not to quit, but to keep on going forward. Your Remembering Pillar teaches you that everything that you go through, no matter how burdensome or painful, will work out for your ultimate benefit.

The easiest way to build your Remembering Pillar is to start keeping a journal from day to day. Without a written record of what you have been through, it is easier for the enemy of your soul to lie to you and tell you that following the Golden Rule Way has not been beneficial to you. But when you can open your journal and read your own personal bible of the situations you were in and how God brought you out, you are empowered to encourage yourself in bad times, and enjoy reliving good times.

Relating: The First Spiritual Pillar

 And do not be conformaed to this world [any longer with its superficial values and customs], but be transformed and progressively changed [as you mature spiritually] by the renewing of your mind focusing on godly values and ethical attitudes], so that you may prove [for yourselves] what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect [in His plan and purpose for you].

Romans 12:2 AMP

The secret to changing your mindset from quiescent (accepting the way things are on other people's terms) to self-liberative (taking full responsibility for your own life and growth) requires that you erect 7 Spiritual Pillars, the first of which is the Relating Pillar.

The Relating Pillar is always three-dimensional: it includes how you relate to God, yourself and others. You build your Relating Pillar toward God by focusing on obeying the Golden Rule Way—treat other people the way a mentally healthy and psychologically whole you would want to be treated.

As you practice treating people with respect, listening to them, seeking to understand them from their point of view, and accepting them as they are—despite their differences from you, in thought, word and deed—you will have an opportunity to consider how God relates with and to you.

If you are aware and take that opportunity, you will begin to think of how good God is and has been to you, despite your differences from God in thought, word, and deed. You may be led to think about how God has brought you out of the trouble into which you have behaved yourself, and how gently and lovingly God hangs in there with you despite your rarely getting everything right.

Your contemplation of God, as you focus on living out the Golden Rule Way, may lead you to thank Him for His kindness and mercy toward you. If you persist in thanking God habitually, you will begin to feel an emotional attachment to God. That feeling of attachment will slowly turn to a feeling of love. As that love of God grows in you, you will begin to want to please God, not out of your duty to relate to people according to the Golden Rule Way, but because you simply want to please God.

You build your Relating Pillar toward yourself by focusing on the fact that God loves you, and if God, who is greater than you, thinks enough of you to love you, then you must think enough of yourself to love yourself. In the same way that you relate to God based on the deal He has cut with you—the Golden Rule Way requirement—you must cut a deal with yourself. You must treat yourself with respect, listen to yourself, and seek to understand and accept who you are and why you are the way you are.

In building the third dimension of your Relating Pillar with other people, you must make sure that the same terms and conditions—the Golden Rule Way requirement—apply. You have been chosen by God to go in the Golden Rule Way, so your personal relationships with other people must model how you expect them to relate to others in the same Golden Rule Way as well. You must ask God for wisdom to determine with whom you will share your life as a friend, lover, and close associate. As you are making this determination, rely on Jesus’ words of wisdom: “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

The Revolutionary Content of Jesus' Resurrection

 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 1 Corinthians 15: 20-22 NIV

True revolutionaries in the Jesus Movement willingly admit that Jesus died in their place to completely dispense with the issue of their ever having to be held personally liable to be condemned or adjudged guilty by God for any negative being or doing acts or omissions in their past, present, or future.

However, it is God’s raising Jesus from the dead that gives life, purpose, and direction to those elite revolutionaries who willingly lay down their lives for the poor and oppressed by engaging in the counter-hegemonic struggle for liberation of the oppressed and social/economic justice for the poor.

God was in the man Jesus (just as He is in us) when he came to rescue humankind from not only physical and spiritual death, but also social, economic, political, philosophical, psychological, and theological death—all that humans have produced in rebellion against God. That God chose to act through a human being whom He raised from the dead is a sign and signal to the Jesus Movement revolutionary that God will raise her/him up from death in all its earthly manifestations.

Because Jesus conquered death, so will the revolutionary who follows Jesus’ revolutionary path—a path that calls for disruption of the status quo, subversion of the Eurocentric world-system, and merciless assault on the bastions of false Eurocentric-oriented Christian religion.

God’s raising Jesus from the dead also announces the hope that the last, least, and lost can be raised from their spiritual, social, and economic death and given new life that manifests itself in their active engagement in counter-hegemonic revolutionary struggle.

Because God demonstrated his ultimate power in raising a very dead Jesus to life—a life that will never die again—the Jesus Movement revolutionary believes that God will use that same mighty power to raise up the millions of people of color who are dead in trespasses and sins and shrouded in the grave clothes of the myth of white supremacy.

Embrace the Contradiction!

 For God took the sinless Christ and poured into him our sins. Then, in exchange, he poured God’s goodness into us!

2 Corinthians 5:21 TLB

African Americans have always lived a life of duality in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois first articulated our “double consciousness” in his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

In the 21^st century, I have reformulated and further developed Du Bois’ concept of “double-consciousness” into the Quiescent/Self-Liberative Contradiction.

The quiescent/self-liberative contradiction in African Americans is a form of social/psychological schizophrenia that manifests itself in how we choose to self-actualize. This contradiction forces us to wrestle with choosing between accommodating to the racist world-system (quiescent behavior) and revolting against the world-system to overthrow it (self-liberative behavior.) For us, there is no middle option.

All too often in the past, the calming, accommodationist voice of the Black Church has been enlisted by Eurocentric racists to control the thinking and behavior of the African American masses so that we would not develop our ability through Jesus to be transformed from accommodating, non-critical, incoherent “common sense” people to Afrocentrist-conscious “organic intellectuals” who are willing and able to engage in effective social change struggle.

Jesus understands the quiescent/self-liberative contradiction first-hand because of his two-ness as both God and man. As man, Jesus died in our place so that we could be in right standing with God, the Father. As God, the Son, Jesus chose to become the very embodiment of sin so that we might become the very embodiment of righteousness before God. In sum, Jesus became his opposite (sin) so that we could become our opposite (righteousness). 

It is our embracing the contradiction of Jesus’ two-ness that radicalizes our thinking, speaking and behaving, provides us with critical understanding, and midwifes our self-transformation into Jesus Movement revolutionaries who are committed to living the kingdom of God on this earth, in our time, on our watch--by any means necessary.

A Meditation on Violence

 And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.

Matthew 11:12 KJV

Every physical and mental motion or action dislodges, dislocates, and destroys the inertia that it must overcome to act. Inertia is an enemy that only action can destroy. Motion, action, is always violent because only violence is capable of moving or acting against the negative force of inertia in the world. To act is to engage in violence to overcome inertia. To refuse to act is to allow the violence of inertia to overcome the self. Therefore, the issue is never whether one likes, dislikes, chooses, or declines to choose violence, but rather the further investigation of the nature of violence itself.

The violence of childbirth cannot be equated with the violence of cutting off someone’s head. Neither can the violence of building a house for a homeless family be equated with the violence of bombing a village to extract the minerals found therein. In the same manner, the violence of freeing oneself from a kidnapper cannot be equated with the violence of enslaving millions of people for their sale to the highest bidder. Nor is the violence of laying one’s life down for another comparable to taking the lives of innocents to demonstrate one’s power to do so. Thus, the false issue of violence versus “non-violence” must give way to the real issue: positive violence versus negative violence.

Positive violence is that powerful word or act that aims at the liberation of enslaved peoples, while negative violence is that powerful word or act that focuses on keeping enslaved peoples enslaved.

The perfect example of negative violence is hate—hate that selfishly takes, enslaves, kills, destroys, and steals from those who believe themselves to be powerless and vulnerable.

The perfect example of positive violence is love—love that gives itself unselfishly to free the last, least, and lost peoples enslaved by poverty, economic exploitation, and discrimination.

The motive, purpose, use and intent of violence determine whether it will be classified as positive or negative. Every thought, act or behavior that is motivated by hate is negative violence. Contrariwise, every thought, act or behavior that is motivated by love is positive violence.

The Righteous Struggle

 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

Ephesians 6:12 KJV

The counter-hegemonic struggle that revolutionary followers of Jesus are engaged in is not a crass struggle for power over and against people, but always a principled struggle to achieve good for the many by developing honest political, social and economic systems, power structures motivated by love, and encouraging and supporting the global many to live as fully and freely as the few who currently do so.

For revolutionary followers of Jesus, one major battleground for counter-hegemonic struggle is located in the Eurocentric Nationalist church itself and its support of racist policies, politics, and politicians, in general, along with its insistence on portraying Jesus as a European who is the idol set up to be worshiped, in particular. The message that God is European (white) drummed into the heads of Africans and other people of color, as well as Europeans who already have an inordinate sense of entitlement and racial privilege, has no place in any 21st-century body of people who claim to confess Jesus as Lord.

The second major battleground is in the Eurocentric-oriented Neo-Colonialist Churches of color and their refusal to call Eurocentric churches out for their denial of the gospel of Jesus, and their own complicity in the oppression of people of color, in general, along with their refusal to proclaim the revolutionary gospel of Jesus for liberation of the oppressed and economic justice for the poor, in particular.

Only such a revolutionary message, made flesh by radical action, true to the biblical mandate, has the power to set the masses of people of color, poor white people, disenfranchised returning citizens, and abandoned U.S. veterans free from the grip of poverty and alienation that destroys them.

The most relevant radical action that we can take now is to change the way we think. By changing our thinking, we have an opportunity to model what the kingdom of God looks like in very concrete terms, as we walk together, proclaiming every person’s right to enjoy the basic necessities of life: healthy food, state-of-the-art healthcare, decent, affordable housing, and livable wage employment.