Eboni Marshall Turman offers good news in Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation by clearly connecting the definition of incarnation at Chalcedon (AD 451) with the problem of broken Black bodies. Further, Marshall Turman expands womanist scholarship by reinforcing Jacquelyn Grant’s earlier observation that Black theology is not holistic without the liberation of Black. I would add along with other womanists that Black theology or womanist theology is not complete if it is does not also address heterosexism.1 Marshall Turman makes brief, quick, occasional references to the problem of sexualization of Black women’s bodies and heterosexism. Her work is sufficiently opened-ended to make room for further conversation on these and other matters, like ableism.

In Marshall Turman’s assessment failure to engage in both/and understanding of incarnation leaves Black churches with broken, unhealed bodies. The truth of God’s presence, however, moves in and through the fractures in “black churches,” in moments that reach, stand and sway in Black women’s bodies.2 The bodies of Black women incarnate God as God!3

Method and Hermeneutics

A womanist critical and prescriptive study of Black bodies in Black churches requires a womanist method and hermeneutics for the healing and wholeness of Black communities of faith, male and female.4 To fulfill this task, Marshall Turman employs the womanist mediating ethic of Marcia Riggs, which values wholistic both/and thinking in contrast to either/or thinking. She further includes Riggs’s method of uncovering, debunking and demystifying texts.5 Theo-ethicist Emilie Townes’s hermeneutics of “truth telling” is a tool for discerning what is “truly true.” To connect Riggs’s method and Townes’s hermeneutic, Marshall Turman introduces an original choreographical method: (1) at barre, a warm-up similar to Riggs’s “methodological posture of unconvering”; (2) petit allegro, “swift, precise, almost undetectable” movement similar to Riggs’s “debunking social myths” and Townes’s “truth telling”; (3) the adagio, constructive ethics; and (4) the grande allegro, similar to Riggs’s “envisioning” the practice of mediating human social conditions among communities of faith and God to “transform communities beyond ourselves.”6 It seems that this fourth movement joins theory with practice to form womanist praxis. Finally, in envisioning God realizes incarnation in ways beyond our imaginings.

Discerning What Is True: Epistemology and Hermeneutics

Marshall Turman’s primary source and criterion for discerning the truth of incarnation is the open-ended definition of incarnation developed at Chalcedon (AD 451), a political and theological compromise on the divinity and humanity of the Logos. She begins with a perennial question regarding the incarnation of the Word of God. What manner of person is Jesus Christ, bodily and spiritually? Marshall Turman finds that professions of incarnation in Christian communities are not consistent with action. Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation, in effect, conscientizes readers to critically reflect on events in which Black communities hear and profess belief in incarnation. What do we really believe when we examine our praxis? What types of thought processes contribute to privileging some bodies more than others?

Problem, Method, and Prescription

Marshall Turman is intrigued by “body politics,” which is “clearly identifiable in the American racial project.” This racial project “has historically thrust othered bodies into a dilemma of pained subjection.”7 Its white and androcentric gaze defines Black identity externally. It violently acts upon the body in contrast to the freeing gaze within the flesh. In spite of his efforts to resist it, Marshall Turman cautions, remnants of a white supremacist gaze remain in W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings on “double consciousness.” As a result Du Bois’s double-consciousness reproduces a broken self. Du Bois’s work fails to adequately move Black incarnation “beyond the veil.”8 Yet Du Bois’s concept of double-consciousness points to more, leaving later generations to name the more that is “beyond the veil” in which “the truth requires that neither of the former selves be lost.”9

Using Marcia Riggs’s womanist “both/and” mediating ethic along with the womanist hermeneutics of Emilie Townes to exegete Marshall Turman finds that Du Bois “commingles the sometimes true with the almost true.”10 Similarly, she finds a commingling of the “sometimes true and almost true” in Mays’s concept of “making men.” Her womanist mediating task is to “reach, stand and sway” with what Townes calls the “true, true” so that scholars and churches can see, hear and practice what Christians have been confessing for generations. An adequate understanding of incarnation can produce healing in Black women’s bodies. Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation prescribes a balm for broken, wounded bodies. Some may recall the spiritual “There Is a Balm in Gilead.” Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation embodies the balm Black ancestors of faith sang about. Living an “in the flesh” understanding of “incarnation” is a gift of divine grace that “makes the wounded whole.”11

As a systematic and constructive theologian, I am delighted that Marshall Turman discusses the doctrine of Christ in two chapters. Her focus is the fifth century. The council at Ephesus (AD 431), she notes, confirmed Cyril’s doctrine of the oneness of God and sent Nestorius with his understanding of two separate, human and divine, natures into exile around 433.12 This was not a satisfying solution for the Alexandrians and Antiochenes, which leads to the “Formula of Reunion,” a compromise in which Antioch concedes Mary as the mother of God (rather than receiver of Christ) and Cyril, representing the Alexandrian school, concedes to two distinct natures in Christ.13 The book notes that this formula, however, also has weaknesses. It is not clear how the two natures are “a unity of prosopon”—one person without separation, mixing or confusion.

Marshall Turman employs the open-ended “Definition at Chalcedon” (AD 451), another political and theological compromise, as a criterion of faith to discern what is true. The definition is ancient, not new. Yet, what she does with it as a scholar and choreographer is original. Examining the two natures of Christ as a dance between divine nature and human nature in relation to God’s love for Black bodies is refreshing. As a systematic and constructive theologian, who has written about “dancing with God,” 14 I find the book important not only for theo-ethics and social ethics, but also for systematic theology and constructive theology.

God in the Flesh

Chapter 2’s use of Sarah Coakley’s and Christopher Morse’s analysis of Chalcedon’s referencing of the creeds of Nicaea (AD 325) and Constantinople (AD 381) helps readers contemplate “something that occurs in the flesh of Jesus” that “functions as the essential given or isness (Townes) of Jesus’ identity.”15 It is the “true, true.” This corrects kata sarka, which defines bodies according to what happens to them externally: the crucifixion, the white supremacist gaze, the classist gaze, and the androcentric gaze. The body of Jesus Christ is different from oppressive, status quo understandings of body, Marshall Turman argues. 16 The en sarki approach sees the divine reality that is in our flesh. As a relational womanist theologian influenced by process theism, I would like to ask if this “essential given” of Christ’s identity is stable and reliable, yet fluid. To be consistent with the metaphor and reality of dance, this identity is in ongoing movement, permeating creaturely existence as we accept the gift of incarnation in our bodies, consciously and unconsciously.

Critique

Marshall Turman is an excellent scholar/choreographer who gives the audience glimpses of her “grande allegro” all along the way.17 Although a lengthy chapter, the material in chapter 4 on “American liberal theology” and “Social Gospel” ethics sheds light on intellectual history that leads to strengths and weaknesses in Mays’s commitment to “making men” as president at Morehouse College. “American liberal theology” subjugates poor bodies. Social Gospel theo-ethics subjugates Black bodies. Mays’s “making of men” subjugates Black women’s bodies. I prefer the terminology “US liberal theology” to “American liberal theology,” which is not, as its producers suggested, the entire continent of America. I also wonder what engaging “a womanist ethic of incarnation” in conversations with global and postcolonial feminism might produce.

Marshall Turman has identified an important problem: “While embracing Chalcedon as the defining moment in Western Christianity, and therefore giving lip service to Christ as simultaneously fully human and fully divine, Christian communities, read churches, rarely embody and enact the both/and ways of thinking, knowing, and being that Chalcedon’s confession mandates.”18 Churches continue to think, know, and live according to a pre-Chalcedon either/or misunderstanding.19

This is a problem among Black communities of faith and it is a global problem, whether in Baltimore, the Sudan, or Latin America.

In a world in which Black bodies are violently acted upon, Black women’s lives matter globally. In the United States, Marshall Turman’s work is profoundly relevant in a society that permits state-authorized violence by law enforcement officers against Black bodies. In Kenya and the Sudan, when Black young women are kidnapped, raped, and if returned are pregnant with the offspring of their enslavers, Black women’s bodies matter. She offers constructive foretastes of a fuller womanist mediating ethic of incarnation. I look forward to further constructive work on resurrected bodies and Parousia’s presence in Black women’s bodies when dancing and living through the “tension that inevitably accompanies seemingly opposing identities.”20Finally, a “womanist ethic of incarnation” is significant for conversations on violence against women, police brutality, postcolonial feminist thought and understandings of gender and sexuality. Breaking Black bodies is partly an economic problem, nationally and globally. We live in a Western economic empire that is built on Black bodies and other bodies of color. As we daily confront a neoliberal form of capitalism in which Du Bois’s and Mays’s middle class is disappearing, what can we learn from marginalized Black women? The grassroots is moving and making it plain that our activist leaders are no longer charismatic, church-sanctioned, academically privileged and/or politically elite Black public intellectuals. Ella Baker’s vision of “group-centered” leadership is at hand.

The problem of difference has been one of the most fundamental problems of Western intellectual culture. Thinking without dualism or hierarchy is an epistemological challenge. Difference, in the West, is equated with deviance, specifically embodied difference. Eboni Marshall Turman’s Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church and the Council of Chalcedon is situated in a broad conversation about how to frame and value difference—specifically embodied difference. Her primary concern is with black bodies—black female bodies to be precise, that have been mismeasured and marked as nonnormative.

The mismeasurement of black female bodies is nothing new, but what makes this text innovative is Marshall Turman arguing that the “brokenness” of black female bodies has structural similarities to the “brokenness” of the body of Christ. The logic of incarnation that posits Christ as having “two seeming opposing natures” coming together as one, according to Marshall Turman, is useful for addressing the internal fragmentation and divisions within black ecclesial and social spaces.

The aim of this paper is to examine Marshall Turman’s use of the logic of incarnation, derived from the Council of Chalcedon, to introduce a new orientation to womanist thought. I begin by exploring a hermeneutics of suspicion against doctrinal Christianity through discussing Marshall Thurman’s appeal to the Council of Chalcedon’s doctrine of incarnation as a source for womanist ethics. This discussion is followed by a brief examination of what Marshall Turman refers to as “the modern problem of incarnation”—race—in the writings of W. E. B Du Bois’s and Benjamin E. Mays. I conclude by examining this new orientation in womanist thought put forth by Marshall Turman through her outlining of two distinct paradigms—sara karta (according to the flesh) paradigm and en kata (what happens in the flesh) paradigm. Marshall Turman argues that womanist thought has been guided by a sara karta paradigm to which she has deep misgivings, she puts forth a en sarta paradigm as the basis for a new orientation from which a redemptive ethical practice evolves.

Womanism, Doctrinal Christianity and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

At first glance, Marshall Turman’s use of a Christological formulation at Chalcedon as paradigmatic for womanist theological ethics may strike one as odd. The Council of Chalcedon, as with all fourth- and fifth-century ecclesial councils, are Christian articulations under Roman imperial pressures. Synod Fathers threatened to oppose, expel and drive away clerics who held contrasting positions. They developed a long list of condemnations against theological positions, demonstrating no tolerance for difference. Ecclesial officials exercised normalizing power by which the church established rules, sanctioned violence and sacralized power.

Christian doctrines are commonly understood as propositional truths, closely associated with Christianity from above not below. They are expressions of Constantinian Christianity, not prophetic faith, more dependent on the “otherworldliness” of Paul than the concretism of the historical Jesus. A contemporary liberationist who reviewed the Chalcedonian definition of faith might wonder, “Isn’t the Chalcedonian Christ, a Christ from above; the same Christ that the lyncher, the enslaver, the colonialist held as authoritative?”

There is a hermeneutics of suspicion against doctrinal Christianity within womanist and black theology because doctrinal traditions have been complicit in supporting unjust power over black bodies. The development of Christian doctrine did not prevent the commencement of slavery, colonialism, genocide, land annexation, apartheid or Jim Crow. An imperial impulse at the heart of the faith disrupts and erases the histories and cultures of peoples of color and the world’s poor. This impulse created the conditions of possibility for the emergence of black and liberationist theologies as traditions of imperial critique and affirmation from below.

Womanist theological interpreters, following the lead of liberation theologians, make an epistemological break with dominant forms of Christianity. Doctrinal Christianity is regarded as an address to the nonbeliever, womanist and black theologians address the nonperson. Human beings, within this framing, are not only alienated from faith in Christ but alienated from the fullness of their own humanity. Such theological positions don’t typically appeal to patristic doctrine, they place subjugated knowledges (i.e., excluded knowledges and ways of knowing) as primary sources for construction. These sources range from ethnographic approaches, black women’s literary tradition, social movements from below, black women’s historiography, syncretic black religiosity, nineteenth-century black women leaders, black women’s ecclesial traditions, and African American women under slavery.

If black women’s traditions and experiences are the primary sources and criteria for truth, why does Marshall Turman run so radically against the grain by embracing aspects of Christianity’s androcentric doctrinal heritage? Conciliar traditions notwithstanding, the incarnation may be the most important doctrine in liberationist and contextual theologies. The advent of the Word becoming flesh gave theologians permission to talk about God in human terms. Jesus, for Christians, is God’s self-disclosure in human life. God choosing to disclose Godself in a poor and oppressed minority community, to an unwed mother has much to say about God’s identity and character. Liberationists sum up God’s self-disclosure though the well-known affirmation: God’s solidarity with the poor. This becomes the dominant hermeneutical orientation for black and womanist theological reflection. It situates the God of biblical faith within the messiness of an unjust world. While the incarnation is a significant feature of womanist and black theology, it stands mostly as background rather than foreground. The incarnation, in the liberationist tradition, is treated as a springboard to push forward more socially and historically relevant insights about biblical faith rather than a statue hailing us to return to an apostolic age.

Marshall Turman’s privileging of the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451) declaration that Christ is “truly God and truly human” feels at first like some kind of advocacy to impose fifth-century doctrinal consensuses on black life. But this is not the case, Marshall Turman doesn’t merely repeat fixed dogma about the person of Christ. She uses insights from modern theologians such as Coakley, Morse, and Baillie to offer a more open textured understanding of doctrine. What’s stressed by Marshall Turman is not the content but the logic of incarnation. “God” and “human,” in the context of Greek metaphysics, are conceived as having antithetical attributes. In traditional theism, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and essentially good, whereas human beings are contingent, limited in power, limited by their bodies. To believe that a single person could have both sets of divine and human attributes seems incomprehensible. The Chalcedonian Definition of Faith used a “both/and” logic to negotiate these presumed opposites, the Alexandrian narrative of “one divine subject” and the “two nature Christological” narrative of Antiochenes. The Chalcedonian definition represented a coming-togetherness beyond dualism and antagonism. What’s appealing about the Chalcedonian Council to Marshall Turman is that despite these different attributes, there is a negotiated unity that points toward redemption. How? The incarnation, according to Marshall Turman, does not only refer exclusively to the birth of Jesus. The incarnation refers to Jesus’ lifespan. “It is only when what happens in Jesus (the incarnation) is held together with what happens to Jesus (the Passion and Resurrection) and what will happen as the future of Jesus (the Parousia), that the Christ event approximates any justice-making, transformative sense at all.” 1.

The logic of incarnation dismisses the binary logic of “either/or” models that privilege certain aspects of the life of Christ (e.g., some constructions start with either the cross or the ministry or the teachings) and stress the coherence of Christ. Each aspect of Jesus’ life is integral to one another, Marshall Turman refers to this as both/and logic (from dualistic to relational logic).

Equally important as Chalcedonian logic, Marshall Turman uses Christopher Morse’s classification of the lifespan of Jesus using two Greek categories—en sarki what happens “in the flesh” and kata sarka what occurs “according to the flesh.” En sarki (in the flesh)—is about God’s activity manifest in the body of Christ. Kata sarka (according to the flesh) is the reality of what happened to Jesus (i.e., suffering and crucifixion). These two categories classify the lifespan of Jesus and become analytical categories for Marshall Turman’s interpretation of black experience.

For Marshall Turman, they become ways of understanding and assessing God’s relationship to black women’s experiences. The en sarki experience expresses God’s activity in the body prior to cultural and historical conditioning, it defines one’s ultimate worth prior to experience, similar to the imago Dei. The kata sarka is how your body has been acted upon in the world, the worth assigned to your humanity through historical and cultural circumstances. What seems to concern Marshall Turman is how do we locate the center of meaning and value of black humanity? Is it in God (en sarki) or the world (kata sarka)? Her argument proceeds as follows: the world has defined black people in denigrating terms but God has defined us as we truly are. We should begin with understanding who we are in God (Christ) and then use that for resisting the world’s definitions.

Marshall Turman’s framework contrasts traditional liberationist frameworks in black theology. Liberationists are deeply committed to the conviction that all social and religious ideals, values, and institutions are products of history. This orientation initiated a new understanding of the relationship between revelation and history. History became the central organizing principle, the realm of meaning and goal-directed purpose of the divine-human encounter. The priority of history used by liberationist theories would be categorized under kata sarka (according to the flesh—events that happened to a subject) in Marshall Turman’s usage. However, for liberationists, history is a conduit of meaning though which divine things become known. God, through Jesus, incarnates into history, preaches good news to the poor, liberation of the captives, the setting at liberty of those who are oppressed (Isa 61:1; Luke 4:18). In so doing Jesus also reveals God’s critical judgment against the rich and the powerful and the liberation of the poor becomes the critical locus for God’s action in history.

For liberationists such as Cone, one’s personal identity (God’s activity in our body) is defined in light of the historical freedom struggle (kata sarka). This is a “God is with us” paradigm, God is in solidarity with us in the struggle for liberation on behalf of the poor. Liberationist constructions notwithstanding, Marshall Turman argues that the prioritization of kata sarka constructions of black experience are misdirected. They allow the worth of black people to be assigned through external not internal determinants. The primacy of God’s involvement in “what happens to black bodies” for liberationists is not persuasive for Marshall Turman, she believes these black responses are reactionary and too circumscribed by white norms. This common misapprehension drives black churches to be complicit in reinscribing bodily injustice upon marginalized female bodies under the guise of liberation.

Blackness as Truly Human

How does the fifth-century problem of incarnation translate into the modern period? Race, in the modern period, is the most visible marker of bodily difference. The African body was rendered black, deviant, morally and mentally inferior. Blackness signified the nonhuman. How can a people who have been designated as non- or subhuman become truly or authentically human? In a world where whiteness represents godliness and blackness is associated with beastliness, the problem of black enfleshment becomes a theological problem. That is to say, the problem of being fully black and fully human is a theological issue. The negative cultural myths about blackness embedded in Western culture make regarding expressions of blackness with equal dignity to other human expressions a challenge. From Trayvon Martin to Rekia Boyd, from Mike Brown to Shantel Davis, from Eric Garner to Natasha McKenna and from Freddie Gray to Tashina Anderson, the legacy of the color line, theologically conceived, remains a fundamental marker of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. Black bodies, Marshall Turman asserts, are the “ground zero for America’s modern crisis of enfleshment.”

Black theological discourse was initiated by radical black clergy using the legacies of Martin and Malcolm to address the problem of being black and Christian. Marshall Turman uses W. E. B Du Bois and Benjamin E. Mays to address the problem of blackness and Christian leadership. She begins by using Du Bois’s classic Souls of Black Folk as the exemplary text to address the modern problem of incarnation. Du Bois’s musing about blackness—how does it feel to be a problem?—gestures to this dilemma. The title of Du Bois’s work begins with religious terminology—Souls. This terminology strategically disrupts white supremacists’ renderings of black folks as creatures without souls (e.g., chattel). A counter narrative emerges that resituates black bodies in the context of the authorizing narrative of the Bible: “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh of them that lived within the Veil.” Here, Du Bois rhetorically links black flesh and bone to the Adam who had hitherto been conceived as a white man. (75)

Marshall Turman devotes the majority of her energies to discussing two Du Boisian metaphors—the Veil and double consciousness. Each metaphor has multiple meanings. The Veil is a metaphor for the boundary between white and black society. Black people exist “behind” the Veil. Blacks can see into the white world but could rarely pass through. On the other side of the partition exists a blackness outside of the white gaze. For whites, on the other side, black life is unobservable, therefore unknowable. There’s a sense of its existence but it’s shrouded with mystery and intrigue.

The metaphor of the Veil, according to Marshall Turman, is a Bible allusion from the book of Exodus. A veil separates the holy of holies from ordinary reality. Du Bois uses this to signify that the world of the Negro is sacred space, while the white world is profane. There are vital aspects of Black America, according to Du Bois, that are hidden, and exist as a “holy of holies” outside the gaze of white normativity.

If the Veil is the visual representation of the modern problem of incarnation, double consciousness is its psychic consequence. Just as Chalcedon mediated “two seemingly opposed identities”—God and “man” — Du Bois’s double consciousness mediates “two seemingly opposed identities” “Americanness” and “Negroness.” Double consciousness is an oppressive modality that suggests the black body is either American or Negro not both American and Negro. It is the normative dilemma that emerges from the internalization of racialized oppression. “The black body’s being caught between Americanness and Negroness, functions as a boundary insofar as it prevents black people from self-actualization and results in a psychic break that is precipitated by the very identity that it is, and yet that it simultaneously seeks it claim.” (80)

Using the logic of incarnation, Du Boisian twoness isn’t an “either/or” dualistic proposition, it’s a “both/and” approach. The choice isn’t an either American or Negro phenomenon, Du Bois realized that the potential of America could only be reached through a hyphenated identity. He simply wished to make it possible for a person to be both a Negro and an American. “Social circumstances might urge the American Negro to merge his double self into [one] better and truer self. Truth requires that neither former selves be lost.” (81) This is a third way, it asserts the “both/and” dimension of double consciousness that resists white normativity.

The life and legacy of Benjamin E. Mays serves as a platform to discuss gendered forms of bodily oppression internal to black communities that inhibit access to true humanity. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse College for twenty-seven years, devoted his life to educating black men for service to the nation and the world, and of reestablishing Morehouse College as a world-class institution. While his mentee, Martin Luther King Jr., is generally seen as more prominent in shaping Christian identity, Marshal Turman makes a persuasive case for Mays’s enormous influence in shaping the religious leadership of black churches either directly or indirectly through his promotion of the social gospel tradition. The social gospel tradition is important because it deals with the problem of “saving bodies.” It interprets Christian faith by examining the social aims of Jesus, which consists of building the kingdom of God on earth and working on the world’s imperfections. Mays saw his tenure at Morehouse as a “kingdom building opportunity.”

Benjamin E. Mays was the quintessential Race Man in the best sense of the term, a man who used his skills and genius for racial uplift and service to humanity. The college and the church were privileged as areas of impact. Mays believed his students were the intellectual and moral equals to Ivy League white men despite the burden of race. The salvation of the race, according to Mays, was dependent on the moral task of “making men” or race leaders, committed to having a positive impact on the church and society. Political advancement was dependent on qualified black leadership in churches because the church was the only institution blacks controlled.

Du Boisian “twoness” as well as Mays’s “making men” made significant contributions to the struggle for justice, nevertheless their participation in reinscribing oppression, albeit unconsciously, cannot be ignored. While the struggle for a black self-consciousness is a constituent part of the struggle to become fully human, what Marshall Turman argues is that this determinant of identity positions the white gaze as a catalyst for negotiating black personhood. The quest for self-consciousness is triggered by a “look,” the rejection of a white girl. Du Bois’s shock became revelatory and launched a journey toward self-understanding. Du Bois engaged both sides of the Veil, after he experience rejection, he became aware he was racially different from whites. Du Bois explored the meaning of this difference for the rest of his career.

Mays’s conception of racial leadership ignored the enormous contributions of black women to black advancement. The project of “making men” assumes a deeply androcentric conception of black humanity. In Mays’s thought, black leadership and black masculinity were one. Marshall Turman argues that Mays’s teachings allowed certain bodies (read: black male) to assert themselves as “divinely authorized to value and/or devalue other bodies.” Marshall Turman argues that Mays’s project of “making men” has a similar problem to Du Bois’s project, “making men” prioritizes what happens externally to black bodies and subordinates what occurs inwardly. Making men reduces black identity to a reactive event, dependent on white gaze and contrary to the logic of incarnation. Both Du Bois and Mays are useful but insufficient for the cause of liberation, according to Marshal Turman, because they’re too circumscribed by a sarta karta “according the flesh” paradigm.

God With Us

Marshall Turman’s rejection of what she refers to as an “according to the flesh” paradigm runs counter to the established liberationist traditions in black and womanist theological thought. Her use of en sarta and kata sarta categories bears much of the conceptual baggage of Greek metaphysics. These categories float independent of space, time, and culture. For liberationists, metaphysics has no appreciable meaning outside of history. For example, in Exodus, Hebrew resistance to the Egyptians is not adequately captured by the category of kata sarka, God is understood to be actively involved in historical affairs. Likewise, black resistance to racial oppression isn’t understood as a reactionary response. It’s read by theologians as God’s activity in black life to overcome evil. For black liberation theologians such as James Cone, Exodus and the cross are redemptive symbols that reveal God’s involvement encompasses the social, political and material affairs of life.

The womanist tradition emerged as a theological corrective to the female-exclusive ideas of first-generation black male liberation theologians. Their conception of black history and cultural experience were deeply androcentric. Womanists insisted that the heroines and foremothers of black history be regarded as credible theological sources. What both black and womanist theology contribute to the broader theological tradition is the positioning of black history and culture as reliable sources of theological reflection. These sources serve to mediate our understanding and interpretation of Christian narratives. Most of these constructions of black experience would fall under the “according to the flesh” paradigm, nevertheless they became the basis for a radical reinterpretation of Christian faith.

God In Us

Marshall Turman makes an epistemological break from received traditions of black and womanist theologies. God is not only with us in terms of God’s siding with the oppressed but more importantly she notes: “God is in us, God is in the flesh of the oppressed.” Marshall Turman has fundamental misgivings about womanist and black theological discourse. Womanists privileged the history of oppression (slavery, Jim Crow, poverty, colorism) over the inherent worth of black womanhood. Or in her words, they prioritize “bodies [that have] been acted upon” becoming the “primary determinants of black women’s identity.” For example, according to Marshall Turman, Delores Williams’s critique of atonement and advancement of the ministerial vision of Jesus as salvific is only apparent after her sustained engagement of the historical suffering of black women. Moreover, Kelly Brown Douglas uses the socio-historical sins of whiteness as a starting point to determine the contours of her theology of black sexuality. The problem with this privileging of the history of oppression is that it makes black theological identity reactionary and contingent. It is circumscribed by the white supremacist discourse it claims it wants to abolish. In this sense, Marshal Turman echoes Victor Anderson’s critique that the construction of blackness in black and womanist theology is the “blackness that whiteness created.” Marshall Turman wants to have black Christian identity centered in Christ (an in and of itself a priori, in her language) and not in socio-historical circumstances.

Most scholars assess the womanist project through the works of first-generation womanists such as Williams, Cannon, Grant; however, Marshall Turman grounds her assessment in Alice Walker’s initial definition of womanism. In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker offers a four-part definition of womanism. She argues that Walker’s womanism is rooted in self-love (she selects the third part as opposed to the first part of the definition) as a radical epistemological orientation. Self-love is the basis of a radical womanist subjectivity. It is a first step that occurs before the operations of power act to discipline and regulate black female bodies. Marshall Turman refers to self-love as the first precept of womanist ethics. Therefore, the womanist project does not begin by examining the historical resistance of black women against racialized patriarchy, it is centered in “what happens in black women apart from the injustice that restricts their personhood.” This, according to Marshal Turman, should be its new center of gravity and its interpretive priority. It follows the logic of incarnation. The incarnation, according to Marshall Turman, does not merely position “God as Emmanu-el, that is, God with us, but more importantly suggests that God is ‘in us’ (en sarki dei)” (48) and shapes the circumstances already given by God.

This new orientation in womanist thought moves its discourse from a “God with us” (God sides with the oppressed) to a “God in us” paradigm. A “God in us” paradigm presumes an already “there-ness” of God and compels the church to recognize injustice against anybody as injustice against God—especially those bodies that are mismeasured and marginalized. As the logic of incarnation negotiates two seemingly opposed positions, God and human, a womanist ethic negotiates the activity of “God in us” and the activity of “God with us.” The “God in us” (en sarka) orientation is always hermeneutically prior to and in accordance with the “God with us” (what happens to our flesh in the world—kata sarka in this discourse.) This repositioning impels a future of redemptive possibilities.

Toward a New Orientation

Womanist and black theologians are typically the troublemakers of Christological discourse. The proclamation that Christ is black and Christ is a black woman are the common currency of Christological discourse in the black theological academy. Since doctrinal discourse did nothing to prevent historical atrocities such as slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and Jim Crow, black and womanist theological interpreters aimed to destabilize doctrinal discourse not honor it. It is not seen as a neutral discourse offering objective knowledge about faith but deeply interested discourse that serves imperial interests.

I don’t read Marshall Turman’s advocacy for the Council of Chalcedon as an effort to supplant the anti-imperial orientation of womanist and black theology, rather I interpret her as challenging womanist and black theologians to be more bilingual—to deepen their conversation with both the received theological tradition and black and womanist theological resources. Bilingualism, from a womanist perspective, is an emancipatory intellectual practice that produces religious knowledge to support human freedom and well-being.

For black churches to effectively address racial-sexual-gender oppression, they must engage in the critical work of repositioning the “according to the flesh” paradigm with the “in the flesh” paradigm. Just as Christ’s personhood and soteriological significance is rooted in God’s promise in the flesh (en sarka phenomenon), the valuing of black womanhood needs to be grounded on God’s promise “in the flesh,” an a priori phenomenon. The history of oppression and black resistance should not become the primary determinant of black Christian identity. The self-understanding of black faith communities should be centered on God dwelling in black bodies. What occurs is the revaluing of embodied difference (e.g., black female bodies). This does not mean a jettisoning of the socio-historical, it means the socio-historical must be negotiated with God’s activity in the flesh.

Taking Marshall Turman seriously means introducing a new orientation to womanist thought. Following the logic of incarnation, what happens “in black women” apart from injustice becomes a starting point for womanist engagement. Marshall Turman flips the script of traditional approaches that begin with the socio-historical conditioning of black women’s experience and emphasizes valuing the divine presence dwelling in black women as a new starting point. This starting point rejects the authority of external hierarchies that diminish black womanhood and embraces a radical subjectivity of self-love. Black women are empowered to reconceive of themselves as “homoousious with Christ.” Or in Marshall Turman’s words, “black women as the incarnate image of God in the world—the ‘same substance’ of God as to his humanity.” (161) With this new self-image, black women become primary resources for resisting injustice in the black church.

This new positionality grounds black women’s identity in Christ and Christ’s identity in black women. The problem of difference and fragmentation, perennial problems in Western culture, become situated within a broader womanist vision of God’s justice. This vision of justice consists of three ethical components: renunciation (relationally), inclusivity (community), and responsibility (ethic of responsibility). The racial-gender hierarchies that demonize certain bodies and divinize others are rethought and reframed. “Brokenness” in this new womanist orientation is an antecedent to wholeness (Christological unity). While some liberationists, especially feminists, argue that doctrinal traditions deny difference and support empire, Marshall Turman finds a redemptive logic operative in the Council of Chalcedon. A womanist ethic that follows Chacedonian logic, she argues, addresses the brokenness of bodily injustice as it manifests in church and society. The Council of Chalcedon was able to take the narratives of Alexandria and Antioch that had been constructed about who Jesus is prior the council, and generate a different way of telling the Jesus story using a “ both/and” logic. Likewise, a womanist orientation that parallels Chalcedon empowers women to tell their story in a different way. Identity is not restricted by previous stories that have been told about oneself. The “othered” bodies of Jesus and black women are rooted in an activity of God that is beyond human circumstances. This means disavowing “either/or hierarchical frameworks” that devalue the marginalized and developing a new body politic.

I situate Marshal Turman’s work in the womanist tradition of “hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick” and using “some of the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.” The Council of Chalcedon is regarded by liberationists as a council that was intolerant of difference and expressive of imperial hierarchy, nevertheless Marshall Turman demonstrates how its logic can be used to escape the circularity of human oppression by initiating a new orientation in womanist theo-ethics that overcomes fragmentation and division and points toward redemptive possibilities.

At the end of the day, can “blackness” be honored, embraced, celebrated—can its meaning for people of African descent be articulated—without prior reference to and, thus, a kind of a priori containment by, whiteness and white supremacy?

I have heard variations of this question posed as a critique or with suspicion more times than I can count. It emerges in a myriad of contexts where the significance and meaning of race in the theological project or the religious studies landscape is being contemplated. The responses the question generates vary and while I admit to having been less troubled by the presumptions that give rise to the question than are some scholars, I have also encountered numerous replies that have seemed more than satisfying.

Yet, deploying the cut-to-the-quick analysis characteristic of so much of her work, Eboni Marshall Turman has done something new and unexpected with (and to) this question. In the process, she has caused me to rethink my level of concern about whether whiteness frames blackness, even in many liberation-committed scholarly formulations.

It may very well be, in fact, that Marshall Turman has actually laid this particular question to rest with her incisive analysis of and response to it. Such a possibility does not emerge because Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation offers a more persuasive argument still for why we should be confident that “‘no,’ the theorizing of blackness in theology does not remain ensconced in the gaze of white supremacy.” On the contrary, Marshall Turman charges quite the opposite. In the process of laying out the charge, she opens new theological vistas for how we might think about this question and points to a shift required in order for us to adequately engage notions of race and the body in theology.

Taking up the theological problem of the body, or the question of incarnation, Marshall Turman demonstrates with precision how the prioritization of sociohistorical categories combined with moves to rest one’s theological starting point on the ground of empiricism allows “that which occurs ‘according to the flesh’ of a specific individual and/or community, . . . to determine the fullness or no-thingness of who and how God is” (109). In the context of a sociohistorical reality drenched in white supremacy’s ideology, logic and material practices, such an approach is devastating. It cannot hope to avoid prioritizing, accepting, and even reifying notions of blackness that are already, always, then, defined and constrained by white supremacist presuppositions. Meanwhile, this was, asserts Marshall Turman, the theological method assumed and promulgated in Social Gospel thinking and the same method has been incorporated into liberationist theologies.

Marshall Turman’s precision here is wielded in the interest of articulating her most salient question and argument. She hones in on the “thorny” problem of body in Christian thought because she wants to know why and how it is that the African American church has demonstrated itself to be, in many ways, content to live with injustice against black women. Why or how is it that the black church continually practices intracommunal injustice? “More importantly,” Marshall Turman asks, “what are we going to do about it?”

Before coming back to Marshall Turman’s contribution on this front, allow me to identify the moves she makes to get there. For, enacting one of the hallmarks of womanist methodology—in which attention to the particular is relentlessly pursued in order to shed insight on truths that might be more universally valid—Marshall Turman’s moves to get to a salient, urgent focus on the lives of black women are themselves significant and make discrete contributions even beyond her specific primary focus.

A powerful paradigm recurs in Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation. Marshall Turman repeatedly distinguishes “according to the flesh” (kata sarki) and “in the flesh” (en sarki) ways of thinking about the body. She goes back to the Council of Chalcedon to argue for a more sound theological understanding of the body in than that which manifests today even in liberal and liberationist theologies. At Chalcedon she not only finds evidence that the problem of the body has long vexed Christian thought. More importantly, she reads Chalcedon to reclaim orthodox ground on which to assert the irrefutable reality of the “in the flesh” activity and presence of God, and to insist that theology inclined toward justice must reclaim and re-root itself on that ground.

The body does not become a place where we may recognize the presence of the divine—the reality of “God with us”—vis-à-vis what transpires on the sociohistorical plane. Rather, it’s only in a full embrace of en sarkie dei—“God is in us”—that we know (or, more to her point, we remember) that the body is an actual site of divine presence in and of itself. It is always and already that place.

It is the rending of the body in its articulation of the doctrine of the incarnation—a rending that makes the divine radically distinct and distant from the human—that Chalcedon rejected. In Marshall Turman’s terms Chalcedon arrived at an insistence that “the isness of Jesus Christ is determined by nothing other than the perfect mediation of divine and human natures in one Person” (36). This, she says, is a “both/and way of thinking, knowing and being” (37) in regard to the body.

But such thinking is endlessly forgotten in Christian thought and practice despite the formal recognition given to notions of Jesus as fully human and fully divine. Instead, the tendency is to displace such both/and thinking with the either/or; this either/or is inevitably hierarchical and leaves the human ensconced in “according to the flesh” realities. More nefariously, when sociohistorical realities become the primary way in which we see the body and recognize bodies, as a result of the either/or, it is inevitable that some bodies will be left and regarded as less than human, innately fractured, problems—at best—that need to be solved. For that vision can only reproduce the injustice and violence that exists in the sociohistorical.

It is here where Marshall Turman’s argument crystallizes most powerfully, and the real possibility that liberationist religion has succumbed to a “thorny dialect wherein God acts in history through a specific group of people who alone are the arbiters of the godly gaze” (109) becomes all but irrefutable. With each analytical piece of the puzzle Marshall Turman laid down, I found myself as reader inexorably drawn closer to an encounter with a chilling recognition. That, indeed, the intracommunal subjugation of black women in the black church is not an aberration nor easily dislodged problematic; it’s not a matter of liberationist thought and praxis somehow not having reached far enough . . . yet. Instead, to the extent the view of body assumed through distorted (and deeply racialized) articulations of embodiment made normative in the Social Gospel have been incorporated into liberationist religion, the intracommunal subjugation of black women within the black church became almost inevitable.

Marshall Turman’s argument need not only bear on the black church community, of course. The either/or pattern of thought that forgets the both/and presumes bodies have to be made into something else in order to fully participate in divine realities. And it will always be the case, when the sociohistorical is thus prioritized, that some bodies will need more “making” and “re-making” than other bodies and along lines those other bodies (the arbiters dictate).

But it is the black church, of course, and the lives of black woman with which Marshall Turman is concerned. Here she traces the genealogy of this “thorny” problem from the white social gospelers through the history of the thought and work of Benjamin Elijah Mays, who is credited with having developed a generation of black male church leaders. Marshall Turman repeatedly describes these leaders as the “moral managers” of the black community, products of Mays’s commitment to “making men” through his work at Morehouse College.

The very notion of “making men” is infused with a prioritization of the sociohistorical. It presumes, if unwittingly, that there is something a priori that thus needs to be fixed; to be made. Such presumption stands in radical contrast to “the logic of incarnation [which] asserts divine activity as the a priori of the flesh, [a logic in which] godliness is always both yours and mine despite embodied difference” (167). This logic would produce a different kind of justice entirely.

The theological genealogy that begins with the Social Gospel is the reason the black church can have simultaneously been successful in distinguishing “itself as a justice-seeking institution that rebels against racial injustice perpetrated on black bodies” and yet have remained so complicit in sanctioning injustice and even violence against black women. Frankly, writes Marshall Turman, the black church remains “circumscribed by a narrative of white supremacy” (140).

It’s problematic enough that such circumscription thus validates a project that assumes black men need to somehow be made. But the impact on black women is more devastating. Black women in this logic are not only incapable of being made into men (deemed “devoid of maleness”), but legitimation is theologically granted to black men as the arbiters of the godly gaze.

Marshall Turman’s deconstruction and genealogical tracing here leads to her insistence that a return to theological ground that understands incarnation in Chalcedonian terms is imperative. Only in such a turn might it become possible to see, recognize and honor the black woman as herself manifesting an “in-itself a priori” (157). Only then does the necessary—that is, the refusal to make fragmentation and constraint by white supremacist, heteropatriarchal violence the starting point for black women’s lives and the move to see, recognize and honor “black woman apart from the injustice that restricts their personhood” (158)—become possible.

Of course, clarity about the isness of black women is not a unique claim. Marshall Turman appropriately locates this commitment as one starting point of womanist theology generally. She then moves from affirmation of the methodological and ethical commitments of womanism, to engage in a powerful dialogue with womanist thought so as to begin (to only just begin) her constructive work. She starts to imagine what it might look like to deploy a method that truly encounters the isness of black women’s lives—a method that requires a doctrine of incarnation that claims the realities of the experience of the divine in the body—in the paradoxical dance between what happens in the flesh and what happens according to the flesh.

Some of the most powerful and evocative moments in this book are found in such constructive work. One such moment is when Marshall Turman draws on the mediating ethic of Maricia Riggs to insist that “the fullness of Christ’s identity is . . . birthed from the constant negotiation of the inconceivable divine activity in the flesh with the narrative strands, images, and activity that occur in history according to the flesh” (166). This is what a womanist doctrine of incarnation looks like.

Another such moment is when Marshall Turman identifies the hegemonic imagination laid bare by Emilie M. Townes to name some of what it takes to render visible the “true truths” about black women’s lives; namely, a recognition of the possibility that communal memory “does not always correspond with what really happened” (152). Understanding the hegemonic imagination enables us to see and to admit the ease with which “white racist-sexist-patriarchal norms” are replicated “under the guise of liberation” (131). This replication if what ultimately, of course, lays at the root of Marshall Turman’s challenge to the black church.

Provocatively enough, Marshall Turman claims that even womanist thought has not completely escaped the trap of kata sarki, however. Womanism too, she says, tends to prioritize the sociohistorical despite its stated commitment to the a priori isness of black women’s lives. I wanted to hear more about this, if only to identify the ways I too have surely succumbed to the sociohistorical and “according to the flesh” thinking in ways I might actually rather reject.

I wanted to hear more as well about the “black body electric.” In Marshall Turman’s final chapter, after having necessarily devoted so much attention to the genealogy, she could finally begin to lean into the vistas that her deconstruction opens up. Drawing on her identity as dancer, Marshall Turman begins a rich query into what it might mean and/or generate if the dance between “in the flesh” and “according to the flesh” was actually choreographed in the lives of women who dance. And then, what truths might be seen and known if the insights of such embodied liturgy and theology might be brought to bear on the presence of the bodies of black women literally as they be and move in the black church in all their isness.

In her final chapter, Marshall Turman begins the work I am most excited to read. Having convinced me with her incisive and exhaustive scholarly analysis, she lays down a gauntlet for the black church that I believe might be appropriately taken up in any number of theologically committed projects and communities. She writes, “The church’s escape from its complicity in reproducing injustice is dependent on its displacing 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” (163).

Having convinced me of the need for a radical shift I eagerly await Marshall Turman’s ongoing work to bring into further view the constructive possibilities that can and will come, possibilities that emerge if we equip ourselves to see such manifestations in their full in-itself a priori.

As a womanist sexual ethicist, bodies matter to me. Bodies are one of the many ways we experience our sexuality, in and through our sensuous and sexual responses to others and ourselves. As a womanist, black female bodies matter to me as I join Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman in her interest in what is going on in black female bodies and not just to black female bodies.

When sexuality is restricted it is often done through the corporeal. Black female bodies are bound, shamed, and subjugated. Yet, these bodies are also pleasured, embraced, and highlighted. (Black body traits are the going rage, just as long as they are not on/in actual black bodies. Just look at the recent Vogue article highlighting 2014 as the era of the booty in which white women’s derrieres were mostly portrayed.1 Black bodies represent a “two-ness” that Marshall Turman reminds us is much deeper than Du Bois’s initial writings.

Reading Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon also reiterates that there has and still is a hierarchy of valuing bodies. Some bodies matter more than others or at least that is what our historical and religious narratives confirm. She boldly states that her work seeks to problematize Christianity’s privileging certain kinds of bodies over others by offering instead a womanist corrective that contends that all bodies count (52). Participating in a reality where all bodies count means that we must interrogate those spaces where we are led to believe that bodies are problematic or even broken.

One of the true gems of her work is her attention to the isness of human bodies especially as it relates to racialized and gendered experiences of embodiment. Her theorizing seeks to respond to her own rhetorical questioning of what “does it mean for black women to acknowledge their isness as more than a reactionary residuum of crisis, rather more than ‘what happened’ to them” (7). It is this question I wish to probe further in my discussion of her work.

Marshall Turman’s astute observation challenges our conversations on incarnation and embodiment to be more than merely reactionary. This is a significant move with major theological implications. Starting with black women’s isness as their primary subjectivity counters the historical narrative of oppression that seldom acknowledges black female resistance. She remarks that societal images and narratives “portray the ‘who’ of black women as rarely informed by the ‘in the flesh’ experience of black women themselves, but rather by ‘what happened to them’ under the sinister gaze of whiteness and patriarchy” (147). Her claim resonates deeply with my work as I have found that it is difficult to discuss the pleasure and joys of black female sexuality without always having to address the terrors of black sexual subjugation. What Marshall Turman proffers is not an either-or model where one chooses to discuss what happened to the body versus what or who is in the body. I believe her work presents an example of a healthy integration of the divine presence in the body which signals attention to additional reasons why we should care what happens to the body.

Her description of en sarka or “in the flesh” experience of black women bestows to black women a divine heritage reminding them that God is not solely with us but God is in us. Her womanist ethic of incarnation envisions black women as the “incarnate image of God in the world—the ‘same substance’ of God” (161) a liberatory concept for women who are often solely discussed as they are subjugated in their societal and ecclesial worlds. Living into the promise of the truth of en sarka reality is often a difficult to acknowledge, as our depictions of Christ and deity are typically male. Even when they are not white they remain male (with a few notable exceptions like Marcella Althaus-Reed, author of Indecent Theology) so it is not shocking that women could posit that divine authority has a preferential option for males. This hierarchy of valuing male bodies as being more divine or more appropriately divine is also represented in the male ecclesial leadership models in many black churches. Presenting a womanist ethic of incarnation in this setting is needed but it will not necessarily be welcome. Yet, this is one arena I had hoped for more concrete examples from Dr. Marshall Turman. In her role as clergyperson and one who held significant authority at Abyssinian Baptist Church I presume she encountered parishioners unwilling to accept her authority or even her being created in divine image with divine essence in her. If one of the first steps for liberation is conscientization, how is this done for those who make up the majority of congregations and remain unwilling to understand or appreciate the God in themselves? Marshall Turman presents a vision for the future but few illustrations from the present of how one moves a congregation to this vision.

While her chapter on the “making of men” rightly connects the process of training Morehouse men to the submission of black women in their churches, it would have been useful to see her work develop the counter perspective more. For instance, if in Dr. Michael Franklin’s inaugural address he quotes Genesis 1: 26, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, . . . and let them rule over all the earth,” can this message be affirming for black women? Can black women be told that they are made in God’s image and are to rule the earth? Marshall Turman argues that the type of reading could suggest that God is more present with some rather than others such that certain bodies are endowed with divine authority to act upon other bodies, which simply recreates another hierarchal model. I concur that this type of reading does not get the liberatory path very far, and yet I still wonder if there are some useful applications of this message for black churchwomen. For example, the black women’s club movement and black sororities were all potentially involved in a particular method of “making women” and most of these organizations claimed to be doing so within the realm of Christianity. Yes, they duplicated classism and pigmentocracy, but they also educated and served the masses. They are examples of our complicated isness where their embodiment reflects both the reaction to white oppression and a divine resistance imbued in their DNA. If we take seriously that we are like Jesus, that we are human and divine, we can also investigate if something redemptive can come from dominion ideology.

Like Marshall Turman I recognize that to address gender inequalities in black churches demands discussions of actual bodies. These bodies are not just “made,” they are not just social constructs. They are problematic and precious bodies that matter. Our “in the flesh” experiences as black women can and should be the starting point for ethical reflection because to quote lyrics from Michael Jackson we live in a world where “they don’t really care about us.” Marshall Turman reminds us that we cannot afford to privilege what is supposed to happen over what is actually happening because justice demands more.

In a framework that emphasizes a concrete embodiment, we are called to see with a “second sight.” We are to gaze outward beyond those that erase our bodies and their significance. We are called to be not just subtly present as the dancer image on the book cover connotes. Our bodies in all our hues represent the divine. They matter not just when we put them in the paths of bodily harm as seen from the frontlines of Selma to our contemporary movements in Ferguson, Missouri. My work also posits that our bodies matter in their everyday isness. Our bodies reverberate with poet Dr. Maya Angelou’s words that our sexiness should not upset you or come as a surprise; neither should the fact “that I dance like I’ve got diamonds at the meeting of my thighs?”2 Our sexual selves are a part of our black churchwoman identities especially since a black woman’s relationship with her body is mediated through her spiritual consciousness. Womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas (whose newer works on black embodiment are curiously missing from Marshall Turman’s text) joins this perspective as she argues that it is in the incarnation that the God of Jesus is revealed to be a sensuous God.3 Brown Douglas’s work asserts that our body is meant to be sensuous, not ashamed of itself, and since Christ took a bodily form he also took on our bodily sensuality. This connection of body and sensuality is important for my work and I contend that it is also relevant for the work Marshall Turman is presenting to black churches. I take seriously Kelly Brown Douglas’s reminder that black churches are body centered, and this claim is reiterated by Turman questioning, “what can be gleaned from the bodies of black women, not merely the word of black male pastors and preachers” (7). When we look to bodies in their fullness we rend the Veil that separates our bodies from our souls. When black churchwomen remember their bodies are divine we glimpse true liberation. It is in those moments when Michael Jackson’s refrain that “I look to heaven to fulfill its prophecy—Set me free”4 becomes tangible, and Rev. Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman’s work starts this hard task.

Any study of Christological hermeneutics should reveal to its students much more than a history of interaction with creeds. Christology has been the legitimating ideology within the noblest as well as the most ignoble institutions, regimes, and social movements in Western world history.1 In her book Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon, Rev. Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman examines the black church as one of the institutions shaped by a Christological hermeneutic, while its membership is simultaneously negotiating their self-understanding within the absurdity of white supremacy. As black Christians in a white racist world, the content that makes for self-awareness can mistakenly be understood as primarily coming from the outside, passing through the filtering process of white supremacy before becoming a black possession. That is to say, black self-knowledge is dependent upon a type of captivity to the treatment of black bodies in a white racist world. Understanding black identity in that way, primarily as reaction to white supremacy, tethers blackness to racism, and typically reproduces the ignobility of supremacy and domination within black Christian communities. In response to claims that see a necessary connection of blackness and white supremacy, Rev. Dr. Marshall Turman creatively interacts with the work of womanist ethicist Marcia Y. Riggs and the Chalcedonian Creed (AD 451) to describe a multifaceted womanist mediating ethic of incarnation that asserts a “just is” inherent value to all humanity, in addition to the historically discursive interaction between black people and white supremacy.

Dr. Marshall Turman writes, “The church’s understanding of Jesus is what informs its identity and propels its active articulation of that identity in the world.”2 Hence, for the Christian, an interpretation of Christ is of paramount importance since Christian character and moral reasoning, for the individual and the community, are shaped by a Christological hermeneutic. What is interesting about Dr. Marshall Turman’s creative work is that she not only addresses an interpretation of Christ that was reached at the Council of Chalcedon, Christ as two natures in one person; she highlights how the decision was reached. Chalcedon represents a mediating ethic that moves beyond a polarizing “either/or” binary that ultimately crafts a reactionary identity and appeals to the practices of domination. For Dr. Marshall Turman, the mediating ethic of Chalcedon moves us toward an inclusive “both/and” that becomes a creative and constructive practice of knowing self and community. The “both/and” mediating ethic that Dr. Marshall Turman advocates recognizes the intrinsic significance of being-in-itself, or “is-ness,” as equally valuable to an understanding of self as the discursive negotiation of identity that occurs by encounter with external forces that press upon the self demanding performance and response.

A description of the womanist “both/and” mediating ethic begins with Chalcedon. Early arguments about Christ were political dilemmas that divided the church into competing schools of thought. At the council of Chalcedon, two prominent schools of thought were represented: the Antiochian school, which underscored the humanity of Christ and is what Marshall Turman describes as a “kata sarka” or “according to the flesh” depiction of Jesus that described Jesus’ personhood as “subject to the flesh insofar as it is primarily regulated by what happens to his body.” The kata sarka emphasis is contrasted with the Alexandrian school that highlighted the divinity of Christ and stresses an “en sarka” or “in the flesh” emphasis that “privileges the promise of God that is made manifest in the body of Christ and is not subject to the flesh,” (43) which is to say that there is ontological worth, or an essential “is-ness” about Jesus that is not narrated by what happens to him. By asserting that Jesus is both human and divine the Chalcedonian Creed represents a synthesis of the two competing schools of thought within the body of Christ, doing away with the problem of authoritarianism and domination that attends the either/or binary logic.

The logic of Chalcedon becomes a scale to measure the ways in which an understanding of identity for black people is justly balanced between the en sarka acknowledgment of the enfleshed, intrinsic value of all humanity, and the kata sarka attention to historical interaction with racism. In Marshall Turman’s study, we find a commonly repeated problem of neglecting attention to the en sarka value of all human life, and instead reading black identity through a kata sarka emphasis on knowing black identity by what white supremacy does to black bodies. Dr. Marshall Turman masterfully describes the history of racialization that turned Africans into blacks in order to meet the desires of white supremacy:

“The Africans becoming black in America served to reinforce race oppression as the decisive imperative that would ensure the social and economic flourishing of white society. This deliberate exercise of racism resolved to naturalize white belonging through the ex-nihilo creation of a bizarre “black image in a white mind.” (2)

The history of changing Africans into blacks, or more historically into “negroes,” in America turns on two racist myth-of-origin theories that were meant to lend scientific credibility to pre-bellum white supremacy. Polygenesis claimed that the races of mankind had evolved, or were created, from different species, while a monogenesis theory imagined a common descent of all humanity from a single ancestry, albeit with white people as the original ideal. The proponent of monogenesis sees non-white humanity as derivations, or deviations from the original, normative white creation. Whichever theory one advocated, both theories advanced the notion that black inferiority was “irrevocable,” and they provided scientific and theological validity for the developing white supremacist imaginary of humanity.3

After the American Civil War, the racial imaginary of black people in America changed. Prior to the Civil War, the narrative of black humanity served white paternalism; black enslavement to white people was the moral, natural condition for blacks who were trustworthy, and capable of leadership under the conditions of white dominance. But after emancipation the narrative of black life was rewritten to describe blacks as dangerous, savage, and violent. (68–70)  The propaganda that served to legitimate white supremacy was adapted in the era of reconstruction; in the absence of lucrative slave labor, and with former slaves demanding a role as contributing members within an American democracy, a white supremacist public was resolute in their efforts to secure the flourishing of a republic for whites only.

E. B Du Bois was equally resolute in his keen analysis and response to white racist propaganda. Du Bois described the peculiarity of life in America for black people in his groundbreaking work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), where he described a veil and double consciousness as hermeneutical keys to understanding black life in racist America. The notion of the veil speaks of an authentic black life and intrinsic value, a soul, partitioned off from a viewing white world. The metaphor invokes the imagery of the “holy of holies” that is partitioned off, separating the most holy place where the arc of the covenant was placed, from the more common holy place. (77) This move to recognize a soul within the veil would indicate the recognition of an en sarka hermeneutic in the work of Du Bois. His description of double consciousness is the result of the veil within the experience of black American life as Marshall Turman explains:

“Double-consciousness is an oppressive modality that like nineteenth-century biological, biblical, and moral arguments regarding black humanity, suggests that the black body is what it really is not, that is either American or Negro, or is not what it really is, that is both American and Negro. . . . Du Bois ingeniously asserts black bodies as ground zero for America’s modern crisis of enfleshment.”(80)

For Marshall Turman, Du Bois’s notion of a veil opens to the possibility of demonstrating the mediating ethic that validates the en sarka intrinsic human worth of black life with his articulation of the black soul, but instead, Du Bois represents a problematic privileging of the kata sarka who’s rendering of the soul only emerges as a consequence of the gaze of white supremacy. (83)

Similarly, Benjamin Mays, former president of Morehouse College and mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., saw a connection between the way of Jesus and contextual social conditions as the pursuit of perfection in a world of harmful imperfection. Mays was a Social Gospel Christian. But where prominent social gospel voices omitted attention to race, Mays did not; “Mays’s God was concerned about the social consequences of being black in twentieth-century America.” (123) This focus for Mays inspired him to address the imperfection in the world as a kingdom-building effort to build men at Morehouse. Yet with Mays, as with Du Bois, the process of self-understanding is constructed by tipping the Chalcedonian scales towards the kata sarka, and working only with the understanding of black life as life acted upon in the world. That is, making men becomes a response to the imperfection occasioned by racism. Mays’s kata sarka imagination of “making men” “makes black identity dependent on the external, racist ‘first sight’ insofar as the substance of black identity is not only dependent on black maleness, but even more significantly on the kata sarka socialhistorical ramifications of the white gaze.” (130) The irony of the effort to make men is that it empowers some within the black community with the ability to make, which in turn reproduces the problem of the white supremacist dominating imagination. The dominating view disempowers, and reduces those segments of the community not in possession of the “man-making” authority of black masculinity. In the case of “making men,” black women are disempowered and made subject to the reactionary imagination of black male leadership.

Dr. Marshall Turman’s turn toward articulating the womanist mediating ethic speaks to the problem of the kata sarka historically one-sided privileging of what happens to the body. Her interaction with Dr. Marcia Riggs’s work on the African American Women’s Club movement of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century is the most insightful and rewarding of the numerous insights in the book. By holding in tension simultaneously contradictory positions in an inclusive, praxis-driven ethic of liberation, Marshall Turman’s womanist mediating ethic speaks to the problem of an embodiment ethics that problematically retools oppression within the black church. Her mediating ethic holds in tension a teleological perspective and a deontological one; a focus on the end goal of the elevation of black people, and a commitment to doing what is just for those without the advantages that would earn one favor within the community of the oppressed. The oppressed must not only seek to overcome their oppression, but must also “privilege the importance of resisting the fantastic hegemonic compulsion to reinscribe injustice in the lives of others.” (160) his practice of overcoming is multidimensional, and concrete, involving a renunciation of privilege, the practice of inclusion, and an ethic of responsibility that identifies the body of Jesus with the bodies of women within the black church. (170) Only by valuing the bodies of black women do we overcome the errors of white supremacy and gain the ability to see Christ in our midst.