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This article is a review of the book — Jesus and Justice by Peter Goodwin Heltzel

Excerpt:

Peter Heltzel, an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and assistant professor of theology at New York Theological Seminary, seeks to integrate these two profound theological insights. Too often, he asserts, white evangelicalism’s emphasis on Sunday’s victory over death obscures black evangelicalism’s emphasis on Friday, the day when Jesus was lynched. Heltzel demands that “the white architects of a Euro-American modernity be interrogated concerning the problem of race.” In Jesus and Justice he does precisely that, circling back to Friday’s injustices, only to return again to Sunday in declaring his confidence in a resurrection of authentic social justice. Switching metaphors, Heltzel concludes that American evangelicalism has matured into a prophetic movement “in a shade of blue-green—blue representing the tragedy of black suffering and green symbolizing the hope of a new social engagement with poverty, AIDS, and the environment.”

Following a lengthy and learned discussion on the ambivalent evangelical heritage of antebellum slavery and antislavery activism, Heltzel fast-forwards to two prominent 20th-century “evangelical” theologians who fashioned the new shade of blue-green. If each had his limits—Martin Luther King, Jr., unable to restrain the civil rights movement from devolving into identity politics; Carl F. H. Henry, “ensnared in the logic of the ‘half-Gospel’” and never fully able “to integrate ministries of social justice”—taken together they prefigured a beloved community that could transcend black and white.

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