Jesus and the Disinherited
By Howard Thurman
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
These 100 pages of exquisite writing expound a simple subject: the religion of Jesus. “It is a privilege … to set down what seems to me to an essentially creative and prognostic interpretation of Jesus as a religious subject rather than religious object” (5). This distinction is not often m made, by professor or preacher; and this is a shame. It is a deeper shame that most of Christianity is orientated toward the latter: Jesus as the object of our religion. This has been the focus of most of the creeds of the Church, defining Jesus as the object of our religion: fully God, fully human, according to the Nicene Creed, “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, died, and buried, descended to hell ….” according to the Apostles Creed.
Thurman, on the other hand, writes about Jesus and his faith and practice. What can we know about Jesus and his faith in God, his love toward other people, his sentiments about life, his way of living out his ethical convictions. This is what Thurman writes about.
Jesus was a Jew, Thurman writes (6), “a poor Jew” at that. But more importantly, “the thing that makes him (Jesus) most significant is not the way in which he resembled his fellows (other Jews) but the way in which he differed from all the rest of them” (9).
Jesus and “the rest of them” were poor people, marginalized in the Roman Empire, struggling to survive in a hostile social situation. They were marginalized, we say today; they were disinherited, Thurman says for us in the title of his book. It is this marginalization, this disinherited status of Jesus and the Jews that connect Thurman with his audience today, the marginalized and disinherited today. He recognizes and confesses that “too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed—this, despite the gospel” (21). He is thinking primarily of American Negroes and their status in society.
It is jolting to remember this book, and the cultural situation it describes, predates the Civil Rights Movement, the Supreme Court Decisions, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other such important forces. This constant reminder is sobering.
Thurman traces fear, deception, and hate as components of the life lived by “the poor, the disposed, the disinherited” (26). After describing the insidious destruction power of fear, Thurman asks the basic question of the book: “Is there any help to be found in the religion of Jesus that can be of value here?” (36). He finds the answer to his question in the conviction that we—all of us—are children of God. What am I? and Who am I? are the most fundamental questions of the human soul. I am a child of God, is the most basic and powerful answer buried in the religion of Jesus. Which Thurman morphed into his own version of this assurance voiced by his mother: “God will take care of us” (47).
Deception is perhaps the oldest of all the techniques by which the weak have protected themselves against the strong” (48). He tells the story of a death in the segregated South and the prohibition for the minister to preach a eulogy; so the wise and shrewd minister prayed to God, saying to God all that he would have said to the congregation (50). Thurman explains that the strong “know that every conceivable device will be used to render ineffective the advantage which they have inherited … as the strong” (53). This pattern of deception destroys “whatever sense of ethical values the individual possesses” (54). It is replaced by the desire not to be killed (59); that becomes the new ethical center of behavior for the disinherited.
Against this culture of deception as a strategy for survival, Thurman advocates truth-telling, and draws this from the religion of Jesus: “The acceptance of this alternative “is to be simply, directly truthful, whatever may be the cost in life, limb, or security” (60). He quotes Jesus, who said, “Let your Yes be Yes and your No be No.”
“A death blow is struck to hypocrisy. One of the major defense mechanisms of the disinherited is taken away from them. What does Jesus give them in its place? What does he substitute for hypocrisy? Sincerity.” (62f).
Chapter four is Hate.
“Hate is another of the hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the disinherited in season and out of season” (64). And he describes it further: “Hatred, in the mind and spirit of the disinherited, is born out of great bitterness—a bitterness that is made possible by sustained resentment which is bottled up until it distills an essence of vitality, giving to the individual in whom this is happening a radical and fundamental basis for self-realization” (69). Thurman thus outlines “all the positive psychological attributes of hatred” (76) then confesses: “hatred destroys finally the core of the life of the hater.”
Jesus rejected hatred. “Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with hi father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial” (78).
Finally, love.
“The religion of Jesus makes the love-ethic central” (79). Thurman describes how Jesus used this love-ethic toward his friends and also toward his enemies. “This man is not just a tax collector; he is a son of God” (85). As to the hated Roman? “There had to be a moment when the Roman and the Jew emerged as neither Roman nor Jew, but as two human spirits that had found a mutual, though individual, validation…. The first step toward love is a common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value” (85f). then this: “The experience of the common worship of God is such a moment” (88).
“The religion of Jesus says to the disinherited, “Love your enemy. Take the initiative seeking ways by which you can have the experience of a common sharing of mutual worth and value” (90).
“What, then, is the word of the religion of Jesus to those who stand with their backs against the wall? …. They must recognize fear, deception, hatred, each for what it is…. The disinherited will know for themselves that there is a Spirit at work in the life and in the hearts of men which is committed to overcoming the world. It is universal, knowing no age, no race, no culture, and no condition of men. For the privileged and underprivileged alike, if the individual puts at the disposal of the Spirit the needful dedication and discipline, he can live effectively in the chaos of the present the high destiny of a son of God” (98f).
The genius and the power of this moral treatment of life is the agency it gives, not to the powerful, but to the disinherited, to the poor, to the marginalized, to people like Jesus.
