Fox News has posted the entirety of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s speech at the National Press Club. He is opening a two-day seminar on “the African-American religious experience and its historical, theological and political context.”

One might think because I do not have the most darkly complected skin that I have no right to comment in this domain. I will not comment on the historical and political context that I do not know. The theology, though, is fair game for anyone with Scripture in hand. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” St. Paul states.

Lest I take things out of context, I will try to quote appropriately and emphasize those parts that I am paying attention to, just to be as fair as possible.

Rev. Wright describes black theology in this manner, emphasis mine:

This principle of “different does not mean deficient” is at the heart of the prophetic theology of the black church. It is a theology of liberation.

The prophetic theology of the black church is not only a theology of liberation; it is also a theology of transformation, which is also rooted in Isaiah 61, the text from which Jesus preached in his inaugural message, as recorded by Luke. When you read the entire passage from either Isaiah 61 or Luke 4 and do not try to understand the passage or the content of the passage in the context of a sound bite, what you see is God’s desire for a radical change in a social order that has gone sour.

God’s desire is for positive, meaningful and permanent change. God does not want one people seeing themselves as superior to other people. God does not want the powerless masses, the poor, the widows, the marginalized, and those underserved by the powerful few to stay locked into sick systems which treat some in the society as being more equal than others in that same society.

This may be true. But when Scripture is quoted to support a position, it is important that the user only let the text say what it says.

In fact Luke 4, where Jesus quotes Isaiah 61, shows Jesus declaring in verse 21: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Christ has fulfilled the prophecy. For verse 21 to be true, we have to ask, what has Christ freed us from?

Slave ships? Forced splitting of families? Heinous mistreatment by plantation owners? Jim Crow laws? Dred Scott v. Sandford? No. Christ saved us from a fate much, much worse. Thus even those who were enslaved understood that they were saved from eternal separation from God, and they produced music that today is still called “gospel.”

This principle of transformation is at the heart of the prophetic theology of the black church. These two foci of liberation and transformation have been at the very core of the black religious experience from the days of David Walker, Harriet Tubman, Richard Allen, Jarena Lee, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, and Sojourner Truth, through the days of Adam Clayton Powell, Ida B. Wells, Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Barbara Jordan, Cornell West, and Fanny Lou Hamer.

Malcolm X was a Sunni Muslim. An unfortunate inclusion in the lineage of Methodist and Baptist traditions.

Richard Allen became the founding pastor of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the motto of the AME Church has always been, “God our father, man our brother, and Christ our redeemer.” The word “man” included men and women of all races back in 1787 and 1792, in the spirit of reconciliation.

The black church’s role in the fight for equality and justice, from the 1700s up until 2008, has always had as its core the nonnegotiable doctrine of reconciliation, children of God repenting for past sins against each other.

Sounds pretty good. Confession and absolution have been basic tenets of the Christian faith for millenia.

Dr. Jones, in his book, God in the ghetto, argues quite accurately that one’s theology, how I see God, determines one’s anthropology, how I see humans, and one’s anthropology then determines one’s sociology, how I order my society.

Now, the implications from the outside are obvious. If I see God as male, if I see God as white male, if I see God as superior, as God over us and not Immanuel, which means “God with us,” if I see God as mean, vengeful, authoritarian, sexist, or misogynist, then I see humans through that lens.

My theological lens shapes my anthropological lens. And as a result, white males are superior; all others are inferior.

And I order my society where I can worship God on Sunday morning wearing a black clergy robe and kill others on Sunday evening wearing a white Klan robe. I can have laws which favor whites over blacks in America or South Africa. I can construct a theology of apartheid in the Africana church (ph) and a theology of white supremacy in the North American or Germanic church.

The implications from the outset are obvious, but then the complicated work is left to be done, as you dig deeper into the constructs, which tradition, habit, and hermeneutics put on your plate.

Rev. Wright correctly identifies bad hermeneutics, that is, the discovery and determination of what Scripture says, as a major theological problem that is a source of injustice. But bad hermeneutics isn’t the exclusive property of those with low melanin production; see the first quote.

Proper theology starts with the plain reading and interpretation of Scripture, setting one’s theological lens according to what Scripture says, rather than what we want it to say.

And we recognize for the first time in modern history in the West that the other who stands before us with a different color of skin, a different texture of hair, different music, different preaching styles, and different dance moves, that other is one of God’s children just as we are, no better, no worse, prone to error and in need of forgiveness, just as we are.

I have no problems with the concept, but the history does not consist of talk that aims to convict and forgive.

Confession and absolution of a government makes no sense, primarily because the people in power change so fast. It makes no sense for me to apologize for someone else’s crime.

But all of this talk about what this preacher said is less important than what is missing, even if you watch the first seven minutes of the “God Damn America” video.

He does not condemn the sinful behavior of his parishioners. He does not diagnose our problem of sin. He emphasizes a God who solves practical problems rather than the God who solves our eternal ones.

The cross is missing.