Is the Black Man God?

The Nation of Islam teaches that the black man is God. Scripture answers that every human being of every race is a creature made in God’s image, and that no person or people is God. If you have heard this teaching from a friend or a family member, the work below will help you state it accurately, answer it from the Bible in the right order, and keep the history behind it in view so your conviction and your care reach the other person together.

You can work through it alone over a week, or with a group in one or two meetings. Each step supplies something the next one needs, so take them in order. Bring a Bible (quotations here use the King James) and a pen. The source throughout is a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Jimmy Butts, a pastor at Forest Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. His descriptions of the movement and of Wesley Muhammad’s arguments are his own summaries, so treat them as a careful reader’s account.

Step one: state the claim so its holders would recognize it

You cannot answer a claim you cannot state fairly. People who hold this teaching have often heard Christians mock it, so a fair summary from you will be unexpected.

Butts gives the background. He describes a man named Fard Muhammad teaching in Detroit around the beginning of the twentieth century that the black man was God and that Islam was the true religion of African Americans. Elijah Muhammad, one of his first students, became the movement’s messenger. Today Wesley Muhammad presents his books as an academic defense of Elijah Muhammad’s teaching. Butts does not caricature him: “he’s definitely a very intelligent man.”

In Butts’s account, the belief sits inside a larger system. The Nation of Islam also teaches that the white man is the devil, and it holds that the problems in the Black community come from a lost knowledge of self. Salvation means recovering that knowledge. The movement quotes the Bible and the Quran, but Butts says Elijah Muhammad’s reading governs both: “he’s still the ultimate arbiter of truth, even when it comes to the Bible and the Quran.” Lisa Fields stresses that the Nation of Islam differs from traditional Islam: “it is very different.”

Butts also notes that some of the movement’s claims carry truth. He reports that scholars estimate somewhere around 15 to 30 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslim. You lose nothing by granting that. It concerns where some enslaved people came from, and it is no evidence that any human being is God.

Practice. Write the claim in three or four sentences that a member of the Nation of Islam would accept as fair. Include where the teaching came from, who interprets it, and why it matters for the movement’s view of salvation. In a group, trade papers and ask one question about each summary: would a person who holds this belief recognize it? Facilitators should gently redirect any summary written to sound foolish.

Step two: learn the distinction everything rests on

The whole conversation comes down to one distinction. God is the Creator, and everything else, including every human being, is created. Wesley Muhammad’s arguments, as Butts summarizes them, try to remove that line. Each biblical answer you give later puts it back.

Start with the text the claim leans on. Genesis 2:7 reads: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

Observation task. Circle every verb God performs in the verse. Then underline what the man is made from and what he becomes. You should find two parties: one forms and breathes, and the other is formed and receives breath. The verse ends by calling the man a living soul, a living creature made from dust.

Now put two more passages beside it. Numbers 23:19 says, “God is not a man, that he should lie.” In Acts 14, crowds try to worship Paul and Barnabas as gods, and the apostles answer, “We also are men of like passions with you” (Acts 14:15). That verse records an event, so it describes rather than commands. Still, it shows how the earliest Christians reacted when a human being was treated as divine. They were horrified.

The same reasoning covers the Bible’s talk of God’s mighty hand. Butts explains that when the subject is far beyond us, “we have to use the language that we have,” so figures like hand or Father tell us true things about God without giving him a human body.

Step three: read a favorite verse in its setting

Butts calls Psalm 82 one of the favorite passages for this teaching. Learn to read it well enough to read it with a friend. Lisa Fields names the danger as “taking things out of context,” and says readers need to know what the passage says “so we won’t try to create things that are not there.”

Reading task. Read Psalm 82 aloud from verse 1 through verse 8 without stopping. Then work through these steps:

1. In verse 1, note where God stands and what he is doing.
2. In verses 2 to 4, list the charges brought against the “gods.” What kind of beings are expected to defend the poor and judge justly?
3. Read verse 6, and then verse 7 immediately after it. Write down what happens to those who were called gods.
4. Read verse 8. Who is finally asked to judge the earth?

Then turn to Exodus 4:16, where God tells Moses that Aaron will speak for him and that Moses will be to Aaron “instead of God.” Butts draws the conclusion: “that doesn’t mean that Moses was God.” The language of God can describe a role of authority while saying nothing about a person’s nature.

Last, read John 10:34-36, where Jesus quotes the psalm. Note two phrases. One describes the people “unto whom the word of God came” (John 10:35). The other describes Jesus himself, the one “whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world” (John 10:36). Jesus uses the psalm to set himself apart from those people.

Be honest about one open question. Many Christians read the gods of Psalm 82 as human rulers and judges. Others read them as heavenly beings in God’s council. Faithful readers differ, and you do not need to settle it here. In both readings, the gods answer to God, are judged, and are told they will die. Neither reading makes any human group divine. Butts gives the principle behind all of this: “the verses are part of a whole body of biblical literature.”

Step four: expect the strongest objection, and avoid the common mistake

At some point the person may say: You already believe a man is God, so why object when we say it? Butts reports that Wesley Muhammad makes exactly this argument. It is where an unprepared Christian is most likely to stall.

The answer depends on which direction the Incarnation moves. Butts describes it this way: “God, the Son, who lived an eternity past, took on flesh.” Scripture describes the same movement. John 1:14 says, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” Philippians 2:6-7 speaks of Christ, “being in the form of God,” who “took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.” In each passage, God exists first and then takes on humanity. The Nation of Islam’s claim runs the other way, with a people said to rise into deity.

Here is the common mistake. Some Christians, eager to guard the line between God and humanity, play down Jesus’s humanity, as though he only seemed human. Avoid that answer. The same texts that show the Son coming from God also show him truly made flesh, and the historic confession of the church holds him to be fully God and fully man. When Butts says Jesus “took on manhood,” he is describing where the person of the Son begins. The Son was God and became man, and his humanity is real and complete.

Mark 2 shows how firm the line was in Jesus’s own setting. When Jesus forgave sins, the scribes asked, “who can forgive sins but God only?” (Mark 2:7). Their outrage shows that no one around Jesus assumed a human being could carry divine identity. That is why his claim was so shocking.

Practice. Write the two directions as two short sentences, one for the Incarnation and one for the Nation of Islam’s claim. Then explain the difference aloud in under a minute, as if to someone who has never heard it. In a group, have a listener stop you whenever the explanation makes Jesus sound less than fully human.

Step five: hold conviction and care together

Lisa Fields asks Butts how the conditions of the country shaped this reading of Scripture. He answers with history: the gains of Reconstruction, the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, and the terror that followed, including the Ku Klux Klan. He traces a line from Marcus Garvey’s movement to the Moorish Science Temple to the Nation of Islam, and calls it “this continual grasp for some type of dignity” that American culture had denied. Of the people who received the teaching, he says, “you can understand this desire to bring some type of dignity to a cast down people.”

Understanding why a belief appealed to people is different from agreeing with it, and Butts keeps both in view. He argues that oppression “doesn’t mean that we have to grab hold of imaginary history,” and warns that inventing a history “has a white supremacist assumption as well,” because it treats true African history as not enough. Lisa Fields reaches the same point from the gospel. Answering one claim of superiority with another copies the oppressor’s method, when “the gospel says we’re all equal.”

Genesis 1:27 gives the alternative: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” This dignity is a gift. No one seizes it, and no group holds it at another group’s expense.

Butts urges zeal, pointing to David’s refusal to let Goliath defame God’s name, and he says “we have to be ready to give an answer.” First Peter 3:15 commands the same readiness and also describes the manner: believers should be “ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” Zeal for God’s honor and gentleness toward the person are both commanded.

A conversation to rehearse

In a group, work in threes. One person plays a thoughtful holder of the teaching, someone who has read Wesley Muhammad and takes him seriously. One plays the Christian, and one observes. Alone, write out both sides on paper. Follow this order:

1. Ask where they first encountered the teaching and what it gave them. Listen without correcting.
2. Restate the claim fairly, using your summary from step one, and ask whether you have it right.
3. Offer to read Psalm 82 together from beginning to end, and ask what they notice in verse 7.
4. When the objection about Jesus comes, explain the direction of the Incarnation in your own words.
5. Close with Genesis 1:27 and what it gives every person.

Afterward, the observer reports one moment when the Christian listened well and one moment when they hurried to win. Rotate roles if time allows. Facilitators should remember that some participants may be thinking of a real parent, sibling or friend, so sharing names or stories is optional.

Questions for discussion

1. When you wrote the claim in step one, what part was hardest to state fairly, and why?
2. After circling the verbs in Genesis 2:7, how would you explain the difference between receiving life from God and being God?
3. Psalm 82 has two faithful readings of who the gods are. Why does the answer to the Nation of Islam hold under either one?
4. How would you answer the objection about Jesus while keeping his humanity complete?
5. Butts says invented history carries a hidden assumption of inferiority. Do you find that argument persuasive? What would make it stronger or weaker?
6. Zeal and meekness are both commanded. Which one do you tend to drop under pressure, and what would keeping it look like in a real conversation?

Before the conversation you are preparing for, read Psalm 82 once more by yourself, slowly, from verse 1 to verse 8. Then decide the first question you will ask, and plan to hear the whole answer before you say anything else.