The verse most often quoted for the claim that the black man is God is followed, one line later, by a death sentence. Psalm 82:6 says “Ye are gods,” and verse 7 answers, “But ye shall die like men.” That pattern holds across the case. Read in context, none of the passages behind the Nation of Islam’s teaching says that any person or people is God. Scripture keeps Creator and creature distinct, and the Incarnation runs from God toward humanity.
Jimmy Butts, a pastor at Forest Baptist Church in Louisville whose study centers on African American Islam, makes that case in conversation with Lisa Fields. He also treats the history that made the teaching feel like good news as part of the answer.
The claim and the method behind it
The doctrine comes from Elijah Muhammad, whom the Nation of Islam regards as its messenger. Its leading current defender is Wesley Muhammad, who presents his books as an academic vindication of Elijah Muhammad’s teaching and whose PhD from the University of Michigan gives the argument weight with readers. Butts does not caricature him: “he’s definitely a very intelligent man.”
The case rests on three moves. God breathing life into Adam is read as God embodying himself, so that Adam becomes the incarnation of a black God. The Spirit moving over the waters is read through physics, with spirit equated to energy and matter formed as energy coalesces, until God self-creates into the black God. Then the Bible’s human descriptions of God, such as the mighty hand that delivered Israel from Egypt, are offered as confirmation.
The interpretive authority matters as much as the verses. The movement quotes both the Bible and the Quran, but in Butts’s account Elijah Muhammad’s reading governs them: “he’s still the ultimate arbiter of truth, even when it comes to the Bible and the Quran.” When the conclusion is fixed in advance, a passage can only illustrate it. Butts names the result: “he takes certain passages of scripture that if you isolate them, it can seem as if that’s what it’s saying.” His test is to return each verse to the whole of Scripture and ask “how is this consistent with other parts of the revelation of God as well?”
Breath, Spirit and a mighty hand
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.” The sentence has two parties. One forms, the other is formed. One breathes, the other receives breath. And the verse names the outcome itself: Adam became “a living soul,” a living creature made from dust. The text meant to make Adam God ends by calling him a creature.
Genesis 1:2 fares no better. There “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” and the rest of the chapter shows God speaking light, sky, land, creatures and finally humanity into being as things distinct from himself. Genesis 1 is a creation narrative, not a physics paper. Christians disagree about how and when God created, and those questions can stay open. What the chapter plainly asserts is that God is the Creator. It never shows him turning into what he makes.
The mighty hand raises the question of how biblical language works. Butts’s answer is that a God beyond our categories has to be described with the words humans actually have: “we have to use the language that we have.” So Scripture speaks by analogy. Calling God Father tells us about his care and authority without claiming that he physically begot us. Butts adds that this reading is old, rooted in Jewish interpretive literature and in the long Christian history of handling the same language.
The obvious objection is that calling some language figurative lets a reader dismiss whatever is inconvenient. That would be true if the choice were arbitrary. Scripture supplies its own controls. Numbers 23:19 says, “God is not a man, that he should lie.” The Bible that speaks of God’s hand also denies that God is a man. It describes him in images no one takes as anatomy, too. Psalm 91:4 says, “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.” If the hand proves a human body, the wings prove a bird. Read consistently, both images speak about power and protection, not physical form.
Butts also turns the movement’s own claim against it. The teaching calls itself African-centered, yet he argues that African traditional religions and African American religious thought commonly keep a firm distinction between God and humanity. Identifying the black man with God departs from that inheritance.
Psalm 82 read from first verse to last
Psalm 82 is a favorite text for this teaching, within the Nation of Islam and in other movements. Its eight verses form one scene. It opens in a courtroom: “God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods” (Psalm 82:1). God then brings charges. These gods have judged unjustly and favored the wicked, and they are commanded to defend the poor and fatherless and rescue the needy (Psalm 82:2-4). Those are duties of people who hold power over others.
Only then comes the famous line: “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High” (Psalm 82:6). The next verse completes it: “But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes” (Psalm 82:7). The title is granted in order to strip away its protection. These gods answer to a higher judge, and they will die. The psalm ends by calling on the one true God to judge the earth (Psalm 82:8). Verse 6 alone sounds like exalted anthropology. Verses 1 to 8 together make a verdict against rulers.
Butts follows the Jewish reading that the psalm uses the language of God for those placed in positions to rule. Moses and Aaron illustrate it. In Exodus 4:16, God tells Moses that Aaron “shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God.” As Butts puts it, “that doesn’t mean that Moses was God. It just means that Moses was the mouthpiece of God to the people of Israel.” The vocabulary fits. The Hebrew word for God, elohim, is the word the KJV renders “the judges” in Exodus 22:8-9, where disputes come before those who decide them.
Not every Christian interpreter agrees on who the gods of Psalm 82 are. Many read them as heavenly beings in God’s council, held responsible for injustice among the nations. Faithful readers differ here, and the question does not need settling, because neither reading helps the Nation of Islam. On both, the gods are created, accountable and condemned. Neither has them sharing God’s nature.
Jesus quotes the psalm in John 10, and his argument is precise. “If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35), then it is no blasphemy for the one “whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world” (John 10:36) to call himself the Son of God. The reasoning moves from lesser to greater. The word of God came to those judges. Jesus was sent from the Father. He sets himself apart from them rather than extending the title to everyone.
The Incarnation runs the other way
Wesley Muhammad’s strongest move, as Butts presents it, is a turnabout. Christians already believe Jesus is God, so why object when the Nation of Islam says the black man is God? The answer depends on which direction the Incarnation moves.
Butts states the Christian claim plainly: “God, the Son, who lived an eternity past, took on flesh.” He continues, “when we say that Jesus is a man, we’re not speaking of his essence as being a man, but that he took on manhood.” Scripture describes that same movement. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Christ, “being in the form of God,” “took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6-7). In each text the one who exists first is God, and humanity is what he takes on.
Butts’s point concerns where the person begins, and it does not shrink Christ’s humanity. The church confesses him fully God and fully man. Colossians 2:9 says, “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,” and his flesh is just as real as that fullness. The Son did not start as a man and rise into deity. He was God and became man. The Nation of Islam reverses that order and applies it to an entire people, so Christian belief in the Incarnation contradicts its teaching instead of supporting it.
The reaction of Jesus’s opponents sharpens the contrast. When he claimed authority to forgive sins, the scribes asked, “who can forgive sins but God only?” (Mark 2:7). Butts observes that “the religious scholars at that time understood what that meant and the implications of that,” and so “they said that he was blasphemous because no one can forgive sin, but God.” Their premise was that no human being has this authority. That premise is exactly why Jesus’s words were a claim to deity, and why they caused an uproar. In that world, divine identity was never assumed of a man. Jesus claimed it as the unique Son, and the claim was met with charges of blasphemy. It was never a status available to a group by birth.
The history that made the claim land
Lisa Fields asks how conditions in the country shaped this reading of Scripture, and Butts answers with history. He places the Nation of Islam after emancipation and the relative gains of Reconstruction, followed by the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, terror from those who had formerly enslaved Black people, and groups like the Ku Klux Klan. He traces a line from Marcus Garvey’s movement to the Moorish Science Temple to the Nation of Islam, describing “this continual grasp for some type of dignity” that American culture had denied.
That history explains the appeal, and Butts gives it weight: “you can understand this desire to bring some type of dignity to a cast down people.” In his view, the teaching worked as a psychological balm for people the country had pushed down. He expects Wesley Muhammad would reject that assessment and insist the teaching is simply true.
Explaining why a belief appealed does not make it true, and showing it false does not make the wound imaginary. Butts recalls James Baldwin’s critique of the Nation of Islam in The Fire Next Time, which he summarizes as a refusal to soothe the conscience with a false story. Then he pushes further. Enduring oppression “doesn’t mean that we have to grab hold of imaginary history.” An invented past, he argues, “has a white supremacist assumption as well,” because rejecting true African history for a made-up one means “we’re assuming that it is less than like the culture has told us.” Lisa Fields names the same trap from the gospel side. Answering a claim of superiority with another claim of superiority copies the oppressor, “but the gospel says we’re all equal.”
Genesis 1:27 states the alternative: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” The verse gives dignity to every person at once, as a gift. No one seizes it, and no group holds it at another’s expense. An image is not the original, and its honor comes from the one it reflects. That makes it firmer ground than a claim to divinity, which Psalm 82 has already shown will end in death. Worth grounded in God’s image, and in the Son who took that same human nature as his own, was never granted by a court, a mob or a culture. None of them can revoke it.