Mika Edmondson
He wrote his doctorate on how Martin Luther King understood suffering. He can also tell you why King's father changed the family name after a trip to Germany, and why the gospel is a ticking time bomb in a slaveholder's hands.
Dr. Mika Edmondson. Pastor of New City Fellowship in Grand Rapids, Michigan. PhD in systematic theology from Calvin Theological Seminary, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, and where he has served as an adjunct professor. Author of The Power of Unearned Suffering: The Roots and Implications of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Theodicy (Lexington Books), the first volume in the Religion and Race series, developed from his dissertation.
Also anchors sessions 5.2, 5.5 of the learning path
Who he is
Mika Edmondson pastors New City Fellowship in Grand Rapids. He holds a PhD in systematic theology from Calvin Theological Seminary, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, and his dissertation became The Power of Unearned Suffering, a study of Martin Luther King Jr.'s theodicy published as the first volume in Lexington's Religion and Race series.
That subject matters here. Everything in this argument eventually reaches the same question: what do you do with a God who did not stop it? Edmondson wrote his doctorate on how the most famous man in the movement answered that, and his interview is the most theologically constructed in the archive. He does not just report what the Black church believed. He shows you the exegesis.
What you are getting in this dossier
His definition of what the Black church actually was, which is a doctrinal claim and not a sociological one. Three ways of meeting a mob, read out of the Garden of Gethsemane, and the one Jesus picked. A Greek word from 1 Peter that explains the whole method of nonviolent direct action. King's answer to the charge that he was too radical. Why the preacher led the community. Why everyone in a Black church has a title. The reason Martin Luther King Jr. is named after a German monk. And the sentence that should be on the cover of this whole project.
What they saw that their teachers did not
He begins with the interpretive achievement, and he is precise about what it required.
"So, the faith of slaves was able to sort of look beyond the constraints of a kind of what we might call a white supremacist hermeneutic in order to see that Christ actually had liberation in mind for them. And that was not something that they really could've gotten from the slave masters. Right? The slave master had intended the religion of slaves to sort of keep them acquiescent, and yet they were able to look at these themes in Scripture, these themes of liberation, and realize that God in Christ had more for them than even what their teachers were suggesting."
The rest of this dossier is part of Unspoken
3,635 more words and 15 more clips of him making the case, including the three objections he answers and the place he refuses to flatter his own argument.
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