Why Does the Black Church Need Apologetics?

Hebrew Israelites, the Nation of Islam and the conscious community each tell a story about the Bible and Black history. When you check those stories against the text, several fall apart. At least one rests on a real harm that the church needs to own. This guide takes the specific claims Dr. Eric Mason names in his Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields and tests them one at a time. For each claim, it asks what the claim says, what Scripture says, what Mason reports and what the conversation does not prove.

You can work through it alone in about an hour with a Bible open. A group can split it across two meetings, taking the first two claims in one sitting and the rest in the next. The goal is a skill more than a verdict. You should leave able to say, about any claim you hear, where it came from and what would have to be true for it to stand.

Before the first claim: how to check one

Mason, pastor and founder of Epiphany Fellowship, explains why his book Urban Apologetics exists: “we need people that are connecting to original sources.” Lisa Fields describes the opposite habit. She says “most people are getting their scholarship from YouTube videos and memes,” and that when she asks people for their research, she is often handed a link to an article that can’t be traced.

Those two remarks give you a method. Ask four questions of each claim below. What exactly is being claimed? Where does it come from? What would the evidence look like if it were true? And does the passage or record, read in context, show that? Keep a fifth question for yourself. Am I accepting this because it was said with confidence, even by someone I agree with? A transcript proves that a person said something. It does not prove that the thing happened.

Mason supplies one more caution. Describing the conscious community he met in college in the early nineties, he says “everybody learned from the same books.” That matters for evidence. Ten people repeating one book are one source, not ten. Agreement that comes from a shared reading list is not independent confirmation.

Claim one: the Bible’s promises belong to one people

Mason treats this claim most carefully because it starts inside Scripture. He says of Hebrew Israelites that “they don’t make you leave the Bible,” and adds that “they automatically got common ground with you.” A believer cannot answer this claim by setting the Bible aside. The test has to happen in the text.

Mason describes the usual opening move. A Psalm about God giving his statutes to Israel is paired with Jesus saying he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The Psalm he paraphrases matches Psalm 147:19-20: “He sheweth his word unto Jacob, his statutes and his judgments unto Israel. He hath not dealt so with any nation: and as for his judgments, they have not known them.” The second text is Matthew 15:24: “But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Read each in context and ask what it asserts. Psalm 147 praises God for a privilege Israel received. It describes a gift. It does not say the nations are shut out of God’s purposes forever. Matthew 15:24 sits inside a story. Jesus speaks it to a Canaanite woman, and before the scene ends he grants her request and heals her daughter (Matthew 15:21-28). The same Gospel closes with the risen Jesus telling his disciples, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19). A verse lifted from the middle of a story can be made to say the opposite of the story.

Mason’s answer works at the scale of the whole Bible. He argues that “God from the beginning wanted all people globally to represent him,” and traces that thread through Genesis 1, 10 and 12, Exodus 19:6 and Revelation 7 and 19. You can check the thread yourself. Genesis 12:3 promises Abraham that “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Exodus 19:6 calls Israel “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” Many Christian interpreters, Mason among them, read a priestly calling as standing for God before others. Revelation 7:9 shows where the story lands: “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb.”

Mason does not erase Israel. He says “the largest segment of scripture is dedicated to that,” meaning Israel’s story. So the dispute is narrower than it first sounds. Everyone agrees Israel was chosen. The question is whether Israel was chosen to keep God to itself or to carry him to the world. Christians read the relationship between Israel and the church in more than one faithful way, and this test does not require settling that question. It only requires reading the verses the claim depends on.

Claim two: Isaiah 28 gives a method for reading the Bible

Some groups teach that verses should be stitched together from across the Bible because Isaiah 28:10 says so: “For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.” Mason’s response is short. “That’s a passage on judgment,” he says, adding “that’s not a lesson on hermeneutics,” because the passage is directed at Ephraim.

You can test this without anyone’s help. Read Isaiah 28:1-13. The chapter opens, “Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim” (Isaiah 28:1). Verse 9 asks whom the prophet thinks he is teaching, as if his hearers were small children. Many interpreters read verse 10 as the scoffers mocking Isaiah’s message as repetitive baby talk. Verse 13 then turns the same words back on them: “But the word of the LORD was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little; that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.”

Interpreters differ on exactly whose voice speaks in verse 10. The direction of the passage is still plain. The repeated phrase ends with people falling backward and being snared. The passage does not prescribe a way to study Scripture. The mismatch also reaches past one verse. A reading method that depends on ignoring context will mislead every time it is used.

Mason tells of a man in a large city who gave a young woman about ten Scriptures on the street and asked whether that was more than her pastor gave her on Sunday. She said yes. Mason’s comment: “the amount of scriptures you give doesn’t matter if you’re not explaining them right.” The number of verses quoted proves nothing. What counts is whether each one is read in its context.

Claim three: Christianity is a white man’s religion

This claim has two parts, and Mason’s account helps separate them. One part is historical: the faith came to Black people from Europe. The other is visual: Jesus and the people of the Bible look white.

The historical part can be checked, and it fails. Jude 3 Project teaches that the charge is historically inaccurate, because Christianity took root in Africa centuries before it reached much of Europe. Scripture itself records an Ethiopian official reading Isaiah, hearing the gospel and being baptized in the church’s first generation (Acts 8:26-39). Mason also reports a change in the debate. After years of apologetics work in Black communities, he says, “I don’t even hear the bigwigs say that anymore.” That is his observation of the people he encounters, not a measured survey, and it should be held that way.

The visual part is a different kind of claim, and on this point Mason does not defend the church. He says “the church’s iconography is saturated with European images, which really is a way of doing image genocide.” He qualifies it in the same breath: “I know people will give examples and give the outliers,” he says, while holding that the pattern dominates the Western world. He also gives a reason the images ended up in many Black congregations. As white churches left inner cities from the fifties on, they sold their buildings to Black churches, and the art stayed. That explanation is his. It is specific enough to check against the church buildings in your own city.

Lisa Fields describes what the images can do. She recalls a student at FAMU who believed his dark skin came from the fall, because he had only seen Adam and Eve pictured as white. Here the investigation turns. The pictures are real evidence, but evidence of what? They show how European artists and churches portrayed the Bible. They do not show what the Bible says. Genesis 1:27 reads, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” No skin color appears in the verse. The student’s conclusion came from the paintings, not the text.

Mason sorts the damage into two kinds: “intellectual barriers is bad information,” while “emotional barriers is bad experiences.” Better facts answer the first kind. The second needs honesty from the church. Mason connects this to 2 Corinthians 4:4: “In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” Paul is describing spiritual blindness, and Mason does not reduce the verse to art history. His conclusion for Western Christianity is still pointed: “there has to be an admission that it’s played a role in blinding black people to the gospel.” So the historical charge gets the faith’s origin wrong. The iconography charge names a real harm and then draws the wrong conclusion from it.

Claim four: race decides who is the devil and who is the original man

Mason lists two beliefs the conscious community broadly shared when he was in college. He says “everybody agreed that the white man was the devil,” and that “black people are the original man.” Look at the form of these claims. They assign moral nature and origin by race.

The textual test is short. Genesis 1:27 places every human being in God’s image and gives no race either a head start or a curse. Mason builds his case on that verse. He argues “our dignity didn’t start at justification. It started at creation,” and says the fall “defaced it, but didn’t erase it.” A claim that one people is the devil and another is the original man cannot be added to Genesis as a footnote. It contradicts Genesis.

The source test applies here too. Mason says the people holding these views largely learned from the same books. A belief can be common in a community and still trace back to a small shelf of texts. Its spread tells you how popular it is. It tells you nothing about whether it is true. The next question is what those books cite, and whether that evidence survives a check.

Claim five: Jesus never existed, and orthodoxy was invented later

Mason names several arguments that he says were pressed hard and then dropped: that Jesus never existed, that orthodoxy was instituted under Constantine, and that Christianity was created at a church council. He credits apologists with answering them.

On this claim, this guide has to admit the limits of its own source. The conversation reports that those claims lost ground. It does not lay out the historical evidence that answered them. A careful reader should not walk away saying Mason proved Jesus existed. He did not attempt that in this episode. What you can responsibly say is narrower. These are historical claims, historical claims are tested by early documents and their dates, and you know what you need to read next.

The same limit applies to the Nation of Islam. Mason says its account of “the way the world came together is just mythological,” and that when Louis Farrakhan speaks in Christian settings he uses Christian words with a different meaning underneath. The conversation gives no details of that cosmology, so you cannot test it from this source. Do not fill the gap with a meme. Mason’s point about Farrakhan does give you a usable habit, though. When a familiar word appears, ask what it means in the speaker’s system before you assume you agree.

The fairest objection

A skeptic could say this whole exercise treats people as arguments. Mason anticipates part of that. Of Hebrew Israelites he says “all of them aren’t the same,” and he separates aggressive camps from moderate or messianic groups. On ethnic identity itself, he says “I don’t really have a problem with that.” His concern is the theology the movement usually leads to.

Lisa Fields tells a story that keeps the investigation humble. At a campus event, she recalls, a Hebrew Israelite who arrived hostile became emotional and asked why people like him were being gunned down in the street. She says it showed her that some people in these movements are wrestling with the problem of evil. A claim can be false while the grief under it is real. Answering the claim does not answer the grief. A leader whose group’s discussion turns to violence or loss should slow down there and let the question stand, rather than reaching for the next rebuttal.

Practice: build a claim file

Choose one claim you have actually heard, from a person, a video or a post. Work through these steps on paper. In a group, do this in pairs and compare files afterward.

1. Write the claim in one sentence, in the strongest form its holders would accept. Have your partner read it back. If they would not recognize it as fair, rewrite it.
2. Name its source. Is it a verse, a book, a clip, or a friend repeating one of those? If two people told you, check whether they got it from the same place.
3. If it rests on a verse, read the whole chapter around that verse. Write down who is speaking, to whom, and what happens next.
4. Sort what you found into three columns: what the text says, what the claim says the text means, and what someone asserted without showing evidence.
5. Write one sentence you could honestly say to the person who holds the claim. Include one thing they get right.

Mason’s advice on conversation fits this practice. He finds one-on-one talks, or small groups not being filmed for YouTube, more effective than taking on a crowd. He also urges keeping to one text at a time: “Let’s stay in this passage and let’s work in this passage.” Your claim file is practice for that discipline.

Questions for discussion

1. Which of the five claims was hardest for you to test, and why? Was the difficulty in the evidence or in how familiar the claim felt?
2. Mason calls it common ground that Hebrew Israelites keep the Bible. Is that common ground a danger, an opening, or both? What would change your answer?
3. Read Matthew 15:21-28 together. What does the full scene add to verse 24 that the verse alone leaves out?
4. The iconography claim names a real harm and draws a wrong conclusion. Where else have you seen a true grievance attached to a false explanation?
5. Where do you get your own information about these movements? Could you trace your sources back further than the person you learned it from?
6. Think about the man who asked why people like him were being gunned down. What would it look like to take his question seriously before addressing his theology?
7. Which claim in this guide do you still not know how to answer? What would you need to read to find out?

What you can responsibly say

After this work, you can say some things with confidence. Several of these claims depend on verses read without their context. The Bible’s story ends with every nation before the throne. The image of God in Genesis carries no color. Christianity was in Africa from its first generation. You should also be honest about what you have not shown. You have not proved every historical point from this one conversation, and you have not answered anyone’s grief by winning a verse. Before your next conversation on these questions, finish one claim file and bring it with you.