Jesus and the Disinherited

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1949

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Christian Ethics

Jesus and the Disinherited is both an ethical roadmap and a work of theology. It focuses on what Christianity has to offer to oppressed people and particularly to African Americans in the 20th century, but it is also Thurman’s contribution to the longstanding theological debate surrounding the politics of Jesus. Thurman is concerned with practical applications and methodology, and he supports his theories with his interpretation of Jesus’s moral imperatives. It is important to understand that despite the New Testament’s relatively short length and the clarity of Jesus’s language, it has been subject to centuries of theological debate. Within Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman presents his interpretation of Christian ethics, how he believes the Bible contends with human evil, and how the dominant strain of Protestant Christian thought has gotten it wrong.

Turning the other cheek, forgiving debts, and turning possessions over to the poor are very difficult for humans to do. One preeminent interpretation of Jesus’s politics, established by Martin Luther, holds that his ethical codes, and especially the Sermon on the Mount, are not meant to be understood literally, but rather as ironic metaphors that prove the sinful nature of mankind and the need for God’s forgiveness. Throughout Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman concedes that the Christian church has been conspicuously absent during America’s central moral struggle: “Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin” (7). Is the problem, then, with Jesus’s original message, or with a cultural church tradition that has strayed from the religion’s first heritage?

Thurman, as opposed to Luther, is arguing for Jesus’s sincerity. He believes in a literal interpretation of Jesus’s message. He acknowledges the difficulty of these goals, both for Christians and Jesus himself: “This was not an easy position for Jesus to take within his own community. Opposition to his teaching increased as the days passed” (89). Thurman doesn’t expect this to be an easy battle or for it to happen quickly. He is arguing for a reevaluation of Jesus’s ethical mandates and their applications to social and political problems in the face of a Christian church which, by and large, had ignored or been complicit in America’s history of racial oppression.

Faith and Love Overcoming Fear and Hate

Thurman splits Jesus and the Disinherited into the chapters “Fear,” “Deception,” “Hate,” and, finally, “Love,” thereby creating a typological system for analyzing the problems facing the disinherited. He explores further classifications in each chapter, breaking down the forces that make up each facet of moral psychology. Throughout Thurman’s explanation of his logical divisions, a pattern emerges: Fear is inextricable from hate. It can only be overcome with love, which is inextricable from faith. As always, Thurman is realistic about the difficulties involved and recognizes that sincerity and love, when first implemented in situations of protest and racial conflict, can make the subject vulnerable to serious harm.

Nevertheless, Thurman’s conclusions are all the same: Over time, love is always the best option, both for individual salvation in the eyes of God and for future racial and social equality. Violence, on the part of the oppressed, is always a defensive move, given the oppressor’s vast strength and power. Love and openness, on the other hand, have the potential to siphon moral power from the strong. Furthermore, Thurman’s contention is that Christianity provides a set of particularly useful tools in faith, hope, dignity, and imagination, which allow this love to come to fruition. Indeed, he is disappointed with church segregation because it means that “men of good will in all the specious classifications within our society find more cause for hope in the secular relations of life than in religion” (100). This is a grave error in Thurman’s accounting, as he believes that love without faith is short-lived and therefore insufficiently matched to the challenge of liberation.

Even faith falters, and Thurman contemplates the difficult questions that a person dedicated to loving their enemy might ask: “Suppose I have misread the will of God. Suppose I am really acting in this way because I do not have the courage to hate […] does it mean that the love ideal is so absolute that it vitiates something as frail and limited as human life—that thus it is an evil and not a good?” (97). Thurman argues for a defined code of ethics and against moral relativism, but he doesn’t pretend that moral decisions will always be clear and easy. For this reason, faith is a necessary component of love and ethical treatment of others. Faith allows the faithful to carry on when the going gets rough. Christianity, with its focus on salvation and the kingdom of heaven, allows for an imagination beyond what we know and is therefore a metaphysical ideology designed to support hope.

Power and Equality

Thurman is compelled to ask his central question, “What, then, is the word of the religion of Jesus to those who stand with their backs against the wall?” (108) because of the racism and poverty suffered by African Americans. Thurman lived through an era dominated by Jim Crow and witnessed the massive disparity between Black and white Americans every day. Framing Jesus and the Disinherited, then, is the crushing power differential between America’s white ruling class and its Black citizens, a structure with unique circumstances, as well as universal analogues through history: “All over the world, wherever ghettos are found, the same basic elements appear—a fact which dramatizes the position of weakness and gives the widest possible range to the policing effect of fear generated by the threat of violence” (43). That the power imbalance in Thurman’s America mirrors the power imbalance between Jews and Romans in the Bible is a cornerstone of Thurman’s argument.

Thurman argues so forcefully for equality and against segregation for several reasons. It contradicts the principle that we are all God’s children. Thurman describes the segregated church as an institution within which African Americans are “doomed on earth to a fixed and unremitting status of inferiority, of which segregation is symbolic” (43). Segregation is inherently unequal, and racial equality in America would vastly improve the lives of African Americans. Segregation also allows for the reinforcement of prejudice and tribalism and limits the opportunities for humans to interact with other groups without the rigid barriers of enforced cultural context. To Thurman, the key to love and mutual, peaceful prosperity is the establishment of situations in which humans can relate on an equal field, without the cultural symbols of power.