Mark S. Medley, Professor of Theology & Academic Dean
Book Panel—BSK Graduation 2025
Dr. Lewis Brogdon’s The Gospel Beyond the Grave is on fire! It is a book that kicks some theological “hiney,” especially white theological “hiney.” If I may: reading Dr. Brogdon’s book is akin to drinking a glass of outstanding bourdon neat—it goes down smooth with a really good burn.
This is a bold, creative, and constructive book.
It is bold because Brogdon is channeling his inner James Cone, the Cone of Black Theology and Black Power. The language, rhetoric, and argument of this book is unvarnished, brutally honest, and courageous. The book is a provocation. It is bold because it stretches eschatological thinking; it demands that eschatology take seriously the contextual, lived realities of people and history, and therefore, must grapple with whiteness, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness racism: “Does a life spent practicing and participating in the sins of racism complicate one’s eternal fate? Is it not beyond the realm of possibility that there will be judgment for racism and idolatry.”[1] (5). Indeed, Brogdon is so correct—eschatology must reckon with race. And he has authored an eschatology, in the shadow of chattel slavery and its afterlives, that does so.
It is creative because a Black Protestant thinker employs a predominantly Roman Catholic theological concept—purgatory. It takes creative courage to draw upon a theological concept that lies far outside one’s own tradition. Brogdon’s use of the concept evokes resonates with the theological heritage of the ancestors in Black theology. Yet, to date, I have not read any Black theologian who engages the concept of purgatory and the ancestors to do the theological, moral, and spiritual work Brogdon does in bringing together these two concepts.
The book is also a contextual, constructive exploration of a Black theology of hope. He is right that eschatology traffics in images, insights, and glimpses of the mystery of God’s future; that it must theologically and morally imagines how God attends to the crucified peoples and places of history and how God will make all things right and meet. Now, I could go on about Brogdon’s interpretation of the Lukan parables of Zaccheus and Lazarus for his constructive eschatology and soteriology. I contend that his section on Black Apocalypticism is profound and could be expanded into a follow up book to this one. Brogdon also clearly demonstrates why eschatology is vitally important to theodicy, especially that black theodicies must take seriously “sin’s dominion and the reign of injustice unleashed in the name of racism” (68). And I think Brogdon clearly demonstrates that shallow, distorted, and privileged White American soteriologies are actually death-oriented. In other words, these soteriologies are really thanatologies.
One of the underappreciated dimensions of James Cone’s theology is his theology of whiteness. One of the features of Cone’s theology of whiteness is white theology’s lie that Christianity is principally concerned with otherworldly, spiritual realities. In other words, this “White pietism” and its moral consequence of quietism is the white lie. In a sense, Brogdon’s book creatively and constructively builds upon Cone’s theology of whiteness to analyze “the eschatological implications of the participation and or complicity of White Christians in human rights atrocities such as colonialism, slavery, racism, and the genocide of Native Americans” (10). If I may, perhaps Brogdon’s Black eschatology looks at White people and White Christians and audaciously asks, “how does it feel to be the problem?” (to borrow DuBois’ famous line).
What I want to do for the next few moments is address the concepts of hope and purgatory. First, hope.
Brogdon explores a Black eschatology of hope. He does not offer a dictionary definition of hope. And I applaud him for not offering such a definition. Reform theologian Daniel Migliore begins his chapter on eschatology in this Faith Seeking Understanding by defining eschatology as hope seeking understanding.[2] By revising Anselm’s famous dictum, Migliore gestures that eschatology is a theological inquiry into the mystery of hope. And Brogdon leans into the mystery of hope by using a variety of images and terms. He primarily thinks of hope as eschatological justice that renews, repairs, restores, and reconciles. He also speaks of hope as reckoning, reconciliation, restoration, and fulfillment. Hope disrupts, irrupts, and deconstructs the logics and legacies of racism.
One important point I do want to make is that for Brogdon, hope is not optimism. Nor is hope equated with optimism. Optimism is a status quo concept. It asks you to hang in there while circumstances are challenging or bad because things will get better. As a status quo concept, optimism is concerned with ongoing management and maintenance of the prevailing power structure. In other words, optimism is about the management and maintenance of white supremacy. Many White American Christian eschatologies traffic in optimism, not hope. And these eschatologies reify whiteness. And they are idolatrous.
Second, to develop an eschatology where “God reconciles, heals, and unifies the hell on earth cause by racism and idolatry of Whiteness,” Brogdon turns to the story of Jonah, Christ descent into hell, and the Catholic doctrine of purgatory (97). I want to focus on this last concept.
Brogdon powerfully argues that death is not “a fixed door” and judgment does not “merely announce a future bound by the past” (94). He asserts that judgment is “an entrance to a path where God’s work of redemption continues on a new way” (94). With this assertion, purgatory becomes a key dimension of his argument. As he states at the beginning of the book: “Some form of a doctrine of purgatory is necessary for the sanctification process to continue until we are perfect” (8). Such a process involves both the oppressed who “carry an unwillingness to forgive” and the oppressors who “carry their refusal to stand for justice and repair the harm they caused” (103-104). The oppressed and the oppressors will be confronted differently by the light of God. He does not arrive at this theological judgment lightly or glibly; through serious questions and painful, existential struggle does he affirm the radical, universal, “injustice” of God called grace. Although Brogdon does not use such language, there are places in the book where he seems to gesture toward apokatastasis (the restoration of creation to a condition of perfection). And then there is this statement: “Purgatory should not be confused as ‘offering a second chance to accept the salvation offered in Jesus Christ. The orientation of one’s soul is set at death.” (108) That statement is the opposite of apokatastasis. I would like for Brogdon to please clarify.
Brogdon’s Black theology of hope appropriates the concept of purgatory in order “to bring historic racism to bear on eschatology” (107). Traditionally, the Catholic doctrine of purgatory has been shrouded in gloom. In order to encounter God in absolute purity, the rank-and-file soul needed to be painfully cleansed of a lifetime’s accretion of sin before face-to-face encounter with the Trinity could be enjoyed. The expression “no pain, no gain” was not in use in the medieval period of Christianity, but it is a phrase that sums up purgatory. And Protestant Reformers were suspicious of the concept of purgatory, especially of a whole set of practices that emerged in association with the concept.
Yet, when I think of purgatory I think of Dante. Purgatory is the second part of Dante’s great canticle “The Divine Comedy.” Now, I don’t think The Divine Comedy is a work of eschatology. It is not about the afterlife. It is essentially about this life. Yet he has mastered eschatological images. And it’s Dante’s imagery of purgatory that I would have loved for Brogdon to have engaged. Dante’s vision of purgatory is not shrouded in gloom but “bathed in gorgeous light,” says Dante scholar Peter Hawkins.[3] Dante does not envision purgatory as a close cousin to the inferno of hell. Says Hawkins: “Rather than being a penitentiary, . . . , purgatory is a hospital for the healing of brokenness. It is a school for learning of truth, an incubator in which worms grow up to be butterflies, a conservatory where soloists become a chorus, and where speakers develop a use for ‘we’ and ‘us’ instead of only ‘I’ and ‘me.’ Life sentences are not served here so much as lives are rewritten.”[4]
Brogdon envision purgatory as a place, a state, where God does not erase history and consequences of racism but reckons with them so that Black and White people are made whole in order to enjoy God together as members of the communion of saints. Purgatory, for Brogdon, is a hospital for the healing of racial brokenness, a brokenness of Black bodies, minds, and spirts by the injury and harm of generations of racial traumas. Purgatory for Black people involves a healing release of anger and an unwillingness to forgive. It is a school of truth for White people to be confronted the Black cloud of witnesses with the searing reality of being racists and anti-Black, dominators and oppressors, thieves and lynchers; of participating in or benefiting from chattel slavery, Jim and Jane Crow, economic and educational systems utterly stacked in their favor. Purgatory for White people involves being purged of the idolatry and lie of Whiteness as well as the unrepentance for being a racist, oppressor, thief, and lyncher.
Brogdon was gracious in quoting me from personal correspondence:
purgatory involves, in part, expunging the last elements of racism and white supremacy that lingers in me. The judgment and mercy of the Black cloud of witnesses, and being confronted by that judgment and mercy, exposes the last remnants of racism in my being so that sin can be purged. That purgation is not only a transfiguring of myself. It is also a full and accountable acceptance of myself as exposed by that cloud of witnesses so I can become my true, loving self that God created. It is the full acceptance of that cloud of witnesses as siblings of God. And it involves rectifying relationship with the cloud of witnesses so that I may be in full communion with those witnesses and with the Divine (124).
With these words I was wholeheartedly affirming Brogdon’s argument. In the presence of God and the great Black cloud of witnesses, every remnant of the hideous sin of racism in my being is to be exposed. That exposure to my complicity in racism will lead to contrition and the final purgation of my racism. The judgment of the great Black cloud of witnesses is grace, a mercy required for renewal, restoration, and reconciliation. My healing is not simply my own affair taking place in my interiority without reference to those I have wronged or to a larger community of which I am part. I heal, but I heal in community with those I have wronged. Such healing and transformation, however difficult, is hope.
A final thought. Reading a recent Christian Century essay by Mac Loftin in connection with reading Brogdon’s book has reminded me of the connections between eschatology and baptism.[5] In many of our churches, baptismal services are joyful celebrations. In many churches, especially those with conscious connections of the catholic tradition of the church, Loftin reminds us that the baptismal rite is also somber, “as the church collectively names the evil powers that corrupt and destroy human life” before a person is initiated into Jesus’ death. The baptismal rite juxtaposes death and life, life and death. Attending to this unsettling juxtaposition in the baptismal rite can pull our attention away from the distracting soteriological and eschatological fantasies of idolatrous white theology identified by Brogdon and towards the crucified people and places of our world, reckoning with the “hell on earth” and the logics of racism and colonialism that has so profoundly shaped the modern past and present of America and the world.
Eschatologically, baptism signifies God’s coming reign. In and through the waters of the font, Christians are initiated into a new life in the kin-dom of God. God’s kin-dom is a renewal of creation, a new ecology of justice and wholeness. God’s kin-dom embraces the whole of life, is catholic and common in its scope—extending to all people, tribes, and nations, as well as to the land and the more-than-human beings of the earth, anticipating the life of the world to come at the consummation of the age when Christ “fills all in all” (Eph 1:23). In baptism God’s kin-dom comes near to us. We are transferred from the old order of creation marked by sin and death to a new reality of peace, solidarity, justice, and reconciliation; we transition from an old age of decay and entropy as well as hegemonic monotones of imperialism and empire to a new age of renewal and transformation, an age characterized by an improvisational dynamics of inclusivity, multiplicity, and partisanship invigorated by the foolish wisdom of the enlivening Spirit of God. Baptism thus places the baptized between the age as it is and the age that is becoming and will come. In becoming citizens of the kin-dom of God—God’s friendly, expanding, and transforming embrace of the whole—as manifest in the body of Christ, we receive from the Holy Spirit the first fruits of the new creation (Rom 3:23) in the present world. In and through the baptismal waters the Spirit awakens hope, vision, desire, and restlessness for the completion of God’s redemptive, transformational work and the establishment of commons of peace and righteousness throughout all creation. Baptism makes us members of Jesus’ “communities of resurrection,” communities that walk in the newness of life as Christ’s disciples, cruciformly giving ourselves to God, to one another, to humanity, and to all creation as we engage in discipleship in the world. As such, the rite of baptism is integral to the process of salvation that will reach its fulfillment beyond the grave. As such, baptism is drenched in hope.
[1] Lewis Brogdon, The Gospel Beyond the Grave: Toward a Black Theology of Hope (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2025), p. 5. Further references to this book will be parenthetically referenced in the text of this paper.
[2] Daniel Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, 4th edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023), pp. 385-412,
[3] Peter S. Hawkins, Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (New York: Seabury Books, 2009), p. 50.
[4] Hawkings, Undiscovered Country, pp. 52-53.
[5] Mac Loftin, “Why does J.D. Vance want more American babies?” Christian Century at https://www.christiancentury.org/print/pdf/node/44186, accessed on May 8, 2025.