My name is Malcolm Foley.
I am a third-year PhD student in the
religion department, specifically
focusing on the history of Christianity.
I have three distinct academic loves:
the Christology of the Early Church,
the theology of Calvin and the Puritans,
and figuring out what in the world the Church was saying
about the lynching of African Americans
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
My dissertation will hopefully center
around that that last topic.
At first glance, these three topics are disparate, but the link that goes through all three of them for me
is an understanding of who Christ is
and what He's done.
The question that's constantly
at the back of my mind is,
how can individuals who claim that their
primary identity is found in Christ
engage in brutality, violence, sadism, all
of these things -- not only doing these
things to other human beings, but to
claim Christian warrant for those things?
The professor who taught me Latin at
Yale Divinity School came to Baylor to
teach in the Great Texts program, and that's
what initially got Baylor on my radar.
After coming out to interview, talking with the professors, talking with the other students here,
I got the feeling that this was a program that was different from the other programs that I was applying to.
It was a place where I would have camaraderie with my
fellow students, and I thought that this
would be the place where I would have
the resources to do the kind of work
that I would want to do, and that I'd be
encouraged in that.
The question for the Church now, as it as
it has been throughout its entire history,
is who is this Jesus and what
does a faith in Him entail?
What does it mean for me to love my neighbor?
Because what I'm studying now
is some pretty grotesque examples of
what not loving your neighbor looks like.
Sometimes as an academic, you write books
for other academics.
I obviously want to train to be able to have those kinds of conversations, but I also have a concern
for the Church, for the body of Christ
broadly. I want people in the pews to be
able to read and understand that this is
family history. So when white Christians
read about the Black Church that they're
not thinking "This is something that I
can push off to the side" but that they're
thinking "No, this is family history,"
as much as reading about the New
Testament Church.
All the periods that I've looked at have
been periods where theology has been
forged in fierce conflict. I think
one of the things that all Christians
can learn looking at the Black Church
during this period is what a theology of
suffering looks like. It continues to be
fascinating to me; it gives me kind of
the energy that continues to drive
me to want to do this kind of research.
Because I want, I mean really because I
want Christians to understand
how deep the joy that Christ has called us to
really, really is,
and how profound our hope really is.
